You should pay more money because someone else will, so you will eventually receive a file in a format that only MS Office 2003 can read. If one person gets it, eventually everyone needs to get it.
In the case of office 65 -> 97, the first to get it within most companies where the upper management, who upgrade their laptops much more frequently that just about everyone else. Their new laptops came with '97, and they of course sent emails to all their minions with Word 97 documents attached, that of course were unreadable in Word 95.
Apparantly the reasonable for such a change in the file format was the move to 16 bit unicode characters for supporting all languages.
Maybe this time it'll be DRM ??? A lot of people were pretty pissed off that Word 97 produced by default unreadable files for users with all older versions... and that was in the day when almost everyone outside academia/engineering/science thought Bill Gates was the a god. Maybe they'll be able to get away with it again, maybe?
Shit happens. That's reality. Things are going to go wrong. Once that thing left the pad, (and at that point everything seamed as right as could be) there is nothing any engineering analysis could do.
Clearly you did not read the article, which claims two things could have been done, had the anticipated damaged tiles:
Cold Soaking: they cool the damaged part before reentry by turning it away from the sun. This was done on a previous flight were tiles were damaged.
Slightly Different Reentry Angle: they would transfer most of the stress stress on the good wing.
The article also mentions that other "creative" ideas may have been thought up. But it clearly spells out these two actions that could have been taken, but were not, because the analysis (completed days before reentry) concluded there was no danger.
.
I'm no expert in these matters. All I did was actually read the linked articles, and it is 100% clear that the article claims some measures could have been taken had the analysis predicted danger (as the disgruntled former Boeing engineers claim it should have).
That's pretty different than your "shit happens", and "nothing any engineering analysis could do". Maybe you're right and the seemingly credible articles are wrong??
Not very practical while driving in the car, while working out at the gym (or treadmill at home), while using the computer (hopefully for something more productive than posting to slashdot....), while shopping, while having sex, and so on.
It's only a matter of time before some malcontent in the wide wonderful world of Open Sores starts producing free RedHat AS updates that are mirrored to 1000s of university FTP sites.
Or more likely, a former RH employee walks out with the customer list, makes a small investment to set up a bunch of servers, and running out of a B-class office space or even his basement sets up a cheap "knock off". He calls all those customers and offers them the "same thing" at half the price.
Thirty seconds later corporations figure out there's no reason to pay RedHat when they can leech.
Leeching is expensive, by the time you pay someone to go to all the trouble to do it. It also seems risky. In truth, the level of risk does depend on the skill and motivation of whomever is doing the work.
But buying the "same thing" from a competitor has a known cost, and the risk is more or less based on their competitance and reputation.
if he only made that much money in the time said, that's not much better than a decently paid programmer. Is this guy really the big fish?
Even if he didn't make a dime, or lost money, it's still FRAUD. It's still false statements made with the intention of defrauding investors, regardless of any profit he personally may have made. What matters is the blantant deception. That's definately not permissible, and he deserves to get nailed hard.
On the other hand, a VHF/UHF tuner has a huge swath of the electromagnetic spectrum to grope around blindly through.
In practice, a phase locked loop creates a frequency comparable with the broadcast carrier frequency, and this frequency is "mixed" with the incoming signal (using a non-linear circuit, which is often a diode or simple transistor circuit). The resulting signal has 4 components, spectrally, at the two original frequencies, their sum and their difference. The difference one is kept (because it effectively eliminates the original high frequency carrier) and the other three are elminited with a simple low-pass filter. The PLL accurately creates exactly the right frequency (well, as accurate as the quartz crystal it has), and the "groping though" the spectrum is an extreemly simple circuit and a low pass filter. There is also the small matter of automatic gain control, but it's also an easy circuit.
This is really pretty simple, and it's been done this way since the days of vaccume tubes... with the exception that the oscillator was tuned by adjusting a coil or capacitor value rather than with a phase locked loop. The reason PLLs are used today is because the complex silicon is less expensive that the coils (involved winding wire) and their moving parts which needed to be calibrated at the factory to match the official broadcast frequencies.
No, the receiver decodes the signal. That's the easy part. It's the tuner that has to find the damn signal to begin with.
As I just described, the modulation of the signal from the RF carrier is quite simple. Tuners were made back in the days when TVs had only a dozen tubes and passive parts hand soldered between the tube sockets (before circuit boards were in common usage).
The comb filters used in all modern receivers, which separate the chrominance from luminance data, are actually quite complex digitial filters (though not expensive with today's technology AND economy of scale). In the old days, the signal was simply low-pass filtered (around 2 MHz) to remove the color signal and capture the luminance.
The thing to keep in mind about tuners is that they've been around a long time.... and they've been implemented long before transistors. Even "cable ready" tuners roughly equivilant to today's were on the market in the mid 80's, when semiconductor technology was at the level of the 4.77 MHz IBM PC and 8 MHz Machintosh.
The TV tuner really isn't that big of a technical challenge.
what are these 'F' and 'D' tables people keep referring to?
You could click on the link, but since reading though these posts is more interesting that actually reading the article (if only the first paragraph or two), I'll do you the service of quoting the first two paragraphs of the article so you don't have to actually click on that link and leave the comfort of slashdot.....
