Yes I did. 5 months ago. 3 CDs from Virgin records via Amazon.
The wife wanted to listed to them on the MP3 player in her car and her Mac at work. None could play them. Even the "proper" Sony CD player had problems with 2 out of 3.
I ended up researching the matter and buying a DVD rewriter model with a known firmware bug (or feature depends how you look at it) which can rip through most current DRM with flying colours. So the "could not rip" lasted for 3 days in total. After that it was ripped and encoded in the suitable formats for usage on the devices used for listening in the house.
Frankly, Virgin and Macromedia can take their DRM and shovel it where sun does not shine and rotate it at 48x CD speed until they the torque pushes their heads out of their arse. What really pissed me off was the fact that I have purchased it legally, 2 out of 3 had a "CD digital audio" on them and they were unuseable on all devices in the house.
From the point of view of the average consumer this is perceived as "shitty and unuseable product" so I am not surprised EMI is considering abandoning the practice. It is costing them lost sales and handling returns from pissed of customers who after that go to "illegal" networks or AllOfMP3.
10 years ago there was a rumour going the rounds that in the run up to the release of OS2 4.0 IBM did a Windows reverse engineering effort outside the US which found something like more 10000 undocumented API calls in Windows 95 which were essential for the full implementation of an emulation environment. There was no way they could ship without exposing themselves to a serious legal liability (as you note, MSFT regards some of these activities as criminal). As a result they abandoned the emulation effort and shipped with the old OS2 Warp emulation platform for Win 3.1x for which they had to pay licensing to MSFT. This ultimately made OS2 economically unviable (each copy was paying silly money to MSFT).
No idea if the rumour was true or not, but looking at the efforts required to get Wine to a working state it does not seem to be terribly off the mark.
For those of us outside the U.S.,. Add UK to this lot. With the state of the NHS I would not even look at a job that does not have BUPA (or suitable alternative) family coverage.
trivial trickle charger - solar of course (I am in the process of rigging this on all cars in the household after changing the batteries last month due to the alarms eating them).
Japan's solution is even better - there you pay taxes according to all the factors you have mentioned and size. So smaller cars get extra tax breaks.
As far as the subject of the article is concerned - looking at the oversize "erectile disfunction compensator" tires and overall styling I am not surprised that this typical GM POS gets only 40miles per charge. It is a typical hybrid allright - once you have taken all factors into account you usually spend more money and damage the environment more compared to a modern small family car or supermini. In fact the math does not come up right even for mid-size family cars and MPVs. If you compare an average hybrid which is usually designed for the US market with a EU spec MPV or large hatch like the Altea or the Scenic the loss per-year (fuel+maintenance+depreciation or estimated return on base cost) will be much more for the hybrid.
In fact the car manufacturers can make a plenty of contribution to the environment for much less money.
For example - nearly every car nowdays has an alarm. As a result the car has a discharge cycle every time you lock it and leave it locked. This leads to average battery life dropping down from 5 years to 3-3.5. On top of that the car also has to recharge what the alarm has eaten every time it starts. It does not seem to be a lot, but it adds up and can be compensated to a large extent with a trivial trickle charger built-in into the roof (or roof window). Costs under 10$ extra manufacturing costs. Saves more then 300$ in petrol + battery replacement costs over the car lifetime. That is besides the environmental damage from recycling lead. By the way, the idea is not new. Mercedes had this on at least some models a while ago.
It is already posted on Spanish, Italian and a few other video sharing sites. The only reason GooTube is involved in this is that Google is already pretty much in the crosshairs of Brazilian law enforcement and ambulance chasers because of Orkut. So as far preservation for posterity - that has already happened. Not that there is a lot to preserve.
As far as your statement about "US company" - well in the real world it pretty damn does as long as it is within their country borders. A Brazilian court has pretty much all the rights to order an American company any way around within Brazil.
Oh, for crying out loud. You yourself are a person of "unknown criminal background", too. That was nothing but a racist slur.
Dunno about the US, but this is clearly the case in the EU (and I would not expect the US to be any different). You have to pay between 5000$ and 10000$ to human traffickers to be illegally transported into the UK and handed over to a local gangmaster to work. The numbers for other "old" EU countries are even higher (due to more difficulties with getting local documents). By the way - I used to live in a country which was a primary transit point for human and drugs traffic so I know these numbers first hand (by the way the UK press reports similar numbers).
