Not at all. I don't think there's anything wrong with using your position to push your agenda. And if you don't like hearing that agenda, then you don't have to listen.
Compare to not buying a product just because you disagree with a person's political views. That's kinda silly.
Remember that patents are supposed to be for specific implementations of the technology. Nowadays, the patent process seems to just be a quick rubber stamp, with any conflicts to be sorted out in the courts. Under this scenario, it's much harder and more expensive to get the patent invalidated, and companies can file for obvious patents, or for patents which are far too vague, and get protection that's hard to get around.
Because people have problems separating politics from other aspects of life?
During the 2004 elections, I knew some people who refused to buy Heinz ketchup, even though it was previously their favorite, due to the connection with John Kerry.
The simple precautions of changing and hiding the network name (SSID) and changing the password will do a lot No it will not! Changing your SSID doesn't do anything in terms of security. Be wary of going to one extreme when fending off another.
Changing your SSID can, in fact, help with security, in the proper context. It's true that just changing it doesn't really help, however if you're using WPA with a PSK, changing your SSID may well keep you safe from a rainbow table crack.
Changing the admin password of the router helps a bit, but there exploits out there which can crack some of these passwords. I don't know of any exploits which do this, but I don't know of any wireless routers which reject logins attempts after too many failures, either. However, this mostly implies that the user has access to the network already, so it's probably not something to worry about. We want to keep them out entirely.
Hiding? In Kismet, you press one button to reveal the hidden APs in the area. Hiding it pointless. Again, you're going to the other extreme. Hiding it isn't/pointless/. It will keep out the casual leecher.
There have been attacks on web sessions that go over http (not https), even when some parts of the session were protected using SSL. The idea is that sensitive information may be encrypted, but non-sensitive information will just go over http in for speed and ease of use. However if you can hijack the session through the non-encrypted requests, you can log in as the user without ever knowing their passwords, and then you might be able to do all sorts of nasty things.
The attack was famously performed against people using Gmail, but it could work against many websites.
Norton used to be really hot stuff. Their products were fantastic, and even as replacements for tools supplied by the OS (chkdisk and later scandisk, and defrag) they were worth the price of admission because they worked so much better. It was like night and day.
When they were bought by Symantec, they maintained their quality for a while, but eventually, they just didn't work. Antivirus was really the last utility to fall, but even it finally did. I used to wholeheartedly recommend Norton (and later, Symantec's Norton line) products to anyone who ran Microsoft OSs. Now, my recommendation is unquestionably to uninstall it, download the full removal tool, and run that, too.
Microsoft's own website says that Vista requires 15GB to install. The authors probably confused requirements to install (which includes temporary files automatically deleted post-installation) and final installation size.
Another thought: Where is the line between the OS and the "extras" that might come along with it? Just the kernel? What about drivers? File Explorers? Media players that are required as they plug into said file explorers. It's a slippery slope, I think. That line is different depending upon the level of knowledge of the person answering it, and to some extent, it's subjective.
An ideal microkernel wouldn't provide any services other than the ability to load modules for the services you actually want. It has nothing to do with the size, other than the fact that a full kernel would be much larger than a micro kernel from similar codebases.
It's quite possible to have a microkernel architecture with nothing loaded which is larger than a monolithic kernel. Comparing such kernels would yield quite a bit of information on architectural differences, both in the design of the kernel, and for the hardware on which they are run.
I never have to search for my install disk to install software that I didn't initially want in Ubuntu. Just sayin'. Microsoft could do the same sort of thing--download the component you wanted, or, if you don't have a network connection, find the disk. Exactly like you'd have to do with any given Linux distribution.
I think anyone with half a brain could understand that they're talking about using AVG from the network (remote scanning) and not using a computer which has AVG installed on it on a network.
It's a poorly written license, but any idiot would understand what it actually means.
Oh, but I see by your name that you were probably trolling. Blah. Here's some food for you.
