Well, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that IE isn't standards compliant. It was never standards compliant, so why is it suddenly a problem that needs solving? Simply, because everything else (more or less) is compliant, and they realise that IE will become increasingly irrelevant if it refuses to play nicely with the rest of the world.
So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE! Rename the new version to "Windows Intranet Application Host" since that's about all it's good for anyway. There's enough other browsers already, and it's likely more would be created to fill the void left by MSIE. We now have reasonably well defined standards and several implementations of interoperable browsers; we simply don't need IE8.
People could still use IE 6 or 7 for legacy web sites and internal applications until they're no longer needed, at which point they'd just die off gracefully.
Okay, maybe it's not realistic, but it would be nicer than forcing the entire internet community to endure yet another round of Microsoft's ineptitude.
I don't imagine it could be a "Windows feature", seeing how no OS is running while the PC is in a sleep state. More likely it's a feature of the network adapter, and the drivers just happen to make the option available for configuration via the Windows UI. Just having a quick look at the properties for my network adapter (on board Intel), it has a Power Management tab with the Intel logo on it which provides these options:
Power Saver Options:
Reduce speed to save power
Reduce link speed during standby
Wake on LAN:
Wake on Directed Packet
Wake on Magic Packet
Wake on Magic Packet from power off state
Wake on Link
The description for the first option says it will wake up "when a packet is sent directly to the adapter". I presume this means when anything sent to its MAC address, but it's not explicit enough.
Wake on LAN requires a magic packet, so browse list refreshes shouldn't be a problem. A PC directly connected to the internet might be wakeable if people send it a WoL packet, and I guess that's a fairly intelligent thing for a network scanner to do if you're looking to infect as many PCs as possible, but would probably be difficult.
The Magic Packet is a broadcast frame, transmitted over port 0 (Historically the most common port used), or 7 or 9 (becoming the most common ports used). It can be sent over a variety of connectionless protocols (UDP, IPX) but UDP is most commonly used. The data that is contained in a Magic Packet is the defined constant as represented in hexadecimal: FF FF FF FF FF FF followed by sixteen repetitions of the target computer's MAC address, possibly followed by a four or six byte password.
It's reasonably unlikely that any random traffic will happen to match this particular pattern. It's possible there's some really crappy chips out there that took "Wake on LAN" to mean "wake if there's any traffic received on the wire whatsoever", but which might make you feel clever in a lab but would be near-useless in the real world.
I thought there were two magic packet standards, but perhaps I'm misremembering things. It might be that the standard port has been changing making several "versions".
Also regarding power, a CPU likely requires other supporting functions to be powered up as well, so while a NIC might not use much more power waiting for a WoL packet than an idle CPU would, you probably also need to factor in memory, maybe video, and probably at least one low speed fan running for the CPU even at idle.
A study on the effect of service pricing on the communication habits of different countries could be very interesting. It does make you wonder if it really should just be left up to capitalism to decide, if it's going to have such far-reaching effects. It's probably the best mechanism we have though.
payment plans in usa makes you pay for both sendt and recieved text messages, is it similar in australia?
It's generally free to receive calls, text and multimedia messages in Australia. I don't think I've ever seen any plans from any operator that work differently, so it might actually be required by law that recipients don't pay for calls. The only exception I'm aware of is reverse charges calls, but when you answer those calls you're told you'll be paying the charges and you can reject it without paying anything.
and how easy is it for text messages to pass between operator networks?
I've never even considered whether someone on another network could receive a text message from me or not, so I guess that's your answer. It's pretty much all GSM here. About the only problems I've seen is people not being able to receive MMS messages, either because their phone doesn't support it or because it's not configured properly. I think there are (or were) some issues with number porting as well, since that relies on your previous carrier to provide full service (e.g. couldn't send MMS messages to ported numbers), but that was a few years ago and hopefully that's all in the past.
As for pricing, going from my last bill from Three (I'm on their cheapest plan), I paid $7.25au for a 10 minute call to a Telstra mobile, and 95c for a 1 minute call to a fixed-line (I'm guessing most of that was flag fall). Sending a text message (160 chars) costs 25c per message regardless of where it's to. Multimedia messages are 75c each. I think these rates are pretty standard across all operators, though some operators offer text for as low as 15c each, and some plans include a ridiculous amount of free messages as well.
Text messaging on phones to me as a nice half-way between email (who knows when they'll receive it?) and a phone call (interrupt what they're doing to speak to them).
Thank you for your reasoned rebuttal (and for not invoking Godwin).
It's probably fairly clear that I don't know the full history here, as I'm pretty much neutral toward religion. I think it's more or less a bunch of fairy tales, but not that it's necessarily a bad thing.
So, my opinion was based purely on what I saw in these reports: the "scientists" protesting someone from speaking because the scientists disagree with their views/opinions. The main thing they're upset about is the Pope's condoning of Galileo's treatment way back when. At the time his views were... unconventional and destabilising, to say the least, and societies' tolerance for such was much lower than now. It's unfortunate, but that's human nature.
It's not as if science is particularly tolerant of differing points of view. Even ignoring obvious things like the huge outcry over the teaching of creationism theory alongside evolution theory, any radical scientific theory and its proponents will be criticised heavily and unfairly until it's finally accepted. And then once it becomes accepted, anyone who still disagrees with it will be criticised and called irrational. It's unfortunate and not something to strive for, but again it's just human nature. I'd expect educated people to be aware of this.
My point is that the response of these "scientists" to someone who supports the silencing of people with opinions they disagree with is to... try to stop someone with opinions they don't agree with from speaking at a venue he was invited to speak at.
The Pope cancelled the visit for his own reasons, none of them to do with his need for a "dignified and tranquil welcome."
