Physically replaced? You can't just reflash it? If so, I'm impressed.
The big problem here is that Computrace has to be installed at the factory. (The BIOS version anyway; there's another version that lives on the hard disk.) But if what you say is true, it would be very stupid to buy a laptop without this software.
That's dumb, but at least you're on the right track. Anything you can do to slow down a thief lessens the chances of your goods getting stolen, even if it's a security cable that will take some time to cut through.
Hey, let's do this right. The language you use sounds like a prank. The government probably gets hundreds of similar messages every day. You need to troll some Islamist web sites and copy some standard rants. Lots of "in the name of Allah the merciful" and stuff like that.
Also copy some Arabic text. It doesn't matter what, since very few of our intrepid warriors against terrorism speak any foreign languages. The text could say, "Gilligan's Island reruns (dubbed in Arabic) will appear on Tripoli TV Thursdays at 6" and it will still come across as a hate message from Osama himself.
Unless you're talking about a casual theft by somebody who intends to sell the laptop on the street, or for their own use, this won't work. If the laptop is fenced, the first thing the fence will do is wipe the hard drive. They do this to remove any trace of the original owner, though it also prevents any phone-home scenario.
Recent products like Computrace/LoJack (same product, different brands) can be installed in the BIOS so a disk wipe doesn't affect them. The catch is that it has to be installed at the factory, so you have to buy the security software (and an annual subscription) when you buy a new laptop. Also, it isn't that hard to reflash a BIOS....
I shouldn't need to point out that you should also have a bare-metal recovery backup. In fact, that's probably more important than any anti-theft measure: paying $1K for a new laptop hurts, but not as much as losing all the work that's on your laptop. A bare-metal solution spares you the hassle of re-installing all your applications and re-applying all the customizations we geeks love to do.
Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again. Oh, jeez, get over yourself.
New content? That's exactly what they are providing. Most of the changes implement rich media (mainly animated cartoons) and user mashups. The results are pretty lame (corny voice acting and user-written punchlines are not my cup of tea), but it is new content. And it probably will grab a few new users from the Garfield crowd.
Excessive bandwidth? They're not doing HD video, they're just doing a few simple flash applications. It's 2008, for crisakes. Next you'll be complaining that lynx isn't supported.
Plugins? They require flash, period. Flash is almost as basic these days as HTML. If your browser doesn't support flash, than half the leading web sites are already inaccessible to you.
The reaction to this change is chidish. "Worst design since Vista?" Please. Yes, the web site is feeble, but so was the old one. The old one was easier to use if all you wanted to do was catch up on the strip, but you can still do that on the new site. Though I find it easier to just subscribe to the RSS feed, and haven't been to the site in months. Of course, they don't get a lot of revenue from the RSS feed, so they decided they needed a way to drive more traffic. Curse them for their evil greed!
The failure rate is not good. But look of the system as a whole: it can suffer major failure and still deliver its crew home safely. It's also a lot cheaper than the U.S. shuttle, which may suffer a lower failure rate, but is much more likely to kill its crew when it does fail.
Neither system is really great. But the Russians know how to make a workable system cheaply, and know they can't design out Murphy's Law. That's the future of space flight. Assuming it has one, which I'm no longer willing to do.
Given the history between IBM and Microsoft, this is quite interesting. It would be "interesting" if IBM still made PCs. But since they sold their PC business to Lenovo, the word you want is "irrelevant".
Doubly so, since the IBM that partnered and feuded with Microsoft (and accidentally made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet) is long gone. That company never understood the paradigm shift that PCs represented, and possessed management that never learned how to use e-mail. (Ironically, the first IBM CEO to do so was Lou Gerstner, who was hired from outside the computer industry.) Now they're as much a services company as a hardware vendor, and that leaves them free to try new stuff.
If you start by hacking into somebody's computer and stealing both CPU time and network bandwidth, you've already lost any legitimacy, no matter how you use the resources you've stolen. But yeah, these botnets are an impressive achievement.
TFA article doesn't use the term, just the submitter. And who knows what they meant? It's perfectly possible they don't even know the moon orbits the earth. Most people are as ignorant of astronomy as they are of geography. And they are ignorant: try asking 10 people on the street which language is spoken in Great Britain!
This reminds me of a news story I read about a decade ago. There was an island off the New England coast that the Navy used as bombing target. Their permission to do so was up for renewal, and you might expect environmental groups to oppose this. Wrong: the environmentalists calculated that the damage done by the Navy's bombs was more than offset by the protection afforded by making the island off limits to people.