Why Nerds are Unpopular
February 2003
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. Our table was populated by complete nerds, cases of delayed pubescence, and recent immigrants from China. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
Microsoft would have to manage to replace every DVD player, computer and MP3 capable device in the world to make DRM mandatory.
They already do a pretty good job of this now with MSIE, without touching all those DVD and MP3 players. They just distribute some "drag and drop" tools to throw together websites and load them up with ActiveX and other proprietary "technologies".... and because 90-some percent of users have windows/MSIE (either by choice or because it "came with the computer"), a good portion of websites choose to use those evil tools.
Likewise, with Pallidium/DRM, all they have to do is make it "easier" to produce pallidium-enabled (they'll call it "secure") documents. As long as 90-some percent of existing windows installations auto-upgrade themselves to be able to view this material, people will author it without a second though to cross platform compatibility, just as they do today with MSIE-only websites. There is the tricky part of a transition phase where "content" must work on the existing windows platforms..... though designing good network protocols is beyond Microsoft's technical savvy, making their own new and legacy products nicely interoperate (while not quite smoothly interoperating with 3rd party apps) is certainly their strong point.
And, perhaps the RIAA and MPAA might actually release some "content" on-line. I wouldn't be as sure to bet on that, no matter how strong the DRM may be, as it's still a big/painful paradigm shift for them. But if they do, and it's palladium-only, it'll be yet another thing that isn't cross platform compatable and will drive people to use the platform that it works on (even if they still have their legacy DVD and MP3 players that work with the older material).
and it appears that Lilo hasn't touched anything other than the MBR (first sector, only 512 bytes). If you try it, you'll probably see something like this (after several lines):
What that means is that everything from 0x0200 to 0x7DFF is all zeros. Sector 33, where TT's copy protection writes its data, is offset 0x4200 to 0x43FF. If you really want to "see" all those zeros, use the "-v" option. Also, the -C option processes the data as bytes and prints the ASCII version (but slashdot will complain about junk characters if you try to post that....)
So at least with Lilo, it looks like everything it needs is all packed into just the MBR and naughty apps like TT writing into those sectors won't screw up Lilo.
Of course, it's still a very evil thing to do. If some user has the restore their system from a backup or otherwise recover from a screwed up system (like that ever happens in windows)... this sector isn't going to be on their backup. Very uncool.
Xilinx promises that at the end of the year, in suitable quantities (>25,000), they will be $100/each.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... the same meaningless price quotes from Xilinx as always. Historically it's been at 100,000 pieces in their widely published literature.
At 25,000 chips, you'd probably go to the trouble to create a custom ASIC. Or at least you'd do a "hard wire" conversion of the FPGA design to an ASIC, if you used the FPGA to "get to market quickly".
If you call up
one of theactual distributors
where you'd actually buy
this part, say at qty 1000 to 5000, the store would be different. A lot different.
Can somebody point me to some case law that implies that EULAs ARE enforceable under current legislation?
Finding specific sources to cite would be far more work than I intend to put into a simple slashdot post, which will only be read by a significant number of people for the remainder of the day (and it's already late afternoon)....
But I will point out the well publicized (at least here on slashdot) story several months ago where a software vendor escaped any liability for a serious bug in their software, based on a ruling that the customer has agreed to the software license which specifically disclaimed any liability for any malfunction in the software.
The particulars of the case involved a construction contractor of some sort, and the software was some sort of large-scale project planning/management package. The contractor used the software to plan a large project, and they won as the lower bidder. Turns out, their bid was lowest because of a bug in the software where it added up the job's cost incorrectly, to the tune of approximately 2 million dollars (if I recall correctly). The plaintif basically proved that they has operated the software correctly and I seem to recall some evidence that the software vendor has knowledge of the bug but did not warn customers or fix it.
Of course, the software vendor claimed that they were not liable, even though they were clearly at fault (and perhaps quite negligant). They won, and as I recall reading the ruling (or was it just a dumbed-down summary.... can't quite recall now), the upshot of the whole thing was that the court found the EULA's disclaimer of all warranty, that the software is sold as-is, was held up as enforcable. I recall reading a summary of the court's opinion which basically said the license was enforcable because the installation process required the user to explicitly agree. I also recall seeing some mention that there were three places to agree to the license (opening the package, initial install, and perhaps an upgrade?)
Anyway, there's one solid example of a case where a court specifically found that EULAs were enforcable. I also seem to recall that the contractor appealed and they lost on the appeal as well. Perhaps I'm not remembering all those details quite accurately.
But there is a good chance that someone reading this message has a more vivid memory than I do, and might even post a link to the coverage here on slashdot or whereever slashdot linked to (Taco, Hemos and crew certainly didn't break the story...)
Saddly, wasting time posting slashdot replies.... I really should get back to work, but.....
why do you say it is unlikely they would have to cover my legal expenses? That seems pretty routine in cases where a prosecution turns out to be malicious but without basis.
