You are correct, it would be a disaster for the person infected...however, I, as the hypothetical neighbor on your cable segment, don't have to care at all about your misfortune, as you aren't spewing gigabytes of virus-laden packets over the Internet. That was the point made in the article. Getting a virus is always going to suck for the user. With Linux, it doesn't have to suck for the rest of the world, too.
Read more carefully....specifically, the part about *executing* the attachment. Reading email attachments is trivial. Executing them is not. That is the point.
You are correct, however, the current proposals do not envision using a single nanotube, or even a nanotube rope. Rather, they intend to use a nonetube composite material, hence the 1m x 0.3m dimensions of the elevator "cable." The site formerly known as Highlift Systems is apparantly the ones behind the proposal that's being discussed, and their site has some interesting info on it. They describe the composite material as "..be[ing] composed of individual fibers 10 microns in diameter lying side-by-side. The fibers will be interconnected by tape sandwiches spaced every 10 cm along the length of the ribbon." Amusingly, they expect Japanese car manufacturers to invent the materials for them in the very near future.
I think his point still holds...if Burst.com wins the case, won't Microsoft become liable for the hundreds of hours Burst.com's legal team spent sorting printouts of emails with oven mitts?
"[Burst] found lawyers willing to take the case on contingency in exchange for a healthy chunk of any damage award. The lawyers are assuming all the financial risk, but they also have a chance to earn a payday worth hundreds of millions of dollars..."
You are exactly right, usually the company with the most money wins, as legal fees are hugely expensive. This seems to be kind of a special case; with only two employees, I bet they don't really need any net income to keep the company afloat, and they managed to find (good) lawyers willing to work on a contingency basis. This also says good things about their case, as the lawyers are risking literally millions in fees they could have accrued on the outcome of the trial. It will be amusing to see the outcome of this, as the court could order Microsoft to remove the bursting functionality from Windows Media Player, which would render it worthless for streaming video, in addition to a hefty fine.
Re:Terrible color and they often don't fit.
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I don't know when the last time you bought a compact flourescent light is, but here in the year 2003 I know for sure that 2 of your 3 problems are solved.
1. They often don't fit in a light fixture.
I recently bought some GE compact flourescent bulbs for our kitchen, which were $8 for two "60W" bulbs. They are *exactly* the same size as the incadescents they are replacing, including the base, which is only ~1" in diameter, only draw 15W, and are ~15% brighter than a 60W incandescent.
3. They make everyone look slightly green.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Our compact flourescent lights have a much more pleasing spectrum than the yellow incandescents, and are very close to the full-spectrum lights we use around the house.
I don't use X10, and so can't answer to that, but please don't post outdated nonsense.
This quote from the article makes me wonder whether we're reading too much into it. This is someone who replaced face to face communication with his employees. That's not a problem with technology: that's him being irrespsonsible.
FOOL!! Don't you realize that it is impossible for him to be responsible for his own actions?! No one can exert any control over their own lives! We all dance to the music played by forces beyond our control! Have you already forgotten that fast food makes people fat by forcing them to overeat? Personal responsibility is a myth perpetuated by those who want to limit your personal litigation, er, freedom!
...I would expect to no longer need to exercise dictatorial control after the bylaws have been initially established...new directors will be elected by the community...
and so on. This document implies that he himself could be removed from the board of directors once it is run completely by the community, although I doubt that would happen.
Those people who use radar cheats (such as Excalubur or Odin's Eye) have to be very careful, because Mythic actively trolls for them. If you are out PvE'ing (killing 'monsters' for experience), they will have invisible, high level monsters that show up as some highly desirable kill (either for experience or good item drops). If you run around chasing an invisible monster that noone else can see or even tell exists, it's a pretty good bet that you are going to get your ass banned. They do the same thing with invisible enemy players. If you chase around a person (or group) that normal people can't see, it tends to incur the wrath of CSR's. From what I'm told, this works fairly well at keeping the population of cheaters down.
The first thing that occured to me is that EVERYWHERE requires me to give them the last four digits of my SSN; virtually every utility, etc. My school even uses our SSN's as ID numbers and prints them on our doorcard/ID's (not that THOSE ever get lost). I've always assumed that anyone who harbors any malicious feelings towards me could secure the last 4 digits without any significant effort, so I derive a small amount of complacency by assuming that the rest of the number should be unknown. This kind of system pretty much makes that useless.
Does the Half-Life engine support more than one keyboard or more than one mouse on one machine? Does it support split-screen?
