If Apple fans want to support Apple, all they have to do is keep buying their music from Apple.
It isn't hard. I see no sign that iPods are subsidized so there is no obligation that an iPod owner should buy their music from a single source. If some zealot wants to fork out money when a cheaper sourceexists they are completely free to do so.
That any of them is complaining that (shock horror) others buy music for less from somewhere else is frankly pathetic.
I own an Apple Mac that I love dearly, but I don't give a shit where my media comes from. If Apple sell a track for 99 cents and another vendor sells it for 49 cents and all else being equal, guess which I'm going to pick.
I don't owe Apple anything. I've paid over the going price for their hardware (nice as it is) and I feel free to pick and choose what I use it for. If they're using lock-in as opposed to innovation or quality to survive, then frankly they deserve to die.
They're attempting to stem piracy in Thailand etc. by selling a cheap version of their operating system.
That's fine in practice, but releasing a brain damaged OS is absolutely the wrong way around it. Who is interested in junk like that when Thais can get a pirate copy of Windows XP (or Server or AS) for $3. Why on earth are they going to stump up $30 for this unsupported, crippled piece of shit?
If Microsoft were serious, they'd release a full featured XP into these markets for $10 or less. If they have to restrict it, prevent 2 or more English apps from running - make everything else run in Thai / Malay. That makes the app supremely useful in its local market, but completely useless elsewhere.
I would if it extended to MSCalc, MSNotepad, MSPaint, MSWrite, MSCmd, MSFormat, MSDefrag etc. and Microsoft chose to label everything as such in the menus. It's utterly pointless.
Besides the MS is optional in parlance. Most people would know what you were talking about if you said, XP, IE, IIS, Exchange & SQL Server.
The same could not be said if you started talking about onqueror, Eye of, IMP, onsole, lade, opete, etc
No ordinary user gives a damn what their program is implemented with as long as it works - apps should compete on their merits and would run anywhere if they (and the host WM) conform to open desktop guidelines.
The use of K & G just makes a mess of the start menu with cryptic sounding apps and introduces redundancy, confusion and partisanship that a Linux desktop could well do without.
That only works if you release a new Java every year. Otherwise Java 2004 will be a distinctly mouldy name for a product in 2006.
Hence why Microsoft are starting to have second thoughts about it themselves. It's been dropped from the mainstream Windows & Office titles, and only lives on in those things that do come out more or less annually - DevStudio, Encarta etc.
I guess we're going to have to go back to the old fashioned way and wait for the movie to go through the movie->video store release before we rip it from a rented copy
While the RIAA would hardly like that either, the point in this case is to stop widespread distribution of a high quality print weeks or months before their official release date. Once a screener escapes into the wild (and many do) it takes a nanosecond to appear on hundreds of P2P networks. That's millions and millions of dollars in lost revenue (at least in theory).
This is what they want to stop. Personallized screeners with watermarking and dire threats would be an extremely effective way to do that.
But which academy member would risk selling / giving away discs if it was encrypted to them? Which academy member would even give someone a tape recording of the disc when that too would very likely be watermarked? Even the latter on its own would be an effective deterrent.
I suggest that if the academy is prepared to swallow the expense of handing out the players (+ the bitching of members who have to play movies on it when their home cinema systems already has a player), they'll have a very workable security system.
I think you're forgetting the part about actually verifying the authenticity of what they're signing.
The thing is, a email / personal cert from Verisign etc. comes with no guarantees that the signer is actually who they say they are. You could impersonate someone quite easily just by typing in bogus details.
Verisign doesn't audit you or vouch for you, so the cert is essentially worthless. It's a few bits that say Verisign touched it but that's about all you get for your ten dollars or whatever it is these days. If you want Verisign to actually vouch for you, you're looking at paying hundreds or thousands for a cert.
And after a 6 months, a year or two the cert expires and you have to start the process all over again.
A free CA is a good thing, but again it says nothing about the authenticity of the site / person who obtained it. I think that in itself would be an extremely valid reason for Microsoft to refuse to acknowledge them for anything but email. i.e. recognize the cert for email addresses, but not for SSL or signed executables.
On the small scale, PGP is a much better model. Anyone can make a key and start passing it around. You can get other people to sign the key if you want, but it's perfectly usable for crypto from the get go. Not only usable but faster too - as anyone who's tried to encrypt something large with RSA already knows. In fact extensions such as Enigmail for Mozilla are arguably easier to use than the built-in S/MIME.
On the signing front, I really wish Mozilla / Firefox would use PGP certs too to sign their XPI files. At present no one signs XPI files (reason: they're too expensive). If an XPI file were signed with a PGP key, you could drill down through the signers and reasonablly gauge the trustworthiness of the author. Hell, PGP doesn't even preclude CAs from doing business since they can sign keys just as well as the next person and charge for it.