Apparantly awarding "court costs" is routine. Attorney's fees are another matter. A judge is going to have a pretty hard time finding "mallice" or even "bad faith" when they had a tip from a former employee (aka, eye witness) that gave them legitimate reason to persue the case. And apparantly the BSA doesn't actually begin real invesigations, let alone go to court, without some real evidence (almost always a tip from a former employee).
their threat model might not be destroyed by Joe Businessman winning his case, but if a sufficiently high court finds that EULAs have no legal weight, the BSA and its supporters are pretty shafted.
Consider the highly improbably events that would lead to this. You lose, appeal, lose again, appeal again, etc. Aside from the time and incredible expense (and distraction from your real business objectives), each appeals becomes exponentially less likely of hearing the case. And even if they did, the matter if the case is wether you violated licenses and copied the software illegally. And in all likelyhood, for there'd be some compelling evidence against you (pretty unlikely the lower courts truely erred badly), so you'd be pretty unlikely to find sympathy with a judge.
Indeed, I'd say you're dreaming. It's a fun and wonderful dream. Leave it in fantsyland where it belongs. Just don't delude yourself and others into believing it ever has a chance in hell of becoming reality.
Traditionally, when I order something mail-order over the phone or by mailing in an order, I didn't have to pay sales tax if I ordered from out of state. Has that changed as well?
From the article, what has changed is several large retailers, with physical presence in nearly all states, who were previously charging sales tax in none of them, or only in a small handful where their on-line division had a physical presence, will now charge you sales tax.
The article specifically names Walmart, with stores in all 50 states, as having walmart.com registered in only 9 states. No longer will they be able to charge sales tax in only those few states where the on-line division has a presence, because they stores at in every state.
Of course, you'll still only pay tax if they have a physical store or presence in your state and you live in one of the 45 states with sales tax. At least for now. But the states also want to change that and force all US merchants to collect sales tax, regardless of wether they have a physical presence in the destination state.
So I can just buy from a Canadian e-retailer. Or a Mexican. Doesn't really affect me where they're based, and now they have a 7% price advantage over US-based companies.
Minus the 30% duty for import. Unpredictable and more expensive shipping would also offset any savings, even if the import duty didn't exist.
Kind of stupid. AFAIK, mail order companies are still tax-free, to show how arbitrary and lobbist-based this is.
If you'd bother to read the article, you'd know that this isn't actually a new law, it isn't any more arbitrary than the existing sales tax law that's been in place for a very long time, and it's a bargain between retails and states (not really involving lobbists).
You would have learned that the real news here involves a bunch of unnamed large companies, with physical presence in nearly all states, previously no sales tax or sales tax in only a small handful of states where their on-line division had a physical presence. Now they're going to charge sales tax on all orders where they reasonably have a physical store or other presence. Same as mail order and other on-line retailers who've been charging sales tax.
As for the "AFAIK" (not very far), all mail order is subject to sales tax when sales are made to any state where the mail order company has a physical presence. Perhaps you've never paid attention to mail order advertising, where there's a small print message or brief announcment (radio) that residents of some state have to pay sales tax. Most mail order companies have a presence in only one state... like Walmart, which is in all states but was only collecting tax in 9 of them. Now they'll be collecting in all 45 states (five states do not have sales tax).
Saddly, as far as a few moderators know (and also didn't read the article) your post sounded insightful. But nearly every statement is false. Rather, it's just bitching about taxes... the least you could do is read the article and learn a few basic facts (like mail order being subject to tax as evidenced by the brief disclaimer in nearly all print, tv and radio ads for mail ordering).
Likewise, shame on you moderators who give such clue challenged bitching about tax a +1. Just because it's bitching about paying tax doesn't make it interesting or insightful.
The BSA can find out in court, if they really want to know whether I've got any illegal software installed (I haven't) and they're prepared to risk a test case that could destroy their whole threat model (I doubt it).
On the flip side the coin, you can risk huge legal expenses, as well as distracting yourself and perhaps other key people in your company away from what's important (customers) to instead focus on the legal battle. And you can't be so sure you'll win. Going to court is risky, and if the BSA is willing to threaten you (specifically, not a generic mass-mailed scare letter), they probably do have some sort of evidence such as a statement from a former employee about unlicensed software.
The health and possibly even survival (if you're not a large corp) of your business are at state. You'd probably be risking quite a bit more than they would be. Even if they lose and you "win" by having them cover your legal expenses (not likely).... their "threat model" probably won't be impacted at all. Unlicensed software will still be illegal, and their tactics will work the same on others regardless of you winning or losing.
Usually a tip from a former employee. You might go so far as to call that an "eye witness" account. But, from what I've heard, it never really gets that far. Businesses almost always cooperate.
My girlfriend worked some time ago at a company that was hit by the BSA (not the bogus scare tactic letter, but a real investigation). Details are sketchy, as the company always wants to keep it quiet and minimize the damage and disruption to their business. It also happened several months before she started working there. A settlement was reached (some money paid to the BSA), and a policy put in place to carefully track licenses so any future audit could be passed easily. Apparantly this is a pretty common outcome.
But these "grace period" letters are a pure scare tactic.
Agreed, but if your company HAD to make changes to the OS, then you would have to employ personell for that purpose.
Most OEMs customize Windows quite a bit and install some additional apps. The already HAVE to customize (in order to add value and differentiate themselves from other OEMs).
