Two new Mac models are announced and Firefox with plugins is a priority. Meanwhile, AMD64/EM64T platform users can't run a native Firefox with plugins under any OS, with no ETA at all for that ability.
Actually, I believe the reason for integrating disposable printheads with ink cartridges is largely driven by maintenance requirements and support costs. Inkjet print heads clog up and are somewhat finicky, especially over years of intermittent use. It's far easier to have users change the printhead when they change the ink cartridge.
I'm very aware that Epson has been using non-disposable printheads integrated into the printer. This is in part why Epsons are generally more favored by high-end users. However, letting your Epson sit for a couple months or more can easily make it unusable, and cleaning the nozzles with alcohol can ruin them. (A glycol solution is available that does a great job.)
I had an Epson CS880 that I modified with a homebrew CFS ink system to avoid paying for new ink carts, it worked great, but I had to clean it often especially if nothing was printed for several days. I had to soak the nozzles overnight once after not printing for a month. Eventually after another period of disuse I couldn't get the nozzles all working again and had to toss the whole printer.
I replaced it with an Epson SP-R300 and a new CFS system (not homebrew-this model has chipped carts) and now have my server sending a 6-color test page to it each night to prevent nozzle clogs. It's great printer, except for the whole cartridge-chipping thing. It makes using a CFS a lot more complicated, and cheats non-CFS users out of using all the ink in each cart.
As for using laserjets, you gotta be kidding? Show me a $100 laser printer that can print photo quality color at over 5000dpi. With my CFS-modded R300 (~$400US) I can print 4x6 photos for about 16 cents each.
Re:Great. So when can we start warezing games?
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PSP UMD Format Cracked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
History disagrees with you. A flashcard system for the GBA costs about the same ratio, and that doesn't seem to be a barrier. Forking over the cost of 4 games to pirate dozens is often a no-brainer for the less ethically-challenged.
Oh come on! This is news? An organization is sending out a valid and useful message to a list of subscribers, and some of them have an ISP spam filter that misclassifies it as spam? So we jump on the company providing the filter as if this was intentional or policy?
Wake up, false positives for spam filters are not news, and it's disingenuous to have a headline that implies "ooh, look what the evil AOL is doing now..." Bah, FUD.
You are wrong. It's unlikely that each device will have a unique set of device Keys, it's common practice that all units of the same model/version player share the same set of Device Keys. This means that if a particular set of Device Keys are compromised, that specific set can be rendered useless for playing future discs. Since the entire production run of that model/version player (and possibly more) share the same set of Device Keys, it will affect them all.
Besides, think about it. It's not practical to deactivate individual players any more than it would be practical to give every unit a unique key.
Some manufacturers have been rather *cough* lax about back-doors or hidden features in their firmware that compromises some of the features intended to be protected by CSS. I imagine the ability to "revoke" the key set will more heavily discourage manufacturers from being so lax. Never underestimate stupidity though.
Sheesh. This article is so light on details, and most of it's implications are just dead wrong. The only truthful part I read was where it admits near the end of the article that most of these "hacks" rely on the web browser in the game Wipeout Pure.
Don't get excited, folks, these "homebrew tools" are NOT code running on the PSP. This isn't a case of somebody stealing Sony SDK tools and writing new software for the PSP or even hacking existing software. This is simply a matter of changing DNS so that you san spoof the scea.com domain and direct an EXISTING browser to a different site and putting server-side tools for the PSP to access. There's nothing particularly amazing about using a web IRC client and portals and the like.
The article makes it sound like they have an IRC client running on the PSP, and an ebook reader. Nope. It's just the existing web browser and photo viewer, no coding changes on the PSP required. Really, there's no news here.
I hope you are not entirely serious. gLabels is a good single page DTP app? When it can't print properly from KDE? When it can't overlay text on images? When it can't do much beyond place blocks next to each other and fill them with content produced by a more capable app?
I agree it does labels and business cards very nicely without requiring many workarounds. I only wish I could print directly to a CUPS printer under KDE in non-draft quality so I don't need to print to a PDF and use another app to do the printing.
Unable to install due to XFS bug
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Suse 9.1 Reviews?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I love SuSE 9.0, and have been looking forward to upgrading to 9.1. It arrived in the mail today.
The 32bit sides of the DVDs are not readable in my machines, but the 64bit sides are. Does me no good, my systems are 32bit. A big part of the reason I wanted the boxed Professional version is for the DVDs, and now I find them useless.
So, I still have the CDs. I booted up and attempted to upgrade my system. No go. None of the partitions on any of my drives are identified. It shows "unknown" for every partition. Even if I manually select my root partition, it fails to mount it. Keep in mind this machine was set up from scratch with 9.0 and works just fine.
I checked SuSE support, and it turns out that there is a bug in the SuSE kernel that prevents it from mounting XFS partitions. Amazing, all that testing and nobody tried to use XFS. There is a driver hotfix released as a workaround, but it can't handle root on XFS. Guess what, my root (and others) are all XFS.
This means I can only install 9.1 if I'm willing to throw away my entire config and start over with a fresh install. Unacceptable. At the very least I'd like to be able to download a replacement CD1 ISO that fixes the problem. It's ridiculous to keep shipping a broken product that can't be installed as an upgrade by an otherwise satisfied customer.
So here I sit, with 2 unreadable DVDs and 5 CDs that I can't install because apparently nobody ever tested a perfectly normal and supported configuration as an upgrade path. Sigh.
From watching the hearing, I was under the impression that the photos were taken between January and April, and evidence in a criminal investigation that was illegally leaked to the media before the proceedings were concluded.
I definitely didn't get the impression that the photos appeared in the media an hour after they were taken! Apparently there are a great many photos and several videos, only a few of which were obtained by the media, and these were actually taken weeks or months before any of us saw them.
Is this not the case? Isn't this topic an assumption or over-sensationalizing digital media? Couldn't all the photos just have easily been film? Did the photos being digital really make any practical difference in the situation at all? What am I not understanding here?
