I still disagree with most use of the term "legislating from the bench." More often than not, the term is used to mean "the judge made a decision I don't agree with" and from where I'm standing, it's most frequently thrown around when a judge decided to weigh someone's rights above someone else's wants. Which, at the end of the day, is the entire reason that we have a legal system.
I am writing to complain about the new 3.21 firmware update. I went through a lot of trouble to obtain a 60GB PS3, partially for the backwards compatiblity with PS2 titles, and partially for the Other OS feature. As an electronics hobbiest, I built it from parts out of non-working systems, as this was far cheaper than the alternative (essentially paying someone else to do the same for me) although still more expensive than buying a Slim. Then the unit was stolen in an apartment robbery just as I finished work on it, and I did it all again. I have, in total, spent a little over a thousand dollars on PS3 systems, parts, games, and accessories (and the games and accessories were all purchased new.) One of the main features I intended to make use of was OtherOS.
I almost didn't purchase a PS3 at all because of the XCP debacle some years back, as this demonstrated a certain contempt for customers as well as an astounding level of arrogance, not to mention an overall lack of responsibility on the part of a trusted content provider. In fact, the aforementioned has caused me to look at other brands first in most product categories. The fact that you are releasing an update specifically to remove a feature, and not to address any of the numerous bugs on the system (such as the web browser that seems to freeze the system habitually during use) only serves to reinforce the notion that you still hold a certain level of disdain for your paying customers.
I really wish that I could treat my customers like criminals after they've paid me their hard-earned money and cancel services they've paid for once they're no longer convenient for me. Of course, I'd be out of a job, and most businesses would close down if they acted in such a fashion. I really don't see why you can't update the hypervisor to close the hole, or simply be content with the fact that first-gen consoles are becoming harder and more expensive to obtain compared to their newer kin - as well as the fact that the only exploits that currently exist require advanced skills and delicate modifications to the PS3 hardware. Instead, you're putting your normal users through the risks of a firmware update simply to remove a feature they know nothing about, and you're simultaneously telling a small but highly taltented niche that you no longer want their business, and - most troubling - that they won't be able to continue using their systems as they're accustomed WITHOUT resorting to hardware modification.
I do hope you realize that the hobson's choice you've presented your advanced users with is only going to encourage significantly harder and more in-depth work on finding workarounds for every last ounce of security your system has. The majority of the users you're disenfranchising are the type who have little to no fear of taking a soldering iron to their PS3, who in the past would've been happy to dabble with their interests within the confines of the sandbox you provided. You've just given them a reason to do so. I myself am probably going to break out the soldering iron in the very near future.
The funny thing is, every time attempts are made to squash potentially threatening technology, said technology always gets a lot more attention than it did before. Remember the MP3 format and the Diamond Rio PMP? DeCSS? How about the significant step forward in CD ripping techniques that came about as a result of the efforts you and others made to obliterate Red Book compliance as thoroughly as possible, even to the point of your own XCP debacle? Most people had never heard of the PS3 exploits before Marth 28, but now some individuals with a high level of skill and a lot of time on their hands are very, very motivated to change that. When piracy on the PS3 finally does become a problem, I hope you'll be able to rest well with the knowledge that you initiated the chain reaction yourselves.
Are you sure you had it in Fixed Disk mode? Most OSs will fail to boot if the card is in Removable mode. All CF cards share this characteristic, and most are in Removable mode by default. A good CF-IDE adapter can (and should) put the card in fixed disk mode, but not all will do so.
I can vouch from personal experience with their engineers that their cards rated for 30MB/s or higher all support UDMA 4 or higher, and I've done tests of my own to verify this. Not all ExtremeIII cards support UDMA though; the ones that don't specify a speed of 30MB/s are instead rated for 20MB/s, which can be quite easily achieved using PIO6 (although less efficiently.) These cards might support UDMA, but since there's no *need* for it, there are no guarantees.