Likewise, most large corporate customers also make quite a few customizations to windows (eg, "standard install") that are specific to their LAN, intranet, and special software. Servers are even more heavily customized that desktop machines, but almost all machines are customized to the environment they will be used in. Paid employes implement these customizations.
A small but significant portion of end users also customize Windows quite a bit, though rarely are they paid to do that.
That would make OSS very popular, very soon wouldn't it ?
The ability to truely customize, without licensing restrictions, together with a design that modularizes everything and facilitates customization on many levels (not just at the low-level source code) already has made Linux and related software VERY popular on servers.
On the client side, the ability to customize will probably be quite an advantage. From the perspective of a medium to large corporation, customizing client machines makes sense. You pay a small number of "IT professionals" to make customizations that dramatically improve the productivity of nearly all other workers.
Today's strategy offen seems to involve putting as much of the company specific infrastructure on the server machines. This is probably driven by the two ugly facts that "client" windows can't really be easily customized much, and it's remote admin capabilities (absent terminal server, vnc, or other 3rd party apps) is basically non-existant. A truely customizable client platform with strong remote admin capabilities _might_ cause the sort of paradigm shift that smart PCs and LANs did to mainframes and dumb terminals. Maybe.
But the ability to customize is an advantage, and most (medium to large) organizations and OEMs already HAVE to customize Windows.
The worm was strictly based on UDP 1434 transfer
I find it very difficult to believe major corporation firewalls would allow UDP 1434 inside from Internet.
Apparantly a common scenario involved a public webserver outsite the firewall that communicated with a SQL server (listening on UDP port 1434) for its "backend" data. In some cases, the SQL server was outside the firewall yet the firewall allowed that machine to communicate with the internal network. In other cases, the SQL server was inside but the firewall allowed the outside to talk to it (because the web server had to, and they "just made it work" rather than locking it down properly).
Once UDP packets could get inside the local network, there was no shortage of _desktop_ systems with the SQL engine silently installed from one program or another. And it only takes a few modern machines spewing UDP packets and maximum speed to pseudo-random IP addresses to bog down a huge network.
let's give them a real chance to prove [their initiative to improve security] to us. The vunerability that caused the Slammer worm is one that they actually found and fixed a long time ago.
Actually, it was fixed about 6 months ago, approx 6 months into their improved security initiative started. Their "patch" involved replacing sensitive files manually, and then only a few months later they released another "patch" with instructions that, if followed as written, would cause the original venurability to be reintroduced.
They have a long history of these "patches" causing their customer's applications to break in one way or another. So it is widely known that customers are reluctant to install the update to SQL server even if they know about it.
If Microsoft were really serious about security, they would:
make sure their customer were notified (rather than quietly posting a notice).
make patch installation very easy, consistent with their claims of how easy GUI-based adminstation is on windows
provide automatic update for ALL products, not just the OS
prevent patches from also making other changes that disrupt customers applications, particularly with SQL server, IIS, etc
switch to a better security model and release a new version of the software (and provide free upgrades to all customers running the old, less secure version)
This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem.
That would be Microsoft's PR position, but the overwhelming majority of expert opinions agree that their patching process is unrealistic and can not reasonably be followed by most admins. And you really should consider all the public statements Microsoft has made about Windows having a lower total cost of ownership because GUI-based administration is easier than competing platforms.
Furthermore, the product that was compromised is legacy from before their big embracing of security.
They supposedly suspended all new product development for over a month, in order to review all their existing code and clean up security problems.
The problem was discovered, but so many servers were not updated that is did not matter.
Let's see what happens with its next major release. If that still had big gaping problems, then we can hang them from the tallest tree.
How many more second chances do they need? Will you still say this in February 2004 ?? It's been one whole year. They said they spent more than one month with ALL their developers checking for security problems, and it's been nearly a year since then. If they were really serious, wouldn't they have found their way to releasing a new, more secure version (no new features, no extensive usability testing, no new documentation, just security) within a whole year!
At about this time last year, everybody said approximately what you're saying... let's see if they can make good on their promise. Everyone said, "it'll take some time". Well, it's been a whole year.
THAT is the reason they're being blasted in the press. It's been a whole gawd damn year, and the internet is still plauged with Nimba-style venurabilities due to Microsoft's buggy code.
Look at a recent article on Macintosh virus attacks. They used to be none-existent.
Obviously you're too young to remember the WDEF / CDEF virus.
Long ago, in the days of system 6, when most, but certainly not all macs had hard drives, and very few macs were networked, EVERYBODY stored data on floppy disks.
Apple's system 6 (and earlier) would allow custom window decoration if a WDEF resource was found. The WDEF resource held code that would draw the window differently. It was never really used... until some creative virus author created the WDEF virus. Simply inserting the floppy disk would execute the virus and infect the machine, which would then infect all floppies used thereafter.
It wasn't long until a good portion of all macintosh computers were infected. Universities and other schools were hit hardest. Of course, the virus didn't really do anything harmful, and it persisted for a very long time as old floppies everywhere had the virus and would reinfect cleaned machines.
