My father was a route driver for a bakery in the 50's, and there were frequent disputes over placement of product and display ads in/around/above his racks in grocery stores. The retailers were usually unaware - or uncaring - of the practice of obscuring one product with a display ad for another.
It still happens to a friend of mine on a regular basis. He sells a publication that sits in a magazine rack. A competing publication also sits in a magazine rack. Some retailers don't want to have two racks in their store but still want to sell both products, so they tell my friend, "Put your product in the other guy's rack."
He is then between a rock and a hard place. He can say "No" and not have his product sold at that store. Or he can do what the store owner/manager told him to do and have his competitor chew him out on the phone for "stealing" his rack space.
The only thing cheaper than french fries in a resturant is the soda pop.
Depends on whether it's bottled, premix or postmix.
Some very small restaurants purchase their soda pop in either single-serving cans or bottles (quite expensive) or 2 liter bottles (slightly cheaper).
Most restaurants use either premix or postmix. Premix is, as the word suggests, pre-mixed with water at the bottling plant. It costs about 10x as much as postmix but it tastes a lot better. Chain restaurants and whatnot use postmix where a syrup is mixed with water on-site. This is the cheapest but least "tasty" option. The contents of cup of postmix costs very little; the cup costs something though.
Where I live we have a 10 cent deposit on drink cans and bottles. One day I was walking home and saw an empty can sitting on the sidewalk about four feet away from my front door. As I keep a bag of returnable bottles in my basement and haul it to the recycling center every time it gets full (which usually nets me around $20, so it's worth the few minutes it takes to drop it off) I just picked up that can thinking I'll throw it into my recycling bag, and pulled out my key to unlock the front door.
Imagine my shock when a woman I've never seen before opened the door of the restaurant across the street and started yelling. "Little man! Little man!" Little man? Well, whatever -- I turned around to see if she was yelling at me for some reason. She was. "That's my can and you can just put it right back where you found it! Right now!" Her can? She's across the street in the restaurant and this can is right in front of my home. Anyway, after a second I got over my shock and without a word I set the can back on the sidewalk and went inside, shaking my head over the weird people that are walking around loose these days.
The punch line here is that I went out again about three hours later and that can was still sitting right where I had left it. So I picked it up and put it into my recycling bag to get it off of the street.
hacking products in this manner is not new to manufactors or others.
It goes back a lot further than 1997.
I re-formatted a 10mb IBM hard drive to a whopping 15mb or so by putting it on a RLL controller card instead of a MFM controller card, and used that 15mb to hold FidoNet messages on my Opus BBS around 1990(?) or so.
I'm sure other folks can come up with much earlier examples.
The 486SX wasn't crippled on purpose, it was a 486DX with a faulty maths co-pro.
Early ones. There are actually two major versions/types of the 486sx CPU. Early 486sx's were 486dx's in "sheep's clothing", as you said. Later 486sx's left the FPU off of the die completely and really were FPU-less CPU's rather than defective 486dx's with a lock-out.
some kind hearted geeks should be going out there with various forms of detector equipment and identifying the source.
And do you want to be the one to tell them that there is no problematic radition in their house? "You're part of the conspiracy!" and who knows what they might do to you.
ISPs could block ALL attachments (and all ports?) (with the exception of script-less html) until users complete a short little online 'course' in email and virus safety. Print out a nice certificate of completion at the end.
(1) Naw, too much work. I'll just sign up with your competition down the street.
(2) "Son, come here and fill out this form so your mother can play Yahtzee."
So if a threat is detected by MS's own engineers it makes sense to not make it public
I couldn't disagree more.
Who's to say that a flaw discovered by MS employees wasn't discovered months ago by the bad guys who have been running rampant over MS-powered sites lo these many months?
If there is a flaw, tell me about it. Then I can make an informed decision to deal with it, which could include shutting down some services, installing patches, doing stuff in a different way that is less exposed to the flaw, or you-name-it. Even pulling the plug.
But if I'm kept in the dark and don't even know that a flaw exists, how am I to deal with it?
'paraphrasing'... time thus spent is wasted - you didn't do anything productive in the process.
I couldn't disagree more.
I learned to program in C by first reading a book on C and then sitting down with a couple of the old David Ahl Basic Computer Games books and re-writing some of the programs in C.
