If I could pay $2 per episode for content that was guaranteed to be ad-free, DRM-free (or free enough that it doesn't hinder my fair use efforts), persistent (meaning it doesn't get deleted out from under me), and included added-value content like commentaries and behind-the-scenes features, I would.
Oh wait, it's called buying it on DVD.
Wait, so DVD's are DRM-free now? I must have missed that news.
Last time I checked, it was still impossible to (legally) play DVD's under Linux (without cracking the DRM, that is), never mind playing DVD's from different regions, like, in my case, the US...
And if you're willing to pay $500 for the phone, chances are you'll be willing to pay full price on the plan.
Not really. At least in the Netherlands, when you enter a "SIM-only" contract (which means you have to provide the phone yourself), you always pay just 50% of the normal monthly fee associated to the chosen service.
Basically this means you should simply add up how much you would pay just for the service during the 2 (or 1) years of the contract (e.g. EUR 600), and beat half this amount worth of phone + accessories (e.g. EUR 300) out of the shop where you buy the contract+phone (if you don't need such an expensive phone, maybe you want a carkit instead...just ask). If they are not willing to do this, simply explain that you will then buy a SIM-only contract and buy the phone yourself and it'll still be cheaper for you. Make sure of course to look up the real (internet) prices for the phone you want to buy, and do not take their sometimes ridiculously inflated prices as the "real" price.
If you get significantly less than EUR 300 worth of stuff out of entering a 2-year EUR 600 contract (that's EUR 25 a month, which should include a lot of "free" minutes), you're basically getting screwed.
I guess it doesn't work like that in the US, then...?
The reason why it works even if you drink soft drinks without caffeine, is because the sugar will give you a quick energy boost.
It seems that having soft drinks for breakfast is quite unhealthy, lowers your attention span, etc.
A Finnish study of 404 10-11 year-olds showed that withdrawal, anxiousness, depression, delinquency and aggression were twice as frequent in those consuming 30 per cent more sucrose in the form of ice cream, sugary snacks and soft drinks. [..] Over the longer term, yo-yoing blood sugar levels are also associated with low mood, behavioural problems, lower IQ and poor academic performance.
Here's the source (but I'm sure there are many other sources that say the same thing).
Battery fires and rootkits are Slashdot tech news, but not everyday Mom & Pop frontpage news.
Frontpage news, maybe not, but I've seen both covered quite extensively (i.e. in regular articles, not just "filler" side-bar articles) in at least 2 of the larger dutch newspapers. I assume others may have covered it as well.
Seriously, this has nothing at all to do with it.. What home user really cares if their PC takes 150W or 180W ? Nobody...
In addition to the fact that some people *do* actually care about the power savings, even if you don't you should still care because most of that power is transformed into heat, which the processor has to somehow get rid of. So you need larger (heavier) heatsinks, CPU coolers etc. not to mention that high power usage often means that increasing the size of the die and/or the clock frequency runs into limits where it is simply not possible to get rid of all that heat fast enough. Hence, why the PPC development was getting "stuck". This also happened to Intel and AMD btw, hence why they're now trying to make processors faster by putting multiple processors on 1 die. At least they seem to manage better than the PPC to keep power consumption down, anyway...
I very much prefer having all my mail on an IMAP server (accessed over SSL only). As you mention, this is problematic when you don't want to run your desktop machine at home 24/7.
Until recently, I had a Linux server for this specific purpose. However, after years of relatively trouble-free service, the hardware was getting old to the point where keeping it running was becoming more troublesome than buying something else.
So I bought a Mac Mini for several reasons:
1. It is very silent 2. It uses only 20-25W (!), even much less (3-5W) when in sleep mode - though you'll have to disable that when you use it as a server, obviously. This is quite important to me for devices that are running 24/7. I'm not just pulling these numbers out of my ass, check for yourself, e.g. here or here 3. It runs UNIX. Installing Courier IMAP and some other basic services (apache, already installed by default; PHP, installed a more recent version) took me just a few hours. 4. The builtin harddisk is not very big and quite slow. Also it's hard (though not impossible) to replace when it breaks. So I bought a 250 GB external drive to go with it. If you buy the right one (e.g. the MiniMax), it even looks nice together with the Mac Mini. 5. It's small, just put it on your desk somewhere.