The average annual income in most places where the immigrants come from is under 1000$. Even assuming that the slave combines "indebture" and partial payment, there is no way in hell for most of them to get the partial payment without being engaged in at least some form of criminal activity. In fact, many gangs deliberately engage people in this prior to transport to ensure that the "indebture" is "signed in blood" and the slave once transported will not cut and run and will continue to pay the arrears on the "transport fee".
That is what it is worth now when the employer and employee do not pay any taxes and benefits. They venture into this "no-man's tax land" because the entire thing is illegal so neither has any reasons to pay taxes. The real cost of this labour as told by the market will be known only after the taxes are payed by both sides and the cost adjusted accordingly.
By the way, the "market" does not want this. Neither in the UK, nor in the US.
The loudest opposition to the free entrance of the Polish, chech, etc labour in the UK came from the parts of the Conservative party supported by the farmers. Guess why - a legal Polish worker at minimum wage is still much more expensive then an illegal Ukrainian or Chinese slave whose passport has been taken away by the mafia, lives in squalor and the employer does not pay any taxes or benefits.
This "underage slave" trick forces 95%+ of the UK population to go through at least one supermarket class job just to be employable. If you do not accumulate some job experience while working the "underage slave" wages you have serious problem finding jobs afterwards. It is also considered normal and proper for students to do unqualified jobs instead of qualified labour even if they can. Personally I find this outrageous and disgusting. I had a high school student do some minor PHP development and graphic design for the website of the company I work for. At that time the kid had already done a few websites as well as some commercial animation work and he actually knew what he was doing (more than any "commercial" web designer we have ever had since). Everything was legal, through his dad's limited company which already had the relevant paperwork sorted for employing him and guess what - our CEO flipped and went into LEO when he understood this. The management keelhauled me for several days in a raw escalating all the way to a dialogue with the CEO. I ended up asking him him bluntly to put in writing what exactly is "improper" for a kid to get to be payed per project based on signed off and completed work instead of a slave wage. Never got a straight answer.
Later, I understood that his thinking reflects the thinking of 90%+ of hiring managers in the UK. I nowdays understand UK is a country where you usually get hired not based on knowledge, not on ability, but on experience. Most UK managers will not hire the brightest university graduate out of principle (the few that do, will try to screw him out of principle as well). At the same time they will hire a monkey if the monkey can claim "relevant" experience. This is the way the UK labour market goes and these "underage slave" positions are an essential tool in keeping it this way. There was a hope that they will be abolished as a part of the age discrimination laws, but this unfortunately did not happen.
If you go that far you might as well consider cooling the external coil of a decent size AC with pool water. In fact the mod is quite easy. You rip out the housing, chuck the fan out, pack the coil in a tank and hook up a pump to the relay used to drive the fan.
One of my dad friends in Russia had done that in his summer house for household hot water. He used the fridge external coil to preheat the water before the boiler unit. Worked quite well actually.
99% of recruiters in the UK call as ACs for reasons of sheer stupidity prevalent in the industry. As a result if you want to have a job, you have no choice, but to answer ACs. The only thing you can do about that is to prearrange the calls. In any case you have to have a phone indicating a ring for these - note, the phone which actually "rings" on these in the house is my office phone which has the ringer off and only a visual indication.
In addition to that Cambridge University, Babraham, Sanger, Addenbrooks Hospital and nearly all other educational/science establishments in the UK call out as ACs. Which in my case means that the wife and all her friends call as ACs. I got pincodes (and a backup SIP VOIP line which runs a different ring schedule) for these, but once again you end up answering an AC once in a while.
On top of that marketeers nowdays supply a fake CallerID instead of calling as a true AC so even AC vs a present CallerID is not indicative any more. So once again, having ring schedule control is a better idea compared to not ringing at all or rejecting a call. Another good trick is to have the voicemail start after 6+ rings. Marketeers nearly always hang up on the 4th ring as this is the default voicemail setting.
I have been doing it for a while now (need to clean the code for the AGI plugin and post it). For my incoming phone lines I have scheduled times when the phone does not ring, when it rings only in my office for known callerIDs or when it rings for everyone who has not withheld their callerid. Trivial to do with asterisk+perl-AGI and quite more powerfull compared to the default autoattendant.
The article brands all VOIP to be Skypelike (and vice versa). VOIP is not just PC based systems and this attack currently applies only to PC based systems. In addition to that it is limited to a specific VOIP system. A valid Skype attack is not applicable to Yahoo, MSN, SIP phones, etc.
Things may change in the future when integrated contact management and click-to-dial becomes commonplace. This is not common enough now and can be found only on PHB/Sales laptops so it is not yet an attack vector that is worth mentioning. By the way, this will apply to any phone system that has click to dial, not just VOIP. Now having outlook+voip worm - that is a scary thought...