Can you substantiate this claim? Sure, cancelling the visit was certainly a politically expedient move, but why it can't it also be due to his need (desire, really) for a dignified and tranquil welcome? He was invited to speak and accepted the invitation, but then a group of people started protesting it and promising to heckle him during his speech. Given that he's the freakin' Pope and does in fact have a wide choice of venues to speak at, why would he bother with one where he knows he'll get a hostile reception?
I guess you can argue that he should've held a communion with God and come to the realisation that if he accepted the invitation some people would be upset; but on the other hand, if he rejected the invitation some people would be upset, too. Maybe you can come up with a theory that he orchestrated the invite from the rector purely for the purpose of being able to cancel after being protested against, but it seems a bit conspiracy theorist to me. A more logical explanation is that he was invited by someone who thought it'd be good for the university to have the pope make a speech, the pope thought it was a good opportunity to spread his message to young intelligent people, and accepted. Then all the protest stuff happened and he decided it probably wasn't worth all the hassle.
He's got all the pulpits of the world to speak from. If he wants to speak about religion, he should get into a church. If he wants to speak at a university, then why shouldn't the staff and students have a right to protest against him? To use your point, if he doesn't want to be protested at, he should speak from his church.
Which is in fact exactly what he did. He was invited, he accepted; then he was protested, so he cancelled. The staff and students certainly have a right to protest, and they invoked that right. I still think choosing to do so reeks of intolerance.
The rector of the 705-year-old university adamantly defended his invitation, which he says he'd do "100 times" over, and Vatican radio warned of "censorship" on the part of the protesting profs.
According to "the letter", the scientists are still pissy about something Benedict said 17 years ago. That's a long time to hold a grudge.
University students poured into Vatican City overnight to show their support for Pope Benedict, after student protests forced him to cancel a speech at Rome's top public college.
The pontiff decided not to deliver an address at La Sapienza University, scheduled for later today, after protests by a small but vociferous group of students and faculty members.
Some occupied part of the campus to demand he stay away.
Many Italians condemned the protests, saying they smacked of censorship. Politicians and pundits used words like "shame" and "humiliation" to describe the national mood.
Disagreeing with the Pope is fine. Not being interested in what he has to say is fine. Boycotting a popular leader because you disagree with his views? That's really lame, and yes, shameful. If you don't want to hear him speak then don't go to his speech. It's not fucking rocket science.
It may be a factor if you have to take a significant pay cut due to the recession. This can happen if you lose your job because the company folds or decides to lay off lots of people to cut their costs, and you have to take whatever job you can to pay the bills.
If it's bad enough, you may well find yourself having to work longer hours possibly in multiple jobs, and therefore not have enough spare time or energy to spend developing software.
Worst case, your computer explodes and you can't justify the cash to fix/buy a new one if you're barely making ends meet as it is.
Re:You need a simulation for this?
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Modeling Urban Panic
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
In that case, they flee from the perceived danger zone, and then they stop to gawk. Also you normally don't find much of a "crowd" within a single vehicle, unless you're in S.A.
It's not so certain everyone inside the car would flee, in any case. For example, would Chuck Norris flee? I don't think so. Neither would MacGuyver.
Natalie Portman probably wouldn't flee either, but that's just because her grits are already so hot she wouldn't notice the heat from the fire. If she actually saw the flames, she'd simply be too petrified to move.
You seem to be forgetting that until quite recently Telstra had a CDMA network as well as a GSM network. I'm not sure if the CDMA is still operating, if it is it's very close to being shut down.
Because there's no way such a thing could possibly be implemented as an optional extension to HTTP that the client has to specifically request, of course. And there's no possible way you could let the browser indicate to the server what kind of content it wants to receive in this manner.
I thought professors were meant to be smart!
Regardless, most dialup users browse the 'net the same way most broadband users do, so while such a scheme could potentially result in them having to wait long before the page appeared at all, the total download time could be significantly reduced.
I say "potentially" because if you place the HTML, CSS and JavaScript first then they can be decompressed as the stream is received, and the browser can do its best to render the page without the images while it waits for the rest of the stream to be received and decompressed. In other words, it'd work just like it does now, only with reduced overhead. Compressing the textual content can give you a huge boost in browsing speed, and sending it all at once will improve the compression ratio and further reduce the overhead (both in terms of unnecessary round-trips, and in the raw amount of data received).
So while I admire your enthusiasm in defending the rights of dialup users, I think you picked a pretty silly battle. The round-trip times for broadband connections are significantly lower than dialup, so it's likely a scheme such as this would be more beneficial to dialup users.
Still, you seem to be itching for a fight, so I'll say it straight and clear: dialup users are a pestilence inflicted upon the otherwise wonderful and peaceful internet, and they should be eradicated. Period. Once upon a time they might have been useful (although even that's doubtful), but it's been years since any of these vile technophobic heathen contributed anything of value to the internet, and we should cut them off once and for all. All they do is force our hard-working web designers to optimise the site for "speed" and "size", and to what end? They all use ad-block and STEAL MY CONTENT without giving me anything for it. Even worse, they're always telling me not to use.bmp files for my inline images and photos, but you know what? They look better, because THEY LOAD UPSIDE DOWN. I'm so sick of these selfish scum demanding I sacrifice cool upside-down-loading pictures just to save them a bit of extra time loading my sites. So quit your bitching and join the 21st century you Amish fool, or GTFO.
The previous paragraph may not reflect the views of myself, my employer, or anyone else on the planet. On the other hand, they might. Reader discretion is advised.
Beating the tar out of someone =! killing them, or leaving them for dead
It's not uncommon for there to be a story on the news about someone who's died or suffered massive head trauma after being punched in the face once (usually outside a bar). Never underestimate the damage that can be caused by someone falling and hitting their head on pavement. Letting the courts decide on the punishment makes it much less likely the perpetrator will come to unintended harm (although our prison system isn't exactly perfect).
Also, you speak as if morals are an absolute truth, shared by everyone. That's not the case. I don't understand why you're surprised not everybody shares your moral code, i.e. that beating someone is justified purely because they beat someone else first.