This brings up an excellent point. I would have to say that there is nothing more obnoxious in the console world than split screen gaming. I mean, who the hell wants to play a FPS game when you can see everything your opponents are doing? I have 6 computers in the house, at least 3 of which make decent game machines, and I would never, ever want to play Half-Life in split screen mode on one of them. One of them is just for lending to visitors. A half-way decent game machine is as cheap as $400, and is a normal computer for the rest of the family at other times.
I don't pay much attention to consoles, but it looks like they are just starting to get the multiplayer features that PC's have had since forever. The idea of a 16-player FPS game involving 16 different machines is a novelty in the console arena, yet every day I play games with twice to fifty times that number of people in them.
On a side note, concerning controllers, what a joke. I keep hoping that Microsoft will release a FPS that is multiplayer across platforms so I can beat the pants off of some kid playing with his thumbs. I can pick a flagrunner out of the air with a headshot at 2000m in Tribes/Tribes2, I'd like to see someone do that with a thumbpad.
Although it sounds like a good idea, that would make me even *more* paranoid...after all, which subscribers are you going to target for surveillance (assuming you don't have the resources to monitor everyone), the regular people, or those who opted for a "high-privacy" connection? After all, they *must* have something to hide!
What we really need is a better anonymizing service, or perhaps a distributed proxy system. When I use our university's internet connection, I set up an IPSEC tunnel between my notebook and my home network, as I don't want the IT people logging my browsing and watching for subversive sites (2600.com, etc.). It would be great if a tool was available to do this on a mass scale. Something like Freenet, but for short-term web caching instead. Encrypted communication between hosts with requests spread over a large number of peers, squid-esque caching, 'bogus' packets to defeat traffic analysis...feel free to let me know if such a beast exists:)
From the article,..."Granite Peak" initiative, which limits the number of driver revisions to one every six months, making the launch of each new chipset even more significant.
So, what exactly does this mean? If I have a problem with Intel's drivers that, say, prevents my machine from booting (not that THAT has ever happened) I have to wait 6 months for the next revision? I don't understand what driver revision schedules have to do with product release cycles.
Also from the article: "...[people buying] the latest GeForce card near the end of this year, when six months later it won't work [fit] inside a new PC?"
This is a non-issue for most people, I think. Those people who buy new video cards every six months (you know who you are) aren't really going to balk at replacing motherboard, CPU, and video card all at the same time, if it yields a 25% performance improvement (or more). At the other end of the scale are people who upgrade video cards by buying a new Dell (or whatever), for whom this is also not an issue. Those of us in the middle just won't buy a new motherboard/CPU until we can afford to replace the whole shebang anyway. Once we do, we will most likely build a whole new machine.
Anyway, it's not like nVidia and ATI are going to stop making AGP cards; I'm sure that both connections will be supported. If you look around, you can still get PCI versions of most cards on the market (shudder).
It makes no difference to the user that your page is coded to standards if he/she can't view it. Telling them they need a different browser isn't the answer either.
Clearly you use IE as your default browser. As an avid user of non-Microsoft browsers (Phoenix, in my case) it is almost a daily occurence that some site blocks me based on my user-agent ID and tells me to go download IE. I'm sure you have also seen "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" bottons before, too. Your argument is specious.
I'd have to strongly advise against Turbo Tax's online service. My fiancee has been using their web service the last couple years (two, at least), and last year they apparantly never filed her return.
She completed her return electronically, made a printout, and returned returned the signature sheet, but then never got a check from the IRS. It was only a couple bucks, and we forgot about it. Then, her FAFSA application got audited in September. We submitted all the additional information the school & government requested, but kept getting requests for more info, until we actually requested a transcript of her 2001 tax return from the IRS, and they informed us that they did not have one on file. This has seriously screwed us financially, as we now have to find a way to cover $9,000 worth of tuition this year.
Spend $50 and file with a real, wetware tax preparer.
Just for kicks, I looked up two Seagate hard drives on Pricewatch....I selected the ST336938LW (Ultra160) and ST340016A (ATA100), as both are 40 gig (well, 37 for the SCSI one) with comparable features (~9 ms access times, 7200 RPM). The priced out at $218 for SCSI and $80 for the ATA drive. I can't believe that the controller card costs $140, especially given that I could buy an adapter card for $100 (and still let the add-on card maker make a profit). What exactly is the difference here? It seems like the SCSI drive would have higher quality, although I can't seem to find MTBF numbers for the drives. Anyone who is more knowledgable want to expand on this?