Besides, performance has never been the strong point of a mainframe. In fact most mainframes performance is laughable (a while ago IBM had to ask Seti@Home to remove the results for the early Z series because they were comparable with a 386SX. The primary selling points of a mainframe are the resource control and reliability.
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of PHB friendly resource control (CPU, IO, etc) for multiple concurrently running applications? Doubt it.
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of reliability and reproducibility of the result? I have some doubts. Most mainframes have 2+ CPUs doing the same task and either flagging a fault on differences or deciding who is right using a "voting" system. This is done on a per instruction basis and cannot be directly simulated in a grid. At best you can do per-task/procedure result comparison which is not the same as it will flag errors considerably later and has higher probability of overall error when using the same number of components.
Someone is either comparing apples and oranges, or being a fanboy or not knowing what mainframe is for or all of these at the same time.
Sorbs blacklists nearly all ISP relays which force their customers to send through them or do transparent SMTP proxying. On the positive side this means that you are not going to get those 1-2 per day annoying Spanish or Dutch lotto scams from orange/freeserve webmail. On the negative side this means that you are not going to get mails from small law abiding businesses like recruitment agencies and such. They also blacklist nearly all lesser webmails.
I tried it for 2 weeks around the time when SpamHaus future was in doubt in October and found it to have an unacceptable level of false positives.
I would suggest using all server level antispam possible - greylisting, autoblacklisting on spamtrap and top it up with SpamHaus. That leaves the annoying crap from l'Orange, but gives close to 0% false positives.
Mrs Donna Marie Maddock also had her license suspended for 20 months for an alcohol related offence just before being handed this ban and these points. Whatever the courts and BBC tell I bet that the magistrates handing out the ban actually knew who is getting it and the list of her previous (or in processing) offences. In fact they definitely knew, because her solicitor has asked the judges to reduce or waive the ban because she was already serving one (the best example of Chewbacca defence I have ever heard of).
This still leaves user facing applications (including all web front-ends) and most workstations. For some of them it will be a forced upgrade.
Frankly, look at this as what it is - Bush & Co making a subsidy to hardware and software manufacturers in the US around WTO rules. Just the software/hardware upgrade costs on all the govt computers should nullify any savings from DST by far.
Chemical compounds as such are not patentable. Their use for a specific purpose, synthesis and administration are. That is usually enough to protect a drug to a point where you have effectively patented the compound.
Diesel has been there since before you went to school (unless you are older than my grandparents).
German WW2 Junkers long range bombers used a diesel engine. Some of their Russian counterparts (which never went into mass production) used diesel engines as well. At least one of the versions of the ANT-25 ultra long range plane which was the first to fly non-stop across the North Pole had a diesel engine.
No. How a business tried to run Linux on a Promise controller. The moment I see Promise and Linux in one sentence it is bad news. I have at least 3 servers with onboard Promises which cannot be used because they fail in a variety of wonderfull ways. 2 high end tyan boards and one Intel OEM board. For two of them I cannot use the binary shite Promise ships as I run Debian with custom kernels and Linux driver does not recognise the contoller at all or does not handle errors correctly. For the Intel board I cannot use any of the following - Promise binary drivers (tried under redhat), Linux built in drivers or the I2O mode and Intel in their infinite wisdom have made RAID mandatory (no way to switch the POS down to a "normal ide").
If I see Promise in the spec (and many small HP servers ship with it) my first reaction is to buy a 3ware or a HPT and chuck the POS out. I have had trouble with either of these, but much less compared to Promise.
That is the reason why I am saying "2 years from now". I am aware that in their infinite wisdom MSFT has made the mistake of going down the "the only auth is active directory auth" route and completely sidelining all third party PKI solutions (including x509). I am estimating 2 years for MSFT to concede and interop or for PKI solution providers to interop with Vista and Office DRM some way.
This is a guess of course and I may be guessing wrong.
Not just that. That is what Microsoft would like us to believe now as it is making all opponents of DRM square off with the recording industry while it is pushing for a completely different agenda.
Media playback is not going to be the primary use of Vista DRM in as little as 2 years from now. Vista + MS Office (post 2003) + active directory should provide businesses with a content control solution top to bottom. Data theft will become considerably more difficult, so will data leaks both internal and external. If implemented correctly any data the company values will be locked down using DRM to the company systems with a very strict and effective policy all the way to the desktop using TPM, per machine, per user keys, etc. Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
There are consequences of this:
If Linux+Openoffice do not offer a similar solution they will be firmly sidelined to hobbyland or special dedicated server duties regardless. Having an "open" server or word processor in the document and data flows will become a thing of the past.