Registering a copyright for sourcecode amounts to sending in a form with the code and a fee to the copyright office. They datestamp it and file it away. It's not required to register to claim copyright, or even to register at all. Registering just gives the holder some leverage in court, since in the absence of other information, the side with the earlier registration date wins.
So, since they are just filing now, and have a 2003 registration date, I don't see what this has to do with anything at all. All this means is that they are "officially" claiming copyright, id doesn't mean they's been "granted" any rights at all. That's for a court to decide in specific disputes.
IANAL, but I've sent in a number of Copyright Form TX filings in my day, at about $10 each. Big deal.
I'm not saying the blocking open relays isn't a good thing...;)
I block them, and have been for several years. There was a time when almost _all_ my spam was blocked by a simple dns-based ORB list, but now my portion of ORB rejects is much smaller than my total number of spams. Either most of my spam is not coming from open relays, or the ORB lists that I use are woefully incomplete. (ORBL and SpamHaus)
Perhaps you know of an ORB list that is much more effective and free?
My personal results are that blocking open relays was once very effective, but is no longer a significant barrier against the big spammers. I would agree that it's important to block open relays, and that it does reduce the amount of spam (and more importantly educate mail administrators.) I would not agree that open relays are the primary avenue for spam, my personal exprience indicates that currently less than 2% of my blocked spam is coming from open relays. Of course, your mileage may differ!;)
I'm using bayesian filtering trained with messages I'd received in the past 9 months (18000 spams and 400 wanted messages) and the results have been excellent, combined with whitelisting.
I whitelist about a dozen sources, and pass the rest to the filter. The filtered results are archived on the server based on junk classification, and tagged with a header before delivery. Rules on the mail client filter the spam.
My main interest is in reducing the number of times per year I need to tweak or retrain my spam filtering. I switched from keyword matching to Bayesian filtering and so far it seems to be a big improvement. It's a simpler process to update the filter now, and it needs it less frequently.
One big difference though, my rather large set of keyword rules was generally effective for an arbitrary group of users. My Bayesian filter is not. For acceptable results, I need to train it for each user using a large number of actual sample messages. Fortunately, at the moment I'm only filtering for 3 users.;)
What's your source of data for this? In my experience, my own MTA's ORB data indicates that the vast majority of spam my domains receive does _not_ come from open relays. My general reading on the subject in recent months gives me the impression that this isn't an anomaly, and that blocking open relays isn't significantly effective any longer in reducing spam.
Education _is_ what you make of it, and a large part of that process is finding individuals worth learning from. If the instructor doesn't actively participate, they are no more than a librarian. Even so, a good librarian can be very helpful. A bad one is worse than useless.
I attended 6 colleges/universities simply because that's what it took for me to find 190 units taught by individuals that were worth my time to absorb what they had to offer. I haven't tried any online courses.
To me, education is almost entirely self-driven. I took college as an opportunity to learn from people and not just books. I can absorb a book any time or place. A college instructor who isn't available and doesn't share their mind with the students is mostly a booklist babysitter. I saw a _lot_ of that, and when it was all that I could find left at a school, I would move on to another.
I didn't find it hard to find worthwhile instructors, I just found it hard to find enough of them in one school. I didn't find it hard to get an education or a degree, I just found it hard to do both at the same time.
Also as a certified diver (1994) I know that tissue nitrogen saturation is highly dependent on the individual and a multitude of complex factors. There are tables for very general estimations, which have to be very conservative to be useful at all to a diverse group of individuals diving in a variety of circumstances.
Dive computers allow the use of less conservative "tables" by applying the algorithms to sensor data. By applying actual depth/time/gas data to the algorithmic tables a diver can dive more agressive profiles, and also have the convenience of having the calculations automated in real time.
The 'no flying within 12 hours' and similar rules are simple conservative safeguards, and don't assume much at all about dive profiles. Also, it's not just a rule against flying, driving home via a route that elevates you a few thousand feet above your dive elevation can result in the same effects. (I live and dive at sea level, but I can't drive more than a few miles in any direction without significantly increasing my elevation.)
The alleged problem with the computer in question (if I understood the story correctly) is that the program assumed the diver continued breathing nitrox while surfaced between dives. That's a considerable problem, since it provides incorrect data. Even worse, it's an anti-conservative error.
Nitrox diving is an inherently more agressive attempt to increase dive profile limits. I am not personally a nitrox diver, but I understand the principles. I certainly don't want my computer to base it's calculations on an air mixture I'm not breathing between dives.
There is no rational excuse for knowingly allowing such an error to go unreported or fixed.
A couple weeks ago I was shopping at my local grocery superstore and picked up a copy of TurboTax Basic from a display next to the service counter. I usually have one of those *block services prepare my taxes, and it usually costs $75 or more in fees. I really didn't put much thought into buying TurboTax. An hour later I fired up the Windows2000Pro laptop I have an slipped in the CD. The next 3 hours was an amazing lack of progress at getting the thing installed, and 3 support sessions with the company involving uncounted people on their end and a fun phone bill for me.
The cause of my problems are the partition scheme of my laptop. The Windows2000Pro system C: partition is 900MB, just big enough for the OS and some temp files. The swapfile is on another larger partition, as are all third-party applications.
The "Minimum System Requirements" on the box (a DVD-style clamshell) are easy to read through the shrinkwrap. To summarize the relevant parts, the OS list included Windows2000, the hard disk space specified 65MB and an additional 60MB if IE was not installed. IE 5.5 or higher was listed as being required to access online features, obtain product updates, and complete electronic filing. I read this before buying, and noted that my system meets all the requirements given on the box.
On insertion, the CD autorun process kicked up a splash window, then an animated install menu window. I clicked the obvious choice to register and install, followed the prompts through selecting my type of network connection, filling out the registration info and getting to a window with a single button to "Install." Clicking the install button got me a window where the file copying process is obviously supposed to happen, but instead I get a standard alery window that informs me that there is insufficient space on the hard disk to install.
Some notable things at this point: I have never been presented a EULA of any type. None of the windows I have progressed through have displayed a EULA, nor has there been any possible sequence of buttons that makes one appear. There is no EULA in the printed material inside the box. I have also not entered the CD key code anywhere in the process. There is no prompt for it anywhere up to this point, not even in the registration window where I entered my name/address/email type info. This becomes interesting in another hour or so when I'm on the phone with their support staff.