That's really pretty amazing. I have contradictory anecdotal experience, though.
Realistically, most people don't generate enough data to fill a 60GB hard drive. People who rip their entire CD collection and put it on their computer may, but most non-technical people that I know don't do that.
Gamers are another demographic that may use lots and lots of hard drive space, as those games tend to take up multiple gigabytes each. If you never remove them, it would certainly add up. What other applications do this? How many people have a dozen word processing programs each with their own complete set of fonts on their computer? What applications are your immediate family members using that they can fill modern laptop hard drives up with?
It seems like that would be something you could easily extend.
Most of the web frameworks out there (CakePHP, Rails, Django) need extending in order to meet all of the requirements for anything but the most simple projects. Most of them are also fairly easy to extend, being object oriented.
Well, there are rumors that Sony paid off Warner to join the Blu-ray camp--it's likely that if everything was done "fairly" (What does fair even really mean, these days?) that HD-DVD could have been the winner.
The 80GB is mostly backwards compatible, but it uses software. Many PS2 games have bugs in this version, making it unsuitable for some people.
Disk space isn't really an issue for me, as I'd just run everything off of my file server. Besides, if I ever need more, I could just upgrade the hard drive.
Incidentally, there's also talk of removing the 80GB version from store shelves. Sony isn't committed to maintaining PS2 compatibility--I think it was mostly a hook to get early adopters to the platform.
For the past several generations, Nintendo has competed for the same market as other consoles--and they've done so much less effectively. They were the leader in the 8- and 16-bit generations because they out-competed, got a huge initial marketshare, and had inertia. Once they got some real competition, in part by some companies that didn't try to censor 3rd party developers, they just couldn't make it.
They realized this. The Wii doesn't target the hardcore gamer, so Nintendo was able to cut down the system specs. Instead, Nintendo used a controller which is much easier for most people (basically two buttons and waving it around) and simple games. They're targeting everyone who isn't a hardcore gamer, although they're drawing in a small amount of those, too. The market is much larger, though, than the market that Sony and Microsoft are vying for.
I know grandparents who play on (and own) a Wii. Parents whose children have long left the nest play Wii Sports. These are people who have never owned a console, and never would have expected to. Rather than competing in the same market that they've been in for years, Nintendo is going in a different direction, and that's how they've managed to beat out Sony and Microsoft.
For a long while, the PS3 was the cheapest device you could get that played Blu-ray. Sony has managed to keep it very much in the running by introducing the 40GB PS3 (dropping the cost by $100, I believe.) Lots of people who researched this kind of thing realized that the PS3 was the way to go if they wanted to invest in Blu-ray. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this helped boost PS3 sales. At the same time, Sony gets to count every PS3 as a Blu-ray player, even if it was bought without any intention of using it to watch movies. It was really win/win for them.
I do enjoy playing games, but I have very little interest in most of the games that have been released for the PS3. I'm also not that interested in Blu-ray. Nonetheless, I've been considering a PS3 simply for the media center abilities. It's only a tiny bit more expensive than a media center PC I could build myself, and it includes Blu-ray (in case I ever want to buy any) and gaming (in case I ever want to game.) Despite the bad rep early on, Sony really made a good move with the PS3. It's massive convergence, letting them capture markets that they never would have with the PS2.
The only issue I take with the PS3 is the lack of PS2 compatibility. I'm sure that most people just don't care, but it's a bit irritating to me--I'd rather do away with my PS2 in my entertainment center. If I buy a PS3 off the shelf now, I can't do that.
Most of the advantages of books that I can see: 1. Easier to read because of higher resolution, contrast, reflective vs. backlit display, higher quality typography, etc. 2. Don't depend on batteries or proximity to civilization. 3. Are a durable, physical good. 4. Have a re-sale market 5. Have an old-timey 'aesthetic' that some people enjoy. There's nothing technologically stopping us from ignoring number 1 today. e-paper is considered to be a perfectly viable substitute by most who have seen it. And while it still relies on energy to change the text, once the text is on the page, no energy is required to maintain it. Lighting and contrast becomes the biggest issue, but even then, it's not that bad.