All musics formats are converted to ATRAC when they are transferred to the device. What is the point I wonder. By implication it means the sound quality will suck in comparison to other players on the market.
Still, it give me a reason to ignore their latest music player, just as I have their earlier efforts for the same reason. And the price no doubt.
Sony must be clearly flush with cash if they can afford to put people off their products so readily.
And it's not even an $8 cab ride. To get from somewhere like Excalibur to Downtown costs at least $20 + tip and from one end of the strip to the other is something like $10 + tip. A monorail would be very useful, especially when it runs the entire length.
Of course there are two extremely unfashionable modes of transport that would also get you from one end of the strip to the other. The first is your legs, although in Vegas that might be a non-starter. I'm not exagerating when I say I have never seen so many grotesquely obese people as on my trips to Vegas.
The other is the public buses that run up and down the strip and to/from downtown for something like $1.25 - i.e. $20 extra in your pocket to see a show, buy a meal, gamble or whatever. After being fleeced in the cab to downtown we caught the bus and were jolly glad of it. It takes 45 mins to get back, but most of that is gridlock which you'd be paying for in a taxi anyway.
Before complacency sets in, let me say that Firefox is just as capable of installing malware as IE.
All it takes is for someone to bundle a kewl sounding extension up in an XPI file, announce its presence on the Extensions page and people will download and install it before anyone realises what it does. An extension pretty much has the power of God and could do what it likes, including parsing the document, or even running native code via DLLs.
It doesn't help either that every extension is unsigned (since getting a cert costs ludicrous amounts of money), so users are trained to trust an unsigned piece of code with hardly a second glance. A community effort like Firefox, really, really needs to support a PGP trust model to encourage at least some package signing.
I believe there are already spyware packages for Firefox, so it can't be long before the first bonafide malware appears on the scene.
Quite a bit. It means having separate projects for client & server (since DevStudio complains of locked files if you load the same project twice), it means hopping from window to window, it means you have set breakpoints twice if you're debugging common code, it means bouncing from window to window to debug, it means opening another DevStudio for every process you want to debug (e.g. to isolate a race condition with multiple clients).
DevStudio is fairly good and certainly better than anything on Linux for C++ work but I wouldn't call it excellent.
Particularly for.NET development, it is missing many features that have been standard in Java IDEs such as JBuilder or Eclipse for some time. For example the ability to debug two apps at once (for client / server etc.), or to rename a class and all references to it throughout a file. Not to mention it's biggest flaw - DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.
But even for Windows work, by far and away the most annoying 'feature' of DevStudio is the retarded context sensitive help. I've lost count of the number of times that I've hit F1 over something in a Win32 C++ project to be taken to a help page for Windows CE. I'm not sure what context it seems to be using, but it has nothing to do with what I'm doing.
Still, it's clear from these 'express' editions that MS is worried by the number of free alternative IDEs that are springing up - in particular Eclipse. After all, if students learn to programme using Eclipse, it means MS is completely frozen out the picture. After all Eclipse is primarily for developing Java apps (bad for.NET) and is cross-platform (bad for Windows). A few years down the line those students will be driving the market and a huge slice of potential MS revenue flies out the window.
Sorry, but if the secret service was involved, AOL already know that their database has been stolen or tampered with in a criminal manner. Obviously that is because something has alerted them to the fact.
I'm talking about what that might have been not necessarily how they pinned the culprit down afterwards.
As for ground to a halt, I suggest otherwise. There is not a database on earth than could do a join on several tables (in this case screen IDs to account holders) without incurring a significant hit that could be detected. All it takes is for database responsiveness to be inexplicably twice as worse (although still responsive) for a few hours to attract the attention of admins. Every large company does metrics as a matter of course and it would stand out like a sore thumb. Attention means looking at audits etc. to see who is doing what. Attention begets alarm when it becomes obvious who is doing what. Alarm begets FBI. FBI begets arrests.
I suppose it depends what the guy was working on. If it was on their accounts database, what limits can you impose on someone like that? He might have a legitmate reason for running through every screen name, for example to gather statistics or whatnot.
As it happens however he has been caught. How was he caught? I don't know, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the aforementioned database had triggers and an audit trail that says who did what and dumps it in a log somewhere. Or perhaps he tripped over by querying for everything including the flagged accounts - accounts that AOL regularly sacks people for looking at because they belong to celebs and so forth.
It would not surprise me at all if the alarm bells didn't start ringing as soon as the DB ground to a halt while it was returning 92000000 rows.
LOL, I went to the site and they expect me to pay $12.95 to pay for shipping their propaganda to Ireland!
In case it sounds like I'm completely partisan, I did actually want to fiddle around with the evaluation copy of Windows Server that they supposedly send in the kit. But on priciple I'm not paying to receive marketing material.
