By saving documents as XML files, the new Office will allow back-end computing systems such as corporate databases to retrieve and reuse data from documents.
Anyone else see the patents as an excuse to charge companies that develop Office/XML solutions for corporates additional licensing fees with this patent?
In this article SCO is already getting the finger from a couple of big New Zealand Linux users.
Massey University has deployed a 132 CPU Helix supercomputer running RedHat Linux 7.3 at its Albany campus in Auckland and would be expected to pay $NZ171,192.61 for the right to continue using its operating system. The director of parallel computing, Chris Messon, says that's not going to happen. "We have no plans to pay off SCO."
And Weta Digital...
Operations manager Milton Ngan says any move to pay the licence would be seen as capitulation and Weta isn't about to start down that road. "We won't make any moves till we see what the rest of the industry does. We're a small company a long way from SCO so we'll try to stay here out of sight."
I haven't seen much mention of this, but Bush was proposing to use moon resources to advance the program. Whilst yes, this gets around the issue somewhat of having to lift resources out of Earths gravitional field, there should be rather strict limits to the amount of mining to be done on the moon. After all, we only have one moon, and it shouldn't be seen as another resource to be plundered. God knows its not like humans have done enough of that already...
In admiralty law, barratry is a fraudulent act committed by a master or crew of a vessel which damages the vessel or its cargo, including desertion, illegal scuttling, and theft of the ship or cargo.
it seems like the idea of them being a nation is more *cool* than it is practical
Not really, they just wanted to rule themselves, like most other peoples on this earth.
They were first claimed by the British, then were turned over to New Zealand, and in 1974 they gained their independence to manage themselves. At the same time they remained in free association with New Zealand, and to this day we provide a lot of financial support and manage their international affairs. There are around 1,500 Niuians on Niue, and around 20,000 in New Zealand. They're just picking that more will come to NZ. Which is a shame because Niue is a lovely place. Great snorkelling and diving, but most of the coastal beds will have been damaged by Heta and take 5-10 years to recover (Cyclone Ofa was the last major one in 1990). They didn't have wireless when I was there in Nov 2002. Main reason for Island wide wireless was that cabling kinda sucked. Mobile phones were starting to take off too - like most developing countries it is easier to roll out wireless.
... is that more companies will be able to access the HP iPod through the wholesale channel, whereas Apple distributors keep a very tight leash on those who are able to purchase the products at wholesale. This potentially means that HP could down the track be outselling Apple purely because a much greater number of stores will have access to the HP iPod. Should be interesting.
Well, I don't see why they can't do it like some other DVD's. When you start them up you get the choice of watching the theatrical version or the special edition. It would be nice to have the ability to watch the original or updated version and have them on the one DVD. I think Independence Day was one such DVD.
Haven't the authorities shown a propensity for going after malicious software writers, particularly viruses and worms, whilst completely ignoring spam? By writing malicious software, haven't they just attracted a whole lot more attention from law enforcement than they would otherwise have got?
Good on them I say - I think we could do with more law enforcement attention on these sort of people!
Of course it doesn't deny the impacts on those being attacked, nor covers the international aspects of spam. But with more countries creating explicit laws to deal with hacking and misuse of computers, the more dodgy spammers might start getting what they deserve - a good ass-pounding in prison!
I had previously attempted to use a multi-monitor (MM) under W2k but had trouble finding PCI cards that would work as secondary display devices. Thought I'd try it again under XPP earlier this year and it worked nicely. Have tried both 2x and 3x 15" LCD displays. I have seen noticeable benefits of MM setups. These include...
* drag and drop/cut and paste is so much easier
* being able to view a document on one screen whilst typing into another window that has focus is very useful
* the ability to have multiple documents open, be it reference material, other word processing documents, spreadsheets is a real boon
* greatly reduced clicking on the task bar to switch between apps, or the use of alt-tab
* having the MM on the same plane suits the eyes panoramic vision - I would find it much harder to look up and down if monitors were piled high.
I thought about the widescreen option, but they were wanting 100% more $ for 25% extra screen estate. Basically I could have 1 17" widescreen, or two 15" LCD's and the extra adapter for the same price. This gave 100% more real estate over one monitor (by pixel), vs 25% for changing the primary to a widescreen.
