I own a JVC microlaptop (which is actually built by Asus and rebranded by JVC) and I'm totally thrilled by it.
Around 900 g, about the size of VHS tape, a keyboard that I can comfortably touchtype with (and I think my hands are pretty normal). This is a great device - it runs Linux, has a 20 GB harddisk and is fast enough to watch movies on its 16:9 display.
I did own a normal 3 kg laptop some years ago and I'm not looking back. I don't own a car and travel by bike and bus - everything more than 1 kg is an annoyance then.
Yes, I'd love to own an even smaller device. I once bought the Zaurus in the hopes of having a PDA-sized Linux computer, but without a harddisk and without the possibility of connecting an external keyboard, it wasn't worth using and collects dust as one of the most expensive toys I ever bought.
I'm looking forward to a PDA-sized x86 computer with a harddisk, a decent display and good battery time. I also need connectors for an external display, keyboard and (if possible) TV. Count me in as one of their first customers.
...I saw the mini-series and yes, it was surprisingly good. I really really liked it. I liked that they avoided a lot of sci-fi cliches, except one.
So let's face, the invention of human cylons is a big horrible mistake and one of the worst sci-fi cliches ever. Obviously, they wanted to save on the CGI-effects budget and wanted to avoid cheesy robot costumes. So they came up with human-looking cylons. The pilot movie made it clear that the following series will revolve around the question which of the Galactica crew members is actually a cylon, possibly without even knowing about it.
But I see no suspense whatsoever from a plot point that was innovative in 1927's "Metropolis" but that has been worn off ever since: Is that person human or isn't it? Am I talking to the original or not? The idea of non-human enemies posing as humans to subvert the human forces has been done to death by every incarnation of Star Trek and practically almost every other sci-fi show ever made. I see no new idea coming from this. Too bad.
I just wish they would have avoided that and come up with some non-cheesy robot cylons.
All this bruhaha, yet still all they would have to do is using their existing laws and take down Ralsky, Richter and the rest of the well known spammers whose track record of criminal past and present has been thoroughly documented over several years now on Spamhaus and other sites.
Ralsky, Richter and the other gang of professional spammers know what they do, most of them openly admit what they do and many of them have boasted about it on several occasions in newspaper and TV reports about the spam trade (e.g. this recent German article and a slur of others articles).
So what are these agencies doing all this time? They keep saying "watch out, spammers, we're really going to get you big time, very soon now, now please don't move while we concentrate our efforts, but yes, we are going to get you!" - and they still don't actually go after them. Or am I missing something?
And while it seems to non-Americans that the new homeland security policity can quite likely send you to Guantanamo for a traffic light violation if you happen to look like the wrong ethnic group, these guys still get away with it.
The problem is that OIRB is in fact junk mail; basically it's an association of a lot of different mass email marketers, and when you opt in for one, the fine print is that you opt in for all of them.
Nope. They harvest mail addresses from any source they can get a hand on and then spam you. I receive "OptInRealBig" spams on every public email account I maintain. I maintain a lot of mail addresses for my customers. Many of them are administrative accounts. None of them were ever used to "opt-in" to anything, yet I get OIRB spam.
There have been "it's just around the corner!" reports exactly like this one about solar cell tech for more than two decades. Probably even longer, but that's when I started to be interested in solar cells.
Yet, solar cells are still a minor technology, not commonly used. Wake me up when the reports are finally true and buy solar cell powered houses and cars are sold at prices an average consumer can afford and at specifications that an average consumer is interested in.
German news reports claims that the Sasser author's peer group encouraged him to write the worm, make it more effective and spread it.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of his friends from this peer group is the one who reported him. After all, the whistleblower also sent source code as proof to Microsoft Germany before the authorities stepped in - he must have been in direct contact with the author and may even be a co-author.
I still don't know what to make of this. I don't like bad hackers writing worms, but I don't like the reward program, either.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying? The pictures were apparently taken in December 2003.
Exactly. But there is another detail that disgust me even more about this whole event:
It has been reported that for a long time, CD-Rs with these photos were swapped as trophies among the soldiers stationned there. Why? Is this some sort of "war porn" souvenier for them? And - why did it take so long until one who saw these images started to blow the whistle while apparently the other owners of this CD-R enjoyed the "fun" of it?