I'm now at the point where the TurboTax installer will not proceed further because I do not have 191MB available on drive C:. I want to install on drive E: which has plenty of space, so I consulted the FAQ on the turbotaxsupport.com website. I didn't find anything applicable, so decided to consult a support staffer about the best way to make this happen. (They use a webchat interface to provice frontline support.) The live person on the other end directed me to the web FAQ with a set of steps for installing from hard disk instead of CD, involving simply copying the CD installer files to the HD. Doubtful, I tried it anyway, and was not surprised when the installer still stubbornly insisted that there was not enough space because it was only scanning the C: drive. I still had the webchat window open, which gave me an option to select that I was unsatisfied with the help I was given and offered me a chance to talk with a "senior" support staffer via webchat. I muttered "hell yes" and was shortly explaining the problem all over again to a new person. I was walked 4 times through the complete process, echoing the window headings and options at each step laboriously. None of the suggestions made were helpful, and few even made any sense at all. At one point I was even told that the only solution would be to uninstall and then reinstall. I reminded him politely that getting the product installed in the first place was the whole point of this exercise, and asked how I could possibly uninstall when nothing has been installed even once yet. I was then treated like a fencepost and told to find the TurboTax menu under Program Files from the Start menu, at which point I seriously wondered what problem the support staffer thought we were trying to fix. (Of course there was no entry under the start menu.) Finally after convincing him that the product was in fact not installed at all, not even a little bit, and could not be uninstalled, he gave up and provided me with a voice toll number and PIN. I asked for a toll free number but was told none exists. Ouch, since I was envisioning a lengthy call if my experience so far proved typical. I decided to take this as far as it goes.
I had no problems getting to a live person quickly. He seemed to understand the nature of the problem and over the course of the next hour I had a pretty dizzy ride as I was asked the same questions repeatedly and he was consulting with an increasing number of people on his end. I had some pointed questions about the minimum requirements listed on the box, such as why the installer wanted 191MB in the first place, since the requirements plainly state 65MB. I was told that the higher amount was due to not having IE 6.0 installed. I pointed out that the IE requirement on the box stated 5.5 or higher, not that 6.0 was needed. I was told that was true, but if 6.0 is not present the installer will install it. I pointed out that the box said that only 60MB more was needed for IE if it was not present, which means a total of 125MB minimum requirement and asked why 66MB more than that was needed. I didn't get an answer to that. I asked him to confirm that IE 6.0 was required, contrary to what the box said. I was told that IE 6.0 is needed, but he stopped short of giving me an actual confirmation that the box was wrong. I asked him to confirm that the requirements on the box were wrong specifically regarding HD space and IE version, and he went on hold for a while. When he came back he asked me if I read the EULA, as all these facts were in the EULA. I told him I hadn't read the EULA and asked where I could find it, at the same time pointing out that it was irrelevant since I had no way to read system requirements prior to purchase other than on the outside of the box. He told me I must have seen the EULA, it was on the third window of the install process. I told him I didn't remember clicking past it, and by now I had gone through these steps many times. I did it again for him, step by step, this time saying "no EULA" after describing every window. When we got all the way to the diskspace alert, there had been no EULA presented. I pointed out that anything in the EULA couldn't possibly apply to me since it never made an appearance. He never mentioned the EULA again.
At one point or another in the phone conversation I was told the following things, all of which turned out to be false:
That I wasn't being presented all the installer windows because I didn't have IE 6.0 installed. That the EULA was presented on the third window and before the registration form. That it was possible to install my E: drive regardless of available space on C:
The end result seemed to be that the installer scans the C: drive before offering an option to specify the location for installation, which they agreed was stupid. They insisted that after that space check there is a prompt that allows changing the installation location, but you can't get there if you don't have enough space for the entire installation on the C: drive. They also changed their minds about how the IE installer worked, and said that it offers a choice to not upgrade to IE 6.0, but obviously not before the space check. I have my doubts, since the disk space alert pops up at the beginning of the file copy process, with the progress bar ready to start counting files. I'm not sure where they are fitting in the choices for install location and options, but it sure doesn't seem to be before the initial file copy. This implies to me that it always needs 191MB on the C: drive to install, no matter what the environment is, which is still 66MB more than the requirements stated on the box. I hope it's not so, but I doubt I'll ever see for myself. I'm not repartitioning my system to accomodate a single proprietary tax program.
I know my experience surely isn't typical. Most people have 200MB or more free on their C: drive. I just don't have the extra space to waste on my laptop for a Windows system partition, and this shouldn't be about how I partition my machine. There were several humorous points for me in the conversations, I think the funniest was when I was told by one of their "experts" to relabel my drives to swap E: and C: just for the install and then switch them back. I had to keep from laughing as I explained that I couldn't change the letter of a running system boot partition, and even if I could the system likely would die immediately and certainly wouldn't be bootable in that condition. Another funny one was the idea that "minimum system requirements" meant only those needed to run the application, but not to install it. Their argument was that the installer temporarily needs more than the minimum requirements during installation, but that the program would run fine with the listed requirements. I believe that is an unreasonable position.
I was given an address to return the product for a refund and cut loose. I came away with several concerns, especially surrounding the EULA (or apparent lack of one) and the listed minimum system requirements, which are misleading at best and untruthful at worst. It's bad enough that a product requires you to buy it before you can read the EULA, and we're used to that. But for the CD-based installer to require you to register the product before you can even install it, and doesn't even show you the EULA until after it copies the product to your hard disk is pretty bad in my opinion. Perhaps I should count myself fortunate that I never got far enough to see the EULA.
Except part 97 does not permit broadcasting.:) Seriously, I see almost no potential for using 802.11b in any normal way on the ham bands. The story says they hope this will encourage existing part 15 users to get amateur licenses and operate under part 97. I just can't see any practical motivation for this.