It would appear that most people responding to your post have a moral belief that they are not responsible for (or possibly not capable of) determining an appropriate punishment for other people. Or they believe that such acts of vigilante justice quickly lead to a mob mentality, which frequently results in amoral behaviour. Or simply that the idea of intentional harming others is abhorrent to them, and something they would only do under dire circumstances. Not everybody enjoys beating people up, after all.
Moreover, a large reason why we have the court system we do is to try to avoid mistakenly punishing people. While the situation you presented was intentionally very cut and dried, it could be interpreted as "beating the crap out of a guy who I think just beat and robbed a little old lady is perfectly moral". What if you're wrong? What if the little old lady actually just robbed the "thug" and shot his wife, and he was getting his stuff back and a little bit of revenge on the side? If everybody is running around serving up whatever kind of punishment they deem "morally okay", how will you be able to tell the difference between the criminals and the vigilantes?
Finally, by living within most western societies, you are agreeing to be bound by the rule of law. Is violating this agreement whenever it inconveniences you or you don't entirely agree with it a "moral" act?
I think by "capped uploads" he meant you can upload a certain amount of data (at full speed) before they start charging for excess usage. It would neatly curtail P2P usage, or at least lead to many more 'selfish' people and thus degrade the usefulness of the network.
This would only be false advertising if they didn't tell you about the capped usage upon signup, but it's unlikely they'd be that stupid.
Also, I had a hard time parsing your post and I'm still not sure what your point was.
They paid for the bandwidth as much as you did.
"They" being the ISP? Or someone else? I'm not sure how either is relevant.
I think this is actually big problem with faster consumer speeds. When the Crysis demo was released, a lot of Internode users were complaining about the speeds they were getting from 'node's mirror of the download. Their file server has two gigabit network ports, which is pretty standard for any kind of semi-modern server. The reason the downloads were slow is simply because its uplink was saturated.
Now, this is in Australia, where most of Internode's gamer customers would probably be on their ADSL2+ plans which give you maximum speeds around 20-25 Mbit/sec. There's still a lot of servers out there that only have 100mbit uplinks to the internet, and not just in internet backwaters like Australia.
Mind you, for most web sites it's not that big an issue, because you don't have enough content to saturate 100mbit for even half a second. I think a lot of the modern-day delay is from javascripts being loaded from multiple sites, which have to run sequentially. Though it's true that HTTP isn't particularly well designed for modern sites, as well. It would be nice if a request to the homepage could return a single compressed blob of data which includes the HTML, CSS, scripts, and the important images referenced from the page all in one go.
May as well redesign SMTP while we're at it, too!;)
The difference is that if it was FOSS, they'd be able to see the comment saying "// this doesn't match the specs but it worked for me in the test I did, so the specs must be wrong."
For.com and.net (the only ones we have with NSI) you need to do the transfer earlier than 10 days before the domain expires. We're sufficiently organised that that's not a problem. We have a calendar and everything! (Digression: one thing I like about.au domains is that they're only renewed-on-transfer if they're within 60 days of expiry, otherwise it's free.)
Most of the domains we have registered with them don't expire until 2010 at the earliest (they must have been initially registered for 10 years). We could conceivably not wish to retain at least some of them in a few years time. Renewing domains we don't want is certainly more expensive than not renewing them.
Also, the price of domain registration is likely to fall with time, so it almost certainly will cost us more to renew them now than it will to renew them in a few years' time. Granted the difference is small enough to be ignored, but this is slashdot, and technical pedantry is the order of the day.
All that said, one of the domains does actually expire in October this year, so I'll transfer that out to stick it to 'em. Also I'm transferring our primary domain which doesn't expire until 2013, but I'm fairly sure we'll still it want it then. This is mostly prompted by how much I hate their site. When you click on a domain you own to manage it, the first half of the screen is a list of mis-spellings they think you might also want to register. Also the left hand column background color sits on top of the content column in Firefox until you resize the window, but I guess technically that's a browser bug.
Gee good point! How could they possibly view the code if it's not open to all? I mean, it's not as if there's any possibility they could've gotten a bunch of companies to agree to let them audit their code provided they only released the results in aggregate, without any identifying information.
Just because it's not open source doesn't mean that nobody is ever able to gain access to it.
If we go ahead and assume that "ASCII file format" means a file containing only the printable ASCII characters, then that's pretty open ended. You can store encrypted data in it just fine by encoding that data as "plain text" (e.g. gpg --armor). The same as how binary files can be sent over SMTP, which traditionally only supports 7-bit ASCII. Or you could come up with your own "cypher", known only to you, so an attacker reading the file would see "mybank.com password: foozball" but you'd know that it's a lie, "mybank.com" actually refers to your gmail password, and "foozball" is a codeword which means "kaequotaegei9EeTie0kietheih6vei3deeb3op0".
So, your use of unencrypted, easily-readable passwords is what is insecure, and has nothing to do with the use of an "ASCII format file". Additionally, what if the OS it resides on allows you to apply access restrictions to the file, and nobody but you can access it? Assuming proper physical security of the computer and strong protection for your account, then that's going to be as secure (for practical purposes) as encrypting it with a forty billion bit cypher.
I think the disparity is probably more an indication of just how few people care about HD formats at the moment. Sure there's enough people to make some noise, but when a "poorly-selling" console is able to "dominate" the market it tells you that the market isn't particularly large. It also suggests that a significant number of people are getting a HD player not because they specifically want one, but because the console they've bought happens to include it.
That's not necessarily a bad marketing / sales strategy though -- if you've already got a Blu-Ray player in your house, why go out and buy an HD-DVD player just to watch HD content? It also gives you a chance to try out HD content to see if it's worth it without having to first buy a player which you might never use again.