Also, I'm pretty sure Lexar cards rated for UDMA do perform as advertised. I can't vouch for other manufacturers. Additionally, be wary of fake cards (ebay is especially prone to fake card sales) as they're never going to perform to your expectations.
Bear in mind, Anonymous is a label - it is not a true organization. Any group of idiots can decide to vandalize a website in the name of Anonymous. Who's to say they were wrong to make that claim? The only requirement for membership in Anonymous is that one be able to call themselves such.
Frankly, some of the products being complained about are things that by all rights should've been incorporated into the OS years ago... and which are already standard offerings for almost every other popular operating system in the industry. At the very least, there are very valid reasons for MS to include network security features in their OS - they simply BELONG THERE. In some cases, Microsoft is only doing what the rest of the industry has been doing for decades.
Now, the anti-malware provisions are a different story. In many ways this is Microsoft cleaning up their own mess. If they provide the products free of charge (as with the Anti-Spyware Beta) I really don't see a problem - they're addressing their own issues. At the end of the day, Symantec's (and others') cash cow is a product that makes up for another product's deficiencies. This would be like Fram getting PO'd about Ford making gas inlet doors that can't be opened from the outside, because that reduces their market for locking gas caps.
If MS sells the crap, though... just plain wrong. I'd use a Microsoft security product as a supplement to other solutions if it were free, but I sure as hell won't actually pay them for it. They created the security holes in the first place; I'll accept proactive solutions but I won't pay for a reactive workaround by the same people responsible.
Actually, if the coffee is hot enough (it SHOULD be brewed near 200 degrees, but most cheap coffeemakers fail here) it'll vaporize most of the alcohol.
Besides, Bailey's really doesn't have much alcohol in it (it seems to have a kick, but that's just because it's a hot drink - were it cold, you wouldn't even notice the booze.)
Irish Coffee, on the other hand... THAT can pack a buzz.
As for the combination of caffeine and alcohol... the effects are seperate and do not cancel out. The exact end effect depends on the individual and his or her reaction to each substance involved. Red Bull, arguably the most famous and popular energy drink and one of the oldest, is very popular in a lot of bars when combined with Jagermeister or various flavored vodkas (cherry seems to have the most call by far.) Drinking a dozen or so shots mixed into five or six cans of Red Bull can put one's heart under a fair amount of stress and has supposedly been cause for a few heart attacks, but that's a hell of a lot more than any normal human being will consume (especially when considering the exhorbitant price of such concoctions at most establishments.) So, if you like how a given drink with both substances goes down, feel free to enjoy a few. Just remember to practice moderation, just as you otherwise would.
What happens when Longhorn comes out? It'll be five years old in a year, even though it's still the most up-to-date desktop OS that Microsoft offers (discounting Media Center Edition, 64-bit, etc.) I'm contemplating trying to convince my company to move to XP (from Windows 98) and support is one of the key selling points... so what happens when Longhorn comes out? You have a few months, and then you lose support if you're running anything less on a desktop?
The reason that you can't submerge electrical parts in water is the simple fact that water is electronically conductive given the presence of electrolytes (which is so hard to guarantee against in practice, that you can rest assured that water is bad.) Many oils, however, are not electrically conductive. Therefore, as long as the medium used is electrically inert and does not chemically react with anything you're submerging in it, you can consider it a viable medium for immersion cooling assuming that heat transfer properties are favorable.
This has been done before. Interestingly, some projects have looked to it for outdoor computer use (stationary) due to the water-repellant properties of many oils.
There is some merit to this argument, but don't forget that if MJ is legalized, it will (as with tobacco and alcohol) be very heavily taxed. The consumer will likely find comparable pricing to today (dramatically reduced overhead in production may cancel out the tax overhead) but the legalization enables more sales to occur. So, what would be drug company profit instead becomes USA government profit, without the need for risky, expensive seizure.