Remember, ham comminications must not be encrypted. They must not be commercial. (This means no ads, no non-ham commerce, basically no websurfing.) They must not be broadcast. (Not really a problem, not much different from packet radio this way.) Each transmitter must identify itself. (I suppose using the ham callsign as the SSID would work for that.)
Sure, hams can have fun playing with 802.11b under part 97, but because of the content restrictions it's in NO WAY any replacement for the people operating under part 15. Seriously, how useful is a network connection that is not allowed to be secure or be used for commercial traffic.? Yes, it has potential for ham-related events, contests, and emergencies. But I don't see anything else.
One peeve of mine is that hams have become followers and are no longer leaders in radio technology. There was a time when hams did things first, and commercial radio products and services grew from those efforts. Technology has mostly become too complex for the single hobbyist to provide a substantial development contribution. Now the ham community mostly waits for commercial technologies to become old and inexpensive, then adapts them for their own purposes while adding little or nothing new. A large part of the reason hams are allocated valuable spectrum is for innovation, but in the past decade I've seen only regurgitation. I would love to use my ham license to do something I couldn't do more cheaply and effectively on the commercial bands. 802.11b under part 97 is another example of less functionality for more effort.
I'm not saying it's not worth doing, just that it's only useful to the hobbyist who wants to play and do a thing because it can be done. I'm saying it's not useful to anybody who wants to operate a real and practical wireless network.
And it appears she doesn't just review on Amazon.com. Google turns up several places with similar patterns, including Barnes&Noble. Could be she's just a prolific reviewer with no more need to get a life than other obsessed people. Also could be fraud. Considering the number of people who concentrate so much time on silly things, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there's nothing particularly nefarious happening here. Somebody has to be number 8.
According to the linked msnbc article, monorails cost around $124 MILLION per mile to build. Now, that's for a one-rail conventional technology contruction type of thing. AFAIK it's basically a bunch of reinforced concrete.
I would imagine the cost for a mile of continous rigid tube strong enough to maintain near-perfect vacuum in the same environment would be fantastically higher than a concrete rail on stilts.
Still, even if such a thing were to be adopted with enough zeal to pay for it, the inherent security risks are incredibly complicated. The number of ways the system could fail due to accidents or hardware failure are numerous. The number of ways the system could be intentionally damaged are huge.
Realize that air travel is inherently insecure, and we generally only have to focus on the entry and exit points (airports) as well as the vehicle itself. Endangering an aircraft in flight from outside the vehicle is relatively expensive and difficult. (Hence most security failures are from within the vehicle.)
The security focus for the ETT system would have to encompass the entire travel environment, unlike air travel. I see no practical way to protect 100% of a length of vacuum tubing on any scale useful for transportation.
If such a system did enter into use on a scale large enough to be more than a novelty, then there is also the risk to public infrastructure in the event of interrupted service. For example, one bomb and not only is every passenger killed instantly as air friction causes rapid deceleration to all cars, but the entire system becomes unavailable for a significant time which forces (hopefully available) alternative transportations methods into use. System reliability can't be any higher than security vulnerabilities allow it to be.
So yes, were an ETT system to exist, the operation costs may well be low enough to be payed for with advertising. But only after development and construction costs were paid for. I would expect those costs to be high enough to take more than one generation to pay for, possibly several. And for all the effort and expense, we'd have something ridiculously easy to damage and destroy for any evil nutball.
Just because several (I know of at least half a dozen) sites have that sound-barrier quote, that doesn't make it true.
I consider the several links on that page as a good cross-section of sources, and from what I read, I agree with Kittenger himself that the most reliable information is that he achieved 90% of the speed of sound at his altitude. The most credible information was that his top speed was 614mph, and that somebody somewhere made a typo of 714, hence many sources believed he broke the speed of sound. It turned into one of those urban myths. There was no evidence at all that he broke the sound barrier, and reasonably solid data that he didn't, and the man himself agreed with the 614mph data. Also, the math agrees with this, showing that another 1300m or so of altitude is needed to break the sound barrier.
It's not like everybody was out there with their own altitude radar taking measurements. I'll side with Kittenger's own opinion, that the radar reading was the most reliable, and that the man himself is more likely to be correct than a few sensationalist storytellers.;)
So when the data and the people involved say he didn't break the sound barrier, I'd say that's the closest to definitive that we have.
Disclaimer: No, I don't believe anything simply because it's posted on a website. But I remain happy to disagree with you. Enjoy!
Uh, if you HAD read the articles on the terminal velocity link, you'd notice that Joe Kittenger did NOT break the sound barrier. We forget that he broke it, because he didn't.
Although the author of http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml has a lot of poor wording in his explanations of terminal velocity, there are several good links to the facts and data on Kittenger's jump.
(My favorite quote on that page is: "In a vacuum with zero air resistance, these two objects will experience same acceleration. But on the earth this is not true.")
I live on Maui, and my experience here goes back to the early 1970's.
According to this story, "There are no naturally occurring reptiles or terrestrial amphibians, no snakes, iguanas, toads or salamanders in Hawaii. Until the coqui arrived, it was a frog-free world."
Umm. No. It says the Coqui arrived around 1990. I wouldn't know about that. Nobody I know here has heard of these frogs. Perhaps the 40+ infestations claimed on Maui are simply places I don't go. HOWEVER...
No other reptiles? No amphibians, toad or frogs before 1990? Totally false. For one thing, these islands are famous for having Geckos. We've got hundreds of them right in our yard. There's more than one within 20 feet of me right now. And we have other salamander-like lizards here than geckos. I'm not a biologist. And I suppose the frogs or toads I played with as a kid 30 years ago weren't here either back then.
I don't know when or how frogs, toads, geckos, salamanders and such got here, but it was long before 1990. I'm sure there is some basis for truth in this story, but I've managed to escape hearing even one of these tens of thousands of 90-decibel frogs on Maui. That doesn't mean they aren't here, just that the story sure doesn't reflect any common knowledge here as far as I can tell after discussing this story with my friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Two new Mac models are announced and Firefox with plugins is a priority. Meanwhile, AMD64/EM64T platform users can't run a native Firefox with plugins under any OS, with no ETA at all for that ability.
