And what if they make a mistake and block someone who just happens to send a lot of mail?
That person switches to using Comcast's SMTP server until they can get the block removed? Or they tunnel their connection to their SMTP server over SSH so it's not seen by Comcast as using port 25?
Most people using Comcast use Comcast's SMTP servers, so it is only a tiny fraction of their users that even have the potential to have legitimate mail affected.
I quit 7th Guest pretty quickly, when I realized that pretty much all of the puzzles in it were just old classic puzzles, which I could get from books I already had, and doing them on paper was more convenient then doing them via a clunky GUI.
First, WTF? Please don't pull things like "4 months late" out of your butt and expect to be taken seriously. You haven't seen Apple's product release roadmaps. You don't know what you're talking about.
I didn't pull it out of my butt. I pulled it out of what Apple said in their conference call explaining their first quarter results. Apple says that these machines were supposed to be out at the end of February, but were delayed because of CPU availability.
Maybe it's cause I'm a Mac zealot, but there's something hardcore about seeing a model that is only offered in a Dual Processor config
It seems rather dumb on their part, rather than hardcore. For most people, a dual CPU offers no real advantage. Single-CPU configurations would seem to be win-win. For users, they would be able to get a cheaper machine that performs just as well for most things. For Apple, they could build twice as many machines with the scarce CPUs (remember, the new machines are 4 months late because the CPU has hard to get).
Re:Not surprising, and not bad.
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I'm not referring to the usability of the system; I'm referring to the number of security holes found in OS X vs. the number found in OS 9
You can't find holes in something that doesn't exist. OS 9 had no security, hence no security holes.
Why on earth would you submit your own website when you know it will go down in a matter of seconds?
It's worse...check the IP address. It's on cable, and it almost certainly violates the TOS to run a web server there. So, not only did it go down right away, it might stay down permanently, depending on how annoyed the cable company is.
The way to deal with spam in a situation like this, where you may be legally required by state record keeping laws to archive records, including email, for a long time, is to only accept encrypted mail from the public.
Actually, it doesn't have to be encrypted--any hoop that you can people jump through to mail you is fine, as long as it isn't something that spammers will be able to automate. For example, you could also use a randomly generated email address that changes frequently, and provide a website with a "mailto" link and a challenge image. (However, the challenge image might provide problems for blind people, so that might not fly).
This should cut out almost all the spam, cutting mail down to a managable volume for archiving, so you can get back to worrying about the other problem with satisfying record retention laws: finding a way to keep the data. Some states require records be maintained for a long time--long enough that you have to worry about media life, and the availability of readers even if the media lasts long enough.
...a standard that doesn't have a lot of real-world support? I mean, if you go onto one of the p2p systems, you find that everything is still pretty much mp3
I don't see why Apple would base any decision on what format is most popular for piracy. (Yes, I realize you are probably one of the 5 people that use P2P legitimately).
Re:60GB... but anything else?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And that, my friend, is the stupidest thing anyone said this week
What exactly is stupid about it? Players with DRM, such as the iPod, and the Creative players, can play files without DRM. Players without DRM, on the other hand, cannot play files with DRM (without hacking or kludging).
Hence, the players with DRM provide the most flexibility.
Re:60GB... but anything else?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The problem with the iRiver iHP 1x0 players is that they lack DRM. I'm currently leaning toward an iPod because of this. Most of my use will be for music I rip from CD, but I would like the option of buying the occasional single track from one of the online stores, when I don't like enough on an album to justify buying a CD.
Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.
I don't understand why you rejected Mindstorms as too childish. It seems perfect to me: it is simple (which is what you want for someone who is a complete beginner), and it is interesting (your programs do something concrete). The only problem I see is that if she isn't mechancially inclined, you might have to build the robots for her.
Anyway, the main problem here is that you can't really separate programming from the problems that the programs solve. You need to find some area where she understands the problems that are to be solved by programming.
Find something she is already interested in and understands, that can be automated by computer, and base your teaching around that. That way, she will understand what is going on, and will only have to pick up the programming part.
I installed FC2 as an upgrade to my RH9 system at work. I knew about the Windows dual boot problem, but didn't care since that box is Linux-only.
First problem was that it totally botched configuring the boot manager. It took out my RH9 entries from grub.conf, but failed to add any entries for FC2. My guess is that it was confused by an entry I had for a test 2.6.0 kernel I had compiled to play with when contemplating just updating RH9 to 2.6 myself.