If I'm supposed to take your opinions seriously, I have to be persuaded you know what you're talking about. Lack of practical experience doesn't necessarily mean you're ill-informed, but it increases my skepticism. Add your dismissal of people who actually do have experience as "stupid", your refusal to acknowledge the existence of successful businesses that don't operate according to your theories, and your slight tendency to babel, and skepticism increases to the point where I'm inclined to dismiss you as an opinionated nitwit.
First you say that it's needlessly complicated, then you cite a procedure that sounds extremely simple, if somewhat unfair to buyers who are exempt from sales taxes.
Since you obviously know more than me about retail (and even more than anybody who's actually in retail) I will defer to your superior judgment. Though I suggest you refrain from calling the owner of a B&M store "stupid" to his face.
With the stroke of a pen, all of your smaller competition can be eliminated. I think you have that backwards. It's the little guys that can't afford to move their operation to a state that doesn't have sales taxes.
Ever hear of Fernley NV? Neither did I until Amazon built a huge warehouse there. Why? Because it's right across the border from California, and a few hours drive to a lot of northern CA cities. It allows Amazon to compete with California retailers without paying California taxes.
But the big issue isn't big-versus-little. It's brick-and-mortar versus online. Why should a physical store have to charge more just because they happen to be in the same state as the customer?
Then again, many B&M stores are mom-and-pop operations. Probably a bigger percentage than online.
As for the complication and expense of collecting sales taxes: it can't be any worse than the complication and expense of accepting credit cards. Which is pretty expensive. That's why most small operations don't do it themselves, they hire a processing service. Said service adds a database of state and local taxes: problem solved.
You might consider slowing down every time you approach an intersection. I know, this might get you thrown out of the pizza drivers guild. But it will allow you to honor a yellow without risking a rear-ender.
90% of the emails from that gmail account are getting marked as spam on the other end? Send them an email and ask them what's going on. Some of your suggestions have merit, but this one is dumb. Any solution that requires human intervention has no hope of keeping up with millions of zombie computers.
Math tests are OK if you just want to keep link spam off your bulletin board. But if you're running web email or some other high-volume web-based application, you need something harder to automate. Alas, even captcha isn't hard enough.
Perhaps you're celebrating the fact that captcha images will go away. Don't. They'll just be replaced by something even more obnoxious. Either that, or the application will just close shop. Either way, you're the one that loses.
What you're really asking is why use H.264 at all? Obviously all the folks who use H.264 have looked at the alternatives you mention and rejected them. I dunno why, but it's not to keep their engineers from getting bored. There a more cost effective solution.
Hey, I wasn't the one that "quoted" an article I hadn't even read. We started with a angry fact-free Slashdot post, that pointed to some angry blogspam, that pointed to an angry "article" that just regurgitated another angry "article". You could follow this chain of nonsense forever.
Think I'm an asshole? Prove it. Point me at an article that is an actual goddamn factual piece of journalism that says that somebody's been caught rigging their yellow lights. Not a blog rumor, not a rant "documented" by a link to another rant, serious facts. If you can I'll apologize.
OK, maybe I'm just showing my age, since I learned C++ when it was still considered to be a kind of preprocessor for C. But I find it very hard to understand how you can be an effective C programmer without knowing K&R-level C and how C++'s object architecture is built on C fundamental data types. C++ is a notoriously complex language, full of gotchas. These are hard enough to avoid even if you happen to know that (for example) that a C "string" is not a fundamental data type, though syntactically it looks like one.
The "article" may not be blogspam, but it's not exactly objective, factual journalism either. It's a rant on the web site for National Motorists Association, an organization that seems to be dedicated to promoting this conspiracy/victimhood nonsense. The article itself is nothing but a series of summaries of similar rants on another "pro-motorist" web site. Does that other site have any hard facts either? I don't know and I don't care. We're already three links deep and not particularly close to any real facts. Life's too short.
Funny you should mention Dallas. The only legitimate hard-news link in the NMA article is to a TV station article talking about that very issue — though it's pretty obvious the NMA author hasn't actually read it. Contrary to what he says, Dallas is not shutting down red light cameras. What they've done is canceled a contract to expand their camera system. Why? First, the existing cameras are actually resulting in less red-light running, which is nice, but causes them to be unprofitable; the city can't afford more.