With system 7, Apple removed the automatic execution of code from WDEF and CDEF resources, and with gradual move to networking and larger hard drives these old viruses finally died out. But in their time they were remarkably common on nearly all macs that had mulitple users.
I cant believe that the same people who will jump down the throat of someone who even smells like they violated the GNU license, can complain that someone else tries to enforce the license of another product.
It's the exact same people posting about something that's exactly equivilant.
GPL violators are faced with penalties of 1/4 million dollars and multiple years in prison. CD copyright infrigers are faced with the prospect of simply stopping and/or having to start following the rules.
Those who refuse to distribute source code are just ordinary individuals who simply wanted to make use of it, but on the other hand, those illicitly copying music are in it to make a profit by leveraging the hard work of those from whom they're pirating without even giving credit where credit is due.
And best of all, authors of GPL'd software are a bunch of unethical scamming businessmen who rape artists and collude to fix prices to extract maximum dollars from consumers. But the labels and studios who provide us with such fine entertainment are a loose knit band of well-meaning individuals and some companies who're doing their part to contribute to each other and anyone who wants to use their wares.
Yep, how dare those _same_ people view these identical scenarios any differently!
if it's set with a strong password by default, if it's never changed, it's still a risk.
If the default is to disallow remote administration _until_ the user sets a password, then the problem eliminated.
As I said, the default setup does not need to be stupid. You can't change stupid people, but you can change stupid default setups. Just think (not even very far) outside the box.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of office 65 -> 97, the first to get it within most companies where the upper management, who upgrade their laptops much more frequently that just about everyone else. Their new laptops came with '97, and they of course sent emails to all their minions with Word 97 documents attached, that of course were unreadable in Word 95.
Apparantly the reasonable for such a change in the file format was the move to 16 bit unicode characters for supporting all languages.
Maybe this time it'll be DRM ??? A lot of people were pretty pissed off that Word 97 produced by default unreadable files for users with all older versions... and that was in the day when almost everyone outside academia/engineering/science thought Bill Gates was the a god. Maybe they'll be able to get away with it again, maybe?
Clearly you did not read the article, which claims two things could have been done, had the anticipated damaged tiles:
The article also mentions that other "creative" ideas may have been thought up. But it clearly spells out these two actions that could have been taken, but were not, because the analysis (completed days before reentry) concluded there was no danger.
.
I'm no expert in these matters. All I did was actually read the linked articles, and it is 100% clear that the article claims some measures could have been taken had the analysis predicted danger (as the disgruntled former Boeing engineers claim it should have).
That's pretty different than your "shit happens", and "nothing any engineering analysis could do". Maybe you're right and the seemingly credible articles are wrong??
Not very practical while driving in the car, while working out at the gym (or treadmill at home), while using the computer (hopefully for something more productive than posting to slashdot....), while shopping, while having sex, and so on.
Or more likely, a former RH employee walks out with the customer list, makes a small investment to set up a bunch of servers, and running out of a B-class office space or even his basement sets up a cheap "knock off". He calls all those customers and offers them the "same thing" at half the price.
Thirty seconds later corporations figure out there's no reason to pay RedHat when they can leech.
Leeching is expensive, by the time you pay someone to go to all the trouble to do it. It also seems risky. In truth, the level of risk does depend on the skill and motivation of whomever is doing the work.
But buying the "same thing" from a competitor has a known cost, and the risk is more or less based on their competitance and reputation.
Even if he didn't make a dime, or lost money, it's still FRAUD. It's still false statements made with the intention of defrauding investors, regardless of any profit he personally may have made. What matters is the blantant deception. That's definately not permissible, and he deserves to get nailed hard.
In practice, a phase locked loop creates a frequency comparable with the broadcast carrier frequency, and this frequency is "mixed" with the incoming signal (using a non-linear circuit, which is often a diode or simple transistor circuit). The resulting signal has 4 components, spectrally, at the two original frequencies, their sum and their difference. The difference one is kept (because it effectively eliminates the original high frequency carrier) and the other three are elminited with a simple low-pass filter. The PLL accurately creates exactly the right frequency (well, as accurate as the quartz crystal it has), and the "groping though" the spectrum is an extreemly simple circuit and a low pass filter. There is also the small matter of automatic gain control, but it's also an easy circuit.
This is really pretty simple, and it's been done this way since the days of vaccume tubes... with the exception that the oscillator was tuned by adjusting a coil or capacitor value rather than with a phase locked loop. The reason PLLs are used today is because the complex silicon is less expensive that the coils (involved winding wire) and their moving parts which needed to be calibrated at the factory to match the official broadcast frequencies.
No, the receiver decodes the signal. That's the easy part. It's the tuner that has to find the damn signal to begin with.
As I just described, the modulation of the signal from the RF carrier is quite simple. Tuners were made back in the days when TVs had only a dozen tubes and passive parts hand soldered between the tube sockets (before circuit boards were in common usage).
The comb filters used in all modern receivers, which separate the chrominance from luminance data, are actually quite complex digitial filters (though not expensive with today's technology AND economy of scale). In the old days, the signal was simply low-pass filtered (around 2 MHz) to remove the color signal and capture the luminance.