I don't recall all the other specific problems I had, but basically I spent all day tracking down and fixing little things that didn't work, after I fixed the bad grub.conf.
The most annoying is that it does not install the policy stuff. This causes RPM to give an error about some missing file every time you install an RPM. This error seemed to confuse up2date, because that hung every time it went to install RPMs. Yum was also broken. I had Yum installed from Fedora Legacy, and apparently that is a later version than the one in FC2, so FC2 does not update it, but it does update some libraries that Yum depends on to versions that Yum doesn't like. So, you have to "rpm -e yum" by hand, and then install Yum from the FC2 disc to get a working Yum.
After doing that I tried to use yum to bring things up to date, and that failed because of a dependency problem with php-manual. php-manual depends on a specif version of php, and so yum could not update that version of php. Again, I suspect that this came from Fedora Legacy.
I also gave FC2 a try at home, as a fresh install on my second disk. It handled most of my hardware, except for my soundcard. I have an Asus P4PE with onboard sound. It is supposedly supported by ALSA, but no sound plays.
There were a few other minor problems, but none of the total hell from the RH9 upgrade test. Still, I am pretty unimpressed by the state of disorganization of the overall Fedora project. For example, there's no obvious mention of Fedora Legacy on Redhat's Fedora site. The Fedora.us site contains a bunch of useful information also not on the Redhat site.
So, I figured that if I am going to have to install from scratch (which I can do--I've got good backups of all my data), I might as well take a look at SuSE. I bought 9.1. So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare! As soon as the kernel starts loading during install, the keyboard goes away. I was going to try it with a USB keyboard to see if that made a difference, but I can't even get VMWare to boot when I have USB 1.x support in my RH9 system. (RH9 has serious USB problems. It works great mostly with USB2 devices (although occasionally I've had to reboot to get a disk to show up as a/dev/sdX device, even though it is showing up on lsusb)), but sometimes fails to load the USB 1.x modules, so they need to be loaded manually. However, when I do that, things that use USB get very slow to load).
However, tests on my second disk worked fairly well with SuSE, with two problems.
First, it has the same soundcard problem FC2 does. I thought it might be a 2.6 kernel problem, but Knoppix with 2.6 finds it fine and plays sound. Doing some experimenting, I have determined that the snd-intel8x0 module simply does not work right. However, the i810-audio module works (which is what Knoppix uses). So, all I have to do is let SuSE configure my soundcard, and then change the module loading stuff from snd-intel8x0 to i810-audio. (That didn't work on FC2 because the kernel shipped with FC2 doesn't include that module. I have to rebuild the kernel to enable OSS...another strike against FC2, since I want to be able to use the kernel from the distro). (Another thing they didn't configure into FC2 is Firewire. Enough computers nowadays include that that I don't understand how they cannot include modular Firewire support).
The only other SuSE problem I saw in my tests was X configuration. Even though they have an entry for my monitor (Gateway
Compared to mechanical storage (oh shit, head crash! there goes my latest $10,000 shoot), high-capacity CF is worth what, to non-pros, looks to be ridiculously high prices
How often do heads crash? If it is rare, it would probably still be cheaper to use disk, and if you do have a crash on your $10k shoot, send the disk to a data recovery service. Sure, those are expensive, but I think even they are cheap compared to this huge flash drive.
CASPIAN seems a bit loony to me. Here's a quote from their spychips.com website:
Unlike the bar code, RFID could be bad for your health. RFID supporters envision a world where RFID reader devices are everywhere - in stores, in floors, in doorways, on airplanes -- even in the refrigerators and medicine cabinets of our own homes. In such a world, we and our children would be continually bombarded with electromagnetic energy. Researchers do not know the long-term health effects of chronic exposure to the energy emitted by these reader devices
(Emphasis theirs). Unless they give some numbers on how the reader emissions compare to the thousands of other sources we are being subjected to, that's just baseless speculation, with the old "think of the children" cliche thrown in to tug at our heartstrings. That's usually a good sign that someone doesn't have a real argument to offer.
As cases filter through, the defense template could be refined. It would enable individuals to defend themselves against the lawsuits, yet with the experience gained through a peer-to-peer legal network
The problem with this is it only works if the people being sued are innocent.