Who said anything about desktops? As an aside, it's also rather heavy for its size, has a smallish screen for its price, and has low performance for its price. As I said, battery life is the only thing it really has going for it, and for that pricetag, I'd much sooner take a nice Vaio or Powerbook and grab a couple of extra batteries.
I can't help but think that, for that pricing and performance, one would be better off getting a more conventional laptop or tablet and keeping an extra battery or two around. It's nice to see a notebook that actually acts like a portable, but sadly the battery life is about the only thing that this tablet has going for it.
All I see is an organization badmouthing its competition and providing little argument other than "We're bigger and better, so there." It could easily be argued that if not for the threat posed by Linux and the vendors and services that have effectively aligned with it, this group wouldn't even have any reason to exist. In the end, they legitimize and acknowledge their competitors' role in the marketplace.
The cables are supposedly "reinforced" with Aluminum. It's possible that this means that there is a thin layer of aluminum sandwiching the wiring, or backing the insulation. This would effectively shield the cables from outside interference, if this is a concern.
As for crosstalk, though I could most certainly be wrong here, if no two adjacent wires carry a single, the other wires will effectively diminish crosstalk (think about 80-pin ATA-66/100/133 cables.)
I'm no expert on RF, but I'd suspect that either mechanism alone could do the trick.
Actually, using Ghostscript's ps2pdf and any Postscript print driver, you can print to PDF from any OS that has any sort of print support and runs Ghostscript.
It's just a HUGE pain in the ass to setup, especially on win32.
It's vastly improved, but it still has serious security ussues and the HAL is simply *horrid.* I can't even count the number of issues I've had with it... The hotpluggable driver handling is simply inexcusable.
Slashdot Mirror
The joke comes within a hair's breadth of explaining itself at the end.
I still disagree with most use of the term "legislating from the bench." More often than not, the term is used to mean "the judge made a decision I don't agree with" and from where I'm standing, it's most frequently thrown around when a judge decided to weigh someone's rights above someone else's wants. Which, at the end of the day, is the entire reason that we have a legal system.
Dear Sony,
I am writing to complain about the new 3.21 firmware update. I went through a lot of trouble to obtain a 60GB PS3, partially for the backwards compatiblity with PS2 titles, and partially for the Other OS feature. As an electronics hobbiest, I built it from parts out of non-working systems, as this was far cheaper than the alternative (essentially paying someone else to do the same for me) although still more expensive than buying a Slim. Then the unit was stolen in an apartment robbery just as I finished work on it, and I did it all again. I have, in total, spent a little over a thousand dollars on PS3 systems, parts, games, and accessories (and the games and accessories were all purchased new.) One of the main features I intended to make use of was OtherOS.
I almost didn't purchase a PS3 at all because of the XCP debacle some years back, as this demonstrated a certain contempt for customers as well as an astounding level of arrogance, not to mention an overall lack of responsibility on the part of a trusted content provider. In fact, the aforementioned has caused me to look at other brands first in most product categories. The fact that you are releasing an update specifically to remove a feature, and not to address any of the numerous bugs on the system (such as the web browser that seems to freeze the system habitually during use) only serves to reinforce the notion that you still hold a certain level of disdain for your paying customers.
I really wish that I could treat my customers like criminals after they've paid me their hard-earned money and cancel services they've paid for once they're no longer convenient for me. Of course, I'd be out of a job, and most businesses would close down if they acted in such a fashion. I really don't see why you can't update the hypervisor to close the hole, or simply be content with the fact that first-gen consoles are becoming harder and more expensive to obtain compared to their newer kin - as well as the fact that the only exploits that currently exist require advanced skills and delicate modifications to the PS3 hardware. Instead, you're putting your normal users through the risks of a firmware update simply to remove a feature they know nothing about, and you're simultaneously telling a small but highly taltented niche that you no longer want their business, and - most troubling - that they won't be able to continue using their systems as they're accustomed WITHOUT resorting to hardware modification.
