Chemical weapons are treated as the same sort of dire threat by actual Armies that both Nuclear and Biological weapons are. There are some very good reasons that those weapons were basically used once and then effectively abandoned.
Well, two out of three were abandoned. Why? Because they don't work very well. One was kept. It works quite well.
but with Google and Yahoo having settled out of court on the issue, and with the terms of the settlement being unclear, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it?
Yeah, I stand corrected. I had forgotten about that lawsuit. It's hard to tell if Google thought the lawsuit had merit, or if it was just cheaper to pay Yahoo instead of fight it. Certainly it means the patent has at least FUD value, if not more.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?
I don't think anything Google does is covered by that patent. The patent covers the clever idea of letting people bid up their links in the search results. Google doesn't do that at all as far as I know. They sell ad placement next to search results, but there is no way to pay Google to improve your placement in the search results themselves. My point being that this patent is worthless because selling search results is a bad idea. It guarantees that you will have crappy search results.
But as far as I know, nobody has yet found a way of making monry from a search site that doesn't involve one particular patent, which Yahoo just happens to own.
If you are talking about Patent 6,269,361 mentioned in a later post, I'm pretty sure that Google would argue that they do know how to make money without that patent. Patent 6,269,361 is a patent for "how to let people pay you to give crappy search results" and is probably who Yahoo is now #2 and sinking instead of #1 where they used to be. Quite simply, being a good search engine is not compatible with selling search placement.
One of the best bumper stickers I've seen lately is "I never thought I'd miss Nixon". Yeah GWII takes the cake, no doubt about it. I didn't care for his dad much, but he's quite the respectable elder statesman compared to his son.
Whois provides info on domain registrations. Go to arin.net and plug your IP into the search field. It should tell you who has been assigned the IP block you are in. That's probably how they are doing the tracking. Anybody can put whatever they want for a reverse DNS entry. Or nothing at all. No reasonable advertising service would use it to target ads. It's too slow and unreliable.
Pick the acronym first. Then decide what it stands for. Use a 'V', it is Vermont after all. Let's say you go with "VLAN". Vermont Local Access Network. That was easy. Or "VICAR". Vermont Internet and Commodity Access Route. Another easy one. "RAVE". Rural Access for Vermont Enlightenment. See how easy it is? Just remember: Acronym first. Meaning second.
It's OK though, because judging from the recent news about spammers being able to solve Yahoo's captchka system with relatively high reliability and the amount of (Yahoo owned) Geocities-based malware sites I get SPAM about, Yahoo has about 4.05e17 active users and can lose 80% of them and still have more users than living being on the planet.
those people recommend, and will continue to recommend, Microsoft because nobody ever got sacked for doing so.
Quite true. And also quite surprising since even the most casual glance at Microsoft's earning shows that those people are paying waaaaay too much. $54.07 billion in revenue leads to $42.40 billion in gross profit? There is a reason Microsoft is the poster child for abusive monopolies.
Lot's of things need fixing under Linux. Same as every other OS. But I don't get aunts, uncles, my dentist, neighbor, etc. bugging me to fix their Windows crap. I don't mind fixing my own shit. I just don't want to get asked to fix everybody else's shit.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
Copyright law: technically, the modified web page is a derived work. The ISP can now be held liable for copyright infringement if, say, Google, or the New York Times objects. The potential revenues sinkhole from copyright litigators is far greater than what any ISP could bear.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that the ISP's even consider changing the content of web pages in flight. It's not just 'technically' copyright infringement. It's blatantly so. And fails every single test which might qualify it as 'fair use'. Rogers must not actually employ any actual lawyers at all to do something this clearly illegal. Even the folks who play lawyers on TV know that if you rip off somebody else's content and put your own ad's into it's a copyright violation.
Think how much more productive an IT worker could be if the software tools didn't require them to learn a bunch of skills which are irrelevant to their job. Back when cars had chokes and manually adjusted spark advance, you would have been claiming how important it was for drivers to get 'basic understanding' of these things. But of course the real answer was to completely hide these details from drivers so that today they have no idea what it even means to choke an engine or advance a spark. Yes, ignorance is a problem. But it's not the users who are ignorant. It's those of us who develop and maintain the IT systems who are ignorantly blaming the users for our own failings.
Amen brother. The unified package management which the good Linux distos provide is probably my favorite thing about Linux. I've gotten to the point where I usually won't even install software at all if it isn't provided as part of the distro. As a result, I know everything is up to date. I can get a list of every installed software package. I can get a list of all the files which make up any one package. I know I can remove it. I can find out exactly why any particular file is on the system. None of them are stomping on each other. It's great. It's really gotten kind of amazing. Windows and MacOS users, by and large, have no idea just how bad they have it. Their systems are total fsck'ing chaos, making their life hard, and they think it _has_ to be that way. Sad really. At work, I feel like I'm cheating. It's so easy to keep every single application up to date, and the Windows folks struggle just trying to keep the OS up to date.