Unlike taxes, buying Spiderman 3 is not obligatory, so I'm failing to see your point. Buying a Big Mac isn't obligatory, but when I do I pay tax on it. It still is tax.
That's got to be the most idiotic, nonsensical response I've ever seen. I'm truly floored.
Your other points seem to have some merit, but I don't actually care HD format wars one way or the other. Still, your argument would be more persuasive if you didn't say really weird things like "I pay tax on Big Macs, therefore it's a tax"... when your argument doesn't really have anything to do with tax at all (or are HD-DVD players tax exempt or something?).
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
P.S. I'll use as many caps as I want to, thanks very much Mr Slashdot Lameness Filter.
People may claim not to be religious, but will nevertheless often still ascribe supreme importance to things like material possessions, knowledge, and power over others, fame, to name a few "gods"
I'm not entirely convinced that people considering any of those things to be supremely important is on par with belief in a god. The main difference, to me, is that they all grant an objectively measurable, tangible gain on those who obtain them. Belief in God grants you what, exactly? We don't have any kind of objective proof of any kind of afterlife, or that those who followed the teachings of their religion during their time on earth gain some kind of tangible benefit after their death.
Or in other words, belief in God requires faith. "Belief" in the power of possessions or knowledge or fame and so on require only to look at those who already have them in the real world.
Regardless, even if we accept these things as being "on parity" with a belief in a god, you go on to say:
Nobody has ever observed any animal engage what we humans call prayer, for example. Maybe you know of examples of animals, mammals specifically, engaging in any activity which would be recognized as "religious". I do not.
This doesn't follow from your previous statement. People who place supreme importance on fame and fortune as a "substitute" for belief in God don't generally pray to fortune, or engage in activities which would typically be recognised as "religious". For one thing, most people who don't believe in God believe that they have full responsibility for obtaining the things they desire; there is no third party they can pray to or ask for assistance from.
If you wish to use the fact that we've never (to the best of my knowledge) observed animals praying or displaying otherwise "religious" behaviour as "proof" that animals are incapable of religion or belief in a higher power, the same treatment should be given to humans. Many humans don't engage in prayer or any forms of worship or religious activity. Allowing "lust for power" to serve as a substitute for religion or god-belief seems like a very feeble attempt to justify the claim that "all humans are religious and always will be".
Back to animals: early humans often attributed thunder to an unseen being, typically assuming that this being possessed great power. This is well documented. Ever had a dog as a pet? Most dogs are terrified of thunder, and will seek a hiding place -- even if they've been living inside a house for their entire life and should be aware by now that the thunder can't hurt them. Why is it such a stretch to think that perhaps they also attribute the crashing boom from the sky as being the work of an unseen entity of great power?
There are lot of companies, which actually kinda see huge connection between doing good and getting profit. If it wasn't so, there won't be PR, there won't be ads, there won't be customer psychology courses, Bs for different marketing types, etc.
I believe that you're conflating public perception of a company being "good" with that company actually doing good. Actually doing good is surely an effective way of getting the public to perceive you as good, but it's certainly not the only way. If everyone followed that approach, marketing and PR etc. would be a much much smaller industry. And it's only the public perception of the company being "good" that can assist with profits. You can pump mountains of toxic waste into the river systems all you want, but if you can keep it secret and promote your company as being "Clean and Green" you'll still get the dollars from environmentally conscious consumers.
Google's "Do No Evil" motto is a great example of an effective PR campaign creating the perception of a good company. We wouldn't normally think that a for-profit, publically listed company could do anything but seek to maximise its profits in the short term. Yet every time there's a story about Google doing something less-than-saintly, it spawns a lot of discussion about whether or not it's really, actually evil, or whether it's just a teeny bit evil and therefore okay compared to what some other companies are doing, etc.; because lots of people actually believe (or want to believe?) that Google really doesn't Do Evil.
Now, this "Do No Evil" thing is really important as a long-term approach to PR for Google; back when they were just a new search engine, most people didn't really care. Now with them hosting people's email, performing all their search, functioning as their news aggregation service etc., it's really important people trust them. But back then, the idea probably was just aimed at short-term gain: it gave everyone a warm fuzzy feeling that this new upstart with the funny name was a different kind of company.
Your main point is that most companies (and individuals) are often only capable of effectively acting on short term goals. I agree with that. Your sub-point that it pays for companies to be good (at least in the long term) isn't the whole story, because what pays is for people to think the company does good. It's likely that for smaller businesses, the easiest way to achieve that perception is to actually do good. For larger companies that can afford to spend the money on PR, it's usually easier to opt for the smoke and mirrors approach. The ability to use deception of course feeds into the short-term actions: once you've done evil, it becomes beneficial in the short-term to spend money to fix the company's image. More far-sighted companies may even be clever enough to spend money promoting themselves as good while they do evil.
Early the next morning, struggling against wind and turbulence over northern France, the huge ship struck the ground and burst into flames. Of the 54 people aboard only six survived.
I don't get the impression that zeppelins were ever really commonplace. More like luxury liners. They also carried far fewer people. Comparing them to modern aircraft transport is a bit disingenuous.
Humans are, always have been and always will be religious creatures.
Did you even think about that when you wrote it? Or do you actually believe that all the people who claim not to be religious or not to believe in God are lying about it?
uniquely among all creatures
That's an interesting statement. Do we know for sure that no other creature has "religious" beliefs as part of their behaviour? How can we be so certain? And if it's true, what is the significance of this?
Your overall point is that pretty much all societies practice some kind of religion, therefore it's good and worthy. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any societies that are absent of unnecessary violence, abuse, torture against other people. Does that mean this kind of behaviour is worthy of respect? Left to our own devices, with no societal pressure to behave in a humane manner, all of us would steal, murder, pillage and rape whenever we thought it would benefit us and/or our immediate family.
Arguing something is good and worthwhile because "lots of people do it" is a self-defeating cause. You should be able to argue the worth of religion on its own merits.