Actually, I believe the reason for integrating disposable printheads with ink cartridges is largely driven by maintenance requirements and support costs. Inkjet print heads clog up and are somewhat finicky, especially over years of intermittent use. It's far easier to have users change the printhead when they change the ink cartridge.
I'm very aware that Epson has been using non-disposable printheads integrated into the printer. This is in part why Epsons are generally more favored by high-end users. However, letting your Epson sit for a couple months or more can easily make it unusable, and cleaning the nozzles with alcohol can ruin them. (A glycol solution is available that does a great job.)
I had an Epson CS880 that I modified with a homebrew CFS ink system to avoid paying for new ink carts, it worked great, but I had to clean it often especially if nothing was printed for several days. I had to soak the nozzles overnight once after not printing for a month. Eventually after another period of disuse I couldn't get the nozzles all working again and had to toss the whole printer.
I replaced it with an Epson SP-R300 and a new CFS system (not homebrew-this model has chipped carts) and now have my server sending a 6-color test page to it each night to prevent nozzle clogs. It's great printer, except for the whole cartridge-chipping thing. It makes using a CFS a lot more complicated, and cheats non-CFS users out of using all the ink in each cart.
As for using laserjets, you gotta be kidding? Show me a $100 laser printer that can print photo quality color at over 5000dpi. With my CFS-modded R300 (~$400US) I can print 4x6 photos for about 16 cents each.
History disagrees with you. A flashcard system for the GBA costs about the same ratio, and that doesn't seem to be a barrier. Forking over the cost of 4 games to pirate dozens is often a no-brainer for the less ethically-challenged.
Oh come on! This is news? An organization is sending out a valid and useful message to a list of subscribers, and some of them have an ISP spam filter that misclassifies it as spam? So we jump on the company providing the filter as if this was intentional or policy?
Wake up, false positives for spam filters are not news, and it's disingenuous to have a headline that implies "ooh, look what the evil AOL is doing now..." Bah, FUD.
You are wrong. It's unlikely that each device will have a unique set of device Keys, it's common practice that all units of the same model/version player share the same set of Device Keys. This means that if a particular set of Device Keys are compromised, that specific set can be rendered useless for playing future discs. Since the entire production run of that model/version player (and possibly more) share the same set of Device Keys, it will affect them all.
Besides, think about it. It's not practical to deactivate individual players any more than it would be practical to give every unit a unique key.
Some manufacturers have been rather *cough* lax about back-doors or hidden features in their firmware that compromises some of the features intended to be protected by CSS. I imagine the ability to "revoke" the key set will more heavily discourage manufacturers from being so lax. Never underestimate stupidity though.
Sheesh. This article is so light on details, and most of it's implications are just dead wrong. The only truthful part I read was where it admits near the end of the article that most of these "hacks" rely on the web browser in the game Wipeout Pure.
Don't get excited, folks, these "homebrew tools" are NOT code running on the PSP. This isn't a case of somebody stealing Sony SDK tools and writing new software for the PSP or even hacking existing software. This is simply a matter of changing DNS so that you san spoof the scea.com domain and direct an EXISTING browser to a different site and putting server-side tools for the PSP to access. There's nothing particularly amazing about using a web IRC client and portals and the like.
The article makes it sound like they have an IRC client running on the PSP, and an ebook reader. Nope. It's just the existing web browser and photo viewer, no coding changes on the PSP required. Really, there's no news here.
Looks like there's plenty of time to revise the design... Quote from the article:
"When will it be available?
At present time, Segway LLC has no plans to manufacture the Centaur."
Try it before you say stuff. SuSE 9.1's installer flatly refuses to install on less than the minimum memory requirement. I expect the same from 9.2.
I hope you are not entirely serious. gLabels is a good single page DTP app? When it can't print properly from KDE? When it can't overlay text on images? When it can't do much beyond place blocks next to each other and fill them with content produced by a more capable app?
I agree it does labels and business cards very nicely without requiring many workarounds. I only wish I could print directly to a CUPS printer under KDE in non-draft quality so I don't need to print to a PDF and use another app to do the printing.
I love SuSE 9.0, and have been looking forward to upgrading to 9.1. It arrived in the mail today.
The 32bit sides of the DVDs are not readable in my machines, but the 64bit sides are. Does me no good, my systems are 32bit. A big part of the reason I wanted the boxed Professional version is for the DVDs, and now I find them useless.
So, I still have the CDs. I booted up and attempted to upgrade my system. No go. None of the partitions on any of my drives are identified. It shows "unknown" for every partition. Even if I manually select my root partition, it fails to mount it. Keep in mind this machine was set up from scratch with 9.0 and works just fine.
I checked SuSE support, and it turns out that there is a bug in the SuSE kernel that prevents it from mounting XFS partitions. Amazing, all that testing and nobody tried to use XFS. There is a driver hotfix released as a workaround, but it can't handle root on XFS. Guess what, my root (and others) are all XFS.
This means I can only install 9.1 if I'm willing to throw away my entire config and start over with a fresh install. Unacceptable. At the very least I'd like to be able to download a replacement CD1 ISO that fixes the problem. It's ridiculous to keep shipping a broken product that can't be installed as an upgrade by an otherwise satisfied customer.
So here I sit, with 2 unreadable DVDs and 5 CDs that I can't install because apparently nobody ever tested a perfectly normal and supported configuration as an upgrade path. Sigh.
From watching the hearing, I was under the impression that the photos were taken between January and April, and evidence in a criminal investigation that was illegally leaked to the media before the proceedings were concluded.
I definitely didn't get the impression that the photos appeared in the media an hour after they were taken! Apparently there are a great many photos and several videos, only a few of which were obtained by the media, and these were actually taken weeks or months before any of us saw them.
Is this not the case? Isn't this topic an assumption or over-sensationalizing digital media? Couldn't all the photos just have easily been film? Did the photos being digital really make any practical difference in the situation at all? What am I not understanding here?
Fortunately, most movies don't require a brain so I won't be missing anything by not taking it into a theater.