I can see a future (medium distance) where you can buy 100 pages of e-paper bound like a book, with an interface that lets you load books onto it and display them as text on the pages. Flip through it, and when you reach the last page, turn it over and the next 100 pages will load up automatically.
I don't think you'll ever get rid of number 5--there are people even today who still prefer records.
2. Hasn't stopped ipod. 3. Hasn't stopped online music sales or online piracy. The biggest difference here is that songs are short and not necessarily listened to in any particular order. I have finished a book while out and about and wished that I had another that I could start, but it's pretty rare. I never think, "Man, I'd like to sit down and read chapter 3 of Good Omens." Music is a pretty different beast. I might want to carry around a thousand songs because I might be in the mood for different types of music at any given time.
I have, very rarely, read multiple books at once. Maybe other people do this more often, and I'm just not aware of it, but that's the only reason I can think of to want to carry around dozens of books at once on an e-reader.
For current copyright, it doesn't matter. Copyright means that I get to control distribution of my own work, period. We can argue all day about what's more profitable, but in the end, it doesn't matter. If the music publisher doesn't want anyone to get their work for free, that's their choice. It may be an honest, informed choice (meaning that they know that their profits may actually be reduced under this mindset) or it may not be. In fact, there's actually no way to prove that allowing downloads stimulates sales, or that after 3 years (say) of allowing downloads, the majority of people won't start downloading instead of buying.
I believe that the latter case is probably true. Some bands have gotten away with alternative music distribution, but I wonder how many people didn't support them largely because they were trying something new. If everyone started doing it, would people still support their favorites? Obviously, it's impossible to say.
Really, you should be using strong passwords and monitoring your logs. With a strong password, the chance of having a brute-force attack compromising your server is minimal, and anything which comes close should be seen in the logs long before it manages to succeed.
Can you explain this a little more? When most people talk about using keys, they're talking about public key authentication--that is, I toss my public key on the server in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and then, as long as I have my public key with me, I can log in. I can put that public key on any number of servers and do the same thing. If one of the servers becomes infected, it cannot log into the others with my key because my private key is not on any of them.
So you're saying if I make a backup of my CDs I'm breaking the law, or if I photocopy a page out of one of my books? These are covered under special exemptions to copyright law known as fair use. Fair use is an affirmative defense, meaning that the copyright holder can bring you to court, show that you have an unauthorized copy of their work, and then you explain how it got there. If the judge agrees that the copy was fair use, he will dismiss the case.
This website appears to suggest that mere possession of an unauthorized copy may cause you to be liable for copyright infringement:
Your possession of the unauthorized copy, no matter how brief, still constitutes an infringing act. If the copyright holder happens to catch you with unlawful copies of their works on your hard drive, deleting it won't make a lawsuit go away should they decide to take legal action. Now that said, copyright violation rulings are extremely subjective on the part of the judge. If your friend e-mailed you a copy just as the RIAA came barging in your door to search your computer, you probably wouldn't be found liable for that copy. But copyright law is pretty clear on what constitutes copyright violation, and the most common defense--fair use--hasn't been tested in the US regarding "just downloading."
Personally, if you said you were using C++ for server-side CGI, I'd think you were crazy!
I think one of the reasons that PHP has such a stigma associated with it is because there are a lot of really bad PHP programmers dumping out really bad code. Sure, it's possible to produce elegant PHP. I'm of the opinion, though, that PHP makes that difficult. There's a certain elegance to separating your code from your output (in this case, from the HTML you generate.) PHP doesn't make it easy to do that. For example, I think I've seen exactly one (out of many) open-source PHP projects which made use of templating. Most of them just output raw HTML (and lots of it) with PHP echo statements. That's just awful and unmaintainable.