I agree that saying that religion contains "nothing worthy of respect whatsoever" is narrow-minded and unfair. Religion provides many people with a sense of purpose, brings them comfort in ways that nothing else can, and can encourage people to behave in incredibly positive ways. These are all worthy things.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that IE isn't standards compliant. It was never standards compliant, so why is it suddenly a problem that needs solving? Simply, because everything else (more or less) is compliant, and they realise that IE will become increasingly irrelevant if it refuses to play nicely with the rest of the world.
So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE! Rename the new version to "Windows Intranet Application Host" since that's about all it's good for anyway. There's enough other browsers already, and it's likely more would be created to fill the void left by MSIE. We now have reasonably well defined standards and several implementations of interoperable browsers; we simply don't need IE8.
People could still use IE 6 or 7 for legacy web sites and internal applications until they're no longer needed, at which point they'd just die off gracefully.
Okay, maybe it's not realistic, but it would be nicer than forcing the entire internet community to endure yet another round of Microsoft's ineptitude.
I don't imagine it could be a "Windows feature", seeing how no OS is running while the PC is in a sleep state. More likely it's a feature of the network adapter, and the drivers just happen to make the option available for configuration via the Windows UI. Just having a quick look at the properties for my network adapter (on board Intel), it has a Power Management tab with the Intel logo on it which provides these options:
Power Saver Options:
Wake on LAN:
The description for the first option says it will wake up "when a packet is sent directly to the adapter". I presume this means when anything sent to its MAC address, but it's not explicit enough.
Wake on LAN requires a magic packet, so browse list refreshes shouldn't be a problem. A PC directly connected to the internet might be wakeable if people send it a WoL packet, and I guess that's a fairly intelligent thing for a network scanner to do if you're looking to infect as many PCs as possible, but would probably be difficult.
From everyone's favourite almost-an-encyclopedia:
The Magic Packet is a broadcast frame, transmitted over port 0 (Historically the most common port used), or 7 or 9 (becoming the most common ports used). It can be sent over a variety of connectionless protocols (UDP, IPX) but UDP is most commonly used. The data that is contained in a Magic Packet is the defined constant as represented in hexadecimal: FF FF FF FF FF FF followed by sixteen repetitions of the target computer's MAC address, possibly followed by a four or six byte password.It's reasonably unlikely that any random traffic will happen to match this particular pattern. It's possible there's some really crappy chips out there that took "Wake on LAN" to mean "wake if there's any traffic received on the wire whatsoever", but which might make you feel clever in a lab but would be near-useless in the real world.
I thought there were two magic packet standards, but perhaps I'm misremembering things. It might be that the standard port has been changing making several "versions".
Also regarding power, a CPU likely requires other supporting functions to be powered up as well, so while a NIC might not use much more power waiting for a WoL packet than an idle CPU would, you probably also need to factor in memory, maybe video, and probably at least one low speed fan running for the CPU even at idle.
A study on the effect of service pricing on the communication habits of different countries could be very interesting. It does make you wonder if it really should just be left up to capitalism to decide, if it's going to have such far-reaching effects. It's probably the best mechanism we have though.
payment plans in usa makes you pay for both sendt and recieved text messages, is it similar in australia?It's generally free to receive calls, text and multimedia messages in Australia. I don't think I've ever seen any plans from any operator that work differently, so it might actually be required by law that recipients don't pay for calls. The only exception I'm aware of is reverse charges calls, but when you answer those calls you're told you'll be paying the charges and you can reject it without paying anything.
and how easy is it for text messages to pass between operator networks?I've never even considered whether someone on another network could receive a text message from me or not, so I guess that's your answer. It's pretty much all GSM here. About the only problems I've seen is people not being able to receive MMS messages, either because their phone doesn't support it or because it's not configured properly. I think there are (or were) some issues with number porting as well, since that relies on your previous carrier to provide full service (e.g. couldn't send MMS messages to ported numbers), but that was a few years ago and hopefully that's all in the past.
As for pricing, going from my last bill from Three (I'm on their cheapest plan), I paid $7.25au for a 10 minute call to a Telstra mobile, and 95c for a 1 minute call to a fixed-line (I'm guessing most of that was flag fall). Sending a text message (160 chars) costs 25c per message regardless of where it's to. Multimedia messages are 75c each. I think these rates are pretty standard across all operators, though some operators offer text for as low as 15c each, and some plans include a ridiculous amount of free messages as well.
Text messaging on phones to me as a nice half-way between email (who knows when they'll receive it?) and a phone call (interrupt what they're doing to speak to them).
Thank you for your reasoned rebuttal (and for not invoking Godwin).
It's probably fairly clear that I don't know the full history here, as I'm pretty much neutral toward religion. I think it's more or less a bunch of fairy tales, but not that it's necessarily a bad thing.
So, my opinion was based purely on what I saw in these reports: the "scientists" protesting someone from speaking because the scientists disagree with their views/opinions. The main thing they're upset about is the Pope's condoning of Galileo's treatment way back when. At the time his views were... unconventional and destabilising, to say the least, and societies' tolerance for such was much lower than now. It's unfortunate, but that's human nature.
It's not as if science is particularly tolerant of differing points of view. Even ignoring obvious things like the huge outcry over the teaching of creationism theory alongside evolution theory, any radical scientific theory and its proponents will be criticised heavily and unfairly until it's finally accepted. And then once it becomes accepted, anyone who still disagrees with it will be criticised and called irrational. It's unfortunate and not something to strive for, but again it's just human nature. I'd expect educated people to be aware of this.
My point is that the response of these "scientists" to someone who supports the silencing of people with opinions they disagree with is to... try to stop someone with opinions they don't agree with from speaking at a venue he was invited to speak at.