Yawn. If it's so hard, why has Apple been able to do it so well for so many years? And now, they do it on hardware that is pretty much identical to the hardware Windows runs on. OK, it might be a hard problem. But the fact is Apple can do it, and Microsoft can't. And I don't buy that I/O is a big deal. Network I/O is trivial. Just block the process until you wake up from sleep. If the network connections die (which they probably will) applications can recover. Network connections die all the time, any application which can't handle it is buggy crap which would have problems with or without sleep. Disk is pretty easy as well. You probably should complete any pending writes just to be safe, but even that is optional. No sleep mode that I know if is expected to handle having the hard drive swapped or re-partitioned while the PC is asleep. Really, "it's probably better to save each application context (except for network connections) and just forget about kernel context" sounds to me like just about the worst possible approach. There is no way you could reset the kernel underneath an application without the applications help. There is a ton of "application" state which is really kept in the kernel. At a minimum, you would have to make all applications close all open FDs because the only mapping from open FD's to actual files is in the kernel. You can't really throw that away, now can you?
It would be far better for most companies to pay double the going salary to attract only the best, but unfortunately business thinking does not seem to be structured that way.
Oh, corporations seem quite comfortable thinking that way when it comes to upper management. And judging by the performance of some 'star' CEO's, methods for distinguishing good CEO's from bad CEO's are just as difficult to find as methods of distinguishing good programmers from bad.
Hmmm. Let's see. He said "basic XBox 360". You quoted the price for the top of the line 360 with the most expensive add-on available. But you're clearly just trolling. You know that $499 less $200 is $299. And you know that $299 is the price of the 360 core. But you wandered off like PS3 fanboys always do. What you (and Sony) forget is that some people buy a game console just to play games. And if you just play games the PS3 is horribly overpriced. Even at $499, it will still be way more expensive than the competition (by 66% to 100%).
processing power will have overtaken processing needs by so much in 10 years that it will be pointless to have a dedicated processing facility.
Why would you expect this to ever happen? When it comes to modeling the behavior of physical systems, whether it's the weather and climate or molecular structure, I don't think there is a limit to processing "needs". More power just means you can run more models, or more accurate models, or bigger models. I'm not sure why you would expect that to change.
1. The cost of producing these cards is extremely high relative to the plastic most users have. On order of 10x.
2. The costs of integrating a new kind of card into banking/CRM infrastructure is another huge cost center.
That might be, but some sort of improved hardware is going to be required to stem the losses from credit card fraud. The simple fact is that CC security right now is basically at the plain-text password stage of the security game. Every store you "authenticate" to ends up with all the information they need to turn around and impersonate you. Making the "password" longer by adding the CCV for example is just polishing a turd. Is this plan going to cost money? Damn right it's going to cost money. But how much are they losing now to fraud? It's hard to get an exact figure, but it's not hard to find estimates that it's in the billions. The article itself implies this is more for online banking, but it's even more likely to happen there because banks actually have to eat a lot of the cost of fraud. As opposed to credit cards, which manage to push most of the cost off on the merchants.
Far from "jumping the shark", I think this is a technology which is inevitable. Perhaps not in this particular incarnation, as this type of manual token is actually fairly cumbersome and not terribly strong compared to public key based transactions. On the other hand, it can be managed with a human in the middle typing into a web form.
What's needed here is an OSS banking system, not the one we currently have.
If you base an OSS banking system on plain text repeatable passwords, the security is going to suck. Period. Strong online security requires cryptography. Crypto requires hardware. To get trustworthy hardware, you either need to secure the users PC (good luck) or provide dedicated hardware.
One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone.
One wipe with what exactly? Sorry, that came out sounding a bit like a joke but I'm serious. If you buy a full retail copy of Windows, that eliminates any savings from the Dell. I suppose you could install a pirate copy, which you might consider morally OK but is definitely not legally OK. Ubuntu perhaps? That would be my choice, but I wouldn't buy a Dell in the first place for that.
Vista. XP. Who Cares? Does Microsoft really care? As long as you are buying their OS, they are doing fine. No, the threat to Microsoft is not people choosing XP over Vista. It's people choosing OSX. In my little part of the world (education/research institution) OSX has reached about 30-50% penetration in the laptop arena. At least judging by what people actually bring to meetings. That trend will spell real trouble for Microsoft if it continutes.
Slashdot Mirror
For the low low price of $289, you can actually turn your mileage into a game courtesy Think Geek.
Error establishing a database connection
They sure blurred him out fast.