I have got older LCDs (Philips 150B2) which have a bevel of around 25mm - this is huge. I get around this by overlapping the bevels. I am starting to think about selling these and purchasing the later models which have much smaller bevels at the edges.
I hate going back to using my laptop when on the road now. You really change you work habit on a multiple monitor. I've had some friends and colleagues use the MM setup too, and they quickly adjust and really like it!
Governments know where the weaknesses are and have all kinds of plans in place to prevent this type of thing happening in case of war. (My father used to be on some of the comittees that put these plans together in the UK. They know where the weaknesses in infrastructure are.)
Actually, Governments do not know every critical weakness in infrastructure. They know the significant ones, yes, but there are always new ones coming along. Why? Because networks change, new circuits are put in, old ones decommissioned. So, you end up with a whole load of different silos of spatial data (network information) that shows different snapshots of different networks at different times. This makes it very easy to confuse people and is a common cause of contractors accidently busting circuits. And with privatisation, you now have to deal with utility companies that won't provide spatial information on their network because it represents commercially sensitive information.
Whilst a Government would seem like a perfect entity to be able to bring this information together, today they are often hamstring by budget cuts. At the same time the politicians throw money at voters trying to lure them with politically correct crap.
But moves in recent years are promising. Canada's Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness is a step in the right direction. Formed a couple of years ago, it takes an all-hazards approach to critical infrastructure. Not just information threats, and not just physical threats. We have yet to merge the two in New Zealand - we have an informal Lifelines Process for physical hazards, and the Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection for virtual threats. But long term, there needs to be a Govt agency repsonsible for Critical Infrastructure Protection from all hazards.
Perhaps a smart worm could monitor attempts to reinfect the machine. Each time it detects another infection attempt, a counter is increased.
After all, if lots of machines are wasting time attempting to infect a machine, may as well close it down automatically so scanning can be more productive elsewhere.
Once the counter hits a trigger value, boom goes the file system.
No point triggering it too early, but if it's done after you have gotten some 'value' from the infection, you could run rampant. The secret would be to not do it too early.
Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash. Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered. It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
If fuel economy is the problem, then the simple and cheap solution is to raise the petrol tax a suitable proportion. It does not require extra costs to create the infrastructure to deal with the increased fuel efficiency issue.
That argument alone should be enough to show that this is not about efficiency and tax, but something else. I'm guessing that something else is that they really would like to invade citizens privacy. Of course if they can automate mindless policing functions, such as vehicle registrations, parking fines, speeding; then that frees up a police force to focus on real crime. Here in NZ police have quotas for speeding fines that they have to meet!
I think these proposals must be looked at in the broader context of what the technological change will mean for society. There are some benefits such as more efficient policing, but the potential privacy costs are huge, and I would suggest that not everyone will agree with that.
1. A spam virus could work if the customer doesn't know about the mechanism a spammer is using to distribute their advertsing (easy), and if there is no way of associating a virus to being a vehicle to deliver spam (much more difficult, but perhaps not impossible). The secret would be to try and keep as much of the mechanism hidden from public view - this would mean a stealth virus/worm rather than the door-smashing varieties we've seen of late. This would require talent, subtlety and intelligence by the programmers.
2. A P2P file-sharing virus/worm. It's getting risky to distribute P2P files, why not use hosts that don't know or care. Separate the clients from the servers, and create an autonomous server network that takes over computers as needed using a virus or worm. If enough systems were compromised, it may be possible to hide some of the traffic flow. Imagine if the servers moved files around every few hours, even if the servers themselves flicked on and off occasionally. How the hell would rights holders go about shutting that network down?
Re:redundancy and surge capacity
on
Network Blackout
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I thought that the internet was supposed to be redundant (like power)... i thought they learned on sept 11, that there wasnt enough capacity on the cell networks
We had a presentation last night from Tom O'Rourke on the critical infrastructure affected by Sept 11 2001.
The main point to come out of it is that most critical infrastructure is commercially run. They are designed to run and handle typical peak loading.