You didn't read the press release, did you? Yes, the article submission is misleading, but what this is is a DVD player with networking capabilities, so that it can not only play content from DVD's, but also from computers on your network. Pretty useful, actually. This means I don't need to put another computer in the living room in order to play my DivX movies or mp3's. Also note that it does not come with wi-fi installed; rather, it has a PCMCIA slot with a notwork card in it, and you can buy an 802.11B PCMICA card to swap it with.
I would suspect this is because Hotmail is the devil. I've had my Hotmail account for years, and used it pretty much as a disposable account, and used my domain-based email address for everything else. I use Sneakemail to keep spam out of my domain email, and I had never recieved a single piece of spam at that address, EVER (4+ years). Then, one fateful day, I decided the best way to get some archived Hotmail messages to my domain email client was to forward them (don't ask why, I was tired), and forgot to use a Sneakemail address, and within 20 minutes I started getting spam at my domain email. Hotmail feels perfectly free to log and sell outgoing email addresses. Some good Evolution filters get rid of most of it, but I loathe Hotmail forever.
I suggest keeping tabs on LWN's weekly kernel page for good explanations of what's going on...you can also read Kernel Traffic, which, although it is usually fairly technical, tends to give you the gist of what is going on in the world of the kernel devs. Good luck-
Doing dishes?? Crack password? Wi-Fi has taught us that most people can't be bothered to change default passwords. I have every expectation spending some fun weekends with nmap, turning on air conditioning in houses with subzero weather and cranking the heat up in desert communities. I have not the slightest intention of being responsible with this, nor will I ever own one of these!:)
How is this +2, Informative? The article clearly states that the standard music tracks are also protected by DRM and are unplayable in computers, which also has been shown to mean that they don't work in any decent CD player. The point of this format is that Sony is "graciously" "allowing" people with computers to listed to their music on both their boombox AND their computer (for only an additional $1.64).
Wow, you can afford to stream movies during a plane flight? I assume that you are flying in your own private jet, not in a commerical airliner, where, even if you could get good data rates over the AirPhone-type service, you'd be paying a dollar a minute or more for airtime. Is "Mr. Show" really worth $120 for a single viewing? [/sarcasm]
Movielink is all about ONLINE distribution of movies. Noone is preventing Macs from playing DVD's. You, as a Mac owner, should be aware of this.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, it would be a disaster for the person infected...however, I, as the hypothetical neighbor on your cable segment, don't have to care at all about your misfortune, as you aren't spewing gigabytes of virus-laden packets over the Internet. That was the point made in the article. Getting a virus is always going to suck for the user. With Linux, it doesn't have to suck for the rest of the world, too.
Read more carefully....specifically, the part about *executing* the attachment. Reading email attachments is trivial. Executing them is not. That is the point.
You are correct, however, the current proposals do not envision using a single nanotube, or even a nanotube rope. Rather, they intend to use a nonetube composite material, hence the 1m x 0.3m dimensions of the elevator "cable." The site formerly known as Highlift Systems is apparantly the ones behind the proposal that's being discussed, and their site has some interesting info on it. They describe the composite material as "..be[ing] composed of individual fibers 10 microns in diameter lying side-by-side. The fibers will be interconnected by tape sandwiches spaced every 10 cm along the length of the ribbon." Amusingly, they expect Japanese car manufacturers to invent the materials for them in the very near future.
I think his point still holds...if Burst.com wins the case, won't Microsoft become liable for the hundreds of hours Burst.com's legal team spent sorting printouts of emails with oven mitts?
From the article,
"[Burst] found lawyers willing to take the case on contingency in exchange for a healthy chunk of any damage award. The lawyers are assuming all the financial risk, but they also have a chance to earn a payday worth hundreds of millions of dollars..."
You are exactly right, usually the company with the most money wins, as legal fees are hugely expensive. This seems to be kind of a special case; with only two employees, I bet they don't really need any net income to keep the company afloat, and they managed to find (good) lawyers willing to work on a contingency basis. This also says good things about their case, as the lawyers are risking literally millions in fees they could have accrued on the outcome of the trial. It will be amusing to see the outcome of this, as the court could order Microsoft to remove the bursting functionality from Windows Media Player, which would render it worthless for streaming video, in addition to a hefty fine.
I don't know when the last time you bought a compact flourescent light is, but here in the year 2003 I know for sure that 2 of your 3 problems are solved.
1. They often don't fit in a light fixture.
I recently bought some GE compact flourescent bulbs for our kitchen, which were $8 for two "60W" bulbs. They are *exactly* the same size as the incadescents they are replacing, including the base, which is only ~1" in diameter, only draw 15W, and are ~15% brighter than a 60W incandescent.