The Pope cancelled the visit for his own reasons, none of them to do with his need for a "dignified and tranquil welcome."Can you substantiate this claim? Sure, cancelling the visit was certainly a politically expedient move, but why it can't it also be due to his need (desire, really) for a dignified and tranquil welcome? He was invited to speak and accepted the invitation, but then a group of people started protesting it and promising to heckle him during his speech. Given that he's the freakin' Pope and does in fact have a wide choice of venues to speak at, why would he bother with one where he knows he'll get a hostile reception?
I guess you can argue that he should've held a communion with God and come to the realisation that if he accepted the invitation some people would be upset; but on the other hand, if he rejected the invitation some people would be upset, too. Maybe you can come up with a theory that he orchestrated the invite from the rector purely for the purpose of being able to cancel after being protested against, but it seems a bit conspiracy theorist to me. A more logical explanation is that he was invited by someone who thought it'd be good for the university to have the pope make a speech, the pope thought it was a good opportunity to spread his message to young intelligent people, and accepted. Then all the protest stuff happened and he decided it probably wasn't worth all the hassle.
He's got all the pulpits of the world to speak from. If he wants to speak about religion, he should get into a church. If he wants to speak at a university, then why shouldn't the staff and students have a right to protest against him? To use your point, if he doesn't want to be protested at, he should speak from his church.Which is in fact exactly what he did. He was invited, he accepted; then he was protested, so he cancelled. The staff and students certainly have a right to protest, and they invoked that right. I still think choosing to do so reeks of intolerance.
The Pope was invited to the university by its rector.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1703692,00.html
The rector of the 705-year-old university adamantly defended his invitation, which he says he'd do "100 times" over, and Vatican radio warned of "censorship" on the part of the protesting profs.According to "the letter", the scientists are still pissy about something Benedict said 17 years ago. That's a long time to hold a grudge.
Also, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/17/2140251.htm?section=world
University students poured into Vatican City overnight to show their support for Pope Benedict, after student protests forced him to cancel a speech at Rome's top public college.The pontiff decided not to deliver an address at La Sapienza University, scheduled for later today, after protests by a small but vociferous group of students and faculty members.
Some occupied part of the campus to demand he stay away.
Many Italians condemned the protests, saying they smacked of censorship. Politicians and pundits used words like "shame" and "humiliation" to describe the national mood.
Disagreeing with the Pope is fine. Not being interested in what he has to say is fine. Boycotting a popular leader because you disagree with his views? That's really lame, and yes, shameful. If you don't want to hear him speak then don't go to his speech. It's not fucking rocket science.
It may be a factor if you have to take a significant pay cut due to the recession. This can happen if you lose your job because the company folds or decides to lay off lots of people to cut their costs, and you have to take whatever job you can to pay the bills.
If it's bad enough, you may well find yourself having to work longer hours possibly in multiple jobs, and therefore not have enough spare time or energy to spend developing software.
Worst case, your computer explodes and you can't justify the cash to fix/buy a new one if you're barely making ends meet as it is.
In that case, they flee from the perceived danger zone, and then they stop to gawk. Also you normally don't find much of a "crowd" within a single vehicle, unless you're in S.A.
It's not so certain everyone inside the car would flee, in any case. For example, would Chuck Norris flee? I don't think so. Neither would MacGuyver.
Natalie Portman probably wouldn't flee either, but that's just because her grits are already so hot she wouldn't notice the heat from the fire. If she actually saw the flames, she'd simply be too petrified to move.
You seem to be forgetting that until quite recently Telstra had a CDMA network as well as a GSM network. I'm not sure if the CDMA is still operating, if it is it's very close to being shut down.
Converging upon one standard takes time.
Because there's no way such a thing could possibly be implemented as an optional extension to HTTP that the client has to specifically request, of course. And there's no possible way you could let the browser indicate to the server what kind of content it wants to receive in this manner.
I thought professors were meant to be smart!
Regardless, most dialup users browse the 'net the same way most broadband users do, so while such a scheme could potentially result in them having to wait long before the page appeared at all, the total download time could be significantly reduced.
I say "potentially" because if you place the HTML, CSS and JavaScript first then they can be decompressed as the stream is received, and the browser can do its best to render the page without the images while it waits for the rest of the stream to be received and decompressed. In other words, it'd work just like it does now, only with reduced overhead. Compressing the textual content can give you a huge boost in browsing speed, and sending it all at once will improve the compression ratio and further reduce the overhead (both in terms of unnecessary round-trips, and in the raw amount of data received).
So while I admire your enthusiasm in defending the rights of dialup users, I think you picked a pretty silly battle. The round-trip times for broadband connections are significantly lower than dialup, so it's likely a scheme such as this would be more beneficial to dialup users.
Still, you seem to be itching for a fight, so I'll say it straight and clear: dialup users are a pestilence inflicted upon the otherwise wonderful and peaceful internet, and they should be eradicated. Period. Once upon a time they might have been useful (although even that's doubtful), but it's been years since any of these vile technophobic heathen contributed anything of value to the internet, and we should cut them off once and for all. All they do is force our hard-working web designers to optimise the site for "speed" and "size", and to what end? They all use ad-block and STEAL MY CONTENT without giving me anything for it. Even worse, they're always telling me not to use .bmp files for my inline images and photos, but you know what? They look better, because THEY LOAD UPSIDE DOWN. I'm so sick of these selfish scum demanding I sacrifice cool upside-down-loading pictures just to save them a bit of extra time loading my sites. So quit your bitching and join the 21st century you Amish fool, or GTFO.
The previous paragraph may not reflect the views of myself, my employer, or anyone else on the planet. On the other hand, they might. Reader discretion is advised.
It's not uncommon for there to be a story on the news about someone who's died or suffered massive head trauma after being punched in the face once (usually outside a bar). Never underestimate the damage that can be caused by someone falling and hitting their head on pavement. Letting the courts decide on the punishment makes it much less likely the perpetrator will come to unintended harm (although our prison system isn't exactly perfect).