Using the office SDK any non-office document flow including multimedia (the way it is described in the question) can be protected in a similar manner.
Sun & Co EU recent competition commission wins will become largely irrelevant because MSFT will sideline them back out of their turf with a single swipe.
And all this will happen quietly while we are paying attention only to the multimedia side of DRM (which I personally do not give a flying fuck about as dedicated players are way cheaper than a PC compliant to all HD requirements).
The only way to fight this off is to compete with it on merit - to have DRM top to bottom in the OS all the way to the word processor, mail client and the desktop. If OO wants to be relevant in 2 years it will have to have it in a year from now.
Well... If we shall compare tractors, let's compare tractors.
Prius vs Toledo shall we? 456l boot space vs nearly 600. Seats 4 adults vs seats 4-5. Once again 12+ seconds 0-60 vs under 10. The new toledo is a tractor after all so it cannot do under 9 (the old one could). Once again - 55 mp(UK)g motorway for the Prius vs 50 for the toledo (urban is more in favour of the Prius 48 vs 35 mpg). If you drive just city you save 500 pounds a year, if you drive outside the city 250 or so before counting service and other expenses. Once all service expenses have been taken into account the gain becomes negligible. At the same time it costs 2000+ more for the same spec.
Once again, once the numbers have been counted the Prius does not recoup the expense vs a much larger car which is once again infinitely more fun to drive. That is without taking into account higher environmental costs.
The Prius fares well only when compared to tractors made for the US market. When you put it head to head with a mid-size or even large European spec car (even one made by US or Japanese manufacturers) it loses very badly. I can compare it to the new Opel/GM Vectra or Toyota Avensis and the results will not be any different.
Similarly, your "do not fit" problem is actually a well known "american driving position" problem. I am taller than you and I have no problems fitting myself into a Sirion as well as fitting 2 more basketball size blokes for the Friday pub run (can fit three if I chuck the child seat out). Major difference - I drive upright and close to the wheel, the so called "french" driving position. Most Japanese cars (except the Prius and some tractors designed solely for the American market) are actually designed to be driven this way. If you splatter yourself in them "GM style" they end up being uncomfortable or useable only for 2 people.
I did the same math and the numbers did not come up in favour of the Prius. They never do.
I got a brand new Daihatsu Sirion in 2003 for 9000. It does 0-60 mph in sub 9 seconds, 0-30 mph in 3.6s and is infinitely more fun to drive compared to the Prius. It does 50 mpg (UK gallons) motorway, 40 mpg city. Real numbers, not benchmarks. As a comparison the Prius barely manages 12s for 0-60 and does 55mpg motorway 48 city, again real numbers, not benchmarks.
Let's say that I drive around 12000 miles per year. With the Daihatsu the cost in petrol only is 1225 pounds per year (for city mileage). With the Prius it would have been 980 pounds per year. You save only 250 pounds per year per 12000 miles driven and this is at UK prices which are quite extortionate (more than 4 pounds=7$ a gallon). If we add the service costs this number becomes even worse. Even if you drive 80000 miles for 3 years which is the optimum for the battery price/lifetime the money still does not come out right. I could have done the same comparison using a Corolla hatchback (the EU manual version, not US) or any other modern small family car. The results would have been no different.
As far as the environmental arguments they are loads of bull as well. The bateries in a Prius, the extra cost to manufacture the engine, the extra costs to manufacture the extra service items, etc offset by far its carbon (and other environmental) gains.
The Prius is a fraud and anyone claiming otherwise should sit down with the numbers and compare it to any other modern small car (small car, not Texan or Chelsey tractors pls).
I can tell you WTF. Britain is marching full steam ahead into a big recession and the only thing that has prevented it from doing it this year was influx of cheap Polish labour. Unfortunately this only delays the inevitable as it does not change the underlying overheated housing market, phenomenal internal debt and other major economical metrics.
Blair's government knows this. It also knows what happened in the recession after the previous housing market crash under their predecessors. It is scared shitless of countrywide poll tax and "Camden" style riots organised via the Internet and mobile networks the way the fuel protesters organised themselves 6 years ago. So it is putting as much effort as it can into a massive surveilance effort to be able to squash these before they go out of control.