The thing to keep in mind about tuners is that they've been around a long time.... and they've been implemented long before transistors. Even "cable ready" tuners roughly equivilant to today's were on the market in the mid 80's, when semiconductor technology was at the level of the 4.77 MHz IBM PC and 8 MHz Machintosh.
The TV tuner really isn't that big of a technical challenge.
You could click on the link, but since reading though these posts is more interesting that actually reading the article (if only the first paragraph or two), I'll do you the service of quoting the first two paragraphs of the article so you don't have to actually click on that link and leave the comfort of slashdot.....
They already do a pretty good job of this now with MSIE, without touching all those DVD and MP3 players. They just distribute some "drag and drop" tools to throw together websites and load them up with ActiveX and other proprietary "technologies".... and because 90-some percent of users have windows/MSIE (either by choice or because it "came with the computer"), a good portion of websites choose to use those evil tools.
Likewise, with Pallidium/DRM, all they have to do is make it "easier" to produce pallidium-enabled (they'll call it "secure") documents. As long as 90-some percent of existing windows installations auto-upgrade themselves to be able to view this material, people will author it without a second though to cross platform compatibility, just as they do today with MSIE-only websites. There is the tricky part of a transition phase where "content" must work on the existing windows platforms..... though designing good network protocols is beyond Microsoft's technical savvy, making their own new and legacy products nicely interoperate (while not quite smoothly interoperating with 3rd party apps) is certainly their strong point.
And, perhaps the RIAA and MPAA might actually release some "content" on-line. I wouldn't be as sure to bet on that, no matter how strong the DRM may be, as it's still a big/painful paradigm shift for them. But if they do, and it's palladium-only, it'll be yet another thing that isn't cross platform compatable and will drive people to use the platform that it works on (even if they still have their legacy DVD and MP3 players that work with the older material).
and it appears that Lilo hasn't touched anything other than the MBR (first sector, only 512 bytes). If you try it, you'll probably see something like this (after several lines):
What that means is that everything from 0x0200 to 0x7DFF is all zeros. Sector 33, where TT's copy protection writes its data, is offset 0x4200 to 0x43FF. If you really want to "see" all those zeros, use the "-v" option. Also, the -C option processes the data as bytes and prints the ASCII version (but slashdot will complain about junk characters if you try to post that....)
So at least with Lilo, it looks like everything it needs is all packed into just the MBR and naughty apps like TT writing into those sectors won't screw up Lilo.
Of course, it's still a very evil thing to do. If some user has the restore their system from a backup or otherwise recover from a screwed up system (like that ever happens in windows)... this sector isn't going to be on their backup. Very uncool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... the same meaningless price quotes from Xilinx as always. Historically it's been at 100,000 pieces in their widely published literature.
At 25,000 chips, you'd probably go to the trouble to create a custom ASIC. Or at least you'd do a "hard wire" conversion of the FPGA design to an ASIC, if you used the FPGA to "get to market quickly".
If you call up one of the actual distributors where you'd actually buy this part, say at qty 1000 to 5000, the store would be different. A lot different.
Finding specific sources to cite would be far more work than I intend to put into a simple slashdot post, which will only be read by a significant number of people for the remainder of the day (and it's already late afternoon)....
But I will point out the well publicized (at least here on slashdot) story several months ago where a software vendor escaped any liability for a serious bug in their software, based on a ruling that the customer has agreed to the software license which specifically disclaimed any liability for any malfunction in the software.
The particulars of the case involved a construction contractor of some sort, and the software was some sort of large-scale project planning/management package. The contractor used the software to plan a large project, and they won as the lower bidder. Turns out, their bid was lowest because of a bug in the software where it added up the job's cost incorrectly, to the tune of approximately 2 million dollars (if I recall correctly). The plaintif basically proved that they has operated the software correctly and I seem to recall some evidence that the software vendor has knowledge of the bug but did not warn customers or fix it.
Of course, the software vendor claimed that they were not liable, even though they were clearly at fault (and perhaps quite negligant). They won, and as I recall reading the ruling (or was it just a dumbed-down summary.... can't quite recall now), the upshot of the whole thing was that the court found the EULA's disclaimer of all warranty, that the software is sold as-is, was held up as enforcable. I recall reading a summary of the court's opinion which basically said the license was enforcable because the installation process required the user to explicitly agree. I also recall seeing some mention that there were three places to agree to the license (opening the package, initial install, and perhaps an upgrade?)
Anyway, there's one solid example of a case where a court specifically found that EULAs were enforcable. I also seem to recall that the contractor appealed and they lost on the appeal as well. Perhaps I'm not remembering all those details quite accurately.
But there is a good chance that someone reading this message has a more vivid memory than I do, and might even post a link to the coverage here on slashdot or whereever slashdot linked to (Taco, Hemos and crew certainly didn't break the story...)
why do you say it is unlikely they would have to cover my legal expenses? That seems pretty routine in cases where a prosecution turns out to be malicious but without basis.