Remembering is copying. Copying is theft.
Registering a copyright for sourcecode amounts to sending in a form with the code and a fee to the copyright office. They datestamp it and file it away. It's not required to register to claim copyright, or even to register at all. Registering just gives the holder some leverage in court, since in the absence of other information, the side with the earlier registration date wins.
So, since they are just filing now, and have a 2003 registration date, I don't see what this has to do with anything at all. All this means is that they are "officially" claiming copyright, id doesn't mean they's been "granted" any rights at all. That's for a court to decide in specific disputes.
IANAL, but I've sent in a number of Copyright Form TX filings in my day, at about $10 each. Big deal.
I'm not saying the blocking open relays isn't a good thing... ;)
;)
I block them, and have been for several years. There was a time when almost _all_ my spam was blocked by a simple dns-based ORB list, but now my portion of ORB rejects is much smaller than my total number of spams. Either most of my spam is not coming from open relays, or the ORB lists that I use are woefully incomplete. (ORBL and SpamHaus)
Perhaps you know of an ORB list that is much more effective and free?
My personal results are that blocking open relays was once very effective, but is no longer a significant barrier against the big spammers. I would agree that it's important to block open relays, and that it does reduce the amount of spam (and more importantly educate mail administrators.) I would not agree that open relays are the primary avenue for spam, my personal exprience indicates that currently less than 2% of my blocked spam is coming from open relays. Of course, your mileage may differ!
I'm using bayesian filtering trained with messages I'd received in the past 9 months (18000 spams and 400 wanted messages) and the results have been excellent, combined with whitelisting.
;)
I whitelist about a dozen sources, and pass the rest to the filter. The filtered results are archived on the server based on junk classification, and tagged with a header before delivery. Rules on the mail client filter the spam.
My main interest is in reducing the number of times per year I need to tweak or retrain my spam filtering. I switched from keyword matching to Bayesian filtering and so far it seems to be a big improvement. It's a simpler process to update the filter now, and it needs it less frequently.
One big difference though, my rather large set of keyword rules was generally effective for an arbitrary group of users. My Bayesian filter is not. For acceptable results, I need to train it for each user using a large number of actual sample messages. Fortunately, at the moment I'm only filtering for 3 users.
What's your source of data for this? In my experience, my own MTA's ORB data indicates that the vast majority of spam my domains receive does _not_ come from open relays. My general reading on the subject in recent months gives me the impression that this isn't an anomaly, and that blocking open relays isn't significantly effective any longer in reducing spam.
Education _is_ what you make of it, and a large part of that process is finding individuals worth learning from. If the instructor doesn't actively participate, they are no more than a librarian. Even so, a good librarian can be very helpful. A bad one is worse than useless.
I attended 6 colleges/universities simply because that's what it took for me to find 190 units taught by individuals that were worth my time to absorb what they had to offer. I haven't tried any online courses.
To me, education is almost entirely self-driven. I took college as an opportunity to learn from people and not just books. I can absorb a book any time or place. A college instructor who isn't available and doesn't share their mind with the students is mostly a booklist babysitter. I saw a _lot_ of that, and when it was all that I could find left at a school, I would move on to another.
I didn't find it hard to find worthwhile instructors, I just found it hard to find enough of them in one school. I didn't find it hard to get an education or a degree, I just found it hard to do both at the same time.
Also as a certified diver (1994) I know that tissue nitrogen saturation is highly dependent on the individual and a multitude of complex factors. There are tables for very general estimations, which have to be very conservative to be useful at all to a diverse group of individuals diving in a variety of circumstances.
Dive computers allow the use of less conservative "tables" by applying the algorithms to sensor data. By applying actual depth/time/gas data to the algorithmic tables a diver can dive more agressive profiles, and also have the convenience of having the calculations automated in real time.
The 'no flying within 12 hours' and similar rules are simple conservative safeguards, and don't assume much at all about dive profiles. Also, it's not just a rule against flying, driving home via a route that elevates you a few thousand feet above your dive elevation can result in the same effects. (I live and dive at sea level, but I can't drive more than a few miles in any direction without significantly increasing my elevation.)
The alleged problem with the computer in question (if I understood the story correctly) is that the program assumed the diver continued breathing nitrox while surfaced between dives. That's a considerable problem, since it provides incorrect data. Even worse, it's an anti-conservative error.
Nitrox diving is an inherently more agressive attempt to increase dive profile limits. I am not personally a nitrox diver, but I understand the principles. I certainly don't want my computer to base it's calculations on an air mixture I'm not breathing between dives.
There is no rational excuse for knowingly allowing such an error to go unreported or fixed.
A couple weeks ago I was shopping at my local grocery superstore and picked up a copy of TurboTax Basic from a display next to the service counter. I usually have one of those *block services prepare my taxes, and it usually costs $75 or more in fees. I really didn't put much thought into buying TurboTax. An hour later I fired up the Windows2000Pro laptop I have an slipped in the CD. The next 3 hours was an amazing lack of progress at getting the thing installed, and 3 support sessions with the company involving uncounted people on their end and a fun phone bill for me.
The cause of my problems are the partition scheme of my laptop. The Windows2000Pro system C: partition is 900MB, just big enough for the OS and some temp files. The swapfile is on another larger partition, as are all third-party applications.
The "Minimum System Requirements" on the box (a DVD-style clamshell) are easy to read through the shrinkwrap. To summarize the relevant parts, the OS list included Windows2000, the hard disk space specified 65MB and an additional 60MB if IE was not installed. IE 5.5 or higher was listed as being required to access online features, obtain product updates, and complete electronic filing. I read this before buying, and noted that my system meets all the requirements given on the box.
On insertion, the CD autorun process kicked up a splash window, then an animated install menu window. I clicked the obvious choice to register and install, followed the prompts through selecting my type of network connection, filling out the registration info and getting to a window with a single button to "Install." Clicking the install button got me a window where the file copying process is obviously supposed to happen, but instead I get a standard alery window that informs me that there is insufficient space on the hard disk to install.