I do hope you realize that the hobson's choice you've presented your advanced users with is only going to encourage significantly harder and more in-depth work on finding workarounds for every last ounce of security your system has. The majority of the users you're disenfranchising are the type who have little to no fear of taking a soldering iron to their PS3, who in the past would've been happy to dabble with their interests within the confines of the sandbox you provided. You've just given them a reason to do so. I myself am probably going to break out the soldering iron in the very near future.
The funny thing is, every time attempts are made to squash potentially threatening technology, said technology always gets a lot more attention than it did before. Remember the MP3 format and the Diamond Rio PMP? DeCSS? How about the significant step forward in CD ripping techniques that came about as a result of the efforts you and others made to obliterate Red Book compliance as thoroughly as possible, even to the point of your own XCP debacle? Most people had never heard of the PS3 exploits before Marth 28, but now some individuals with a high level of skill and a lot of time on their hands are very, very motivated to change that. When piracy on the PS3 finally does become a problem, I hope you'll be able to rest well with the knowledge that you initiated the chain reaction yourselves.
Are you sure you had it in Fixed Disk mode? Most OSs will fail to boot if the card is in Removable mode. All CF cards share this characteristic, and most are in Removable mode by default. A good CF-IDE adapter can (and should) put the card in fixed disk mode, but not all will do so.
I can vouch from personal experience with their engineers that their cards rated for 30MB/s or higher all support UDMA 4 or higher, and I've done tests of my own to verify this. Not all ExtremeIII cards support UDMA though; the ones that don't specify a speed of 30MB/s are instead rated for 20MB/s, which can be quite easily achieved using PIO6 (although less efficiently.) These cards might support UDMA, but since there's no *need* for it, there are no guarantees.
Also, I'm pretty sure Lexar cards rated for UDMA do perform as advertised. I can't vouch for other manufacturers. Additionally, be wary of fake cards (ebay is especially prone to fake card sales) as they're never going to perform to your expectations.
It's not really impressive until you start getting below 6 digits.
If only I signed up when I started lurking...
They were probably running something similar to Verisign's SiteFinder that attempts to cash in on typos and non-registered domains.
Bear in mind, Anonymous is a label - it is not a true organization. Any group of idiots can decide to vandalize a website in the name of Anonymous. Who's to say they were wrong to make that claim? The only requirement for membership in Anonymous is that one be able to call themselves such.
Frankly, some of the products being complained about are things that by all rights should've been incorporated into the OS years ago... and which are already standard offerings for almost every other popular operating system in the industry. At the very least, there are very valid reasons for MS to include network security features in their OS - they simply BELONG THERE. In some cases, Microsoft is only doing what the rest of the industry has been doing for decades.
Now, the anti-malware provisions are a different story. In many ways this is Microsoft cleaning up their own mess. If they provide the products free of charge (as with the Anti-Spyware Beta) I really don't see a problem - they're addressing their own issues. At the end of the day, Symantec's (and others') cash cow is a product that makes up for another product's deficiencies. This would be like Fram getting PO'd about Ford making gas inlet doors that can't be opened from the outside, because that reduces their market for locking gas caps.
If MS sells the crap, though... just plain wrong. I'd use a Microsoft security product as a supplement to other solutions if it were free, but I sure as hell won't actually pay them for it. They created the security holes in the first place; I'll accept proactive solutions but I won't pay for a reactive workaround by the same people responsible.
Actually, if the coffee is hot enough (it SHOULD be brewed near 200 degrees, but most cheap coffeemakers fail here) it'll vaporize most of the alcohol.
Besides, Bailey's really doesn't have much alcohol in it (it seems to have a kick, but that's just because it's a hot drink - were it cold, you wouldn't even notice the booze.)
Irish Coffee, on the other hand... THAT can pack a buzz.