It was a set top box called the Media Station or something like that. I don't know what I did, but I assume it sat in the front room and had Linux, Mozilla and other stuff running on it. I assume the product was canned even before it was launched, but it was an interesting concept nonetheless.
I suppose that whoever is pushing Mozilla in Nokia in the moment was at least aware of the earlier effort and possibly involved in it.
Nokia had a TV console some while ago based on Mozilla. There are probably engineers in their group who are familiar with it and know what it is capable of.
I used Tera Term Pro too for a long time, but recently I've switched to PuTTY which I got from OpenCD 1.4. There is little between them in terms of what they do but PuTTY feels a little bit more integrated in Windows and is more actively developed.
It's also a bit easier to set up too since SSH works out of the box without hunting around for the patch that you have to unzip over Tera Term to get it working. It also supports SSH v2.
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Except it doesn't run on Windows or the Mac.
It isn't hard. I see no sign that iPods are subsidized so there is no obligation that an iPod owner should buy their music from a single source. If some zealot wants to fork out money when a cheaper sourceexists they are completely free to do so.
That any of them is complaining that (shock horror) others buy music for less from somewhere else is frankly pathetic.
I own an Apple Mac that I love dearly, but I don't give a shit where my media comes from. If Apple sell a track for 99 cents and another vendor sells it for 49 cents and all else being equal, guess which I'm going to pick.
I don't owe Apple anything. I've paid over the going price for their hardware (nice as it is) and I feel free to pick and choose what I use it for. If they're using lock-in as opposed to innovation or quality to survive, then frankly they deserve to die.
That's fine in practice, but releasing a brain damaged OS is absolutely the wrong way around it. Who is interested in junk like that when Thais can get a pirate copy of Windows XP (or Server or AS) for $3. Why on earth are they going to stump up $30 for this unsupported, crippled piece of shit?
If Microsoft were serious, they'd release a full featured XP into these markets for $10 or less. If they have to restrict it, prevent 2 or more English apps from running - make everything else run in Thai / Malay. That makes the app supremely useful in its local market, but completely useless elsewhere.
Besides the MS is optional in parlance. Most people would know what you were talking about if you said, XP, IE, IIS, Exchange & SQL Server.
The same could not be said if you started talking about onqueror, Eye of, IMP, onsole, lade, opete, etc
No ordinary user gives a damn what their program is implemented with as long as it works - apps should compete on their merits and would run anywhere if they (and the host WM) conform to open desktop guidelines.
The use of K & G just makes a mess of the start menu with cryptic sounding apps and introduces redundancy, confusion and partisanship that a Linux desktop could well do without.
An app should be judged on its own merits, not on what particular widget set it happens to have running underneath.
More often than not for well written apps, it makes not a damned bit of difference to the functionality that the app is capable of.
... are a great way to palm off shitty sequels for $$$. I hear the Robocop trilogy is available as a boxed set too.
Hence why Microsoft are starting to have second thoughts about it themselves. It's been dropped from the mainstream Windows & Office titles, and only lives on in those things that do come out more or less annually - DevStudio, Encarta etc.
While the RIAA would hardly like that either, the point in this case is to stop widespread distribution of a high quality print weeks or months before their official release date. Once a screener escapes into the wild (and many do) it takes a nanosecond to appear on hundreds of P2P networks. That's millions and millions of dollars in lost revenue (at least in theory).
This is what they want to stop. Personallized screeners with watermarking and dire threats would be an extremely effective way to do that.
I suggest that if the academy is prepared to swallow the expense of handing out the players (+ the bitching of members who have to play movies on it when their home cinema systems already has a player), they'll have a very workable security system.
The thing is, a email / personal cert from Verisign etc. comes with no guarantees that the signer is actually who they say they are. You could impersonate someone quite easily just by typing in bogus details.
Verisign doesn't audit you or vouch for you, so the cert is essentially worthless. It's a few bits that say Verisign touched it but that's about all you get for your ten dollars or whatever it is these days. If you want Verisign to actually vouch for you, you're looking at paying hundreds or thousands for a cert.
And after a 6 months, a year or two the cert expires and you have to start the process all over again.
A free CA is a good thing, but again it says nothing about the authenticity of the site / person who obtained it. I think that in itself would be an extremely valid reason for Microsoft to refuse to acknowledge them for anything but email. i.e. recognize the cert for email addresses, but not for SSL or signed executables.
On the small scale, PGP is a much better model. Anyone can make a key and start passing it around. You can get other people to sign the key if you want, but it's perfectly usable for crypto from the get go. Not only usable but faster too - as anyone who's tried to encrypt something large with RSA already knows. In fact extensions such as Enigmail for Mozilla are arguably easier to use than the built-in S/MIME.