3. They make everyone look slightly green.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Our compact flourescent lights have a much more pleasing spectrum than the yellow incandescents, and are very close to the full-spectrum lights we use around the house.
I don't use X10, and so can't answer to that, but please don't post outdated nonsense.
This quote from the article makes me wonder whether we're reading too much into it. This is someone who replaced face to face communication with his employees. That's not a problem with technology: that's him being irrespsonsible.
FOOL!! Don't you realize that it is impossible for him to be responsible for his own actions?! No one can exert any control over their own lives! We all dance to the music played by forces beyond our control! Have you already forgotten that fast food makes people fat by forcing them to overeat? Personal responsibility is a myth perpetuated by those who want to limit your personal litigation, er, freedom!
and so on. This document implies that he himself could be removed from the board of directors once it is run completely by the community, although I doubt that would happen.
Hoping to avoid getting modded down, but....
:)
I havn't seen that Latin joke since my high school Latin class many years ago. Props to you
Those people who use radar cheats (such as Excalubur or Odin's Eye) have to be very careful, because Mythic actively trolls for them. If you are out PvE'ing (killing 'monsters' for experience), they will have invisible, high level monsters that show up as some highly desirable kill (either for experience or good item drops). If you run around chasing an invisible monster that noone else can see or even tell exists, it's a pretty good bet that you are going to get your ass banned. They do the same thing with invisible enemy players. If you chase around a person (or group) that normal people can't see, it tends to incur the wrath of CSR's. From what I'm told, this works fairly well at keeping the population of cheaters down.
The first thing that occured to me is that EVERYWHERE requires me to give them the last four digits of my SSN; virtually every utility, etc. My school even uses our SSN's as ID numbers and prints them on our doorcard/ID's (not that THOSE ever get lost). I've always assumed that anyone who harbors any malicious feelings towards me could secure the last 4 digits without any significant effort, so I derive a small amount of complacency by assuming that the rest of the number should be unknown. This kind of system pretty much makes that useless.
Does the Half-Life engine support more than one keyboard or more than one mouse on one machine? Does it support split-screen?
:)
This brings up an excellent point. I would have to say that there is nothing more obnoxious in the console world than split screen gaming. I mean, who the hell wants to play a FPS game when you can see everything your opponents are doing? I have 6 computers in the house, at least 3 of which make decent game machines, and I would never, ever want to play Half-Life in split screen mode on one of them. One of them is just for lending to visitors. A half-way decent game machine is as cheap as $400, and is a normal computer for the rest of the family at other times.
I don't pay much attention to consoles, but it looks like they are just starting to get the multiplayer features that PC's have had since forever. The idea of a 16-player FPS game involving 16 different machines is a novelty in the console arena, yet every day I play games with twice to fifty times that number of people in them.
On a side note, concerning controllers, what a joke. I keep hoping that Microsoft will release a FPS that is multiplayer across platforms so I can beat the pants off of some kid playing with his thumbs. I can pick a flagrunner out of the air with a headshot at 2000m in Tribes/Tribes2, I'd like to see someone do that with a thumbpad.
Anyway, enough ranting, back to the games
Although it sounds like a good idea, that would make me even *more* paranoid...after all, which subscribers are you going to target for surveillance (assuming you don't have the resources to monitor everyone), the regular people, or those who opted for a "high-privacy" connection? After all, they *must* have something to hide!
:)
What we really need is a better anonymizing service, or perhaps a distributed proxy system. When I use our university's internet connection, I set up an IPSEC tunnel between my notebook and my home network, as I don't want the IT people logging my browsing and watching for subversive sites (2600.com, etc.). It would be great if a tool was available to do this on a mass scale. Something like Freenet, but for short-term web caching instead. Encrypted communication between hosts with requests spread over a large number of peers, squid-esque caching, 'bogus' packets to defeat traffic analysis...feel free to let me know if such a beast exists
From the article, ..."Granite Peak" initiative, which limits the number of driver revisions to one every six months, making the launch of each new chipset even more significant.
So, what exactly does this mean? If I have a problem with Intel's drivers that, say, prevents my machine from booting (not that THAT has ever happened) I have to wait 6 months for the next revision? I don't understand what driver revision schedules have to do with product release cycles.
Also from the article: "...[people buying] the latest GeForce card near the end of this year, when six months later it won't work [fit] inside a new PC?"
This is a non-issue for most people, I think. Those people who buy new video cards every six months (you know who you are) aren't really going to balk at replacing motherboard, CPU, and video card all at the same time, if it yields a 25% performance improvement (or more). At the other end of the scale are people who upgrade video cards by buying a new Dell (or whatever), for whom this is also not an issue. Those of us in the middle just won't buy a new motherboard/CPU until we can afford to replace the whole shebang anyway. Once we do, we will most likely build a whole new machine.