Most of these things are done for bragging rights, and are not malicious.
You forget that there are now connections between virus/worm authors and organized crime (*). Some new viruses/worms appear to be contract work with the specific intent of using it for criminal intent. It is claimed that several new viruses/worms now scan the victims harddisk for credit card data, online bank account logins and similar interesting data they can sell or use for their own amusement. Some viruses/worms are also written for the purpose of selling the victims computers as spam relays and web server proxies to professional spammers.
(*) Big word, but I don't mean international drug gangs. Still, it is organized crime.
BUT... he didn't just wear the costume for the masquerade. No. He wore it all Saturday evening and all morning and afternoon on Sunday as things were winding down. That, in particular, kinda weirded me out.
Obviously, you haven't been to a SciFi Convention before. That's normal there. The whole concept of Penguicon - the combination of SciFi convention with a Linux conference - is a bastard idea and should have been a warning sign for you.
It's funny that the US is getting upset about data processing "beyond the reach of U.S. authorities", because already some years back, it used to be the other way round.
For several years now, some larger German companies used to offshore their customer data processing to the USA. Some claim this is also done because of the USA's less strict privacy laws that allow for far more data profiling than allowed in Germany. There is also growing concern in German media that it will be impossible to control such outsourced data and that there is no way to ensure that customer data will not be used by the American procesing company for other purposes or sold to third parties.
One such example was the Bahncard, a price rebate system for the national railway. For a few years, it came combined with a creditcard option and its data would be shared with an external partner of CitiBank US for customer profiling, including a photograph, a full credit history and all payment data of the user.
In the trailer, the CGI looked very fine indeed, but the acting looked horrible. The whole trailer just cried "bad acting!". Actors in fron of blue screens, obviously.
...why the Japanese Film industry isn't capable of making a non-cheesy Godzilla SFX film.
I mean, Emmerich's German-American Godzilla in New York had pretty decent effects, but a dull story.
The Japanese Godzilla films often have a good or at least a cute story (*), but really really bad effects. And bad acting. And bad costumes. And bad props.
(* I just _loved_ one Godzilla film that included an UFO traveling to the WW2 era. An American soldier spots it and says to his superiour: "Do we report this, sir?" "No, they wouldn't believe us, anyway. But you can tell your children about this when they're older, Major Spielberg.")
So why don't the Japanese filmmakers get together, set up a decent special effects budget and a good script and make THE ultimate Godzilla movie? It's their national trademark, after all. They should know, shouldn't they?
With apologies to Tetsche...
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
"Sag ich doch, es gibt Lehm auf'm Mars!"
(Tetsche is a German cartoonist. I always liked that joke, but I cannot find the old cartoon online now...)
At the same time, if I unknowingly sent an important document that had a virus and was not recieved, I would want to know.
Read the article.
Of course there are viruses such as Word-macro viruses that users unknowingly send out as an attachment.
But the AV developers know that the particular viruses mentioned in the article fake the sending address of the mail. So the AV software should know that there is no need to send out a warning, since it already knows that the "sender" isn't the sender.
This isn't exactly a difficult programming task.
It's simple. And this has been known for about three years. And there have been previous rants such as the article about it. Yet the AV software developers _still_ write software that sends bogus warnings.
I receive hundreds of these warnings, thanks to being a developer whose mail address is all over the place. I got fed up with these bogus warnings today, so I decided to try to talk to one of the many organizations sending me these virus "warnings". I called the mail admin and the help desk operator of Saxion University and tried to explain to them that these messages are useless. It was a sad discussion.
Yes, they know that the virus is faking the sender's address.
Yes, they know that I am not the sender of the virus, but some unidentified third party.
Yes, they know that this warning is useless for me.
Yes, they do send thousands of these warnings every day. And they know that these are useless, too.
No, there's nothing they are going to do about it.
No, they are not going to turn the warnings off. Because these warnings will be "useful if there is a real virus threat through a mail message." While this particular virus may be faking the mail address, others don't and so they stick to their IT policy.
