-- Someone who speaks three languages is trilingual. Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual. Someone who only speaks one language is "a typical American".
The summary doesn't claim that they are anything new. What's "new" is the fact that this is the first time these have been installed on our side of the pond.
The $75,000 system has been installed across the Netherlands, and have spread to London and Belfast, but Victoria will be the first North American city to try them out."
Granted, the summary specifically mentions that they have been installed in London, after mentioning that they have been "installed across the Netherlands" -- leading people to assume that London is the ONLY UK city they've been installed in.
This could be a simple omission, or it could be an artifact of a USian-centric viewpoint. After all, according to Google Maps London and Reading are only 42.4 miles (~68 km) apart. By our standards, that makes Reading a suburb of London.... and it's common practice to refer to an entire metropolitan area (a city and all of its suburbs) under the name of the main city. So... following that practice, Reading is part of London.
OS vulnerabilities are the BETTER fruit, because they directly lead to being able to crash or pwn the system, which is why they've been focused on.
All of the easier OS vulnerabilities have been patched, and OS vulnerabilities are becoming harder and harder to find. So now, the bad guys are going back to looking at application vulnerabilities that they've been ignoring to see if they can use them to do what they want.
Note that the text I mentioned about Windows 2000 is also absent, despite being on an actual dead-tree copy of the EULA in a drawer in my office.
This page says that a license for XP can be downgraded to any "previous version" of Windows XP, where "previous version" was defined as XP, 2000, NT... But that later, downgrade rights were also extended to 95 and 98.... but Win ME and XP home were NEVER OSes that you were allowed to downgrade to from XP Pro.
The license for XP PRO included a clause specifically stating that you could use it for a copy of 2K PRO, and only that OS. No other M$ licence that I recall reading included a similar clause.
I emphasized the above phrase because I'm willing to grant that given it's been a while since I had cause to peruse a M$ license agreement, I may not be remembering something I did in fact read.
My point was that they can afford to be able to occasionally sell CDs at $6-$7 BECAUSE they buy direct from the label and sell direct to you.
They have no brick and mortar retail outlets to support. There are no middlemen between them and the labels they buy from.
The fact that the proposed pricing model postulated a $10 retail price at brick and mortar retail chains is not invalidated by the above sale price as you have suggested.
Go to your music collection, and pull out a handful of cds that you KNOW, for absolute certainty, that you purchsed through BMG. Now, look at the label side of the CD. You should see text along these lines: "Manufactured in USA for BMG Direct Marketing, INC" This text, and/or the BMG logo should also be on either the CD sleeve or the CD insert, if not both.
BMG is not a retail outlet.
BMG is a wholesaler, or to use an actual quote from the post you're responding to, "a first-level middleman". They buy direct from the record label and sell direct to you, the end user. Their actual cost to buy the discs is going to be slightly higher than the $2.50 listed, but just because they have to amortize the costs of custom silkscreens for the CDs and custom printing for the sleeves. Amortized across even 1000 CDs, we're only talking a per-disc cost of a few cents. Let's be generous and call it a total cost to BMG (or Columbia House) of $2.60.
Now, every time you purchase from BMG, or Columbia House, they charge you a "Shipping and Handling" fee that is significantly higher than the cost of postage. The "Handling" part of that fee covers somebody going into the warehouse, finding the CDs you ordered, and boxing them up to go out the door. (Actually, the "handling" fee is generally significantly more than the actual handling costs, but that's beside the point.) This is something that would be normally included in the overhead of a wholesaler.
We also have to account for the monthly mailing that you get. Let's assume that they average only selling one CD per mailing that they put out the door. Tack on 40 cents for postage, and another 25 (I'm being generous. High volume web printing is CHEAP) for the cost of acutally printing the mailing.
We're now up to $3.25 for their cost, and on the "Discount" discs, you're paying $6 plus "Handling". So they're still making good money on the discount discs, and they're making a killing on the ones you're buying at full price.
Its a little early to call the Nintendo DS a failure, especially when it is outselling the PSP in Japan. Why does everyone want Nintendo to fail so badly?
Since they are the only console manufacturer still around that managed to survive the video game crash of 84, they ended up with the same kind of near monopoly that Microsoft has in the PC world, and people resented (and still resent) them for it.
Sony's gone quite a way to cutting into that near-monopoly, and Microsoft's catching up... (Personally, I like the Xbox a lot more that I like the GC) But I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever completely overcome the stigma...
Sure, but once your laptop has GPS, what is to stop your boss requiring location-reporting spyware to be installed as a condition for connecting to the corporate network?
Actually, I can see this as a prime reason to adopt the technology....
If a user has access to sensitive material stored on network fileservers, the GPS could be used to make sure that the laptop was actually IN a secured area before allowing its user access. It'd be just one more added layer of security.