And there is a difference between redundancy and surge capacity. Redundancy allows you to continue operating at a reduced or normal level. Surge capacity allows you to operate at increased levels due to an unexpected event - such as handling increased mobile phone demand by increasing available spectrum bandwidth as was also done after Sept 11 2001.
The problem that you have in these sort of failures is that not only have you lost capacity, but you see increased demand at the same time. One slide he had detailed cell phones in NYC. Typical block rate (no tone) is about 4% - ie one in 25 calls you can't make. After losing all the capacity after the collapse, combined with everyone wanting to talk on their phones, the blocked call rate jumped to 92%. The expense required handle these sort of extreme events cannot be justified.
Utilities can handle ordinary spikes in their systems, but it is not economic to design surge capacity into most systems.
You'll find this problem across a number of sectors... telecommunications, power, and hospital beds tend to provide the best examples. You'd be suprised at how few hospital beds are generally available at any given point in time.
If we had a mass casualty event in New Zealand, it is quite possible we would be sending victims to hospitals in Australia because we don't have the surge capacity.
They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report. They did have multiple lines going into Central Auckland (see this section of the report, pages 34-39). It is true that maintainence had been cut back. One failed, and placed increasing loads on the remaining two (if I recall correctly) lines. After about a week of increasing load, these two lines failed as well. So yes, one failed and it caused two others to fail later. But to say they were totally inept and had only one line for central Auckland is just wrong. And it was only the central city. Auckland is a very spread out city, and greater Auckland in fact covers four cities. It was only the Central Business District that was affected.
Aucklands failure was human in origin however. It sounds like todays failure in Niagara was of natural origin (lightning strike), and could perhaps be compared to the Canadian powercuts caused by the ice storms of 1998.
I was at the gym for the 3pm NZST news today, and Microsoft took a hammering. Only Microsoft Systems are affected... MSFT this, MSFT that - I'd like to see what Microsoft New Bliss-Land do to spin this.
I've just checked their NZ home page and they are soliciting for feedback on customer feelings towards MSFT today, and have some obvious customer advice in big, bright colours. Microsoft US doesn't seem to care in comparision.
The feedback form has three cute faces with various different states from happy to angry on them. Perhaps you may want to give them some feedback to;)
POPFiles utility does not lie just in managing the spam menace. To me, the real utility in POPFile is the ability to create x number of buckets and train it to sort your mail. SpamBayes looks great for spam but has no further utility. I like having POPFile sort my work from personal emails, and file all my mailing lists in another, and even jokes. Of course there is the spam folder that I check every now and then. I look forward to it being able to support IMAP servers as well.
Ah that will pale into insignificance when compared to the aging of the customer data already in the db. I did a Certificate in Direct Marketing (never used it in the end) 4-5 years ago, it was quite interesting. One of the points we were taught by our national DMA was that in a given year, approximately 25% of the customer records in a database will become outdated - I'm sure it is even higher in Internet time. The relevance to spammers is that they must continually be creating new databases to guard against obselete customer data.
but above it. At least according to this article. Scary how a number of these things are starting to come together at the same time... it sounds like it is in the rest of the world's interest to support anything that isn't American. Which is a real pity that the DOD just can't play nice with the rest of us. Cheap, GPS guided cruise missile anyone?.
If I had the opportunity to purchase a DVD on the way out of the theatre I would. Purchases are only possible with a ticket, and before you leave the ticket check section. They would milk it. The longer time there is between theatre and dvd release, the more pirating there will be. It will also reduce their potential revenue. Idiots.
how they could prove that an individual who puts Jedi on the form does not believe in the faith, and hence lied, and should be fined? Sure it might not be a 'recognised' religion but authorities can't prove that it is not a religion, any less than they can prove other religions actually are real!
Slashdot Mirror
By saving documents as XML files, the new Office will allow back-end computing systems such as corporate databases to retrieve and reuse data from documents.
Anyone else see the patents as an excuse to charge companies that develop Office/XML solutions for corporates additional licensing fees with this patent?
In this article SCO is already getting the finger from a couple of big New Zealand Linux users.