Anyway, it's not like nVidia and ATI are going to stop making AGP cards; I'm sure that both connections will be supported. If you look around, you can still get PCI versions of most cards on the market (shudder).
It makes no difference to the user that your page is coded to standards if he/she can't view it. Telling them they need a different browser isn't the answer either.
Clearly you use IE as your default browser. As an avid user of non-Microsoft browsers (Phoenix, in my case) it is almost a daily occurence that some site blocks me based on my user-agent ID and tells me to go download IE. I'm sure you have also seen "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" bottons before, too. Your argument is specious.
I'd have to strongly advise against Turbo Tax's online service. My fiancee has been using their web service the last couple years (two, at least), and last year they apparantly never filed her return.
She completed her return electronically, made a printout, and returned returned the signature sheet, but then never got a check from the IRS. It was only a couple bucks, and we forgot about it. Then, her FAFSA application got audited in September. We submitted all the additional information the school & government requested, but kept getting requests for more info, until we actually requested a transcript of her 2001 tax return from the IRS, and they informed us that they did not have one on file. This has seriously screwed us financially, as we now have to find a way to cover $9,000 worth of tuition this year.
Spend $50 and file with a real, wetware tax preparer.
Just for kicks, I looked up two Seagate hard drives on Pricewatch....I selected the ST336938LW (Ultra160) and ST340016A (ATA100), as both are 40 gig (well, 37 for the SCSI one) with comparable features (~9 ms access times, 7200 RPM). The priced out at $218 for SCSI and $80 for the ATA drive. I can't believe that the controller card costs $140, especially given that I could buy an adapter card for $100 (and still let the add-on card maker make a profit). What exactly is the difference here? It seems like the SCSI drive would have higher quality, although I can't seem to find MTBF numbers for the drives. Anyone who is more knowledgable want to expand on this?
You didn't read the press release, did you? Yes, the article submission is misleading, but what this is is a DVD player with networking capabilities, so that it can not only play content from DVD's, but also from computers on your network. Pretty useful, actually. This means I don't need to put another computer in the living room in order to play my DivX movies or mp3's. Also note that it does not come with wi-fi installed; rather, it has a PCMCIA slot with a notwork card in it, and you can buy an 802.11B PCMICA card to swap it with.
I would suspect this is because Hotmail is the devil. I've had my Hotmail account for years, and used it pretty much as a disposable account, and used my domain-based email address for everything else. I use Sneakemail to keep spam out of my domain email, and I had never recieved a single piece of spam at that address, EVER (4+ years). Then, one fateful day, I decided the best way to get some archived Hotmail messages to my domain email client was to forward them (don't ask why, I was tired), and forgot to use a Sneakemail address, and within 20 minutes I started getting spam at my domain email. Hotmail feels perfectly free to log and sell outgoing email addresses. Some good Evolution filters get rid of most of it, but I loathe Hotmail forever.
Somehow, I suspect that your post would be much more useful if you actually mentioned who your providers are :)
I suggest keeping tabs on LWN's weekly kernel page for good explanations of what's going on...you can also read Kernel Traffic, which, although it is usually fairly technical, tends to give you the gist of what is going on in the world of the kernel devs. Good luck-
Now, I'm no expert on legacy computers, but a machine with 32KW of core sounds dangerous...suddenly my 80W Athlon looks puny!
Doing dishes?? Crack password? Wi-Fi has taught us that most people can't be bothered to change default passwords. I have every expectation spending some fun weekends with nmap, turning on air conditioning in houses with subzero weather and cranking the heat up in desert communities. I have not the slightest intention of being responsible with this, nor will I ever own one of these! :)
How is this +2, Informative? The article clearly states that the standard music tracks are also protected by DRM and are unplayable in computers, which also has been shown to mean that they don't work in any decent CD player. The point of this format is that Sony is "graciously" "allowing" people with computers to listed to their music on both their boombox AND their computer (for only an additional $1.64).
Wow, you can afford to stream movies during a plane flight? I assume that you are flying in your own private jet, not in a commerical airliner, where, even if you could get good data rates over the AirPhone-type service, you'd be paying a dollar a minute or more for airtime. Is "Mr. Show" really worth $120 for a single viewing? [/sarcasm]
Movielink is all about ONLINE distribution of movies. Noone is preventing Macs from playing DVD's. You, as a Mac owner, should be aware of this.