They basically told me that it's _my_ problem to deal with their useless warnings. "It's just a few mails. Why do you complain?" Ah yeah, a classic spammer's excuse, now used by mail admins for their virus warnings.
I explained them that they should set up a list of mass mailing worms so that they do not send warnings for those that fake the sender address. But no, that's not "an issue" they are going to work on.
It also suggests complaining to the securities and exchange commission, which you're entitled to do if you've lost investment money as a result of any wrongdoing that SCO might have committed.
You can complain to both even if you have not lost money yet. And again, I have to say: complain to the FTC and/or the SEC, it's easy and even non-Americans are allowed to complain there about an American company.
most spam does not come from the US!! Seriously. And the rest of the world can give a sh*t about the laws we pass. [..] Our laws will have no affect on the big fish.
It DOES. It's only RELAYED through foreign computers.
Professional American spammers set up boxes and rape relays outside of the US to avoid being linked with the originating IP of their spam.
Some of the best known spammers are known to have hired servers at Asian and Third World providers. And then there are the current waves of mail viruses that turn the victims' computers into spam relays, also with the primary intention of setting up a network of spam relays to hide the spam's origin.
But most of the professional spammers DO operate from Northern America. Look up the listings on Spamhaus.
(And yes, we in Europe have the same problem. There is a Swiss professional spammer who has set up his computers in South America and a German spam gang using computers in Holland and Eastern Europe. It's easy to hide your tracks that way. But the spam DOES originate in Switzerland and Germany, it's only RELAYED through other countries.)
If he knows, then fine, he should go ahead and do it, for christ's sake.
There's a saying in music: Failed musicians become concert organiziers. Failed concert organizers become music critics. (Sorry if "evevent organizer" is the wrong word. English isn't my first language.)
There is a sad actual quote from a German lawsuit where one judge used the following sentence in the official verdict:
http://daufaq.de/index.php4?aktuellerubrik=Techn ik
F: Was ist ein FTP-Server?
A: Es antwortet LG Braunschweig, Urteil vom 21.7.2003 - 6 KLs 1/03, rechtskraeftig, CR 2003, 801: FTP-Server sind Systeme, in denen gecrackte, also nach Ueberwindung des Vervielfaeltigungsschutzes kopierte, Software geladen ist.
Translation:
Q: What is an FTP server
A: As answered by the court of Braunschweig, in its decision from July 2003: FTP servers are systems used to store cracked software - software that has been copied after removing its copy protection.
An unused rechargeable battery that has been stored for 5 years doesn't give you full performance anymore. I'm not a battery expert myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a battery would give less than half of its original perfomance. These things age quite quick.
Also, the cells are not always a standard format.
My uncle, who loves to salvage old electronics just for the fun of it, recently opened the battery case of an older laptop to replace the cells. He contacted the manufacturer of the battery cells he found in there and even though they still produce them, they were unable/unwilling to sell these cells to him in small quantities, since he isn't an industrial-size customer.
This is an argument that could apply to any part of a computer, yet we have standard USB devices that even work across several OS and hardware platforms and these haven't been the doom of the computer industry, either.
Apple, IBM et. al. do not manufacture and sell batteries, they manufacture and sell computers. It is an unnecessary burden for them to sell and stock batteries for their products.
There is little business sense for the vendor in that form of vendor lock-in. The vendor has to stock a large pile of batteries, these will age while waiting to be sold and eventually, he will have lots of batteries to throw away once this battery's particular product isn't on the market anymore.
The vendor has to sell a product he isn't good in and this raises prices, which makes his customers unhappy. The vendor should rather leave selling batteries to those who are good at it - the battery manufacturers.
The consumer electronics gadget market hasn't this kind of vendor lock-in - they use standard AA batteries and the market is still alive "despite" the fact that the businesses do not have "pricing and control" of their products' batteries at their own hands.
But I still wonder why companies still don't come up with a standard form factor. Come on, it's a GOOD thing to have a standard battery form factor. Where is the business sense in keeping a large stock of special-sized batteries for your product that may become useless before you can sell it to your customers?
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I own a JVC microlaptop (which is actually built by Asus and rebranded by JVC) and I'm totally thrilled by it.