Massey University has deployed a 132 CPU Helix supercomputer running RedHat Linux 7.3 at its Albany campus in Auckland and would be expected to pay $NZ171,192.61 for the right to continue using its operating system. The director of parallel computing, Chris Messon, says that's not going to happen. "We have no plans to pay off SCO."
And Weta Digital...
Operations manager Milton Ngan says any move to pay the licence would be seen as capitulation and Weta isn't about to start down that road. "We won't make any moves till we see what the rest of the industry does. We're a small company a long way from SCO so we'll try to stay here out of sight."
I haven't seen much mention of this, but Bush was proposing to use moon resources to advance the program. Whilst yes, this gets around the issue somewhat of having to lift resources out of Earths gravitional field, there should be rather strict limits to the amount of mining to be done on the moon. After all, we only have one moon, and it shouldn't be seen as another resource to be plundered. God knows its not like humans have done enough of that already...
From that page...
In admiralty law, barratry is a fraudulent act committed by a master or crew of a vessel which damages the vessel or its cargo, including desertion, illegal scuttling, and theft of the ship or cargo.
Sounds even more like SCOX now...
it seems like the idea of them being a nation is more *cool* than it is practical
Not really, they just wanted to rule themselves, like most other peoples on this earth.
They were first claimed by the British, then were turned over to New Zealand, and in 1974 they gained their independence to manage themselves. At the same time they remained in free association with New Zealand, and to this day we provide a lot of financial support and manage their international affairs. There are around 1,500 Niuians on Niue, and around 20,000 in New Zealand. They're just picking that more will come to NZ. Which is a shame because Niue is a lovely place. Great snorkelling and diving, but most of the coastal beds will have been damaged by Heta and take 5-10 years to recover (Cyclone Ofa was the last major one in 1990). They didn't have wireless when I was there in Nov 2002. Main reason for Island wide wireless was that cabling kinda sucked. Mobile phones were starting to take off too - like most developing countries it is easier to roll out wireless.
... is that more companies will be able to access the HP iPod through the wholesale channel, whereas Apple distributors keep a very tight leash on those who are able to purchase the products at wholesale. This potentially means that HP could down the track be outselling Apple purely because a much greater number of stores will have access to the HP iPod. Should be interesting.
The International Spy Museum mentioned is open to the public, but admission is quite pricey: about $10 per head
A mere pittance when I recall the hilarity at seeing the rectal tool kit on display (I kid you not). I've had less laughs at some movies I've been to!
Well, I don't see why they can't do it like some other DVD's. When you start them up you get the choice of watching the theatrical version or the special edition. It would be nice to have the ability to watch the original or updated version and have them on the one DVD. I think Independence Day was one such DVD.
I'm being serious here...
Haven't the authorities shown a propensity for going after malicious software writers, particularly viruses and worms, whilst completely ignoring spam? By writing malicious software, haven't they just attracted a whole lot more attention from law enforcement than they would otherwise have got?
Good on them I say - I think we could do with more law enforcement attention on these sort of people!
Of course it doesn't deny the impacts on those being attacked, nor covers the international aspects of spam. But with more countries creating explicit laws to deal with hacking and misuse of computers, the more dodgy spammers might start getting what they deserve - a good ass-pounding in prison!
I had previously attempted to use a multi-monitor (MM) under W2k but had trouble finding PCI cards that would work as secondary display devices. Thought I'd try it again under XPP earlier this year and it worked nicely. Have tried both 2x and 3x 15" LCD displays. I have seen noticeable benefits of MM setups. These include...
* drag and drop/cut and paste is so much easier
* being able to view a document on one screen whilst typing into another window that has focus is very useful
* the ability to have multiple documents open, be it reference material, other word processing documents, spreadsheets is a real boon
* greatly reduced clicking on the task bar to switch between apps, or the use of alt-tab
* having the MM on the same plane suits the eyes panoramic vision - I would find it much harder to look up and down if monitors were piled high.
I thought about the widescreen option, but they were wanting 100% more $ for 25% extra screen estate. Basically I could have 1 17" widescreen, or two 15" LCD's and the extra adapter for the same price. This gave 100% more real estate over one monitor (by pixel), vs 25% for changing the primary to a widescreen.