You ask about ogg players and OSX, I'll address this one first. I'm using the ihp-120, from iRiver, it's a nice player, with features geeks can appreciate. Price is the same as an iPod (got mine for $344 from newegg, free shipping)
The iRivers look nice...and Ogg Vorbis support is a big plus, but what I don't understand is why they don't support DRM'ed WMA. There are occasional times where I like a song from a band, but not enough of their other songs to buy and rip the whole album, so I'd like the option of buying the single from an online music store. iRiver supports this in their non-HD players.
I know you can do frequency analysis on the output of these various codecs. Just compare that to the average human auditory capacity and you can get an objective measurement of the merits of these various compression method
Uhm...no you can't. All that gives you is an objective measurement of the frequency response of the various codecs. Since there are plenty of ways to screw up sound besides losing high frequencies, that will be pretty worthless.
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That person switches to using Comcast's SMTP server until they can get the block removed? Or they tunnel their connection to their SMTP server over SSH so it's not seen by Comcast as using port 25?
Most people using Comcast use Comcast's SMTP servers, so it is only a tiny fraction of their users that even have the potential to have legitimate mail affected.
I find the white iPods ugly. White clashes with just about everything else I own.
If you were to drive on Pass Avenue in Burbank, California, on Passover, and cross the freeway, you would "pass over Pass overpass over Passover".
6 * a few hundred dollars?
I quit 7th Guest pretty quickly, when I realized that pretty much all of the puzzles in it were just old classic puzzles, which I could get from books I already had, and doing them on paper was more convenient then doing them via a clunky GUI.
I didn't pull it out of my butt. I pulled it out of what Apple said in their conference call explaining their first quarter results. Apple says that these machines were supposed to be out at the end of February, but were delayed because of CPU availability.
It seems rather dumb on their part, rather than hardcore. For most people, a dual CPU offers no real advantage. Single-CPU configurations would seem to be win-win. For users, they would be able to get a cheaper machine that performs just as well for most things. For Apple, they could build twice as many machines with the scarce CPUs (remember, the new machines are 4 months late because the CPU has hard to get).
You can't find holes in something that doesn't exist. OS 9 had no security, hence no security holes.
Check out the inventor names on the patent.
It's worse...check the IP address. It's on cable, and it almost certainly violates the TOS to run a web server there. So, not only did it go down right away, it might stay down permanently, depending on how annoyed the cable company is.
Actually, it doesn't have to be encrypted--any hoop that you can people jump through to mail you is fine, as long as it isn't something that spammers will be able to automate. For example, you could also use a randomly generated email address that changes frequently, and provide a website with a "mailto" link and a challenge image. (However, the challenge image might provide problems for blind people, so that might not fly).
This should cut out almost all the spam, cutting mail down to a managable volume for archiving, so you can get back to worrying about the other problem with satisfying record retention laws: finding a way to keep the data. Some states require records be maintained for a long time--long enough that you have to worry about media life, and the availability of readers even if the media lasts long enough.
I'm surprised that there aren't any state laws that would override that local limit.
I don't see why Apple would base any decision on what format is most popular for piracy. (Yes, I realize you are probably one of the 5 people that use P2P legitimately).
What exactly is stupid about it? Players with DRM, such as the iPod, and the Creative players, can play files without DRM. Players without DRM, on the other hand, cannot play files with DRM (without hacking or kludging).
Hence, the players with DRM provide the most flexibility.
Also, the iPod works with Audible.com. The iRiver does not.
I don't understand why you rejected Mindstorms as too childish. It seems perfect to me: it is simple (which is what you want for someone who is a complete beginner), and it is interesting (your programs do something concrete). The only problem I see is that if she isn't mechancially inclined, you might have to build the robots for her.
Anyway, the main problem here is that you can't really separate programming from the problems that the programs solve. You need to find some area where she understands the problems that are to be solved by programming.
Find something she is already interested in and understands, that can be automated by computer, and base your teaching around that. That way, she will understand what is going on, and will only have to pick up the programming part.
First problem was that it totally botched configuring the boot manager. It took out my RH9 entries from grub.conf, but failed to add any entries for FC2. My guess is that it was confused by an entry I had for a test 2.6.0 kernel I had compiled to play with when contemplating just updating RH9 to 2.6 myself.
I don't recall all the other specific problems I had, but basically I spent all day tracking down and fixing little things that didn't work, after I fixed the bad grub.conf.