Also, you speak as if morals are an absolute truth, shared by everyone. That's not the case. I don't understand why you're surprised not everybody shares your moral code, i.e. that beating someone is justified purely because they beat someone else first.
It would appear that most people responding to your post have a moral belief that they are not responsible for (or possibly not capable of) determining an appropriate punishment for other people. Or they believe that such acts of vigilante justice quickly lead to a mob mentality, which frequently results in amoral behaviour. Or simply that the idea of intentional harming others is abhorrent to them, and something they would only do under dire circumstances. Not everybody enjoys beating people up, after all.
Moreover, a large reason why we have the court system we do is to try to avoid mistakenly punishing people. While the situation you presented was intentionally very cut and dried, it could be interpreted as "beating the crap out of a guy who I think just beat and robbed a little old lady is perfectly moral". What if you're wrong? What if the little old lady actually just robbed the "thug" and shot his wife, and he was getting his stuff back and a little bit of revenge on the side? If everybody is running around serving up whatever kind of punishment they deem "morally okay", how will you be able to tell the difference between the criminals and the vigilantes?
Finally, by living within most western societies, you are agreeing to be bound by the rule of law. Is violating this agreement whenever it inconveniences you or you don't entirely agree with it a "moral" act?
I think by "capped uploads" he meant you can upload a certain amount of data (at full speed) before they start charging for excess usage. It would neatly curtail P2P usage, or at least lead to many more 'selfish' people and thus degrade the usefulness of the network.
This would only be false advertising if they didn't tell you about the capped usage upon signup, but it's unlikely they'd be that stupid.
Also, I had a hard time parsing your post and I'm still not sure what your point was.
They paid for the bandwidth as much as you did."They" being the ISP? Or someone else? I'm not sure how either is relevant.
I think this is actually big problem with faster consumer speeds. When the Crysis demo was released, a lot of Internode users were complaining about the speeds they were getting from 'node's mirror of the download. Their file server has two gigabit network ports, which is pretty standard for any kind of semi-modern server. The reason the downloads were slow is simply because its uplink was saturated.
Now, this is in Australia, where most of Internode's gamer customers would probably be on their ADSL2+ plans which give you maximum speeds around 20-25 Mbit/sec. There's still a lot of servers out there that only have 100mbit uplinks to the internet, and not just in internet backwaters like Australia.
Mind you, for most web sites it's not that big an issue, because you don't have enough content to saturate 100mbit for even half a second. I think a lot of the modern-day delay is from javascripts being loaded from multiple sites, which have to run sequentially. Though it's true that HTTP isn't particularly well designed for modern sites, as well. It would be nice if a request to the homepage could return a single compressed blob of data which includes the HTML, CSS, scripts, and the important images referenced from the page all in one go.
May as well redesign SMTP while we're at it, too! ;)
The difference is that if it was FOSS, they'd be able to see the comment saying "// this doesn't match the specs but it worked for me in the test I did, so the specs must be wrong."
For .com and .net (the only ones we have with NSI) you need to do the transfer earlier than 10 days before the domain expires. We're sufficiently organised that that's not a problem. We have a calendar and everything! (Digression: one thing I like about .au domains is that they're only renewed-on-transfer if they're within 60 days of expiry, otherwise it's free.)
Most of the domains we have registered with them don't expire until 2010 at the earliest (they must have been initially registered for 10 years). We could conceivably not wish to retain at least some of them in a few years time. Renewing domains we don't want is certainly more expensive than not renewing them.
Also, the price of domain registration is likely to fall with time, so it almost certainly will cost us more to renew them now than it will to renew them in a few years' time. Granted the difference is small enough to be ignored, but this is slashdot, and technical pedantry is the order of the day.
All that said, one of the domains does actually expire in October this year, so I'll transfer that out to stick it to 'em. Also I'm transferring our primary domain which doesn't expire until 2013, but I'm fairly sure we'll still it want it then. This is mostly prompted by how much I hate their site. When you click on a domain you own to manage it, the first half of the screen is a list of mis-spellings they think you might also want to register. Also the left hand column background color sits on top of the content column in Firefox until you resize the window, but I guess technically that's a browser bug.
Gee good point! How could they possibly view the code if it's not open to all? I mean, it's not as if there's any possibility they could've gotten a bunch of companies to agree to let them audit their code provided they only released the results in aggregate, without any identifying information.
Just because it's not open source doesn't mean that nobody is ever able to gain access to it.
Unless... NetSol only have one customer who actually registers domains through them!
We do actually have a few domains with them, but when they're up for renewal we're moving them to a different registrar.
If we go ahead and assume that "ASCII file format" means a file containing only the printable ASCII characters, then that's pretty open ended. You can store encrypted data in it just fine by encoding that data as "plain text" (e.g. gpg --armor). The same as how binary files can be sent over SMTP, which traditionally only supports 7-bit ASCII. Or you could come up with your own "cypher", known only to you, so an attacker reading the file would see "mybank.com password: foozball" but you'd know that it's a lie, "mybank.com" actually refers to your gmail password, and "foozball" is a codeword which means "kaequotaegei9EeTie0kietheih6vei3deeb3op0".
So, your use of unencrypted, easily-readable passwords is what is insecure, and has nothing to do with the use of an "ASCII format file". Additionally, what if the OS it resides on allows you to apply access restrictions to the file, and nobody but you can access it? Assuming proper physical security of the computer and strong protection for your account, then that's going to be as secure (for practical purposes) as encrypting it with a forty billion bit cypher.
I think the disparity is probably more an indication of just how few people care about HD formats at the moment. Sure there's enough people to make some noise, but when a "poorly-selling" console is able to "dominate" the market it tells you that the market isn't particularly large. It also suggests that a significant number of people are getting a HD player not because they specifically want one, but because the console they've bought happens to include it.