I have got older LCDs (Philips 150B2) which have a bevel of around 25mm - this is huge. I get around this by overlapping the bevels. I am starting to think about selling these and purchasing the later models which have much smaller bevels at the edges.
I hate going back to using my laptop when on the road now. You really change you work habit on a multiple monitor. I've had some friends and colleagues use the MM setup too, and they quickly adjust and really like it!
Governments know where the weaknesses are and have all kinds of plans in place to prevent this type of thing happening in case of war. (My father used to be on some of the comittees that put these plans together in the UK. They know where the weaknesses in infrastructure are.)
Actually, Governments do not know every critical weakness in infrastructure. They know the significant ones, yes, but there are always new ones coming along. Why? Because networks change, new circuits are put in, old ones decommissioned. So, you end up with a whole load of different silos of spatial data (network information) that shows different snapshots of different networks at different times. This makes it very easy to confuse people and is a common cause of contractors accidently busting circuits. And with privatisation, you now have to deal with utility companies that won't provide spatial information on their network because it represents commercially sensitive information.
Whilst a Government would seem like a perfect entity to be able to bring this information together, today they are often hamstring by budget cuts. At the same time the politicians throw money at voters trying to lure them with politically correct crap.
But moves in recent years are promising. Canada's Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness is a step in the right direction. Formed a couple of years ago, it takes an all-hazards approach to critical infrastructure. Not just information threats, and not just physical threats. We have yet to merge the two in New Zealand - we have an informal Lifelines Process for physical hazards, and the Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection for virtual threats. But long term, there needs to be a Govt agency repsonsible for Critical Infrastructure Protection from all hazards.
Perhaps a smart worm could monitor attempts to reinfect the machine. Each time it detects another infection attempt, a counter is increased.
After all, if lots of machines are wasting time attempting to infect a machine, may as well close it down automatically so scanning can be more productive elsewhere.
Once the counter hits a trigger value, boom goes the file system.
No point triggering it too early, but if it's done after you have gotten some 'value' from the infection, you could run rampant. The secret would be to not do it too early.
I really can't decide which is worse. GPS or RFID? I used to think that we had pretty rational politicians in NZ - until I read this recently.
Motorists face travel tax and 'Big Brother' microchip law enforcement
Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash. Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered. It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
If fuel economy is the problem, then the simple and cheap solution is to raise the petrol tax a suitable proportion. It does not require extra costs to create the infrastructure to deal with the increased fuel efficiency issue.
That argument alone should be enough to show that this is not about efficiency and tax, but something else. I'm guessing that something else is that they really would like to invade citizens privacy. Of course if they can automate mindless policing functions, such as vehicle registrations, parking fines, speeding; then that frees up a police force to focus on real crime. Here in NZ police have quotas for speeding fines that they have to meet!
I think these proposals must be looked at in the broader context of what the technological change will mean for society. There are some benefits such as more efficient policing, but the potential privacy costs are huge, and I would suggest that not everyone will agree with that.
1. A spam virus could work if the customer doesn't know about the mechanism a spammer is using to distribute their advertsing (easy), and if there is no way of associating a virus to being a vehicle to deliver spam (much more difficult, but perhaps not impossible). The secret would be to try and keep as much of the mechanism hidden from public view - this would mean a stealth virus/worm rather than the door-smashing varieties we've seen of late. This would require talent, subtlety and intelligence by the programmers.
2. A P2P file-sharing virus/worm. It's getting risky to distribute P2P files, why not use hosts that don't know or care. Separate the clients from the servers, and create an autonomous server network that takes over computers as needed using a virus or worm. If enough systems were compromised, it may be possible to hide some of the traffic flow. Imagine if the servers moved files around every few hours, even if the servers themselves flicked on and off occasionally. How the hell would rights holders go about shutting that network down?
I thought that the internet was supposed to be redundant (like power)... i thought they learned on sept 11, that there wasnt enough capacity on the cell networks
We had a presentation last night from Tom O'Rourke on the critical infrastructure affected by Sept 11 2001.