Some notable things at this point: I have never been presented a EULA of any type. None of the windows I have progressed through have displayed a EULA, nor has there been any possible sequence of buttons that makes one appear. There is no EULA in the printed material inside the box. I have also not entered the CD key code anywhere in the process. There is no prompt for it anywhere up to this point, not even in the registration window where I entered my name/address/email type info. This becomes interesting in another hour or so when I'm on the phone with their support staff.
I'm now at the point where the TurboTax installer will not proceed further because I do not have 191MB available on drive C:. I want to install on drive E: which has plenty of space, so I consulted the FAQ on the turbotaxsupport.com website. I didn't find anything applicable, so decided to consult a support staffer about the best way to make this happen. (They use a webchat interface to provice frontline support.) The live person on the other end directed me to the web FAQ with a set of steps for installing from hard disk instead of CD, involving simply copying the CD installer files to the HD. Doubtful, I tried it anyway, and was not surprised when the installer still stubbornly insisted that there was not enough space because it was only scanning the C: drive. I still had the webchat window open, which gave me an option to select that I was unsatisfied with the help I was given and offered me a chance to talk with a "senior" support staffer via webchat. I muttered "hell yes" and was shortly explaining the problem all over again to a new person. I was walked 4 times through the complete process, echoing the window headings and options at each step laboriously. None of the suggestions made were helpful, and few even made any sense at all. At one point I was even told that the only solution would be to uninstall and then reinstall. I reminded him politely that getting the product installed in the first place was the whole point of this exercise, and asked how I could possibly uninstall when nothing has been installed even once yet. I was then treated like a fencepost and told to find the TurboTax menu under Program Files from the Start menu, at which point I seriously wondered what problem the support staffer thought we were trying to fix. (Of course there was no entry under the start menu.) Finally after convincing him that the product was in fact not installed at all, not even a little bit, and could not be uninstalled, he gave up and provided me with a voice toll number and PIN. I asked for a toll free number but was told none exists. Ouch, since I was envisioning a lengthy call if my experience so far proved typical. I decided to take this as far as it goes.
I had no problems getting to a live person quickly. He seemed to understand the nature of the problem and over the course of the next hour I had a pretty dizzy ride as I was asked the same questions repeatedly and he was consulting with an increasing number of people on his end. I had some pointed questions about the minimum requirements listed on the box, such as why the installer wanted 191MB in the first place, since the requirements plainly state 65MB. I was told that the higher amount was due to not having IE 6.0 installed. I pointed out that the IE requirement on the box stated 5.5 or higher, not that 6.0 was needed. I was told that was true, but if 6.0 is not present the installer will install it. I pointed out that the box said that only 60MB more was needed for IE if it was not present, which means a total of 125MB minimum requirement and asked why 66MB more than that was needed. I didn't get an answer to that. I asked him to confirm that IE 6.0 was required, contrary to what the box said. I was told that IE 6.0 is needed, but he stopped short of giving me an actual confirmation that the box was wrong. I asked him to confirm that the requirements on the box were wrong specifically regarding HD space and IE version, and he went on hold for a while. When he came back he asked me if I read the EULA, as all these facts were in the EULA. I told him I hadn't read the EULA and asked where I could find it, at the same time pointing out that it was irrelevant since I had no way to read system requirements prior to purchase other than on the outside of the box. He told me I must have seen the EULA, it was on the third window of the install process. I told him I didn't remember clicking past it, and by now I had gone through these steps many times. I did it again for him, step by step, this time saying "no EULA" after describing every window. When we got all the way to the diskspace alert, there had been no EULA presented. I pointed out that anything in the EULA couldn't possibly apply to me since it never made an appearance. He never mentioned the EULA again.
At one point or another in the phone conversation I was told the following things, all of which turned out to be false:
That I wasn't being presented all the installer windows because I didn't have IE 6.0 installed.
That the EULA was presented on the third window and before the registration form.
That it was possible to install my E: drive regardless of available space on C:
The end result seemed to be that the installer scans the C: drive before offering an option to specify the location for installation, which they agreed was stupid. They insisted that after that space check there is a prompt that allows changing the installation location, but you can't get there if you don't have enough space for the entire installation on the C: drive. They also changed their minds about how the IE installer worked, and said that it offers a choice to not upgrade to IE 6.0, but obviously not before the space check. I have my doubts, since the disk space alert pops up at the beginning of the file copy process, with the progress bar ready to start counting files. I'm not sure where they are fitting in the choices for install location and options, but it sure doesn't seem to be before the initial file copy. This implies to me that it always needs 191MB on the C: drive to install, no matter what the environment is, which is still 66MB more than the requirements stated on the box. I hope it's not so, but I doubt I'll ever see for myself. I'm not repartitioning my system to accomodate a single proprietary tax program.
I know my experience surely isn't typical. Most people have 200MB or more free on their C: drive. I just don't have the extra space to waste on my laptop for a Windows system partition, and this shouldn't be about how I partition my machine. There were several humorous points for me in the conversations, I think the funniest was when I was told by one of their "experts" to relabel my drives to swap E: and C: just for the install and then switch them back. I had to keep from laughing as I explained that I couldn't change the letter of a running system boot partition, and even if I could the system likely would die immediately and certainly wouldn't be bootable in that condition. Another funny one was the idea that "minimum system requirements" meant only those needed to run the application, but not to install it. Their argument was that the installer temporarily needs more than the minimum requirements during installation, but that the program would run fine with the listed requirements. I believe that is an unreasonable position.
I was given an address to return the product for a refund and cut loose. I came away with several concerns, especially surrounding the EULA (or apparent lack of one) and the listed minimum system requirements, which are misleading at best and untruthful at worst. It's bad enough that a product requires you to buy it before you can read the EULA, and we're used to that. But for the CD-based installer to require you to register the product before you can even install it, and doesn't even show you the EULA until after it copies the product to your hard disk is pretty bad in my opinion. Perhaps I should count myself fortunate that I never got far enough to see the EULA.
Except part 97 does not permit broadcasting. :) Seriously, I see almost no potential for using 802.11b in any normal way on the ham bands. The story says they hope this will encourage existing part 15 users to get amateur licenses and operate under part 97. I just can't see any practical motivation for this.