If you don't want to access the corporate network, you don't have to have the GPS reporting application running.
That having been said, if it's a company-owned computer, then the company is well within its rights to demand that such an application is always active when the computer is in use.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, maybe for the same reason that This guy wrote a webserver using Postscript.
BTW: The latest Epsons print directly onto coated CD/DVDs with no sticky label and no stomper.
That's right, they do.... with a water soluable ink.
Take a wet sponge to the printed disk, and the image gets all sorts of messed up.
With these disks (and with thermal transfer printers) you don't have that problem.
I've been eyeing a few different thermal transfer units, including a few that'll do full color. Maybe I'll wait a while to see what these drives will cost, and more importantly, the cost of the media.
Blu-Ray, backed by companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Philips and Matsushita will require the codec to be used in playback equipment. The rival HD DVD format, backed by NEC and Toshiba, has already endorsed the VC-1 codec in its own specification.
"We've been committed to adding advanced codecs to enrich the Blu-ray Disc format," said Maureen Weber, general manager of HP's optical storage solutions business and a member of the Blu-Ray group, in a statement. "We want to offer content providers a variety of compression codecs to suit their various needs."
MANUFACTURERS of Blu-Ray PLAYERS are being required to support the ENTIRE collection of codecs that they specify (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, etc) so that a CONTENT PROVIDER (read: the company making the discs) CAN CHOOSE which codec to use.
This means that if Paramount Pictures decides that they're going to exclusively use the VC-1 codec when transferring their movie catalogue to the Blu-Ray format, then that's it. You're not going to play ANY of their movies on a linux (let alone a Solaris, Irix, or MacOS) box without violating the license of the codec. That is, unless Microsoft decides to open the source, or at least start releasing binaries for the other OSes.
Plus, it gives Microsoft the power to mandate that all Blu-Ray players run some embedded form of Windows...
That having been said, given that HD DVD has already chosen to support VC-1, I can kind of understand the Blu-Ray folks wanting to jump on the bandwagon... If both groups support the same collection of codecs, it gives rise to the hope that we'll eventually see Dual-Format players. Sound familiar, anyone? (DVD +/-R)
The article spends a fair amount of time talking about how they dealt with their proverbial "sticks in the mud" and talking about a few of the benefits of running linux vs. Windows, and then finishes up with the following paragraph:
Late on Tuesday, Microsoft issued a patch for a vulnerability in its Windows software that could be used to unleash a virus even more devastating than MyDoom. This patch should be installed by anyone running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.
Think what MS could do if they could just sit up and say, "You know what? No PCI-33 devices will be supported in the next Windows. It's the latest and fastest or it's nothing.
This is already happening. Upgrade a pre-existing system to XP, and you lose all of the ISA peripherals. They're not detected by XP, and drivers aren't available.
Regardless of what you think they should do to this slogan due to the OpenSSH buffer overflows, here's an excerpt from the email I just got from the security-announce@openbsd.org mailing list:
--------- A buffer overflow in sendmail's address parsing routines has been found by Michal Zalewski. The bug appears to be remotely exploitable on Linux and while it will be more difficult to exploit on OpenBSD it still looks to be possible. ---------
Blacklists are great, but they've got strictly limited utility - The originating IP needs to be listed with some blacklist maintainer for it to do you any good.
But I noticed something about the spam that makes it past the blacklist - my mailserver happens to be the only one listed in the headers. That is, the email went from the spammer's workstation directly to my mailserver, and into my inbox.
All of the 'legitimate' email I receive either goes through one or more mailservers before it reaches mine, or comes from an IP address that I have explicitly told sendmail is OK to relay.
What I'd like to see happen when a computer tries passing off an email is:
1) do a DNS lookup on name the computer gave in its HELO to make sure it matches the machine's actual IP address. 2) If it does, check to make sure that there exists a valid MX record for it somewhere. If so, THEN check the RBLs, and block or allow as appropriate. 3) If not, check to see if relaying is explicitly allowed for that IP. If not, block it.
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My intent was not to offend, but to simply elaborate on the thought process that might have gone into that writeup. If I offended you, I apologise.
Is it really 3 hours from Reading to London? What's the speed limit on M-4? Your average highway in the US has a limit between 55 and 70 mph.
Few people quite grasp just how immense the US is compared to most other countries... and the things it does to the average US-ian's world-view...
The UK has a landmass of 244,820 km^2 (94,526 mi^2). That puts the UK at being about 2,500 mi^2 smaller than Oregon (96,981.00 mi^2) Texas is the second-largest state, at 267,338 mi^2 of landmass.
--
Someone who speaks three languages is trilingual.
Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual.
Someone who only speaks one language is "a typical American".