Genuinely stupid move which is bound to fail. Until the underlying economical conditions are fixed (even by shock therapy if necessary) the recession and the riots are bound to happen. Cameras can help in a policeable situation. They are useless when the whole population stops giving a flying fuck.
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Yes I did. 5 months ago. 3 CDs from Virgin records via Amazon.
The wife wanted to listed to them on the MP3 player in her car and her Mac at work. None could play them. Even the "proper" Sony CD player had problems with 2 out of 3.
I ended up researching the matter and buying a DVD rewriter model with a known firmware bug (or feature depends how you look at it) which can rip through most current DRM with flying colours. So the "could not rip" lasted for 3 days in total. After that it was ripped and encoded in the suitable formats for usage on the devices used for listening in the house.
Frankly, Virgin and Macromedia can take their DRM and shovel it where sun does not shine and rotate it at 48x CD speed until they the torque pushes their heads out of their arse. What really pissed me off was the fact that I have purchased it legally, 2 out of 3 had a "CD digital audio" on them and they were unuseable on all devices in the house.
From the point of view of the average consumer this is perceived as "shitty and unuseable product" so I am not surprised EMI is considering abandoning the practice. It is costing them lost sales and handling returns from pissed of customers who after that go to "illegal" networks or AllOfMP3.
10 years ago there was a rumour going the rounds that in the run up to the release of OS2 4.0 IBM did a Windows reverse engineering effort outside the US which found something like more 10000 undocumented API calls in Windows 95 which were essential for the full implementation of an emulation environment. There was no way they could ship without exposing themselves to a serious legal liability (as you note, MSFT regards some of these activities as criminal). As a result they abandoned the emulation effort and shipped with the old OS2 Warp emulation platform for Win 3.1x for which they had to pay licensing to MSFT. This ultimately made OS2 economically unviable (each copy was paying silly money to MSFT).
No idea if the rumour was true or not, but looking at the efforts required to get Wine to a working state it does not seem to be terribly off the mark.
For those of us outside the U.S.,. Add UK to this lot. With the state of the NHS I would not even look at a job that does not have BUPA (or suitable alternative) family coverage.
trivial trickle charger - solar of course (I am in the process of rigging this on all cars in the household after changing the batteries last month due to the alarms eating them).
Japan's solution is even better - there you pay taxes according to all the factors you have mentioned and size. So smaller cars get extra tax breaks.
As far as the subject of the article is concerned - looking at the oversize "erectile disfunction compensator" tires and overall styling I am not surprised that this typical GM POS gets only 40miles per charge. It is a typical hybrid allright - once you have taken all factors into account you usually spend more money and damage the environment more compared to a modern small family car or supermini. In fact the math does not come up right even for mid-size family cars and MPVs. If you compare an average hybrid which is usually designed for the US market with a EU spec MPV or large hatch like the Altea or the Scenic the loss per-year (fuel+maintenance+depreciation or estimated return on base cost) will be much more for the hybrid.
In fact the car manufacturers can make a plenty of contribution to the environment for much less money.
For example - nearly every car nowdays has an alarm. As a result the car has a discharge cycle every time you lock it and leave it locked. This leads to average battery life dropping down from 5 years to 3-3.5. On top of that the car also has to recharge what the alarm has eaten every time it starts. It does not seem to be a lot, but it adds up and can be compensated to a large extent with a trivial trickle charger built-in into the roof (or roof window). Costs under 10$ extra manufacturing costs. Saves more then 300$ in petrol + battery replacement costs over the car lifetime. That is besides the environmental damage from recycling lead. By the way, the idea is not new. Mercedes had this on at least some models a while ago.
It is already posted on Spanish, Italian and a few other video sharing sites. The only reason GooTube is involved in this is that Google is already pretty much in the crosshairs of Brazilian law enforcement and ambulance chasers because of Orkut. So as far preservation for posterity - that has already happened. Not that there is a lot to preserve.
As far as your statement about "US company" - well in the real world it pretty damn does as long as it is within their country borders. A Brazilian court has pretty much all the rights to order an American company any way around within Brazil.
Dunno about the US, but this is clearly the case in the EU (and I would not expect the US to be any different). You have to pay between 5000$ and 10000$ to human traffickers to be illegally transported into the UK and handed over to a local gangmaster to work. The numbers for other "old" EU countries are even higher (due to more difficulties with getting local documents). By the way - I used to live in a country which was a primary transit point for human and drugs traffic so I know these numbers first hand (by the way the UK press reports similar numbers).