Apparantly awarding "court costs" is routine. Attorney's fees are another matter. A judge is going to have a pretty hard time finding "mallice" or even "bad faith" when they had a tip from a former employee (aka, eye witness) that gave them legitimate reason to persue the case. And apparantly the BSA doesn't actually begin real invesigations, let alone go to court, without some real evidence (almost always a tip from a former employee).
their threat model might not be destroyed by Joe Businessman winning his case, but if a sufficiently high court finds that EULAs have no legal weight, the BSA and its supporters are pretty shafted.
Consider the highly improbably events that would lead to this. You lose, appeal, lose again, appeal again, etc. Aside from the time and incredible expense (and distraction from your real business objectives), each appeals becomes exponentially less likely of hearing the case. And even if they did, the matter if the case is wether you violated licenses and copied the software illegally. And in all likelyhood, for there'd be some compelling evidence against you (pretty unlikely the lower courts truely erred badly), so you'd be pretty unlikely to find sympathy with a judge.
Indeed, I'd say you're dreaming. It's a fun and wonderful dream. Leave it in fantsyland where it belongs. Just don't delude yourself and others into believing it ever has a chance in hell of becoming reality.
From the article, what has changed is several large retailers, with physical presence in nearly all states, who were previously charging sales tax in none of them, or only in a small handful where their on-line division had a physical presence, will now charge you sales tax.
The article specifically names Walmart, with stores in all 50 states, as having walmart.com registered in only 9 states. No longer will they be able to charge sales tax in only those few states where the on-line division has a presence, because they stores at in every state.
Of course, you'll still only pay tax if they have a physical store or presence in your state and you live in one of the 45 states with sales tax. At least for now. But the states also want to change that and force all US merchants to collect sales tax, regardless of wether they have a physical presence in the destination state.
Minus the 30% duty for import. Unpredictable and more expensive shipping would also offset any savings, even if the import duty didn't exist.
Kind of stupid. AFAIK, mail order companies are still tax-free, to show how arbitrary and lobbist-based this is.
If you'd bother to read the article, you'd know that this isn't actually a new law, it isn't any more arbitrary than the existing sales tax law that's been in place for a very long time, and it's a bargain between retails and states (not really involving lobbists).
You would have learned that the real news here involves a bunch of unnamed large companies, with physical presence in nearly all states, previously no sales tax or sales tax in only a small handful of states where their on-line division had a physical presence. Now they're going to charge sales tax on all orders where they reasonably have a physical store or other presence. Same as mail order and other on-line retailers who've been charging sales tax.
As for the "AFAIK" (not very far), all mail order is subject to sales tax when sales are made to any state where the mail order company has a physical presence. Perhaps you've never paid attention to mail order advertising, where there's a small print message or brief announcment (radio) that residents of some state have to pay sales tax. Most mail order companies have a presence in only one state... like Walmart, which is in all states but was only collecting tax in 9 of them. Now they'll be collecting in all 45 states (five states do not have sales tax).
Saddly, as far as a few moderators know (and also didn't read the article) your post sounded insightful. But nearly every statement is false. Rather, it's just bitching about taxes... the least you could do is read the article and learn a few basic facts (like mail order being subject to tax as evidenced by the brief disclaimer in nearly all print, tv and radio ads for mail ordering).
Likewise, shame on you moderators who give such clue challenged bitching about tax a +1. Just because it's bitching about paying tax doesn't make it interesting or insightful.
On the flip side the coin, you can risk huge legal expenses, as well as distracting yourself and perhaps other key people in your company away from what's important (customers) to instead focus on the legal battle. And you can't be so sure you'll win. Going to court is risky, and if the BSA is willing to threaten you (specifically, not a generic mass-mailed scare letter), they probably do have some sort of evidence such as a statement from a former employee about unlicensed software.
The health and possibly even survival (if you're not a large corp) of your business are at state. You'd probably be risking quite a bit more than they would be. Even if they lose and you "win" by having them cover your legal expenses (not likely).... their "threat model" probably won't be impacted at all. Unlicensed software will still be illegal, and their tactics will work the same on others regardless of you winning or losing.
Usually a tip from a former employee. You might go so far as to call that an "eye witness" account. But, from what I've heard, it never really gets that far. Businesses almost always cooperate.
My girlfriend worked some time ago at a company that was hit by the BSA (not the bogus scare tactic letter, but a real investigation). Details are sketchy, as the company always wants to keep it quiet and minimize the damage and disruption to their business. It also happened several months before she started working there. A settlement was reached (some money paid to the BSA), and a policy put in place to carefully track licenses so any future audit could be passed easily. Apparantly this is a pretty common outcome.
But these "grace period" letters are a pure scare tactic.
Most OEMs customize Windows quite a bit and install some additional apps. The already HAVE to customize (in order to add value and differentiate themselves from other OEMs).
Likewise, most large corporate customers also make quite a few customizations to windows (eg, "standard install") that are specific to their LAN, intranet, and special software. Servers are even more heavily customized that desktop machines, but almost all machines are customized to the environment they will be used in. Paid employes implement these customizations.
A small but significant portion of end users also customize Windows quite a bit, though rarely are they paid to do that.
That would make OSS very popular, very soon wouldn't it ?
The ability to truely customize, without licensing restrictions, together with a design that modularizes everything and facilitates customization on many levels (not just at the low-level source code) already has made Linux and related software VERY popular on servers.