Remember, ham comminications must not be encrypted. They must not be commercial. (This means no ads, no non-ham commerce, basically no websurfing.) They must not be broadcast. (Not really a problem, not much different from packet radio this way.) Each transmitter must identify itself. (I suppose using the ham callsign as the SSID would work for that.)
Sure, hams can have fun playing with 802.11b under part 97, but because of the content restrictions it's in NO WAY any replacement for the people operating under part 15. Seriously, how useful is a network connection that is not allowed to be secure or be used for commercial traffic.? Yes, it has potential for ham-related events, contests, and emergencies. But I don't see anything else.
One peeve of mine is that hams have become followers and are no longer leaders in radio technology. There was a time when hams did things first, and commercial radio products and services grew from those efforts. Technology has mostly become too complex for the single hobbyist to provide a substantial development contribution. Now the ham community mostly waits for commercial technologies to become old and inexpensive, then adapts them for their own purposes while adding little or nothing new. A large part of the reason hams are allocated valuable spectrum is for innovation, but in the past decade I've seen only regurgitation. I would love to use my ham license to do something I couldn't do more cheaply and effectively on the commercial bands. 802.11b under part 97 is another example of less functionality for more effort.
I'm not saying it's not worth doing, just that it's only useful to the hobbyist who wants to play and do a thing because it can be done. I'm saying it's not useful to anybody who wants to operate a real and practical wireless network.
And it appears she doesn't just review on Amazon.com. Google turns up several places with similar patterns, including Barnes&Noble. Could be she's just a prolific reviewer with no more need to get a life than other obsessed people. Also could be fraud. Considering the number of people who concentrate so much time on silly things, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there's nothing particularly nefarious happening here. Somebody has to be number 8.
According to the linked msnbc article, monorails cost around $124 MILLION per mile to build. Now, that's for a one-rail conventional technology contruction type of thing. AFAIK it's basically a bunch of reinforced concrete.
I would imagine the cost for a mile of continous rigid tube strong enough to maintain near-perfect vacuum in the same environment would be fantastically higher than a concrete rail on stilts.
Still, even if such a thing were to be adopted with enough zeal to pay for it, the inherent security risks are incredibly complicated. The number of ways the system could fail due to accidents or hardware failure are numerous. The number of ways the system could be intentionally damaged are huge.
Realize that air travel is inherently insecure, and we generally only have to focus on the entry and exit points (airports) as well as the vehicle itself. Endangering an aircraft in flight from outside the vehicle is relatively expensive and difficult. (Hence most security failures are from within the vehicle.)
The security focus for the ETT system would have to encompass the entire travel environment, unlike air travel. I see no practical way to protect 100% of a length of vacuum tubing on any scale useful for transportation.
If such a system did enter into use on a scale large enough to be more than a novelty, then there is also the risk to public infrastructure in the event of interrupted service. For example, one bomb and not only is every passenger killed instantly as air friction causes rapid deceleration to all cars, but the entire system becomes unavailable for a significant time which forces (hopefully available) alternative transportations methods into use. System reliability can't be any higher than security vulnerabilities allow it to be.
So yes, were an ETT system to exist, the operation costs may well be low enough to be payed for with advertising. But only after development and construction costs were paid for. I would expect those costs to be high enough to take more than one generation to pay for, possibly several. And for all the effort and expense, we'd have something ridiculously easy to damage and destroy for any evil nutball.
Just because several (I know of at least half a dozen) sites have that sound-barrier quote, that doesn't make it true.
;)
I consider the several links on that page as a good cross-section of sources, and from what I read, I agree with Kittenger himself that the most reliable information is that he achieved 90% of the speed of sound at his altitude. The most credible information was that his top speed was 614mph, and that somebody somewhere made a typo of 714, hence many sources believed he broke the speed of sound. It turned into one of those urban myths. There was no evidence at all that he broke the sound barrier, and reasonably solid data that he didn't, and the man himself agreed with the 614mph data. Also, the math agrees with this, showing that another 1300m or so of altitude is needed to break the sound barrier.
It's not like everybody was out there with their own altitude radar taking measurements. I'll side with Kittenger's own opinion, that the radar reading was the most reliable, and that the man himself is more likely to be correct than a few sensationalist storytellers.
So when the data and the people involved say he didn't break the sound barrier, I'd say that's the closest to definitive that we have.
Disclaimer: No, I don't believe anything simply because it's posted on a website. But I remain happy to disagree with you. Enjoy!
Uh, if you HAD read the articles on the terminal velocity link, you'd notice that Joe Kittenger did NOT break the sound barrier. We forget that he broke it, because he didn't.
Although the author of http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml has a lot of poor wording in his explanations of terminal velocity, there are several good links to the facts and data on Kittenger's jump.
(My favorite quote on that page is: "In a vacuum with zero air resistance, these two objects will experience same acceleration. But on the earth this is not true.")
I live on Maui, and my experience here goes back to the early 1970's.
According to this story, "There are no naturally occurring reptiles or terrestrial amphibians, no snakes, iguanas, toads or salamanders in Hawaii. Until the coqui arrived, it was a frog-free world."
Umm. No. It says the Coqui arrived around 1990. I wouldn't know about that. Nobody I know here has heard of these frogs. Perhaps the 40+ infestations claimed on Maui are simply places I don't go. HOWEVER...
No other reptiles? No amphibians, toad or frogs before 1990? Totally false. For one thing, these islands are famous for having Geckos. We've got hundreds of them right in our yard. There's more than one within 20 feet of me right now. And we have other salamander-like lizards here than geckos. I'm not a biologist. And I suppose the frogs or toads I played with as a kid 30 years ago weren't here either back then.
I don't know when or how frogs, toads, geckos, salamanders and such got here, but it was long before 1990. I'm sure there is some basis for truth in this story, but I've managed to escape hearing even one of these tens of thousands of 90-decibel frogs on Maui. That doesn't mean they aren't here, just that the story sure doesn't reflect any common knowledge here as far as I can tell after discussing this story with my friends.