The programs were small enough to be fairly trivial to re-implement and interesting enough to keep me working at it.
My C programs weren't original but "paraphrases" of the Basic-language games in Ahl's books. And I don't think I wasted my time as I got a reasonably decent understanding of the basics of C from that and had fun while doing it as well.
The technically-minded can be drawn to the law as just another complex system, one with its own terminology, protocols, communications systems, manuals.
Interesting thought, but the point you overlooked is that the US legal system is based on confrontation and most of the "geeks" that I know tend to be very non-confrontational except when playing the latest release of Quake.
Standing up in court in front of a hostile "opposition" just waiting for the opportunity to pounce on any slip that you might make or any tiny overlooked point is a whole lot different than writing a page of code, compiling it and saying "Damn" when it doesn't run.
It's only a matter of time until the whole thing gets regulated.
That when[the UNITED STATES] Congress will come to the "realization" that programming is what makes everything on the net possible, and finally demand that programmers be held accountable for their code.
In the good ol' USA, land of the free, home of the brave, etc etc.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be moving right along and computer science people and professional, amateur and hobby programmers will be doing pretty much what they always do.
There is a whole big world out there beyond the borders of the USA.
Strangely enough to start his car he now takes the front of his radio and there is a button there.
That's how the locking shotgun racks in police cars work. There is a "hidden button" in the vehicle within easy reach of both the driver and the passenger that will release the lock on the rack and allow the gun to be removed. If you don't know where that button is, you're outta luck. (Those racks also have a solid steel semi-enclosed boot at the bottom where the muzzle of the gun sits so if the thing goes off by mistake you don't fill the car with pellets.)
The only problem that I can see with your friend's scheme is the actual location of the button. Behind the radio? If I'm a thief, I may try to steal that radio and find your hidden button. It's kind of like storing the combination to your safe in a Ming vase.
A few years after VCR's started to become somewhat common (the mid-80's), theatres got very upset with 20th Century Fox when they started putting movies that were LESS THAN TWELVE YEARS OLD on videotapes that people could buy or rent.
Now it's more like 8 months and sometimes half of that or less between theatrical release and the home video.
I distinctly remember having sharp pains after going a whole day without eating when Final Fantasy was released on the Nintindo.
Not just games.
About 20 years ago I was writing a program to download and format data from survey instruments, then pack it and send it in to another office over a modem. All to be automated, and all very slick for its time.
Anyway, as this was just kind of a "spare time job" I went into my basement where my computers were at the time and started working on it on a Friday night. It was a truly fascinating project, especially the communications end of it because I had never done a lot with communications before then so it was a real learn-and-experiment experience.
Work progressed on the program, and after a while I started to feel sick. I thought there was something wrong with me; gosh maybe I need to lie down for a while or something.
Then I checked the clock and discovered that it was 4pm on Sunday afternoon! I hadn't left the computers, had anything to eat or done anything at all other than work on the program for almost 48 straight hours. And I hadn't even noticed or realized it at all until, as I said, I started to feel sick.
I have only done that once, to such an extreme at least. And I still find it amazing that it really happened.
I've always felt that the SCO of the 90's is a very different organization then the SCO of today.
Yup. Completely different. Not surprising, because it's an enitirely different company that happens to run under the same name.
They kept the most of the IP, and spun off a huge chunk of their business into Tarantella.
Actually, no. SCO sold off the tattered remants of their Unix business to a company called Caldera, and then renamed themselves to Tarantella. Subsequently, Caldera renamed themselves to SCO. So, Tarantella is actually "oldSCO", and "SCO" isn't anything other than Caldera after purchasing the "oldSCO"'s Unix business.
Yes, it's confusing. Read this over twice and you'll get it.
Slashdot Mirror
My father was a route driver for a bakery in the 50's, and there were frequent disputes over placement of product and display ads in/around/above his racks in grocery stores. The retailers were usually unaware - or uncaring - of the practice of obscuring one product with a display ad for another.
It still happens to a friend of mine on a regular basis. He sells a publication that sits in a magazine rack. A competing publication also sits in a magazine rack. Some retailers don't want to have two racks in their store but still want to sell both products, so they tell my friend, "Put your product in the other guy's rack."