That's not necessarily a bad marketing / sales strategy though -- if you've already got a Blu-Ray player in your house, why go out and buy an HD-DVD player just to watch HD content? It also gives you a chance to try out HD content to see if it's worth it without having to first buy a player which you might never use again.
That's got to be the most idiotic, nonsensical response I've ever seen. I'm truly floored.
Your other points seem to have some merit, but I don't actually care HD format wars one way or the other. Still, your argument would be more persuasive if you didn't say really weird things like "I pay tax on Big Macs, therefore it's a tax" ... when your argument doesn't really have anything to do with tax at all (or are HD-DVD players tax exempt or something?).
ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
P.S. I'll use as many caps as I want to, thanks very much Mr Slashdot Lameness Filter.
I'm not entirely convinced that people considering any of those things to be supremely important is on par with belief in a god. The main difference, to me, is that they all grant an objectively measurable, tangible gain on those who obtain them. Belief in God grants you what, exactly? We don't have any kind of objective proof of any kind of afterlife, or that those who followed the teachings of their religion during their time on earth gain some kind of tangible benefit after their death.
Or in other words, belief in God requires faith. "Belief" in the power of possessions or knowledge or fame and so on require only to look at those who already have them in the real world.
Regardless, even if we accept these things as being "on parity" with a belief in a god, you go on to say:
Nobody has ever observed any animal engage what we humans call prayer, for example. Maybe you know of examples of animals, mammals specifically, engaging in any activity which would be recognized as "religious". I do not.This doesn't follow from your previous statement. People who place supreme importance on fame and fortune as a "substitute" for belief in God don't generally pray to fortune, or engage in activities which would typically be recognised as "religious". For one thing, most people who don't believe in God believe that they have full responsibility for obtaining the things they desire; there is no third party they can pray to or ask for assistance from.
If you wish to use the fact that we've never (to the best of my knowledge) observed animals praying or displaying otherwise "religious" behaviour as "proof" that animals are incapable of religion or belief in a higher power, the same treatment should be given to humans. Many humans don't engage in prayer or any forms of worship or religious activity. Allowing "lust for power" to serve as a substitute for religion or god-belief seems like a very feeble attempt to justify the claim that "all humans are religious and always will be".
Back to animals: early humans often attributed thunder to an unseen being, typically assuming that this being possessed great power. This is well documented. Ever had a dog as a pet? Most dogs are terrified of thunder, and will seek a hiding place -- even if they've been living inside a house for their entire life and should be aware by now that the thunder can't hurt them. Why is it such a stretch to think that perhaps they also attribute the crashing boom from the sky as being the work of an unseen entity of great power?
I believe that you're conflating public perception of a company being "good" with that company actually doing good. Actually doing good is surely an effective way of getting the public to perceive you as good, but it's certainly not the only way. If everyone followed that approach, marketing and PR etc. would be a much much smaller industry. And it's only the public perception of the company being "good" that can assist with profits. You can pump mountains of toxic waste into the river systems all you want, but if you can keep it secret and promote your company as being "Clean and Green" you'll still get the dollars from environmentally conscious consumers.
Google's "Do No Evil" motto is a great example of an effective PR campaign creating the perception of a good company. We wouldn't normally think that a for-profit, publically listed company could do anything but seek to maximise its profits in the short term. Yet every time there's a story about Google doing something less-than-saintly, it spawns a lot of discussion about whether or not it's really, actually evil, or whether it's just a teeny bit evil and therefore okay compared to what some other companies are doing, etc.; because lots of people actually believe (or want to believe?) that Google really doesn't Do Evil.
Now, this "Do No Evil" thing is really important as a long-term approach to PR for Google; back when they were just a new search engine, most people didn't really care. Now with them hosting people's email, performing all their search, functioning as their news aggregation service etc., it's really important people trust them. But back then, the idea probably was just aimed at short-term gain: it gave everyone a warm fuzzy feeling that this new upstart with the funny name was a different kind of company.
Your main point is that most companies (and individuals) are often only capable of effectively acting on short term goals. I agree with that. Your sub-point that it pays for companies to be good (at least in the long term) isn't the whole story, because what pays is for people to think the company does good. It's likely that for smaller businesses, the easiest way to achieve that perception is to actually do good. For larger companies that can afford to spend the money on PR, it's usually easier to opt for the smoke and mirrors approach. The ability to use deception of course feeds into the short-term actions: once you've done evil, it becomes beneficial in the short-term to spend money to fix the company's image. More far-sighted companies may even be clever enough to spend money promoting themselves as good while they do evil.
From http://www.currell.net/models/r101.htm:
Early the next morning, struggling against wind and turbulence over northern France, the huge ship struck the ground and burst into flames. Of the 54 people aboard only six survived.I don't get the impression that zeppelins were ever really commonplace. More like luxury liners. They also carried far fewer people. Comparing them to modern aircraft transport is a bit disingenuous.
Did you even think about that when you wrote it? Or do you actually believe that all the people who claim not to be religious or not to believe in God are lying about it?
uniquely among all creaturesThat's an interesting statement. Do we know for sure that no other creature has "religious" beliefs as part of their behaviour? How can we be so certain? And if it's true, what is the significance of this?
Your overall point is that pretty much all societies practice some kind of religion, therefore it's good and worthy. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any societies that are absent of unnecessary violence, abuse, torture against other people. Does that mean this kind of behaviour is worthy of respect? Left to our own devices, with no societal pressure to behave in a humane manner, all of us would steal, murder, pillage and rape whenever we thought it would benefit us and/or our immediate family.
Arguing something is good and worthwhile because "lots of people do it" is a self-defeating cause. You should be able to argue the worth of religion on its own merits.
I agree that saying that religion contains "nothing worthy of respect whatsoever" is narrow-minded and unfair. Religion provides many people with a sense of purpose, brings them comfort in ways that nothing else can, and can encourage people to behave in incredibly positive ways. These are all worthy things.