There's very little wrong with PHP from a design perspective. It has crappy typing/casting, but that's a design decision. It has hacks like === (which wouldn't be necessary if it had better typing!) And its objects leave a lot to be desired, but then, object oriented programming isn't the end-all be-all, anyway. Other than that, I can't think of anything particularly egregious about the design of the language. It's primarily the way people use it that gives it such a bad name.
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How sure should you be? How much time should you spend researching prior art?
Not at all. I don't think there's anything wrong with using your position to push your agenda. And if you don't like hearing that agenda, then you don't have to listen.
Compare to not buying a product just because you disagree with a person's political views. That's kinda silly.
Remember that patents are supposed to be for specific implementations of the technology. Nowadays, the patent process seems to just be a quick rubber stamp, with any conflicts to be sorted out in the courts. Under this scenario, it's much harder and more expensive to get the patent invalidated, and companies can file for obvious patents, or for patents which are far too vague, and get protection that's hard to get around.
Because people have problems separating politics from other aspects of life?
During the 2004 elections, I knew some people who refused to buy Heinz ketchup, even though it was previously their favorite, due to the connection with John Kerry.
Changing your SSID can, in fact, help with security, in the proper context. It's true that just changing it doesn't really help, however if you're using WPA with a PSK, changing your SSID may well keep you safe from a rainbow table crack. Changing the admin password of the router helps a bit, but there exploits out there which can crack some of these passwords. I don't know of any exploits which do this, but I don't know of any wireless routers which reject logins attempts after too many failures, either. However, this mostly implies that the user has access to the network already, so it's probably not something to worry about. We want to keep them out entirely. Hiding? In Kismet, you press one button to reveal the hidden APs in the area. Hiding it pointless. Again, you're going to the other extreme. Hiding it isn't
There have been attacks on web sessions that go over http (not https), even when some parts of the session were protected using SSL. The idea is that sensitive information may be encrypted, but non-sensitive information will just go over http in for speed and ease of use. However if you can hijack the session through the non-encrypted requests, you can log in as the user without ever knowing their passwords, and then you might be able to do all sorts of nasty things.
The attack was famously performed against people using Gmail, but it could work against many websites.
Norton used to be really hot stuff. Their products were fantastic, and even as replacements for tools supplied by the OS (chkdisk and later scandisk, and defrag) they were worth the price of admission because they worked so much better. It was like night and day.
When they were bought by Symantec, they maintained their quality for a while, but eventually, they just didn't work. Antivirus was really the last utility to fall, but even it finally did. I used to wholeheartedly recommend Norton (and later, Symantec's Norton line) products to anyone who ran Microsoft OSs. Now, my recommendation is unquestionably to uninstall it, download the full removal tool, and run that, too.
Microsoft's own website says that Vista requires 15GB to install. The authors probably confused requirements to install (which includes temporary files automatically deleted post-installation) and final installation size.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905075.aspx
I like the term Operating Environment, but it's not used very much.
An ideal microkernel wouldn't provide any services other than the ability to load modules for the services you actually want. It has nothing to do with the size, other than the fact that a full kernel would be much larger than a micro kernel from similar codebases.
It's quite possible to have a microkernel architecture with nothing loaded which is larger than a monolithic kernel. Comparing such kernels would yield quite a bit of information on architectural differences, both in the design of the kernel, and for the hardware on which they are run.
I never have to search for my install disk to install software that I didn't initially want in Ubuntu. Just sayin'. Microsoft could do the same sort of thing--download the component you wanted, or, if you don't have a network connection, find the disk. Exactly like you'd have to do with any given Linux distribution.
I think anyone with half a brain could understand that they're talking about using AVG from the network (remote scanning) and not using a computer which has AVG installed on it on a network.
It's a poorly written license, but any idiot would understand what it actually means.
Oh, but I see by your name that you were probably trolling. Blah. Here's some food for you.
That's really pretty amazing. I have contradictory anecdotal experience, though.