The most annoying is that it does not install the policy stuff. This causes RPM to give an error about some missing file every time you install an RPM. This error seemed to confuse up2date, because that hung every time it went to install RPMs. Yum was also broken. I had Yum installed from Fedora Legacy, and apparently that is a later version than the one in FC2, so FC2 does not update it, but it does update some libraries that Yum depends on to versions that Yum doesn't like. So, you have to "rpm -e yum" by hand, and then install Yum from the FC2 disc to get a working Yum.
After doing that I tried to use yum to bring things up to date, and that failed because of a dependency problem with php-manual. php-manual depends on a specif version of php, and so yum could not update that version of php. Again, I suspect that this came from Fedora Legacy.
I also gave FC2 a try at home, as a fresh install on my second disk. It handled most of my hardware, except for my soundcard. I have an Asus P4PE with onboard sound. It is supposedly supported by ALSA, but no sound plays.
There were a few other minor problems, but none of the total hell from the RH9 upgrade test. Still, I am pretty unimpressed by the state of disorganization of the overall Fedora project. For example, there's no obvious mention of Fedora Legacy on Redhat's Fedora site. The Fedora.us site contains a bunch of useful information also not on the Redhat site.
So, I figured that if I am going to have to install from scratch (which I can do--I've got good backups of all my data), I might as well take a look at SuSE. I bought 9.1. So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare! As soon as the kernel starts loading during install, the keyboard goes away. I was going to try it with a USB keyboard to see if that made a difference, but I can't even get VMWare to boot when I have USB 1.x support in my RH9 system. (RH9 has serious USB problems. It works great mostly with USB2 devices (although occasionally I've had to reboot to get a disk to show up as a /dev/sdX device, even though it is showing up on lsusb)), but sometimes fails to load the USB 1.x modules, so they need to be loaded manually. However, when I do that, things that use USB get very slow to load).
However, tests on my second disk worked fairly well with SuSE, with two problems.
First, it has the same soundcard problem FC2 does. I thought it might be a 2.6 kernel problem, but Knoppix with 2.6 finds it fine and plays sound. Doing some experimenting, I have determined that the snd-intel8x0 module simply does not work right. However, the i810-audio module works (which is what Knoppix uses). So, all I have to do is let SuSE configure my soundcard, and then change the module loading stuff from snd-intel8x0 to i810-audio. (That didn't work on FC2 because the kernel shipped with FC2 doesn't include that module. I have to rebuild the kernel to enable OSS...another strike against FC2, since I want to be able to use the kernel from the distro). (Another thing they didn't configure into FC2 is Firewire. Enough computers nowadays include that that I don't understand how they cannot include modular Firewire support).
The only other SuSE problem I saw in my tests was X configuration. Even though they have an entry for my monitor (Gateway
How often do heads crash? If it is rare, it would probably still be cheaper to use disk, and if you do have a crash on your $10k shoot, send the disk to a data recovery service. Sure, those are expensive, but I think even they are cheap compared to this huge flash drive.
Unlike the bar code, RFID could be bad for your health. RFID supporters envision a world where RFID reader devices are everywhere - in stores, in floors, in doorways, on airplanes -- even in the refrigerators and medicine cabinets of our own homes. In such a world, we and our children would be continually bombarded with electromagnetic energy. Researchers do not know the long-term health effects of chronic exposure to the energy emitted by these reader devices
(Emphasis theirs). Unless they give some numbers on how the reader emissions compare to the thousands of other sources we are being subjected to, that's just baseless speculation, with the old "think of the children" cliche thrown in to tug at our heartstrings. That's usually a good sign that someone doesn't have a real argument to offer.
I want Ogg Vorbis at more than 80% of real time.
Then you are a moron.
You could, without being a moron, believe that it should not be illegal, but to refuse to believe that it currently is illegal is simply idiotic.
The problem with this is it only works if the people being sued are innocent.
They aren't threatening lawsuits. They are suing.
The iRivers look nice...and Ogg Vorbis support is a big plus, but what I don't understand is why they don't support DRM'ed WMA. There are occasional times where I like a song from a band, but not enough of their other songs to buy and rip the whole album, so I'd like the option of buying the single from an online music store. iRiver supports this in their non-HD players.
Uhm...no you can't. All that gives you is an objective measurement of the frequency response of the various codecs. Since there are plenty of ways to screw up sound besides losing high frequencies, that will be pretty worthless.