Chemical weapons are treated as the same sort of dire
threat by actual Armies that both Nuclear and Biological
weapons are. There are some very good reasons that those
weapons were basically used once and then effectively
abandoned.
Well, two out of three were abandoned. Why? Because they don't work very well. One was kept. It works quite well.
but with Google and Yahoo having settled out of court on the issue, and with the terms of the settlement being unclear, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it?
Yeah, I stand corrected. I had forgotten about that lawsuit. It's hard to tell if Google thought the lawsuit had merit, or if it was just cheaper to pay Yahoo instead of fight it. Certainly it means the patent has at least FUD value, if not more.
What proportion of Google's income does come from AdSense and AdWords, then?
I don't think anything Google does is covered by that patent. The patent covers the clever idea of letting people bid up their links in the search results. Google doesn't do that at all as far as I know. They sell ad placement next to search results, but there is no way to pay Google to improve your placement in the search results themselves. My point being that this patent is worthless because selling search results is a bad idea. It guarantees that you will have crappy search results.
But as far as I know, nobody has yet found a way of making monry from a search site that doesn't involve one particular patent, which Yahoo just happens to own.
If you are talking about Patent 6,269,361 mentioned in a later post, I'm pretty sure that Google would argue that they do know how to make money without that patent. Patent 6,269,361 is a patent for "how to let people pay you to give crappy search results" and is probably who Yahoo is now #2 and sinking instead of #1 where they used to be. Quite simply, being a good search engine is not compatible with selling search placement.
One of the best bumper stickers I've seen lately is "I never thought I'd miss Nixon". Yeah GWII takes the cake, no doubt about it. I didn't care for his dad much, but he's quite the respectable elder statesman compared to his son.
Whois provides info on domain registrations. Go to arin.net and plug your IP into the search field. It should tell you who has been assigned the IP block you are in. That's probably how they are doing the tracking. Anybody can put whatever they want for a reverse DNS entry. Or nothing at all. No reasonable advertising service would use it to target ads. It's too slow and unreliable.
Pick the acronym first. Then decide what it stands for. Use a 'V', it is Vermont after all. Let's say you go with "VLAN". Vermont Local Access Network. That was easy. Or "VICAR". Vermont Internet and Commodity Access Route. Another easy one. "RAVE". Rural Access for Vermont Enlightenment. See how easy it is? Just remember: Acronym first. Meaning second.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now.
Well, that makes two of us. I'm not sure we'll find a third.
It's OK though, because judging from the recent news about spammers being able to solve Yahoo's captchka system with relatively high reliability and the amount of (Yahoo owned) Geocities-based malware sites I get SPAM about, Yahoo has about 4.05e17 active users and can lose 80% of them and still have more users than living being on the planet.
those people recommend, and will continue to recommend, Microsoft because nobody ever got sacked for doing so.
Quite true. And also quite surprising since even the most casual glance at Microsoft's earning shows that those people are paying waaaaay too much. $54.07 billion in revenue leads to $42.40 billion in gross profit? There is a reason Microsoft is the poster child for abusive monopolies.
Lot's of things need fixing under Linux. Same as every other OS. But I don't get aunts, uncles, my dentist, neighbor, etc. bugging me to fix their Windows crap. I don't mind fixing my own shit. I just don't want to get asked to fix everybody else's shit.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
Copyright law: technically, the modified web page is a derived work. The ISP can now be held liable for copyright infringement if, say, Google, or the New York Times objects. The potential revenues sinkhole from copyright litigators is far greater than what any ISP could bear.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that the ISP's even consider changing the content of web pages in flight. It's not just 'technically' copyright infringement. It's blatantly so. And fails every single test which might qualify it as 'fair use'. Rogers must not actually employ any actual lawyers at all to do something this clearly illegal. Even the folks who play lawyers on TV know that if you rip off somebody else's content and put your own ad's into it's a copyright violation.
Think how much more productive an IT worker could be if the software tools didn't require them to learn a bunch of skills which are irrelevant to their job. Back when cars had chokes and manually adjusted spark advance, you would have been claiming how important it was for drivers to get 'basic understanding' of these things. But of course the real answer was to completely hide these details from drivers so that today they have no idea what it even means to choke an engine or advance a spark. Yes, ignorance is a problem. But it's not the users who are ignorant. It's those of us who develop and maintain the IT systems who are ignorantly blaming the users for our own failings.
Amen brother. The unified package management which the good Linux distos provide is probably my favorite thing about Linux. I've gotten to the point where I usually won't even install software at all if it isn't provided as part of the distro. As a result, I know everything is up to date. I can get a list of every installed software package. I can get a list of all the files which make up any one package. I know I can remove it. I can find out exactly why any particular file is on the system. None of them are stomping on each other. It's great. It's really gotten kind of amazing. Windows and MacOS users, by and large, have no idea just how bad they have it. Their systems are total fsck'ing chaos, making their life hard, and they think it _has_ to be that way. Sad really. At work, I feel like I'm cheating. It's so easy to keep every single application up to date, and the Windows folks struggle just trying to keep the OS up to date.
