The thing is that an ancient 286 can still do what it could when it was new. This includes running a rather good word processor (e.g. MS Works or WordPerfect), run sophisticated mathematical simulations (A 12MHz 286 still give a few MIPS).
If you're lucky enough to have a whopping 386, then you can run Linux in text mode. This gives full internet support, and the ability to run a lot of programmes. If a graphical output is needed then you might need a more powerful machine, but really you can get Windows 3.11 for it. It will even run a web browser.
So they "standardised" on an email package despite the fact that email uses standards that all email packages on all systems support Thjey did the same for PPP.
On the other hand, they haven't yet decided to standardise an office package even though it would make sense since they all use different formats.
It strikes me that some huge downloads, no actual black box to test the things, and a very small number of samples is not the best way to guarentee security.
If they were really confident about it, they would have produced a large number of samples, possibly including analogue recorded basic samples and white noise. They would have provided software that can veryify whether the code has been removed. If it was really secure they would have provided a tool to watermark your own data.
This was simply a means to say to their investors "See. We gave them a suitably large amount of time to break it. We offered a suitably large prize. Its secure".
I wonder how many instances of "GATTACA" are in my genome.
Shouldn't be too hard to work out. 7 letters. 4 possibilities. 4^7 = 2^14 = 16384. Therefore, simply divide the length of your genome by 16384 to get a fairly accurate figure for the number of occurances. Shame I don't now all the figures.
No, thats the point. You only pay more if you paid more in the first place. If you spend $5000 trying to sue someone, and because of a technicality it seems that you are in the wrong, you only have to pay your court costs + $5000. Expensive but probably manageable.
The other options are that that everyone pays their own costs or the loser pays the winner's costs. Paying ones own costs means that even if you do win the case, you might not win as much as you spent. Loser pays costs means that its too easy for a large corporation to intimidate a smaller corporation simply by spending a stupid amount on their own legal team.
But is anyone really stupid enough to believe advertising? Well, yeah they are aren't they. I still think its easier to train people to deal with lies than to train advertising people not to lie. I'm a believer in the school of hard knocks.
Besides, everyone seems happy to accept that corporations lie. Its a sucky system that sort of works. Unless someones got some idea of a way to enforce honesty with no exageration, and no biased opinions in marketing.
Someone once suggested that a plaintiff should be expected to pay a multiple of their own court costs if they lost. It would have this nice effect of preventing people from spending fortunes on daft legal actions in an attempt to try to starve out the opposition.
Not sure if its in the C specification (And K&R is on the opposite side of the room, so I'm too lazy to look), but since b is global, it will quite likely be initialised to zero.
Because they're marketing people. Their whole purpose is to insist that there is no other OS but MS. Ideally the effect should be countereacted by a large number of competitors saying "We have an OS, and no others are better". Since Microsoft is significantly larger than all other vendors put together, the counter arguments are drowned out a bit, but in theory its a good system.
Honesty and objectivity guidlines for marketing people would be interesting of course, but I don't think its ever going to happen.
Now, you could make the case that, since you never signed a contract, I cannot hold you to the agreement,
I'm pretty certain that verbal agreements are legally binding in the US (I can't be sure since I know no US lawyers). Written contracts are useful in that they prove the agreement was made, and keep a recrd of the agreementsm but not legally essential.
In the case of most of the people here, its like selling a house without the tacky plastic/ simulated elephant hide/chintz furniture. Not to stretch the analogy of course.
In the past, they assumed that you were buying a copy of Windows. ISTR they had a per computer sold licence, which means that you were forced to buy it.
There is no way that the MS marketing department will admit to believing that you can have an OS written by people other than MS, and I'm not sure if we should expect them to.
You're forgetting thespeed that a monolithic organisation moves at. They have to find someone who was working on the affected area, take them off the project that they're working on now, do a lot of fiddling with version control systems (Which often break through corporate ineptness even though they shouldn't) and get them to fix the bug.
With GPL and BSD code, you will get a lot of security experts looking into it immediately. A large company can't afford that.
there's no need to release them to the general public
I think its intended to persuade the company to fix it. 45 days is a reasonable amount of time to fix these bugs as long as the company is expecting that they might have to. It would be irresponsible to leave a security hole for longer than is neccesary to fix it, but many companies are irresponsible.
I'm not sure if arcades are necessarily good.
They have a few benefits, but they can be addictive. Even the arcade games can be. An
absolute ban may be a little excessive, but the negative effects are not going to be serious.
What did you write? The reason I ask is that
generally they probably aren't going to take action after
a single complaint, but might with a few. It would be
helpful if everyone made the same points.
Not to much of a problem surely. Simply inform them that the call is being recorded. Confirm that they are aware that the call is being recorded (If they seem uncomfortable with this ask to talk to their supervisor). Ask to be added to the do-not-call list. Long winded but it should scare them enough to make sure that they don't call again.
Personally I'd feel a little offended if they started selling my information.
I'd be shocked if somebody who lived 200 miles away knew what I'd bought unless they were close friends with the butcher.
Then there's the problem that there's a perception that storing data on a machine is inhuman and therefore it seems wrong. An emotional response of course, but I don't think it should be ignored on this basis.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that an ancient 286 can still do what it could when it was new. This includes running a rather good word processor (e.g. MS Works or WordPerfect), run sophisticated mathematical simulations (A 12MHz 286 still give a few MIPS).
If you're lucky enough to have a whopping 386, then you can run Linux in text mode. This gives full internet support, and the ability to run a lot of programmes. If a graphical output is needed then you might need a more powerful machine, but really you can get Windows 3.11 for it. It will even run a web browser.