Around 900 g, about the size of VHS tape, a keyboard that I can comfortably touchtype with (and I think my hands are pretty normal). This is a great device - it runs Linux, has a 20 GB harddisk and is fast enough to watch movies on its 16:9 display.
I did own a normal 3 kg laptop some years ago and I'm not looking back. I don't own a car and travel by bike and bus - everything more than 1 kg is an annoyance then.
Yes, I'd love to own an even smaller device. I once bought the Zaurus in the hopes of having a PDA-sized Linux computer, but without a harddisk and without the possibility of connecting an external keyboard, it wasn't worth using and collects dust as one of the most expensive toys I ever bought.
I'm looking forward to a PDA-sized x86 computer with a harddisk, a decent display and good battery time. I also need connectors for an external display, keyboard and (if possible) TV. Count me in as one of their first customers.
...I saw the mini-series and yes, it was surprisingly good. I really really liked it. I liked that they avoided a lot of sci-fi cliches, except one.
So let's face, the invention of human cylons is a big horrible mistake and one of the worst sci-fi cliches ever. Obviously, they wanted to save on the CGI-effects budget and wanted to avoid cheesy robot costumes. So they came up with human-looking cylons. The pilot movie made it clear that the following series will revolve around the question which of the Galactica crew members is actually a cylon, possibly without even knowing about it.
But I see no suspense whatsoever from a plot point that was innovative in 1927's "Metropolis" but that has been worn off ever since: Is that person human or isn't it? Am I talking to the original or not? The idea of non-human enemies posing as humans to subvert the human forces has been done to death by every incarnation of Star Trek and practically almost every other sci-fi show ever made. I see no new idea coming from this. Too bad.
I just wish they would have avoided that and come up with some non-cheesy robot cylons.
I don't get it.
All this bruhaha, yet still all they would have to do is using their existing laws and take down Ralsky, Richter and the rest of the well known spammers whose track record of criminal past and present has been thoroughly documented over several years now on Spamhaus and other sites.
Ralsky, Richter and the other gang of professional spammers know what they do, most of them openly admit what they do and many of them have boasted about it on several occasions in newspaper and TV reports about the spam trade (e.g. this recent German article and a slur of others articles).
So what are these agencies doing all this time? They keep saying "watch out, spammers, we're really going to get you big time, very soon now, now please don't move while we concentrate our efforts, but yes, we are going to get you!" - and they still don't actually go after them. Or am I missing something?
And while it seems to non-Americans that the new homeland security policity can quite likely send you to Guantanamo for a traffic light violation if you happen to look like the wrong ethnic group, these guys still get away with it.
I really really don't get it.
...because the projection bulb is so dim these days!
The problem is that OIRB is in fact junk mail; basically it's an association of a lot of different mass email marketers, and when you opt in for one, the fine print is that you opt in for all of them.
Nope. They harvest mail addresses from any source they can get a hand on and then spam you. I receive "OptInRealBig" spams on every public email account I maintain. I maintain a lot of mail addresses for my customers. Many of them are administrative accounts. None of them were ever used to "opt-in" to anything, yet I get OIRB spam.
Go figure.
There have been "it's just around the corner!" reports exactly like this one about solar cell tech for more than two decades. Probably even longer, but that's when I started to be interested in solar cells.
Yet, solar cells are still a minor technology, not commonly used. Wake me up when the reports are finally true and buy solar cell powered houses and cars are sold at prices an average consumer can afford and at specifications that an average consumer is interested in.
German news reports claims that the Sasser author's peer group encouraged him to write the worm, make it more effective and spread it.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of his friends from this peer group is the one who reported him. After all, the whistleblower also sent source code as proof to Microsoft Germany before the authorities stepped in - he must have been in direct contact with the author and may even be a co-author.
I still don't know what to make of this. I don't like bad hackers writing worms, but I don't like the reward program, either.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying? The pictures were apparently taken in December 2003.
Exactly. But there is another detail that disgust me even more about this whole event:
It has been reported that for a long time, CD-Rs with these photos were swapped as trophies among the soldiers stationned there. Why? Is this some sort of "war porn" souvenier for them? And - why did it take so long until one who saw these images started to blow the whistle while apparently the other owners of this CD-R enjoyed the "fun" of it?