On the signing front, I really wish Mozilla / Firefox would use PGP certs too to sign their XPI files. At present no one signs XPI files (reason: they're too expensive). If an XPI file were signed with a PGP key, you could drill down through the signers and reasonablly gauge the trustworthiness of the author. Hell, PGP doesn't even preclude CAs from doing business since they can sign keys just as well as the next person and charge for it.
Why buy a dead iPod when you can can simply mug someone? Look for any fool walking around with a pair of white earphones.
Still, it give me a reason to ignore their latest music player, just as I have their earlier efforts for the same reason. And the price no doubt.
Sony must be clearly flush with cash if they can afford to put people off their products so readily.
Of course there are two extremely unfashionable modes of transport that would also get you from one end of the strip to the other. The first is your legs, although in Vegas that might be a non-starter. I'm not exagerating when I say I have never seen so many grotesquely obese people as on my trips to Vegas.
The other is the public buses that run up and down the strip and to/from downtown for something like $1.25 - i.e. $20 extra in your pocket to see a show, buy a meal, gamble or whatever. After being fleeced in the cab to downtown we caught the bus and were jolly glad of it. It takes 45 mins to get back, but most of that is gridlock which you'd be paying for in a taxi anyway.
All it takes is for someone to bundle a kewl sounding extension up in an XPI file, announce its presence on the Extensions page and people will download and install it before anyone realises what it does. An extension pretty much has the power of God and could do what it likes, including parsing the document, or even running native code via DLLs.
It doesn't help either that every extension is unsigned (since getting a cert costs ludicrous amounts of money), so users are trained to trust an unsigned piece of code with hardly a second glance. A community effort like Firefox, really, really needs to support a PGP trust model to encourage at least some package signing.
I believe there are already spyware packages for Firefox, so it can't be long before the first bonafide malware appears on the scene.
Quite a bit. It means having separate projects for client & server (since DevStudio complains of locked files if you load the same project twice), it means hopping from window to window, it means you have set breakpoints twice if you're debugging common code, it means bouncing from window to window to debug, it means opening another DevStudio for every process you want to debug (e.g. to isolate a race condition with multiple clients).
Particularly for .NET development, it is missing many features that have been standard in Java IDEs such as JBuilder or Eclipse for some time. For example the ability to debug two apps at once (for client / server etc.), or to rename a class and all references to it throughout a file. Not to mention it's biggest flaw - DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.
But even for Windows work, by far and away the most annoying 'feature' of DevStudio is the retarded context sensitive help. I've lost count of the number of times that I've hit F1 over something in a Win32 C++ project to be taken to a help page for Windows CE. I'm not sure what context it seems to be using, but it has nothing to do with what I'm doing.
Still, it's clear from these 'express' editions that MS is worried by the number of free alternative IDEs that are springing up - in particular Eclipse. After all, if students learn to programme using Eclipse, it means MS is completely frozen out the picture. After all Eclipse is primarily for developing Java apps (bad for .NET) and is cross-platform (bad for Windows). A few years down the line those students will be driving the market and a huge slice of potential MS revenue flies out the window.
Yes. In fact, a lot of the BIOS flash disks that PC & motherboard suppliers put up on their support pages actually use FreeDOS these days.
I'm talking about what that might have been not necessarily how they pinned the culprit down afterwards.
As for ground to a halt, I suggest otherwise. There is not a database on earth than could do a join on several tables (in this case screen IDs to account holders) without incurring a significant hit that could be detected. All it takes is for database responsiveness to be inexplicably twice as worse (although still responsive) for a few hours to attract the attention of admins. Every large company does metrics as a matter of course and it would stand out like a sore thumb. Attention means looking at audits etc. to see who is doing what. Attention begets alarm when it becomes obvious who is doing what. Alarm begets FBI. FBI begets arrests.
As it happens however he has been caught. How was he caught? I don't know, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the aforementioned database had triggers and an audit trail that says who did what and dumps it in a log somewhere. Or perhaps he tripped over by querying for everything including the flagged accounts - accounts that AOL regularly sacks people for looking at because they belong to celebs and so forth.
It would not surprise me at all if the alarm bells didn't start ringing as soon as the DB ground to a halt while it was returning 92000000 rows.
In case it sounds like I'm completely partisan, I did actually want to fiddle around with the evaluation copy of Windows Server that they supposedly send in the kit. But on priciple I'm not paying to receive marketing material.
I suppose that whoever is pushing Mozilla in Nokia in the moment was at least aware of the earlier effort and possibly involved in it.
Nokia had a TV console some while ago based on Mozilla. There are probably engineers in their group who are familiar with it and know what it is capable of.
It's also a bit easier to set up too since SSH works out of the box without hunting around for the patch that you have to unzip over Tera Term to get it working. It also supports SSH v2.
One tin of thin clear varnish.
I wonder if this is a concession from Sony that their marginalised memory stick format is on its last legs.