Yawn. If it's so hard, why has Apple been able to do it so well for so many years? And now, they do it on hardware that is pretty much identical to the hardware Windows runs on. OK, it might be a hard problem. But the fact is Apple can do it, and Microsoft can't. And I don't buy that I/O is a big deal. Network I/O is trivial. Just block the process until you wake up from sleep. If the network connections die (which they probably will) applications can recover. Network connections die all the time, any application which can't handle it is buggy crap which would have problems with or without sleep. Disk is pretty easy as well. You probably should complete any pending writes just to be safe, but even that is optional. No sleep mode that I know if is expected to handle having the hard drive swapped or re-partitioned while the PC is asleep. Really, "it's probably better to save each application context (except for network connections) and just forget about kernel context" sounds to me like just about the worst possible approach. There is no way you could reset the kernel underneath an application without the applications help. There is a ton of "application" state which is really kept in the kernel. At a minimum, you would have to make all applications close all open FDs because the only mapping from open FD's to actual files is in the kernel. You can't really throw that away, now can you?
It would be far better for most companies to pay double the going salary to attract only the best, but unfortunately business thinking does not seem to be structured that way.
Oh, corporations seem quite comfortable thinking that way when it comes to upper management. And judging by the performance of some 'star' CEO's, methods for distinguishing good CEO's from bad CEO's are just as difficult to find as methods of distinguishing good programmers from bad.
Hmmm. Let's see. He said "basic XBox 360". You quoted the price for the top of the line 360 with the most expensive add-on available. But you're clearly just trolling. You know that $499 less $200 is $299. And you know that $299 is the price of the 360 core. But you wandered off like PS3 fanboys always do. What you (and Sony) forget is that some people buy a game console just to play games. And if you just play games the PS3 is horribly overpriced. Even at $499, it will still be way more expensive than the competition (by 66% to 100%).
processing power will have overtaken processing needs by so much in 10 years that it will be pointless to have a dedicated processing facility.
Why would you expect this to ever happen? When it comes to modeling the behavior of physical systems, whether it's the weather and climate or molecular structure, I don't think there is a limit to processing "needs". More power just means you can run more models, or more accurate models, or bigger models. I'm not sure why you would expect that to change.
1. The cost of producing these cards is extremely high relative to the plastic most users have. On order of 10x.
2. The costs of integrating a new kind of card into banking/CRM infrastructure is another huge cost center.
That might be, but some sort of improved hardware is going to be required to stem the losses from credit card fraud. The simple fact is that CC security right now is basically at the plain-text password stage of the security game. Every store you "authenticate" to ends up with all the information they need to turn around and impersonate you. Making the "password" longer by adding the CCV for example is just polishing a turd. Is this plan going to cost money? Damn right it's going to cost money. But how much are they losing now to fraud? It's hard to get an exact figure, but it's not hard to find estimates that it's in the billions. The article itself implies this is more for online banking, but it's even more likely to happen there because banks actually have to eat a lot of the cost of fraud. As opposed to credit cards, which manage to push most of the cost off on the merchants.
Far from "jumping the shark", I think this is a technology which is inevitable. Perhaps not in this particular incarnation, as this type of manual token is actually fairly cumbersome and not terribly strong compared to public key based transactions. On the other hand, it can be managed with a human in the middle typing into a web form.
What's needed here is an OSS banking system, not the one we currently have.
If you base an OSS banking system on plain text repeatable passwords, the security is going to suck. Period. Strong online security requires cryptography. Crypto requires hardware. To get trustworthy hardware, you either need to secure the users PC (good luck) or provide dedicated hardware.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I thought the restore CD's that the OEM's include put things back the way they were from the factory.
One wipe, which I'd be doing anyways, and it's all gone.
One wipe with what exactly? Sorry, that came out sounding a bit like a joke but I'm serious. If you buy a full retail copy of Windows, that eliminates any savings from the Dell. I suppose you could install a pirate copy, which you might consider morally OK but is definitely not legally OK. Ubuntu perhaps? That would be my choice, but I wouldn't buy a Dell in the first place for that.
Vista. XP. Who Cares? Does Microsoft really care? As long as you are buying their OS, they are doing fine. No, the threat to Microsoft is not people choosing XP over Vista. It's people choosing OSX. In my little part of the world (education/research institution) OSX has reached about 30-50% penetration in the laptop arena. At least judging by what people actually bring to meetings. That trend will spell real trouble for Microsoft if it continutes.