Whoa, never heard of that. Is there any half-credible source for that rumour?
Most of these things are done for bragging rights, and are not malicious.
You forget that there are now connections between virus/worm authors and organized crime (*). Some new viruses/worms appear to be contract work with the specific intent of using it for criminal intent. It is claimed that several new viruses/worms now scan the victims harddisk for credit card data, online bank account logins and similar interesting data they can sell or use for their own amusement. Some viruses/worms are also written for the purpose of selling the victims computers as spam relays and web server proxies to professional spammers.
(*) Big word, but I don't mean international drug gangs. Still, it is organized crime.
BUT... he didn't just wear the costume for the masquerade. No. He wore it all Saturday evening and all morning and afternoon on Sunday as things were winding down. That, in particular, kinda weirded me out.
Obviously, you haven't been to a SciFi Convention before. That's normal there. The whole concept of Penguicon - the combination of SciFi convention with a Linux conference - is a bastard idea and should have been a warning sign for you.
It's funny that the US is getting upset about data processing "beyond the reach of U.S. authorities", because already some years back, it used to be the other way round.
For several years now, some larger German companies used to offshore their customer data processing to the USA. Some claim this is also done because of the USA's less strict privacy laws that allow for far more data profiling than allowed in Germany. There is also growing concern in German media that it will be impossible to control such outsourced data and that there is no way to ensure that customer data will not be used by the American procesing company for other purposes or sold to third parties.
One such example was the Bahncard, a price rebate system for the national railway. For a few years, it came combined with a creditcard option and its data would be shared with an external partner of CitiBank US for customer profiling, including a photograph, a full credit history and all payment data of the user.
In the trailer, the CGI looked very fine indeed, but the acting looked horrible. The whole trailer just cried "bad acting!". Actors in fron of blue screens, obviously.
...why the Japanese Film industry isn't capable of making a non-cheesy Godzilla SFX film.
I mean, Emmerich's German-American Godzilla in New York had pretty decent effects, but a dull story.
The Japanese Godzilla films often have a good or at least a cute story (*), but really really bad effects. And bad acting. And bad costumes. And bad props.
(* I just _loved_ one Godzilla film that included an UFO traveling to the WW2 era. An American soldier spots it and says to his superiour: "Do we report this, sir?" "No, they wouldn't believe us, anyway. But you can tell your children about this when they're older, Major Spielberg.")
So why don't the Japanese filmmakers get together, set up a decent special effects budget and a good script and make THE ultimate Godzilla movie? It's their national trademark, after all. They should know, shouldn't they?
"Sag ich doch, es gibt Lehm auf'm Mars!"
(Tetsche is a German cartoonist. I always liked that joke, but I cannot find the old cartoon online now...)
At the same time, if I unknowingly sent an important document that had a virus and was not recieved, I would want to know.
Read the article.
Of course there are viruses such as Word-macro viruses that users unknowingly send out as an attachment.
But the AV developers know that the particular viruses mentioned in the article fake the sending address of the mail. So the AV software should know that there is no need to send out a warning, since it already knows that the "sender" isn't the sender.
This isn't exactly a difficult programming task.
It's simple. And this has been known for about three years. And there have been previous rants such as the article about it. Yet the AV software developers _still_ write software that sends bogus warnings.
Where's the logic in that?
I receive hundreds of these warnings, thanks to being a developer whose mail address is all over the place. I got fed up with these bogus warnings today, so I decided to try to talk to one of the many organizations sending me these virus "warnings". I called the mail admin and the help desk operator of Saxion University and tried to explain to them that these messages are useless. It was a sad discussion.
Yes, they know that the virus is faking the sender's address.
Yes, they know that I am not the sender of the virus, but some unidentified third party.
Yes, they know that this warning is useless for me.
Yes, they do send thousands of these warnings every day. And they know that these are useless, too.
No, there's nothing they are going to do about it.
No, they are not going to turn the warnings off. Because these warnings will be "useful if there is a real virus threat through a mail message." While this particular virus may be faking the mail address, others don't and so they stick to their IT policy.
They basically told me that it's _my_ problem to deal with their useless warnings. "It's just a few mails. Why do you complain?" Ah yeah, a classic spammer's excuse, now used by mail admins for their virus warnings.