Many people on Slashdot have been screaming for over a year that Vista doesn't offer anything new.
Yes, and it looks like you've just proven this point yourself. Thanks for pointing it out yourself, here goes:
IPv6.
Has been available in every other OS I know of for years. Microsoft is finally catching up here.
-I think it's cool that when you browse the network people can see a picture of the person instead of the Computer Icon.
Whatever. I think it's a privacy-sensitive thing that I'd want to disable ASAP, but ok. So, you can set an arbitrary picture as your login icon. Stop the presses! Groundbreaking developments!
-I have clients that are going to love the way the Windows clock works now. They can jump around by month, year, or decade in seconds. Those little things are pretty cool.
See above, only even more so.
-I also do photography, and you use to be able to open an image file on an OSX machine and XP and it would look better on the OSX box. Not with vista.
So again, if what you say is true, Microsoft is finally catching up to other OS's here once again. Btw. in fact I don't agree with you, I have used the same 19" CRT on a Mac Mini and a Windows/Linux machine, and the pictures look exactly the same (you just have to calibrate the screen right).
Seriously, apple announces multiple desktops and have this site has a heart attack.... then praises Steve Jobs for being an inventor, a genius, etc. Meanwhile Windows has had those features for years, hell, Unix has for decades!
!? Since when has Windows had multiple desktop built into the OS (without installing 3rd party applications, specific video card drivers or funny power tools that nobody ever bothers with - not least because many applications tend to act in very strange ways when you try to use it)? Also, if Vista finally supports this, Microsoft is, once more (how often do you want to point this out?) finally catching up with what has been taken for granted in every other major OS for ages.
So far, my reaction to Vista (and yes, I tried to run RC2 on my AMD64 3500+ with 1GB RAM) is that it's completely underwhelming. The only thing that is overwhelming about it are the memory requirements - it managed to use 600+ MB right from booting it up!
By the way, you also forgot to mention a few more "features", such as the fantastic customer-friendly Digital Restriction Management schemes, activation schemes that might disable your computer, etc. etc. just to name a few.
For example, you can throttle the bandwidth of a particular subnet to a particular server, giving some departments more access to the servers that they need. You can even restrict outgoing bandwidth for certain peer-to-peer applications like bit torrent. This shaping can also be handy when applied to servers, allowing less bandwidth for certain users/departments, and more for others.
Why is this called "next-gen"? There is nothing "next-gen" about this. If anything, Microsoft is finally catching up with the rest of the world in this department.
Such stuff was possible with Linux (and, I'm sure, BSD) servers for years. I know for sure because I used to have such a setup (to do traffic shaping on our -then- relatively slow internet connection shared by too many people) on a Linux server, more than 5 years ago!
Please stop this silly use of marketingspeak of calling something "next-gen" when in fact the company under consideration is just finally catching up with what the rest of the world has been doing for ages.
After he gets the count of hands and shows that it's about half of the audience, he points out that the public as a whole (at least in the U.S.) prefers automatics to standards by a margin of at least 9:1.
At least, indeed, you mentioned "here in the US", as I'm sure that in most of Europe, about 90% of people would raise their hands when you asked them the same question, and also about 90% (if not actually 95% or more) do indeed drive cars with manual transmission.
I don't know exactly why - are manual cars still in fact more fuel efficient? If so that could be the reason (remember that fuel is way more expensive here because of additional taxes, it's like 3x as expensive). I think many cars with automatic transmission here are driven by people with some kind of disability (e.g. can use only 1 leg or 1 arm).
I mean, it's bad enough that people always talk about "Computer viruses" instead of "Windows viruses" and so on, but come on, can we please include *some* information in the post itself?
Admittedly, the article to which this newspost links also doesn't mention this until the third or fourth paragraph or so.
At first I thought the article was about the Linux kernel, in that case I would have wanted a (global) list of the OS's/versions affected as well, because my laptop might have been vulnerable in that case!
So, I assume it's just Windows XP SP2 (and probably older SP's), or other versions as well?
It's a "Less critical" vulnerability - not really dangerous at all.