The second reason made me laugh out loud: Dallas has recently lengthened its yellow light times. So much for your conspiracy.
Slashdot Mirror
And why does a "Linux" sticker make a laptop hard to sell?
Physically replaced? You can't just reflash it? If so, I'm impressed.
The big problem here is that Computrace has to be installed at the factory. (The BIOS version anyway; there's another version that lives on the hard disk.) But if what you say is true, it would be very stupid to buy a laptop without this software.
That's dumb, but at least you're on the right track. Anything you can do to slow down a thief lessens the chances of your goods getting stolen, even if it's a security cable that will take some time to cut through.
A $1000 laptop is worth $100 to a fence, regardless of what OS is on it.
Hey, let's do this right. The language you use sounds like a prank. The government probably gets hundreds of similar messages every day. You need to troll some Islamist web sites and copy some standard rants. Lots of "in the name of Allah the merciful" and stuff like that.
Also copy some Arabic text. It doesn't matter what, since very few of our intrepid warriors against terrorism speak any foreign languages. The text could say, "Gilligan's Island reruns (dubbed in Arabic) will appear on Tripoli TV Thursdays at 6" and it will still come across as a hate message from Osama himself.
Unless you're talking about a casual theft by somebody who intends to sell the laptop on the street, or for their own use, this won't work. If the laptop is fenced, the first thing the fence will do is wipe the hard drive. They do this to remove any trace of the original owner, though it also prevents any phone-home scenario.
Recent products like Computrace/LoJack (same product, different brands) can be installed in the BIOS so a disk wipe doesn't affect them. The catch is that it has to be installed at the factory, so you have to buy the security software (and an annual subscription) when you buy a new laptop. Also, it isn't that hard to reflash a BIOS....
I shouldn't need to point out that you should also have a bare-metal recovery backup. In fact, that's probably more important than any anti-theft measure: paying $1K for a new laptop hurts, but not as much as losing all the work that's on your laptop. A bare-metal solution spares you the hassle of re-installing all your applications and re-applying all the customizations we geeks love to do.
New content? That's exactly what they are providing. Most of the changes implement rich media (mainly animated cartoons) and user mashups. The results are pretty lame (corny voice acting and user-written punchlines are not my cup of tea), but it is new content. And it probably will grab a few new users from the Garfield crowd.
Excessive bandwidth? They're not doing HD video, they're just doing a few simple flash applications. It's 2008, for crisakes. Next you'll be complaining that lynx isn't supported.
Plugins? They require flash, period. Flash is almost as basic these days as HTML. If your browser doesn't support flash, than half the leading web sites are already inaccessible to you.
The reaction to this change is chidish. "Worst design since Vista?" Please. Yes, the web site is feeble, but so was the old one. The old one was easier to use if all you wanted to do was catch up on the strip, but you can still do that on the new site. Though I find it easier to just subscribe to the RSS feed, and haven't been to the site in months. Of course, they don't get a lot of revenue from the RSS feed, so they decided they needed a way to drive more traffic. Curse them for their evil greed!
The failure rate is not good. But look of the system as a whole: it can suffer major failure and still deliver its crew home safely. It's also a lot cheaper than the U.S. shuttle, which may suffer a lower failure rate, but is much more likely to kill its crew when it does fail.
Neither system is really great. But the Russians know how to make a workable system cheaply, and know they can't design out Murphy's Law. That's the future of space flight. Assuming it has one, which I'm no longer willing to do.
Oh yeah? Well I'm rubber, you're glue...
Doubly so, since the IBM that partnered and feuded with Microsoft (and accidentally made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet) is long gone. That company never understood the paradigm shift that PCs represented, and possessed management that never learned how to use e-mail. (Ironically, the first IBM CEO to do so was Lou Gerstner, who was hired from outside the computer industry.) Now they're as much a services company as a hardware vendor, and that leaves them free to try new stuff.
If you start by hacking into somebody's computer and stealing both CPU time and network bandwidth, you've already lost any legitimacy, no matter how you use the resources you've stolen. But yeah, these botnets are an impressive achievement.
These are serious computer scientists. You can tell because they write their pseudocode in a variant of Algol.
TFA article doesn't use the term, just the submitter. And who knows what they meant? It's perfectly possible they don't even know the moon orbits the earth. Most people are as ignorant of astronomy as they are of geography. And they are ignorant: try asking 10 people on the street which language is spoken in Great Britain!