Realistically, most people don't generate enough data to fill a 60GB hard drive. People who rip their entire CD collection and put it on their computer may, but most non-technical people that I know don't do that.
Gamers are another demographic that may use lots and lots of hard drive space, as those games tend to take up multiple gigabytes each. If you never remove them, it would certainly add up. What other applications do this? How many people have a dozen word processing programs each with their own complete set of fonts on their computer? What applications are your immediate family members using that they can fill modern laptop hard drives up with?
The summary sucked, but this is clearly about Power over Ethernet, for which that 5% can be quite significant.
It seems like that would be something you could easily extend.
Most of the web frameworks out there (CakePHP, Rails, Django) need extending in order to meet all of the requirements for anything but the most simple projects. Most of them are also fairly easy to extend, being object oriented.
Well, there are rumors that Sony paid off Warner to join the Blu-ray camp--it's likely that if everything was done "fairly" (What does fair even really mean, these days?) that HD-DVD could have been the winner.
The 80GB is mostly backwards compatible, but it uses software. Many PS2 games have bugs in this version, making it unsuitable for some people.
Disk space isn't really an issue for me, as I'd just run everything off of my file server. Besides, if I ever need more, I could just upgrade the hard drive.
Incidentally, there's also talk of removing the 80GB version from store shelves. Sony isn't committed to maintaining PS2 compatibility--I think it was mostly a hook to get early adopters to the platform.
For the past several generations, Nintendo has competed for the same market as other consoles--and they've done so much less effectively. They were the leader in the 8- and 16-bit generations because they out-competed, got a huge initial marketshare, and had inertia. Once they got some real competition, in part by some companies that didn't try to censor 3rd party developers, they just couldn't make it.
They realized this. The Wii doesn't target the hardcore gamer, so Nintendo was able to cut down the system specs. Instead, Nintendo used a controller which is much easier for most people (basically two buttons and waving it around) and simple games. They're targeting everyone who isn't a hardcore gamer, although they're drawing in a small amount of those, too. The market is much larger, though, than the market that Sony and Microsoft are vying for.
I know grandparents who play on (and own) a Wii. Parents whose children have long left the nest play Wii Sports. These are people who have never owned a console, and never would have expected to. Rather than competing in the same market that they've been in for years, Nintendo is going in a different direction, and that's how they've managed to beat out Sony and Microsoft.
It's almost not even fair to compare the systems.
For a long while, the PS3 was the cheapest device you could get that played Blu-ray. Sony has managed to keep it very much in the running by introducing the 40GB PS3 (dropping the cost by $100, I believe.) Lots of people who researched this kind of thing realized that the PS3 was the way to go if they wanted to invest in Blu-ray. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this helped boost PS3 sales. At the same time, Sony gets to count every PS3 as a Blu-ray player, even if it was bought without any intention of using it to watch movies. It was really win/win for them.
I do enjoy playing games, but I have very little interest in most of the games that have been released for the PS3. I'm also not that interested in Blu-ray. Nonetheless, I've been considering a PS3 simply for the media center abilities. It's only a tiny bit more expensive than a media center PC I could build myself, and it includes Blu-ray (in case I ever want to buy any) and gaming (in case I ever want to game.) Despite the bad rep early on, Sony really made a good move with the PS3. It's massive convergence, letting them capture markets that they never would have with the PS2.
The only issue I take with the PS3 is the lack of PS2 compatibility. I'm sure that most people just don't care, but it's a bit irritating to me--I'd rather do away with my PS2 in my entertainment center. If I buy a PS3 off the shelf now, I can't do that.
1. Easier to read because of higher resolution, contrast, reflective vs. backlit display, higher quality typography, etc.
2. Don't depend on batteries or proximity to civilization.
3. Are a durable, physical good.
4. Have a re-sale market
5. Have an old-timey 'aesthetic' that some people enjoy. There's nothing technologically stopping us from ignoring number 1 today. e-paper is considered to be a perfectly viable substitute by most who have seen it. And while it still relies on energy to change the text, once the text is on the page, no energy is required to maintain it. Lighting and contrast becomes the biggest issue, but even then, it's not that bad.