Uhm, hello!?
Using this hole any arbitrary website you visit can request pages from arbitrary other websites *through your browser*, that means including sites to which you may be logged in at the time. For example, your bank account, paypal account, ebay account. They don't even *need* to steal your password if you still have open sessions at sites that matter...
I rather fail to see how this is "not really dangerous at all"!
So what's that all about? Why don't Watts = Volts * Amps? Are they as efficient as we've been told?
I wondered about that myself, and found this article, which IMO explains it pretty decently (without having to really understand all the details). The article is about PFC (Power Factor Correction), which is technology used in e.g. PC power supplies to make them look more like the simple inductive loads that would follow the laws you just described (such as Ohms law).
Basically the "problem" is that measuring electricity usage is not that easy when you use devices that are "reactive" loads. Such devices do not just take input from the net, but "feed back" stuff into the net as well (hence the name reactive), thus e.g. distorting the voltage, drawing different currents over time in weird patterns, etc.
Simple "inductive" loads, such as toasters or electric stoves, don't have this behavior.
Power Factor Correction is about making reactive loads look more like inductive loads. This is needed because the prevalence of electronic equipment in e.g. office buildings would really mess up things for the power company (and hence, eventually for their customers), because the weird current and voltage spikes and whatnot _do_ feedback and influence the electricity net itself. Hence PFC.
That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe;)
No, he didn't. As others also pointed out, there is nothing in the Eve Online EULA or in the game mechanics that forbids what this guy has done. There is no "exploiting" of bugs or broken game mechanics going on here. "Exploiting" of stupid people, sure, but that's a different matter.
What *is* explicitly forbidden by the EULA however, is converting in-game money to real money. That is a bannable offense.
This can't be serious guys, just imagine booting your laptop during some meeting (happens all the time), conference, whatever, and being unable to disable that sound. That would piss off so many people that just this would be reason enough to switch back to XP.
Nah, Microsoft is doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot lately, but this is too much...I think Scobleizer is pulling our legs here:D
"Our users never signed up for this kind of thing. You have to wonder where it goes from here. It seems an effective method has been found but more than a small private company could handle. Will someone else adapt this concept, or does the internet world give up?"
What kind of thing? What kind of effective method has been found to do, what exactly? What is "this" concept we are talking about?
I read this site (almost) daily but have never ever heard of this company before. As it is apparently some kind of small startup, I'd imagine many others around here have never heard of them, either.
Without any context, this "article" is pure gibberish. Maybe it makes sense after reading the linked article (which, I'll admit in good/. style, I haven't *yet* done), but can we please at least try to make somewhat clear what an article is about, so that everyone can decide for himself whether this subject is of interest to them in the first place?
You mentioned avoiding null bytes, I seem to recall reading that on PPC that's much harder to pull off because of many RISC ops tend to have a byte of null padding that smaller CISC ops don't need. So besides having to learn a new asm, its also much harder to exploit... PPC did have a real advantage here.
No. You just need to write an encoder/decoder, which itself does not contain ops containing nulls, and which will encode (and decode) any string of assembled binary code into one that does not contain nulls.
Now you're gonna say "yes, but that's an awful lot of work". Indeed. However, at least for x86 there are kits that you can just download (metasploit, etc.) and be done with it. Nothing hard about that. It's a matter of time before someone will construct something similar for PPC.
...it is a good idea not to run VNC all the time anyway. It'd be dangerous even if it was completely designed from the beginning with security in mind, which it wasn't. I'm not even sure that the password is sent encrypted (probably it is by now), but certainly the normal traffic is not encrypted AFAIK.
Also, there have been vulnerabilities before.
This, of course, is not good, but whether it is acceptable also depends on the purpose that you're using it for.
I installed VNC on the computers at my parents place, but it's disabled by default (but put in an obvious place in the start menu). When there is a problem, my parents can call me, I'll tell them to start the "Remote control thingy" (1 click in the start menu) and then I can reach the computer.
Not much can go wrong that way, of course someone could intercept the traffic etc. if they like to stare at default windows desktops I wish them good luck.
However, don't type the admin password over VNC, I'd guess...it's like doing 'su root' over telnet....