The main point to come out of it is that most critical infrastructure is commercially run. They are designed to run and handle typical peak loading.
And there is a difference between redundancy and surge capacity. Redundancy allows you to continue operating at a reduced or normal level. Surge capacity allows you to operate at increased levels due to an unexpected event - such as handling increased mobile phone demand by increasing available spectrum bandwidth as was also done after Sept 11 2001.
The problem that you have in these sort of failures is that not only have you lost capacity, but you see increased demand at the same time. One slide he had detailed cell phones in NYC. Typical block rate (no tone) is about 4% - ie one in 25 calls you can't make. After losing all the capacity after the collapse, combined with everyone wanting to talk on their phones, the blocked call rate jumped to 92%. The expense required handle these sort of extreme events cannot be justified.
Utilities can handle ordinary spikes in their systems, but it is not economic to design surge capacity into most systems.
You'll find this problem across a number of sectors... telecommunications, power, and hospital beds tend to provide the best examples. You'd be suprised at how few hospital beds are generally available at any given point in time.
If we had a mass casualty event in New Zealand, it is quite possible we would be sending victims to hospitals in Australia because we don't have the surge capacity.
Cheers Gav
They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report. They did have multiple lines going into Central Auckland (see this section of the report, pages 34-39). It is true that maintainence had been cut back. One failed, and placed increasing loads on the remaining two (if I recall correctly) lines. After about a week of increasing load, these two lines failed as well. So yes, one failed and it caused two others to fail later. But to say they were totally inept and had only one line for central Auckland is just wrong. And it was only the central city. Auckland is a very spread out city, and greater Auckland in fact covers four cities. It was only the Central Business District that was affected.
Aucklands failure was human in origin however. It sounds like todays failure in Niagara was of natural origin (lightning strike), and could perhaps be compared to the Canadian powercuts caused by the ice storms of 1998.
Cheers Gav
if you're lucky and the power stays out for long enough, you might be able to enjoy the night sky for a change.
I was at the gym for the 3pm NZST news today, and Microsoft took a hammering. Only Microsoft Systems are affected... MSFT this, MSFT that - I'd like to see what Microsoft New Bliss-Land do to spin this.
I've just checked their NZ home page and they are soliciting for feedback on customer feelings towards MSFT today, and have some obvious customer advice in big, bright colours. Microsoft US doesn't seem to care in comparision.
The feedback form has three cute faces with various different states from happy to angry on them. Perhaps you may want to give them some feedback to ;)
Actually, I think the Australians are more American than British... look how they spell labor...
Australian Labor Party
POPFiles utility does not lie just in managing the spam menace. To me, the real utility in POPFile is the ability to create x number of buckets and train it to sort your mail. SpamBayes looks great for spam but has no further utility. I like having POPFile sort my work from personal emails, and file all my mailing lists in another, and even jokes. Of course there is the spam folder that I check every now and then. I look forward to it being able to support IMAP servers as well.
Ah that will pale into insignificance when compared to the aging of the customer data already in the db. I did a Certificate in Direct Marketing (never used it in the end) 4-5 years ago, it was quite interesting. One of the points we were taught by our national DMA was that in a given year, approximately 25% of the customer records in a database will become outdated - I'm sure it is even higher in Internet time. The relevance to spammers is that they must continually be creating new databases to guard against obselete customer data.
viral marketing! ;)
but above it. At least according to this article. Scary how a number of these things are starting to come together at the same time... it sounds like it is in the rest of the world's interest to support anything that isn't American. Which is a real pity that the DOD just can't play nice with the rest of us. Cheap, GPS guided cruise missile anyone?.
If I had the opportunity to purchase a DVD on the way out of the theatre I would. Purchases are only possible with a ticket, and before you leave the ticket check section. They would milk it. The longer time there is between theatre and dvd release, the more pirating there will be. It will also reduce their potential revenue. Idiots.
how they could prove that an individual who puts Jedi on the form does not believe in the faith, and hence lied, and should be fined? Sure it might not be a 'recognised' religion but authorities can't prove that it is not a religion, any less than they can prove other religions actually are real!