So they "standardised" on an email package despite the fact that email uses standards that all email packages on all systems support Thjey did the same for PPP.
On the other hand, they haven't yet decided to standardise an office package even though it would make sense since they all use different formats.
That would be disaster #20 then.
but the DeCSS code has one purpose -- decoding encrypted DVDs said Taylor (MPAA spokesman)
Well spotted that man. That's what any DVD player does isn't it?
Normal use is sufficient use to allow the battery to last for nearly two weeks.
What did the NSA provide as evidence that their new hashes are secure?
They're the NSA. Don't you trust them? Good lord. Next thing you'll make suggestions that Bill Clinton told lies.
It strikes me that some huge downloads, no actual black box to test the things, and a very small number of samples is not the best way to guarentee security.
If they were really confident about it, they would have produced a large number of samples, possibly including analogue recorded basic samples and white noise. They would have provided software that can veryify whether the code has been removed. If it was really secure they would have provided a tool to watermark your own data.
This was simply a means to say to their investors "See. We gave them a suitably large amount of time to break it. We offered a suitably large prize. Its secure".
I wonder how many instances of "GATTACA" are in my genome.
Shouldn't be too hard to work out. 7 letters. 4 possibilities. 4^7 = 2^14 = 16384. Therefore, simply divide the length of your genome by 16384 to get a fairly accurate figure for the number of occurances. Shame I don't now all the figures.
No, thats the point. You only pay more if you paid more in the first place. If you spend $5000 trying to sue someone, and because of a technicality it seems that you are in the wrong, you only have to pay your court costs + $5000. Expensive but probably manageable.
The other options are that that everyone pays their own costs or the loser pays the winner's costs. Paying ones own costs means that even if you do win the case, you might not win as much as you spent. Loser pays costs means that its too easy for a large corporation to intimidate a smaller corporation simply by spending a stupid amount on their own legal team.
But is anyone really stupid enough to believe advertising? Well, yeah they are aren't they. I still think its easier to train people to deal with lies than to train advertising people not to lie. I'm a believer in the school of hard knocks.
Besides, everyone seems happy to accept that corporations lie. Its a sucky system that sort of works. Unless someones got some idea of a way to enforce honesty with no exageration, and no biased opinions in marketing.
Someone once suggested that a plaintiff should be expected to pay a multiple of their own court costs if they lost. It would have this nice effect of preventing people from spending fortunes on daft legal actions in an attempt to try to starve out the opposition.
Yeah! Overclock it until to maximise speed x number_of_cores. Accept the loss of a few processing units if the total speed increases sufficiently.
Not sure if its in the C specification (And K&R is on the opposite side of the room, so I'm too lazy to look), but since b is global, it will quite likely be initialised to zero.
Why shouldn't we expect them to admit that?
Because they're marketing people. Their whole purpose is to insist that there is no other OS but MS. Ideally the effect should be countereacted by a large number of competitors saying "We have an OS, and no others are better". Since Microsoft is significantly larger than all other vendors put together, the counter arguments are drowned out a bit, but in theory its a good system.
Honesty and objectivity guidlines for marketing people would be interesting of course, but I don't think its ever going to happen.
Now, you could make the case that, since you never signed a contract, I cannot hold you to the agreement,
I'm pretty certain that verbal agreements are legally binding in the US (I can't be sure since I know no US lawyers). Written contracts are useful in that they prove the agreement was made, and keep a recrd of the agreementsm but not legally essential.
In the case of most of the people here, its like selling a house without the tacky plastic/ simulated elephant hide/chintz furniture. Not to stretch the analogy of course.
In the past, they assumed that you were buying a copy of Windows. ISTR they had a per computer sold licence, which means that you were forced to buy it.
There is no way that the MS marketing department will admit to believing that you can have an OS written by people other than MS, and I'm not sure if we should expect them to.
Its on the Urban legends web site. They say no. The US Post Office just throws it out.
You're forgetting thespeed that a monolithic organisation moves at. They have to find someone who was working on the affected area, take them off the project that they're working on now, do a lot of fiddling with version control systems (Which often break through corporate ineptness even though they shouldn't) and get them to fix the bug.
With GPL and BSD code, you will get a lot of security experts looking into it immediately. A large company can't afford that.
there's no need to release them to the general public
I think its intended to persuade the company to fix it. 45 days is a reasonable amount of time to fix these bugs as long as the company is expecting that they might have to. It would be irresponsible to leave a security hole for longer than is neccesary to fix it, but many companies are irresponsible.
I'm not sure if arcades are necessarily good. They have a few benefits, but they can be addictive. Even the arcade games can be. An absolute ban may be a little excessive, but the negative effects are not going to be serious.
What did you write? The reason I ask is that generally they probably aren't going to take action after a single complaint, but might with a few. It would be helpful if everyone made the same points.
Not to much of a problem surely. Simply inform them that the call is being recorded. Confirm that they are aware that the call is being recorded (If they seem uncomfortable with this ask to talk to their supervisor). Ask to be added to the do-not-call list. Long winded but it should scare them enough to make sure that they don't call again.
"Hold on while I turn the cooker down", and leave them holding on. It might work. It might not. On the plus side, it IS costing them money:)
Thats a good analogy.
Personally I'd feel a little offended if they started selling my information.
I'd be shocked if somebody who lived 200 miles away knew what I'd bought unless they were close friends with the butcher.
Then there's the problem that there's a perception that storing data on a machine is inhuman and therefore it seems wrong. An emotional response of course, but I don't think it should be ignored on this basis.