This reminds me of a news story I read about a decade ago. There was an island off the New England coast that the Navy used as bombing target. Their permission to do so was up for renewal, and you might expect environmental groups to oppose this. Wrong: the environmentalists calculated that the damage done by the Navy's bombs was more than offset by the protection afforded by making the island off limits to people.
If I'm supposed to take your opinions seriously, I have to be persuaded you know what you're talking about. Lack of practical experience doesn't necessarily mean you're ill-informed, but it increases my skepticism. Add your dismissal of people who actually do have experience as "stupid", your refusal to acknowledge the existence of successful businesses that don't operate according to your theories, and your slight tendency to babel, and skepticism increases to the point where I'm inclined to dismiss you as an opinionated nitwit.
First you say that it's needlessly complicated, then you cite a procedure that sounds extremely simple, if somewhat unfair to buyers who are exempt from sales taxes.
Since you obviously know more than me about retail (and even more than anybody who's actually in retail) I will defer to your superior judgment. Though I suggest you refrain from calling the owner of a B&M store "stupid" to his face.
Ever hear of Fernley NV? Neither did I until Amazon built a huge warehouse there. Why? Because it's right across the border from California, and a few hours drive to a lot of northern CA cities. It allows Amazon to compete with California retailers without paying California taxes.
But the big issue isn't big-versus-little. It's brick-and-mortar versus online. Why should a physical store have to charge more just because they happen to be in the same state as the customer?
Then again, many B&M stores are mom-and-pop operations. Probably a bigger percentage than online.
As for the complication and expense of collecting sales taxes: it can't be any worse than the complication and expense of accepting credit cards. Which is pretty expensive. That's why most small operations don't do it themselves, they hire a processing service. Said service adds a database of state and local taxes: problem solved.
You might consider slowing down every time you approach an intersection. I know, this might get you thrown out of the pizza drivers guild. But it will allow you to honor a yellow without risking a rear-ender.
Math tests are OK if you just want to keep link spam off your bulletin board. But if you're running web email or some other high-volume web-based application, you need something harder to automate. Alas, even captcha isn't hard enough.
Perhaps you're celebrating the fact that captcha images will go away. Don't. They'll just be replaced by something even more obnoxious. Either that, or the application will just close shop. Either way, you're the one that loses.
Spam is totally out of control, just now I....
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What you're really asking is why use H.264 at all? Obviously all the folks who use H.264 have looked at the alternatives you mention and rejected them. I dunno why, but it's not to keep their engineers from getting bored. There a more cost effective solution.
Hey, I wasn't the one that "quoted" an article I hadn't even read. We started with a angry fact-free Slashdot post, that pointed to some angry blogspam, that pointed to an angry "article" that just regurgitated another angry "article". You could follow this chain of nonsense forever.
Think I'm an asshole? Prove it. Point me at an article that is an actual goddamn factual piece of journalism that says that somebody's been caught rigging their yellow lights. Not a blog rumor, not a rant "documented" by a link to another rant, serious facts. If you can I'll apologize.
OK, maybe I'm just showing my age, since I learned C++ when it was still considered to be a kind of preprocessor for C. But I find it very hard to understand how you can be an effective C programmer without knowing K&R-level C and how C++'s object architecture is built on C fundamental data types. C++ is a notoriously complex language, full of gotchas. These are hard enough to avoid even if you happen to know that (for example) that a C "string" is not a fundamental data type, though syntactically it looks like one.
The "article" may not be blogspam, but it's not exactly objective, factual journalism either. It's a rant on the web site for National Motorists Association, an organization that seems to be dedicated to promoting this conspiracy/victimhood nonsense. The article itself is nothing but a series of summaries of similar rants on another "pro-motorist" web site. Does that other site have any hard facts either? I don't know and I don't care. We're already three links deep and not particularly close to any real facts. Life's too short.
Funny you should mention Dallas. The only legitimate hard-news link in the NMA article is to a TV station article talking about that very issue — though it's pretty obvious the NMA author hasn't actually read it. Contrary to what he says, Dallas is not shutting down red light cameras. What they've done is canceled a contract to expand their camera system. Why? First, the existing cameras are actually resulting in less red-light running, which is nice, but causes them to be unprofitable; the city can't afford more.
The second reason made me laugh out loud: Dallas has recently lengthened its yellow light times. So much for your conspiracy.