He is then between a rock and a hard place. He can say "No" and not have his product sold at that store. Or he can do what the store owner/manager told him to do and have his competitor chew him out on the phone for "stealing" his rack space.
What would you do in that situation?
http://www.privoxy.org/
Who pays for a new musician/author's/film maker's early labor while they are trying to make a name for themselves giving away freebies?
The same person who pays for it now, when a new artist is trying to make a name for themselves.
Some electronic safe locks have a "duress combination". Enter that one and the door still opens, but the (hopefully silent) alarm goes off as well.
The only thing cheaper than french fries in a resturant is the soda pop.
Depends on whether it's bottled, premix or postmix.
Some very small restaurants purchase their soda pop in either single-serving cans or bottles (quite expensive) or 2 liter bottles (slightly cheaper).
Most restaurants use either premix or postmix. Premix is, as the word suggests, pre-mixed with water at the bottling plant. It costs about 10x as much as postmix but it tastes a lot better. Chain restaurants and whatnot use postmix where a syrup is mixed with water on-site. This is the cheapest but least "tasty" option. The contents of cup of postmix costs very little; the cup costs something though.
I can (almost) beat that.
Where I live we have a 10 cent deposit on drink cans and bottles. One day I was walking home and saw an empty can sitting on the sidewalk about four feet away from my front door. As I keep a bag of returnable bottles in my basement and haul it to the recycling center every time it gets full (which usually nets me around $20, so it's worth the few minutes it takes to drop it off) I just picked up that can thinking I'll throw it into my recycling bag, and pulled out my key to unlock the front door.
Imagine my shock when a woman I've never seen before opened the door of the restaurant across the street and started yelling. "Little man! Little man!" Little man? Well, whatever -- I turned around to see if she was yelling at me for some reason. She was. "That's my can and you can just put it right back where you found it! Right now!" Her can? She's across the street in the restaurant and this can is right in front of my home. Anyway, after a second I got over my shock and without a word I set the can back on the sidewalk and went inside, shaking my head over the weird people that are walking around loose these days.
The punch line here is that I went out again about three hours later and that can was still sitting right where I had left it. So I picked it up and put it into my recycling bag to get it off of the street.
I have seen this type of shredder at RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) offices.
hacking products in this manner is not new to manufactors or others.
It goes back a lot further than 1997.
I re-formatted a 10mb IBM hard drive to a whopping 15mb or so by putting it on a RLL controller card instead of a MFM controller card, and used that 15mb to hold FidoNet messages on my Opus BBS around 1990(?) or so.
I'm sure other folks can come up with much earlier examples.
The 486SX wasn't crippled on purpose, it was a 486DX with a faulty maths co-pro.
Early ones. There are actually two major versions/types of the 486sx CPU. Early 486sx's were 486dx's in "sheep's clothing", as you said. Later 486sx's left the FPU off of the die completely and really were FPU-less CPU's rather than defective 486dx's with a lock-out.
some kind hearted geeks should be going out there with various forms of detector equipment and identifying the source.
And do you want to be the one to tell them that there is no problematic radition in their house? "You're part of the conspiracy!" and who knows what they might do to you.
The folks here have mental health issues.
Which begs the question:
Actually, it raises the question.
when is that first-person Pac-Man coming out?
Here you go.
ISPs could block ALL attachments (and all ports?) (with the exception of script-less html) until users complete a short little online 'course' in email and virus safety. Print out a nice certificate of completion at the end.
(1) Naw, too much work. I'll just sign up with your competition down the street.
(2) "Son, come here and fill out this form so your mother can play Yahtzee."
And I wonder if the test program clicks "Yes" when asked "Do you trust this web site to install software on your computer?", the way IE users do.
The article says that it does indeed click "Yes" as required.
I'm sure MS Bob seemed like a good idea, at the time. Certainly an interesting concept.
But not an original concept.
Actually, it wasn't. MS Bob uses concepts and functionality that I believe were first used in Magic Desk for the Commodore 64.
MS Bob is not original.
So if a threat is detected by MS's own engineers it makes sense to not make it public
I couldn't disagree more.
Who's to say that a flaw discovered by MS employees wasn't discovered months ago by the bad guys who have been running rampant over MS-powered sites lo these many months?
If there is a flaw, tell me about it. Then I can make an informed decision to deal with it, which could include shutting down some services, installing patches, doing stuff in a different way that is less exposed to the flaw, or you-name-it. Even pulling the plug.