As for the combination of caffeine and alcohol... the effects are seperate and do not cancel out. The exact end effect depends on the individual and his or her reaction to each substance involved. Red Bull, arguably the most famous and popular energy drink and one of the oldest, is very popular in a lot of bars when combined with Jagermeister or various flavored vodkas (cherry seems to have the most call by far.) Drinking a dozen or so shots mixed into five or six cans of Red Bull can put one's heart under a fair amount of stress and has supposedly been cause for a few heart attacks, but that's a hell of a lot more than any normal human being will consume (especially when considering the exhorbitant price of such concoctions at most establishments.) So, if you like how a given drink with both substances goes down, feel free to enjoy a few. Just remember to practice moderation, just as you otherwise would.
What happens when Longhorn comes out? It'll be five years old in a year, even though it's still the most up-to-date desktop OS that Microsoft offers (discounting Media Center Edition, 64-bit, etc.) I'm contemplating trying to convince my company to move to XP (from Windows 98) and support is one of the key selling points... so what happens when Longhorn comes out? You have a few months, and then you lose support if you're running anything less on a desktop?
The reason that you can't submerge electrical parts in water is the simple fact that water is electronically conductive given the presence of electrolytes (which is so hard to guarantee against in practice, that you can rest assured that water is bad.) Many oils, however, are not electrically conductive. Therefore, as long as the medium used is electrically inert and does not chemically react with anything you're submerging in it, you can consider it a viable medium for immersion cooling assuming that heat transfer properties are favorable.
This has been done before. Interestingly, some projects have looked to it for outdoor computer use (stationary) due to the water-repellant properties of many oils.
There is some merit to this argument, but don't forget that if MJ is legalized, it will (as with tobacco and alcohol) be very heavily taxed. The consumer will likely find comparable pricing to today (dramatically reduced overhead in production may cancel out the tax overhead) but the legalization enables more sales to occur. So, what would be drug company profit instead becomes USA government profit, without the need for risky, expensive seizure.
Who said anything about desktops? As an aside, it's also rather heavy for its size, has a smallish screen for its price, and has low performance for its price. As I said, battery life is the only thing it really has going for it, and for that pricetag, I'd much sooner take a nice Vaio or Powerbook and grab a couple of extra batteries.
when you can just point Slashdot at a server?
I can't help but think that, for that pricing and performance, one would be better off getting a more conventional laptop or tablet and keeping an extra battery or two around. It's nice to see a notebook that actually acts like a portable, but sadly the battery life is about the only thing that this tablet has going for it.
All I see is an organization badmouthing its competition and providing little argument other than "We're bigger and better, so there." It could easily be argued that if not for the threat posed by Linux and the vendors and services that have effectively aligned with it, this group wouldn't even have any reason to exist. In the end, they legitimize and acknowledge their competitors' role in the marketplace.
Ironic, no?
The cables are supposedly "reinforced" with Aluminum. It's possible that this means that there is a thin layer of aluminum sandwiching the wiring, or backing the insulation. This would effectively shield the cables from outside interference, if this is a concern.
As for crosstalk, though I could most certainly be wrong here, if no two adjacent wires carry a single, the other wires will effectively diminish crosstalk (think about 80-pin ATA-66/100/133 cables.)
I'm no expert on RF, but I'd suspect that either mechanism alone could do the trick.
I do have to wonder... what on earth does the word "privacy" have to do with this? I've seen some bad misnomers before, but not so bad as this.
How long until someone uses a bunch of TBirds to make a coffee roaster?
I do believe that's what TVSS is for... but I'm no expert on the subject.
For the audio part of what you're doing, a CB radio will work just fine. Be warned; it's mostly cabbies and truckers that use it.
Goatse, of course.
Dumb cracker... Real website defacers link to Lemon Party.
Actually, using Ghostscript's ps2pdf and any Postscript print driver, you can print to PDF from any OS that has any sort of print support and runs Ghostscript.
It's just a HUGE pain in the ass to setup, especially on win32.
I've had Win2k crash on an almost daily basis.
It's vastly improved, but it still has serious security ussues and the HAL is simply *horrid.* I can't even count the number of issues I've had with it... The hotpluggable driver handling is simply inexcusable.