I explained them that they should set up a list of mass mailing worms so that they do not send warnings for those that fake the sender address. But no, that's not "an issue" they are going to work on.
Arghl!
It also suggests complaining to the securities and exchange commission, which you're entitled to do if you've lost investment money as a result of any wrongdoing that SCO might have committed.
You can complain to both even if you have not lost money yet. And again, I have to say: complain to the FTC and/or the SEC, it's easy and even non-Americans are allowed to complain there about an American company.
most spam does not come from the US!! Seriously. And the rest of the world can give a sh*t about the laws we pass. [..] Our laws will have no affect on the big fish.
The big fish are Americans.
Most of the spam does NOT come from the US.
It DOES. It's only RELAYED through foreign computers.
Professional American spammers set up boxes and rape relays outside of the US to avoid being linked with the originating IP of their spam.
Some of the best known spammers are known to have hired servers at Asian and Third World providers. And then there are the current waves of mail viruses that turn the victims' computers into spam relays, also with the primary intention of setting up a network of spam relays to hide the spam's origin.
But most of the professional spammers DO operate from Northern America. Look up the listings on Spamhaus.
(And yes, we in Europe have the same problem. There is a Swiss professional spammer who has set up his computers in South America and a German spam gang using computers in Holland and Eastern Europe. It's easy to hide your tracks that way. But the spam DOES originate in Switzerland and Germany, it's only RELAYED through other countries.)
I'm constantly amazed about the fluff he writes.
If he knows, then fine, he should go ahead and do it, for christ's sake.
There's a saying in music: Failed musicians become concert organiziers. Failed concert organizers become music critics. (Sorry if "evevent organizer" is the wrong word. English isn't my first language.)
There is a sad actual quote from a German lawsuit where one judge used the following sentence in the official verdict:
n ik
http://daufaq.de/index.php4?aktuellerubrik=Tech
F: Was ist ein FTP-Server?
A: Es antwortet LG Braunschweig, Urteil vom 21.7.2003 - 6 KLs 1/03, rechtskraeftig, CR 2003, 801: FTP-Server sind Systeme, in denen gecrackte, also nach Ueberwindung des Vervielfaeltigungsschutzes kopierte, Software geladen ist.
Translation:
Q: What is an FTP server
A: As answered by the court of Braunschweig, in its decision from July 2003: FTP servers are systems used to store cracked software - software that has been copied after removing its copy protection.
An unused rechargeable battery that has been stored for 5 years doesn't give you full performance anymore. I'm not a battery expert myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a battery would give less than half of its original perfomance. These things age quite quick.
Also, the cells are not always a standard format.
My uncle, who loves to salvage old electronics just for the fun of it, recently opened the battery case of an older laptop to replace the cells. He contacted the manufacturer of the battery cells he found in there and even though they still produce them, they were unable/unwilling to sell these cells to him in small quantities, since he isn't an industrial-size customer.
This is an argument that could apply to any part of a computer, yet we have standard USB devices that even work across several OS and hardware platforms and these haven't been the doom of the computer industry, either.
Apple, IBM et. al. do not manufacture and sell batteries, they manufacture and sell computers. It is an unnecessary burden for them to sell and stock batteries for their products.
There is little business sense for the vendor in that form of vendor lock-in. The vendor has to stock a large pile of batteries, these will age while waiting to be sold and eventually, he will have lots of batteries to throw away once this battery's particular product isn't on the market anymore.
The vendor has to sell a product he isn't good in and this raises prices, which makes his customers unhappy. The vendor should rather leave selling batteries to those who are good at it - the battery manufacturers.
The consumer electronics gadget market hasn't this kind of vendor lock-in - they use standard AA batteries and the market is still alive "despite" the fact that the businesses do not have "pricing and control" of their products' batteries at their own hands.
...on how laptop batteries should be standardized. It never received any feedback, though, so I didn't start the petition.
But I still wonder why companies still don't come up with a standard form factor. Come on, it's a GOOD thing to have a standard battery form factor. Where is the business sense in keeping a large stock of special-sized batteries for your product that may become useless before you can sell it to your customers?