But if I'm kept in the dark and don't even know that a flaw exists, how am I to deal with it?
Must be an odd feeling.
'paraphrasing'... time thus spent is wasted - you didn't do anything productive in the process.
I couldn't disagree more.
I learned to program in C by first reading a book on C and then sitting down with a couple of the old David Ahl Basic Computer Games books and re-writing some of the programs in C.
The programs were small enough to be fairly trivial to re-implement and interesting enough to keep me working at it.
My C programs weren't original but "paraphrases" of the Basic-language games in Ahl's books. And I don't think I wasted my time as I got a reasonably decent understanding of the basics of C from that and had fun while doing it as well.
"Here's your 3kb of data, that'll be $20,000 please."
3k of data could easily be worth $20,000 (or even ten times more). Really.
The technically-minded can be drawn to the law as just another complex system, one with its own terminology, protocols, communications systems, manuals.
Interesting thought, but the point you overlooked is that the US legal system is based on confrontation and most of the "geeks" that I know tend to be very non-confrontational except when playing the latest release of Quake.
Standing up in court in front of a hostile "opposition" just waiting for the opportunity to pounce on any slip that you might make or any tiny overlooked point is a whole lot different than writing a page of code, compiling it and saying "Damn" when it doesn't run.
It's only a matter of time until the whole thing gets regulated.
That when [the UNITED STATES] Congress will come to the "realization" that programming is what makes everything on the net possible, and finally demand that programmers be held accountable for their code.
In the good ol' USA, land of the free, home of the brave, etc etc.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be moving right along and computer science people and professional, amateur and hobby programmers will be doing pretty much what they always do.
There is a whole big world out there beyond the borders of the USA.
Strangely enough to start his car he now takes the front of his radio and there is a button there.
That's how the locking shotgun racks in police cars work. There is a "hidden button" in the vehicle within easy reach of both the driver and the passenger that will release the lock on the rack and allow the gun to be removed. If you don't know where that button is, you're outta luck. (Those racks also have a solid steel semi-enclosed boot at the bottom where the muzzle of the gun sits so if the thing goes off by mistake you don't fill the car with pellets.)
The only problem that I can see with your friend's scheme is the actual location of the button. Behind the radio? If I'm a thief, I may try to steal that radio and find your hidden button. It's kind of like storing the combination to your safe in a Ming vase.
A few years after VCR's started to become somewhat common (the mid-80's), theatres got very upset with 20th Century Fox when they started putting movies that were LESS THAN TWELVE YEARS OLD on videotapes that people could buy or rent.
Now it's more like 8 months and sometimes half of that or less between theatrical release and the home video.
I distinctly remember having sharp pains after going a whole day without eating when Final Fantasy was released on the Nintindo.
Not just games.
About 20 years ago I was writing a program to download and format data from survey instruments, then pack it and send it in to another office over a modem. All to be automated, and all very slick for its time.
Anyway, as this was just kind of a "spare time job" I went into my basement where my computers were at the time and started working on it on a Friday night. It was a truly fascinating project, especially the communications end of it because I had never done a lot with communications before then so it was a real learn-and-experiment experience.
Work progressed on the program, and after a while I started to feel sick. I thought there was something wrong with me; gosh maybe I need to lie down for a while or something.
Then I checked the clock and discovered that it was 4pm on Sunday afternoon! I hadn't left the computers, had anything to eat or done anything at all other than work on the program for almost 48 straight hours. And I hadn't even noticed or realized it at all until, as I said, I started to feel sick.
I have only done that once, to such an extreme at least. And I still find it amazing that it really happened.
I've always felt that the SCO of the 90's is a very different organization then the SCO of today.
Yup. Completely different. Not surprising, because it's an enitirely different company that happens to run under the same name.
They kept the most of the IP, and spun off a huge chunk of their business into Tarantella.
Actually, no. SCO sold off the tattered remants of their Unix business to a company called Caldera, and then renamed themselves to Tarantella. Subsequently, Caldera renamed themselves to SCO. So, Tarantella is actually "oldSCO", and "SCO" isn't anything other than Caldera after purchasing the "oldSCO"'s Unix business.
Yes, it's confusing. Read this over twice and you'll get it.