The average annual income in most places where the immigrants come from is under 1000$. Even assuming that the slave combines "indebture" and partial payment, there is no way in hell for most of them to get the partial payment without being engaged in at least some form of criminal activity. In fact, many gangs deliberately engage people in this prior to transport to ensure that the "indebture" is "signed in blood" and the slave once transported will not cut and run and will continue to pay the arrears on the "transport fee".
That is what it is worth now when the employer and employee do not pay any taxes and benefits. They venture into this "no-man's tax land" because the entire thing is illegal so neither has any reasons to pay taxes. The real cost of this labour as told by the market will be known only after the taxes are payed by both sides and the cost adjusted accordingly.
By the way, the "market" does not want this. Neither in the UK, nor in the US.
The loudest opposition to the free entrance of the Polish, chech, etc labour in the UK came from the parts of the Conservative party supported by the farmers. Guess why - a legal Polish worker at minimum wage is still much more expensive then an illegal Ukrainian or Chinese slave whose passport has been taken away by the mafia, lives in squalor and the employer does not pay any taxes or benefits.
There are other results from this
This "underage slave" trick forces 95%+ of the UK population to go through at least one supermarket class job just to be employable. If you do not accumulate some job experience while working the "underage slave" wages you have serious problem finding jobs afterwards. It is also considered normal and proper for students to do unqualified jobs instead of qualified labour even if they can. Personally I find this outrageous and disgusting. I had a high school student do some minor PHP development and graphic design for the website of the company I work for. At that time the kid had already done a few websites as well as some commercial animation work and he actually knew what he was doing (more than any "commercial" web designer we have ever had since). Everything was legal, through his dad's limited company which already had the relevant paperwork sorted for employing him and guess what - our CEO flipped and went into LEO when he understood this. The management keelhauled me for several days in a raw escalating all the way to a dialogue with the CEO. I ended up asking him him bluntly to put in writing what exactly is "improper" for a kid to get to be payed per project based on signed off and completed work instead of a slave wage. Never got a straight answer.
Later, I understood that his thinking reflects the thinking of 90%+ of hiring managers in the UK. I nowdays understand UK is a country where you usually get hired not based on knowledge, not on ability, but on experience. Most UK managers will not hire the brightest university graduate out of principle (the few that do, will try to screw him out of principle as well). At the same time they will hire a monkey if the monkey can claim "relevant" experience. This is the way the UK labour market goes and these "underage slave" positions are an essential tool in keeping it this way. There was a hope that they will be abolished as a part of the age discrimination laws, but this unfortunately did not happen.
If you go that far you might as well consider cooling the external coil of a decent size AC with pool water. In fact the mod is quite easy. You rip out the housing, chuck the fan out, pack the coil in a tank and hook up a pump to the relay used to drive the fan.
One of my dad friends in Russia had done that in his summer house for household hot water. He used the fridge external coil to preheat the water before the boiler unit. Worked quite well actually.
99% of recruiters in the UK call as ACs for reasons of sheer stupidity prevalent in the industry. As a result if you want to have a job, you have no choice, but to answer ACs. The only thing you can do about that is to prearrange the calls. In any case you have to have a phone indicating a ring for these - note, the phone which actually "rings" on these in the house is my office phone which has the ringer off and only a visual indication.
In addition to that Cambridge University, Babraham, Sanger, Addenbrooks Hospital and nearly all other educational/science establishments in the UK call out as ACs. Which in my case means that the wife and all her friends call as ACs. I got pincodes (and a backup SIP VOIP line which runs a different ring schedule) for these, but once again you end up answering an AC once in a while.
On top of that marketeers nowdays supply a fake CallerID instead of calling as a true AC so even AC vs a present CallerID is not indicative any more. So once again, having ring schedule control is a better idea compared to not ringing at all or rejecting a call. Another good trick is to have the voicemail start after 6+ rings. Marketeers nearly always hang up on the 4th ring as this is the default voicemail setting.
Exactly.
I have been doing it for a while now (need to clean the code for the AGI plugin and post it). For my incoming phone lines I have scheduled times when the phone does not ring, when it rings only in my office for known callerIDs or when it rings for everyone who has not withheld their callerid. Trivial to do with asterisk+perl-AGI and quite more powerfull compared to the default autoattendant.
The article brands all VOIP to be Skypelike (and vice versa). VOIP is not just PC based systems and this attack currently applies only to PC based systems. In addition to that it is limited to a specific VOIP system. A valid Skype attack is not applicable to Yahoo, MSN, SIP phones, etc.