Is this just for fun, or a clever, highly effective protest?
Anyone care to explain how this can possible be construed as to be highly effective?
Let's see, RMS does something very subtle that nobody in the mainstream press will bother to report, or actually even *notice*, not to mention *understand*. I fail to see how this can in any way, shape or form be seen as an "highly effective" protest.
Of course this is Slashdot, but even then....I mean come on;)
the advisory that this affects 6.x versions is wrong
Version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 here (so yes, XP SP2), and the exploit works just fine. It might depend on your security settings, which I didn't really bother to check in IE because I never use it anyway. Maybe you disabled any kind of scripting or have installed 3rd party popup-blockers or anything else that might change the default behaviour?
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, it was still impossible to (legally) play DVD's under Linux (without cracking the DRM, that is), never mind playing DVD's from different regions, like, in my case, the US...
Basically this means you should simply add up how much you would pay just for the service during the 2 (or 1) years of the contract (e.g. EUR 600), and beat half this amount worth of phone + accessories (e.g. EUR 300) out of the shop where you buy the contract+phone (if you don't need such an expensive phone, maybe you want a carkit instead...just ask). If they are not willing to do this, simply explain that you will then buy a SIM-only contract and buy the phone yourself and it'll still be cheaper for you. Make sure of course to look up the real (internet) prices for the phone you want to buy, and do not take their sometimes ridiculously inflated prices as the "real" price.
If you get significantly less than EUR 300 worth of stuff out of entering a 2-year EUR 600 contract (that's EUR 25 a month, which should include a lot of "free" minutes), you're basically getting screwed.
I guess it doesn't work like that in the US, then...?
It seems that having soft drinks for breakfast is quite unhealthy, lowers your attention span, etc.
Here's the source (but I'm sure there are many other sources that say the same thing).
Looks to me like somebody has been paying attention to ESR's World Domination 201 article.
:)
Putting aside whether you like it or not, sometimes you have got to admit the man has a point
Frontpage news, maybe not, but I've seen both covered quite extensively (i.e. in regular articles, not just "filler" side-bar articles) in at least 2 of the larger dutch newspapers. I assume others may have covered it as well.
Seriously, this has nothing at all to do with it.. What home user really cares if their PC takes 150W or 180W ? Nobody...
In addition to the fact that some people *do* actually care about the power savings, even if you don't you should still care because most of that power is transformed into heat, which the processor has to somehow get rid of. So you need larger (heavier) heatsinks, CPU coolers etc. not to mention that high power usage often means that increasing the size of the die and/or the clock frequency runs into limits where it is simply not possible to get rid of all that heat fast enough. Hence, why the PPC development was getting "stuck". This also happened to Intel and AMD btw, hence why they're now trying to make processors faster by putting multiple processors on 1 die. At least they seem to manage better than the PPC to keep power consumption down, anyway...
I very much prefer having all my mail on an IMAP server (accessed over SSL only). As you mention, this is problematic when you don't want to run your desktop machine at home 24/7.
Until recently, I had a Linux server for this specific purpose. However, after years of relatively trouble-free service, the hardware was getting old to the point where keeping it running was becoming more troublesome than buying something else.
So I bought a Mac Mini for several reasons:
1. It is very silent
2. It uses only 20-25W (!), even much less (3-5W) when in sleep mode - though you'll have to disable that when you use it as a server, obviously. This is quite important to me for devices that are running 24/7. I'm not just pulling these numbers out of my ass, check for yourself, e.g. here or here
3. It runs UNIX. Installing Courier IMAP and some other basic services (apache, already installed by default; PHP, installed a more recent version) took me just a few hours.
4. The builtin harddisk is not very big and quite slow. Also it's hard (though not impossible) to replace when it breaks. So I bought a 250 GB external drive to go with it. If you buy the right one (e.g. the MiniMax), it even looks nice together with the Mac Mini.
5. It's small, just put it on your desk somewhere.
They dislike it because it's TOO accurate. It shows how religious people really think and act.
Overly broad generalizations for teh win, then?
Yes, I'm absolutely sure any religious person thinks like this....uhhhuh.