On the client side, the ability to customize will probably be quite an advantage. From the perspective of a medium to large corporation, customizing client machines makes sense. You pay a small number of "IT professionals" to make customizations that dramatically improve the productivity of nearly all other workers.
Today's strategy offen seems to involve putting as much of the company specific infrastructure on the server machines. This is probably driven by the two ugly facts that "client" windows can't really be easily customized much, and it's remote admin capabilities (absent terminal server, vnc, or other 3rd party apps) is basically non-existant. A truely customizable client platform with strong remote admin capabilities _might_ cause the sort of paradigm shift that smart PCs and LANs did to mainframes and dumb terminals. Maybe.
But the ability to customize is an advantage, and most (medium to large) organizations and OEMs already HAVE to customize Windows.
In a nutshell, some are true advantages, many are equivilant between the two system (XP vs RH8), and for a few windows doesn't compare so favorably.
Apparantly a common scenario involved a public webserver outsite the firewall that communicated with a SQL server (listening on UDP port 1434) for its "backend" data. In some cases, the SQL server was outside the firewall yet the firewall allowed that machine to communicate with the internal network. In other cases, the SQL server was inside but the firewall allowed the outside to talk to it (because the web server had to, and they "just made it work" rather than locking it down properly).
Once UDP packets could get inside the local network, there was no shortage of _desktop_ systems with the SQL engine silently installed from one program or another. And it only takes a few modern machines spewing UDP packets and maximum speed to pseudo-random IP addresses to bog down a huge network.
Actually, it was fixed about 6 months ago, approx 6 months into their improved security initiative started. Their "patch" involved replacing sensitive files manually, and then only a few months later they released another "patch" with instructions that, if followed as written, would cause the original venurability to be reintroduced.
They have a long history of these "patches" causing their customer's applications to break in one way or another. So it is widely known that customers are reluctant to install the update to SQL server even if they know about it.
If Microsoft were really serious about security, they would:
This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem.
That would be Microsoft's PR position, but the overwhelming majority of expert opinions agree that their patching process is unrealistic and can not reasonably be followed by most admins. And you really should consider all the public statements Microsoft has made about Windows having a lower total cost of ownership because GUI-based administration is easier than competing platforms.
Furthermore, the product that was compromised is legacy from before their big embracing of security.
They supposedly suspended all new product development for over a month, in order to review all their existing code and clean up security problems.
The problem was discovered, but so many servers were not updated that is did not matter.
Let's see what happens with its next major release. If that still had big gaping problems, then we can hang them from the tallest tree.
How many more second chances do they need? Will you still say this in February 2004 ?? It's been one whole year. They said they spent more than one month with ALL their developers checking for security problems, and it's been nearly a year since then. If they were really serious, wouldn't they have found their way to releasing a new, more secure version (no new features, no extensive usability testing, no new documentation, just security) within a whole year!
At about this time last year, everybody said approximately what you're saying... let's see if they can make good on their promise. Everyone said, "it'll take some time". Well, it's been a whole year.
THAT is the reason they're being blasted in the press. It's been a whole gawd damn year, and the internet is still plauged with Nimba-style venurabilities due to Microsoft's buggy code.
Obviously you're too young to remember the WDEF / CDEF virus.
Long ago, in the days of system 6, when most, but certainly not all macs had hard drives, and very few macs were networked, EVERYBODY stored data on floppy disks.
Apple's system 6 (and earlier) would allow custom window decoration if a WDEF resource was found. The WDEF resource held code that would draw the window differently. It was never really used... until some creative virus author created the WDEF virus. Simply inserting the floppy disk would execute the virus and infect the machine, which would then infect all floppies used thereafter.
It wasn't long until a good portion of all macintosh computers were infected. Universities and other schools were hit hardest. Of course, the virus didn't really do anything harmful, and it persisted for a very long time as old floppies everywhere had the virus and would reinfect cleaned machines.
With system 7, Apple removed the automatic execution of code from WDEF and CDEF resources, and with gradual move to networking and larger hard drives these old viruses finally died out. But in their time they were remarkably common on nearly all macs that had mulitple users.
It's the exact same people posting about something that's exactly equivilant.
GPL violators are faced with penalties of 1/4 million dollars and multiple years in prison. CD copyright infrigers are faced with the prospect of simply stopping and/or having to start following the rules.
Those who refuse to distribute source code are just ordinary individuals who simply wanted to make use of it, but on the other hand, those illicitly copying music are in it to make a profit by leveraging the hard work of those from whom they're pirating without even giving credit where credit is due.
And best of all, authors of GPL'd software are a bunch of unethical scamming businessmen who rape artists and collude to fix prices to extract maximum dollars from consumers. But the labels and studios who provide us with such fine entertainment are a loose knit band of well-meaning individuals and some companies who're doing their part to contribute to each other and anyone who wants to use their wares.
Yep, how dare those _same_ people view these identical scenarios any differently!
If the default is to disallow remote administration _until_ the user sets a password, then the problem eliminated.
As I said, the default setup does not need to be stupid. You can't change stupid people, but you can change stupid default setups. Just think (not even very far) outside the box.
Default setup and settings don't need to (be stupid). That can be changed.