Things may change in the future when integrated contact management and click-to-dial becomes commonplace. This is not common enough now and can be found only on PHB/Sales laptops so it is not yet an attack vector that is worth mentioning. By the way, this will apply to any phone system that has click to dial, not just VOIP. Now having outlook+voip worm - that is a scary thought...
Besides, performance has never been the strong point of a mainframe. In fact most mainframes performance is laughable (a while ago IBM had to ask Seti@Home to remove the results for the early Z series because they were comparable with a 386SX. The primary selling points of a mainframe are the resource control and reliability.
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of PHB friendly resource control (CPU, IO, etc) for multiple concurrently running applications? Doubt it.
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of reliability and reproducibility of the result? I have some doubts. Most mainframes have 2+ CPUs doing the same task and either flagging a fault on differences or deciding who is right using a "voting" system. This is done on a per instruction basis and cannot be directly simulated in a grid. At best you can do per-task/procedure result comparison which is not the same as it will flag errors considerably later and has higher probability of overall error when using the same number of components.
Someone is either comparing apples and oranges, or being a fanboy or not knowing what mainframe is for or all of these at the same time.
Sorbs blacklists nearly all ISP relays which force their customers to send through them or do transparent SMTP proxying. On the positive side this means that you are not going to get those 1-2 per day annoying Spanish or Dutch lotto scams from orange/freeserve webmail. On the negative side this means that you are not going to get mails from small law abiding businesses like recruitment agencies and such. They also blacklist nearly all lesser webmails.
I tried it for 2 weeks around the time when SpamHaus future was in doubt in October and found it to have an unacceptable level of false positives.
I would suggest using all server level antispam possible - greylisting, autoblacklisting on spamtrap and top it up with SpamHaus. That leaves the annoying crap from l'Orange, but gives close to 0% false positives.
C'mon, that case was "a person who was well known to deserve it": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/478568 6.stm
Mrs Donna Marie Maddock also had her license suspended for 20 months for an alcohol related offence just before being handed this ban and these points. Whatever the courts and BBC tell I bet that the magistrates handing out the ban actually knew who is getting it and the list of her previous (or in processing) offences. In fact they definitely knew, because her solicitor has asked the judges to reduce or waive the ban because she was already serving one (the best example of Chewbacca defence I have ever heard of).
This still leaves user facing applications (including all web front-ends) and most workstations. For some of them it will be a forced upgrade.
Frankly, look at this as what it is - Bush & Co making a subsidy to hardware and software manufacturers in the US around WTO rules. Just the software/hardware upgrade costs on all the govt computers should nullify any savings from DST by far.
Chemical compounds as such are not patentable. Their use for a specific purpose, synthesis and administration are. That is usually enough to protect a drug to a point where you have effectively patented the compound.
Err...
Diesel has been there since before you went to school (unless you are older than my grandparents).
German WW2 Junkers long range bombers used a diesel engine. Some of their Russian counterparts (which never went into mass production) used diesel engines as well. At least one of the versions of the ANT-25 ultra long range plane which was the first to fly non-stop across the North Pole had a diesel engine.
And so on...
No. How a business tried to run Linux on a Promise controller. The moment I see Promise and Linux in one sentence it is bad news. I have at least 3 servers with onboard Promises which cannot be used because they fail in a variety of wonderfull ways. 2 high end tyan boards and one Intel OEM board. For two of them I cannot use the binary shite Promise ships as I run Debian with custom kernels and Linux driver does not recognise the contoller at all or does not handle errors correctly. For the Intel board I cannot use any of the following - Promise binary drivers (tried under redhat), Linux built in drivers or the I2O mode and Intel in their infinite wisdom have made RAID mandatory (no way to switch the POS down to a "normal ide").
If I see Promise in the spec (and many small HP servers ship with it) my first reaction is to buy a 3ware or a HPT and chuck the POS out. I have had trouble with either of these, but much less compared to Promise.
That is the reason why I am saying "2 years from now". I am aware that in their infinite wisdom MSFT has made the mistake of going down the "the only auth is active directory auth" route and completely sidelining all third party PKI solutions (including x509). I am estimating 2 years for MSFT to concede and interop or for PKI solution providers to interop with Vista and Office DRM some way.
This is a guess of course and I may be guessing wrong.
Not just that. That is what Microsoft would like us to believe now as it is making all opponents of DRM square off with the recording industry while it is pushing for a completely different agenda.