Yes, and it looks like you've just proven this point yourself. Thanks for pointing it out yourself, here goes:
Has been available in every other OS I know of for years. Microsoft is finally catching up here.
Whatever. I think it's a privacy-sensitive thing that I'd want to disable ASAP, but ok. So, you can set an arbitrary picture as your login icon. Stop the presses! Groundbreaking developments!
See above, only even more so.
So again, if what you say is true, Microsoft is finally catching up to other OS's here once again. Btw. in fact I don't agree with you, I have used the same 19" CRT on a Mac Mini and a Windows/Linux machine, and the pictures look exactly the same (you just have to calibrate the screen right).
!? Since when has Windows had multiple desktop built into the OS (without installing 3rd party applications, specific video card drivers or funny power tools that nobody ever bothers with - not least because many applications tend to act in very strange ways when you try to use it)? Also, if Vista finally supports this, Microsoft is, once more (how often do you want to point this out?) finally catching up with what has been taken for granted in every other major OS for ages.
So far, my reaction to Vista (and yes, I tried to run RC2 on my AMD64 3500+ with 1GB RAM) is that it's completely underwhelming. The only thing that is overwhelming about it are the memory requirements - it managed to use 600+ MB right from booting it up!
By the way, you also forgot to mention a few more "features", such as the fantastic customer-friendly Digital Restriction Management schemes, activation schemes that might disable your computer, etc. etc. just to name a few.
Why is this called "next-gen"? There is nothing "next-gen" about this. If anything, Microsoft is finally catching up with the rest of the world in this department.
Such stuff was possible with Linux (and, I'm sure, BSD) servers for years. I know for sure because I used to have such a setup (to do traffic shaping on our -then- relatively slow internet connection shared by too many people) on a Linux server, more than 5 years ago!
Please stop this silly use of marketingspeak of calling something "next-gen" when in fact the company under consideration is just finally catching up with what the rest of the world has been doing for ages.
After he gets the count of hands and shows that it's about half of the audience, he points out that the public as a whole (at least in the U.S.) prefers automatics to standards by a margin of at least 9:1.
At least, indeed, you mentioned "here in the US", as I'm sure that in most of Europe, about 90% of people would raise their hands when you asked them the same question, and also about 90% (if not actually 95% or more) do indeed drive cars with manual transmission.
I don't know exactly why - are manual cars still in fact more fuel efficient? If so that could be the reason (remember that fuel is way more expensive here because of additional taxes, it's like 3x as expensive). I think many cars with automatic transmission here are driven by people with some kind of disability (e.g. can use only 1 leg or 1 arm).
I mean, it's bad enough that people always talk about "Computer viruses" instead of "Windows viruses" and so on, but come on, can we please include *some* information in the post itself?
Admittedly, the article to which this newspost links also doesn't mention this until the third or fourth paragraph or so.
At first I thought the article was about the Linux kernel, in that case I would have wanted a (global) list of the OS's/versions affected as well, because my laptop might have been vulnerable in that case!
So, I assume it's just Windows XP SP2 (and probably older SP's), or other versions as well?
See The brillant Paula bean and The Brillant Paula Bean, J2ME Edition
Uhm, hello!?
Using this hole any arbitrary website you visit can request pages from arbitrary other websites *through your browser*, that means including sites to which you may be logged in at the time. For example, your bank account, paypal account, ebay account. They don't even *need* to steal your password if you still have open sessions at sites that matter...
I rather fail to see how this is "not really dangerous at all"!
I wondered about that myself, and found this article, which IMO explains it pretty decently (without having to really understand all the details). The article is about PFC (Power Factor Correction), which is technology used in e.g. PC power supplies to make them look more like the simple inductive loads that would follow the laws you just described (such as Ohms law).
Basically the "problem" is that measuring electricity usage is not that easy when you use devices that are "reactive" loads. Such devices do not just take input from the net, but "feed back" stuff into the net as well (hence the name reactive), thus e.g. distorting the voltage, drawing different currents over time in weird patterns, etc.
Simple "inductive" loads, such as toasters or electric stoves, don't have this behavior.