I can see a future (medium distance) where you can buy 100 pages of e-paper bound like a book, with an interface that lets you load books onto it and display them as text on the pages. Flip through it, and when you reach the last page, turn it over and the next 100 pages will load up automatically.
I don't think you'll ever get rid of number 5--there are people even today who still prefer records. 2. Hasn't stopped ipod.
3. Hasn't stopped online music sales or online piracy. The biggest difference here is that songs are short and not necessarily listened to in any particular order. I have finished a book while out and about and wished that I had another that I could start, but it's pretty rare. I never think, "Man, I'd like to sit down and read chapter 3 of Good Omens." Music is a pretty different beast. I might want to carry around a thousand songs because I might be in the mood for different types of music at any given time.
I have, very rarely, read multiple books at once. Maybe other people do this more often, and I'm just not aware of it, but that's the only reason I can think of to want to carry around dozens of books at once on an e-reader.
For current copyright, it doesn't matter. Copyright means that I get to control distribution of my own work, period. We can argue all day about what's more profitable, but in the end, it doesn't matter. If the music publisher doesn't want anyone to get their work for free, that's their choice. It may be an honest, informed choice (meaning that they know that their profits may actually be reduced under this mindset) or it may not be. In fact, there's actually no way to prove that allowing downloads stimulates sales, or that after 3 years (say) of allowing downloads, the majority of people won't start downloading instead of buying.
I believe that the latter case is probably true. Some bands have gotten away with alternative music distribution, but I wonder how many people didn't support them largely because they were trying something new. If everyone started doing it, would people still support their favorites? Obviously, it's impossible to say.
Really, you should be using strong passwords and monitoring your logs. With a strong password, the chance of having a brute-force attack compromising your server is minimal, and anything which comes close should be seen in the logs long before it manages to succeed.
Can you explain this a little more? When most people talk about using keys, they're talking about public key authentication--that is, I toss my public key on the server in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and then, as long as I have my public key with me, I can log in. I can put that public key on any number of servers and do the same thing. If one of the servers becomes infected, it cannot log into the others with my key because my private key is not on any of them.
This website appears to suggest that mere possession of an unauthorized copy may cause you to be liable for copyright infringement: Your possession of the unauthorized copy, no matter how brief, still constitutes an infringing act. If the copyright holder happens to catch you with unlawful copies of their works on your hard drive, deleting it won't make a lawsuit go away should they decide to take legal action. Now that said, copyright violation rulings are extremely subjective on the part of the judge. If your friend e-mailed you a copy just as the RIAA came barging in your door to search your computer, you probably wouldn't be found liable for that copy. But copyright law is pretty clear on what constitutes copyright violation, and the most common defense--fair use--hasn't been tested in the US regarding "just downloading."
Personally, if you said you were using C++ for server-side CGI, I'd think you were crazy!
I think one of the reasons that PHP has such a stigma associated with it is because there are a lot of really bad PHP programmers dumping out really bad code. Sure, it's possible to produce elegant PHP. I'm of the opinion, though, that PHP makes that difficult. There's a certain elegance to separating your code from your output (in this case, from the HTML you generate.) PHP doesn't make it easy to do that. For example, I think I've seen exactly one (out of many) open-source PHP projects which made use of templating. Most of them just output raw HTML (and lots of it) with PHP echo statements. That's just awful and unmaintainable.
There's very little wrong with PHP from a design perspective. It has crappy typing/casting, but that's a design decision. It has hacks like === (which wouldn't be necessary if it had better typing!) And its objects leave a lot to be desired, but then, object oriented programming isn't the end-all be-all, anyway. Other than that, I can't think of anything particularly egregious about the design of the language. It's primarily the way people use it that gives it such a bad name.