Media playback is not going to be the primary use of Vista DRM in as little as 2 years from now. Vista + MS Office (post 2003) + active directory should provide businesses with a content control solution top to bottom. Data theft will become considerably more difficult, so will data leaks both internal and external. If implemented correctly any data the company values will be locked down using DRM to the company systems with a very strict and effective policy all the way to the desktop using TPM, per machine, per user keys, etc. Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
There are consequences of this:
And all this will happen quietly while we are paying attention only to the multimedia side of DRM (which I personally do not give a flying fuck about as dedicated players are way cheaper than a PC compliant to all HD requirements).
The only way to fight this off is to compete with it on merit - to have DRM top to bottom in the OS all the way to the word processor, mail client and the desktop. If OO wants to be relevant in 2 years it will have to have it in a year from now.
Exactly,
They used to train for the previous moon landings on lava flows. What is exactly is the problem with doing this now?
Well... If we shall compare tractors, let's compare tractors.
Prius vs Toledo shall we? 456l boot space vs nearly 600. Seats 4 adults vs seats 4-5. Once again 12+ seconds 0-60 vs under 10. The new toledo is a tractor after all so it cannot do under 9 (the old one could). Once again - 55 mp(UK)g motorway for the Prius vs 50 for the toledo (urban is more in favour of the Prius 48 vs 35 mpg). If you drive just city you save 500 pounds a year, if you drive outside the city 250 or so before counting service and other expenses. Once all service expenses have been taken into account the gain becomes negligible. At the same time it costs 2000+ more for the same spec.
Once again, once the numbers have been counted the Prius does not recoup the expense vs a much larger car which is once again infinitely more fun to drive. That is without taking into account higher environmental costs.
The Prius fares well only when compared to tractors made for the US market. When you put it head to head with a mid-size or even large European spec car (even one made by US or Japanese manufacturers) it loses very badly. I can compare it to the new Opel/GM Vectra or Toyota Avensis and the results will not be any different.
Similarly, your "do not fit" problem is actually a well known "american driving position" problem. I am taller than you and I have no problems fitting myself into a Sirion as well as fitting 2 more basketball size blokes for the Friday pub run (can fit three if I chuck the child seat out). Major difference - I drive upright and close to the wheel, the so called "french" driving position. Most Japanese cars (except the Prius and some tractors designed solely for the American market) are actually designed to be driven this way. If you splatter yourself in them "GM style" they end up being uncomfortable or useable only for 2 people.
Exactly.
I did the same math and the numbers did not come up in favour of the Prius. They never do.
I got a brand new Daihatsu Sirion in 2003 for 9000. It does 0-60 mph in sub 9 seconds, 0-30 mph in 3.6s and is infinitely more fun to drive compared to the Prius. It does 50 mpg (UK gallons) motorway, 40 mpg city. Real numbers, not benchmarks. As a comparison the Prius barely manages 12s for 0-60 and does 55mpg motorway 48 city, again real numbers, not benchmarks.
Let's say that I drive around 12000 miles per year. With the Daihatsu the cost in petrol only is 1225 pounds per year (for city mileage). With the Prius it would have been 980 pounds per year. You save only 250 pounds per year per 12000 miles driven and this is at UK prices which are quite extortionate (more than 4 pounds=7$ a gallon). If we add the service costs this number becomes even worse. Even if you drive 80000 miles for 3 years which is the optimum for the battery price/lifetime the money still does not come out right. I could have done the same comparison using a Corolla hatchback (the EU manual version, not US) or any other modern small family car. The results would have been no different.
As far as the environmental arguments they are loads of bull as well. The bateries in a Prius, the extra cost to manufacture the engine, the extra costs to manufacture the extra service items, etc offset by far its carbon (and other environmental) gains.
The Prius is a fraud and anyone claiming otherwise should sit down with the numbers and compare it to any other modern small car (small car, not Texan or Chelsey tractors pls).
I can tell you WTF. Britain is marching full steam ahead into a big recession and the only thing that has prevented it from doing it this year was influx of cheap Polish labour. Unfortunately this only delays the inevitable as it does not change the underlying overheated housing market, phenomenal internal debt and other major economical metrics.
Blair's government knows this. It also knows what happened in the recession after the previous housing market crash under their predecessors. It is scared shitless of countrywide poll tax and "Camden" style riots organised via the Internet and mobile networks the way the fuel protesters organised themselves 6 years ago. So it is putting as much effort as it can into a massive surveilance effort to be able to squash these before they go out of control.
Genuinely stupid move which is bound to fail. Until the underlying economical conditions are fixed (even by shock therapy if necessary) the recession and the riots are bound to happen. Cameras can help in a policeable situation. They are useless when the whole population stops giving a flying fuck.