Power Factor Correction is about making reactive loads look more like inductive loads. This is needed because the prevalence of electronic equipment in e.g. office buildings would really mess up things for the power company (and hence, eventually for their customers), because the weird current and voltage spikes and whatnot _do_ feedback and influence the electricity net itself. Hence PFC.
SCOX 3 year price chart. Because one picture is worth a thousand words.
Yes, maybe this explains why many people think that PHP sucks?
;)
That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe
He violated the rules of a game.
No, he didn't. As others also pointed out, there is nothing in the Eve Online EULA or in the game mechanics that forbids what this guy has done. There is no "exploiting" of bugs or broken game mechanics going on here. "Exploiting" of stupid people, sure, but that's a different matter.
What *is* explicitly forbidden by the EULA however, is converting in-game money to real money. That is a bannable offense.
/me looks at calendar
:D
No it's not april fools day...
This can't be serious guys, just imagine booting your laptop during some meeting (happens all the time), conference, whatever, and being unable to disable that sound. That would piss off so many people that just this would be reason enough to switch back to XP.
Nah, Microsoft is doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot lately, but this is too much...I think Scobleizer is pulling our legs here
[quote]
Eclipse is stone age compared to Visual Studio.
[/quote]
R-O-F-L.
Muahahahaha, whahahahahah. *drags himself back to chair*
OK seriously now, can I have some of what you've been smoking?
"Our users never signed up for this kind of thing. You have to wonder where it goes from here. It seems an effective method has been found but more than a small private company could handle. Will someone else adapt this concept, or does the internet world give up?"
/. style, I haven't *yet* done), but can we please at least try to make somewhat clear what an article is about, so that everyone can decide for himself whether this subject is of interest to them in the first place?
What kind of thing? What kind of effective method has been found to do, what exactly? What is "this" concept we are talking about?
I read this site (almost) daily but have never ever heard of this company before. As it is apparently some kind of small startup, I'd imagine many others around here have never heard of them, either.
Without any context, this "article" is pure gibberish. Maybe it makes sense after reading the linked article (which, I'll admit in good
You mentioned avoiding null bytes, I seem to recall reading that on PPC that's much harder to pull off because of many RISC ops tend to have a byte of null padding that smaller CISC ops don't need. So besides having to learn a new asm, its also much harder to exploit... PPC did have a real advantage here.
No. You just need to write an encoder/decoder, which itself does not contain ops containing nulls, and which will encode (and decode) any string of assembled binary code into one that does not contain nulls.
Now you're gonna say "yes, but that's an awful lot of work". Indeed. However, at least for x86 there are kits that you can just download (metasploit, etc.) and be done with it. Nothing hard about that. It's a matter of time before someone will construct something similar for PPC.
...it is a good idea not to run VNC all the time anyway. It'd be dangerous even if it was completely designed from the beginning with security in mind, which it wasn't. I'm not even sure that the password is sent encrypted (probably it is by now), but certainly the normal traffic is not encrypted AFAIK.
Also, there have been vulnerabilities before.
This, of course, is not good, but whether it is acceptable also depends on the purpose that you're using it for.
I installed VNC on the computers at my parents place, but it's disabled by default (but put in an obvious place in the start menu). When there is a problem, my parents can call me, I'll tell them to start the "Remote control thingy" (1 click in the start menu) and then I can reach the computer.
Not much can go wrong that way, of course someone could intercept the traffic etc. if they like to stare at default windows desktops I wish them good luck.
However, don't type the admin password over VNC, I'd guess...it's like doing 'su root' over telnet....
Is this just for fun, or a clever, highly effective protest?
;)
Anyone care to explain how this can possible be construed as to be highly effective?
Let's see, RMS does something very subtle that nobody in the mainstream press will bother to report, or actually even *notice*, not to mention *understand*. I fail to see how this can in any way, shape or form be seen as an "highly effective" protest.
Of course this is Slashdot, but even then....I mean come on
the advisory that this affects 6.x versions is wrong
Version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 here (so yes, XP SP2), and the exploit works just fine. It might depend on your security settings, which I didn't really bother to check in IE because I never use it anyway. Maybe you disabled any kind of scripting or have installed 3rd party popup-blockers or anything else that might change the default behaviour?