Granted, the summary specifically mentions that they have been installed in London, after mentioning that they have been "installed across the Netherlands" -- leading people to assume that London is the ONLY UK city they've been installed in.
This could be a simple omission, or it could be an artifact of a USian-centric viewpoint. After all, according to Google Maps London and Reading are only 42.4 miles (~68 km) apart. By our standards, that makes Reading a suburb of London.... and it's common practice to refer to an entire metropolitan area (a city and all of its suburbs) under the name of the main city. So... following that practice, Reading is part of London.
You can buy "Wireless extension cords" from ThinkGeek.com
And no, I haven't RTFA.
You're looking for The Toy
No... The analogy fits.
OS vulnerabilities are the BETTER fruit, because they directly lead to being able to crash or pwn the system, which is why they've been focused on.
All of the easier OS vulnerabilities have been patched, and OS vulnerabilities are becoming harder and harder to find. So now, the bad guys are going back to looking at application vulnerabilities that they've been ignoring to see if they can use them to do what they want.
Ahh... There's the difference.
You're looking at volume licenses. I only deal with shrinkwrapped, retail licenses.
If you pull up the actual retail license text for any release of XP the text you cite is quite absent.
Note that the text I mentioned about Windows 2000 is also absent, despite being on an actual dead-tree copy of the EULA in a drawer in my office.
This page says that a license for XP can be downgraded to any "previous version" of Windows XP, where "previous version" was defined as XP, 2000, NT... But that later, downgrade rights were also extended to 95 and 98.... but Win ME and XP home were NEVER OSes that you were allowed to downgrade to from XP Pro.
The license for XP PRO included a clause specifically stating that you could use it for a copy of 2K PRO, and only that OS. No other M$ licence that I recall reading included a similar clause.
I emphasized the above phrase because I'm willing to grant that given it's been a while since I had cause to peruse a M$ license agreement, I may not be remembering something I did in fact read.
Why would you put Darl's head on a fish?
Well, SCO has floundered about this long....
Wouldn't it be fun if it was, though?
Haven't you always wanted a prehensile penis?
My point was that they can afford to be able to occasionally sell CDs at $6-$7 BECAUSE they buy direct from the label and sell direct to you.
They have no brick and mortar retail outlets to support.
There are no middlemen between them and the labels they buy from.
The fact that the proposed pricing model postulated a $10 retail price at brick and mortar retail chains is not invalidated by the above sale price as you have suggested.
You're ignoring BMG's business model.
Go to your music collection, and pull out a handful of cds that you KNOW, for absolute certainty, that you purchsed through BMG. Now, look at the label side of the CD. You should see text along these lines: "Manufactured in USA for BMG Direct Marketing, INC" This text, and/or the BMG logo should also be on either the CD sleeve or the CD insert, if not both.
BMG is not a retail outlet.
BMG is a wholesaler, or to use an actual quote from the post you're responding to, "a first-level middleman". They buy direct from the record label and sell direct to you, the end user. Their actual cost to buy the discs is going to be slightly higher than the $2.50 listed, but just because they have to amortize the costs of custom silkscreens for the CDs and custom printing for the sleeves. Amortized across even 1000 CDs, we're only talking a per-disc cost of a few cents. Let's be generous and call it a total cost to BMG (or Columbia House) of $2.60.
Now, every time you purchase from BMG, or Columbia House, they charge you a "Shipping and Handling" fee that is significantly higher than the cost of postage. The "Handling" part of that fee covers somebody going into the warehouse, finding the CDs you ordered, and boxing them up to go out the door. (Actually, the "handling" fee is generally significantly more than the actual handling costs, but that's beside the point.) This is something that would be normally included in the overhead of a wholesaler.
We also have to account for the monthly mailing that you get. Let's assume that they average only selling one CD per mailing that they put out the door. Tack on 40 cents for postage, and another 25 (I'm being generous. High volume web printing is CHEAP) for the cost of acutally printing the mailing.
We're now up to $3.25 for their cost, and on the "Discount" discs, you're paying $6 plus "Handling". So they're still making good money on the discount discs, and they're making a killing on the ones you're buying at full price.
I don't know why you guys (Americans) don't make this kind of legislative foolishness illegal.
The problem is that our Legislature is the body that would have to make it illegal.
As long as drives are released that are capable of reading both formats, not really....
It'd be better still if consumer DVD players were capable of reading both formats.
And better still when computer drives are releaseed to support WRITING both formats.
Since they are the only console manufacturer still around that managed to survive the video game crash of 84, they ended up with the same kind of near monopoly that Microsoft has in the PC world, and people resented (and still resent) them for it.
Sony's gone quite a way to cutting into that near-monopoly, and Microsoft's catching up... (Personally, I like the Xbox a lot more that I like the GC) But I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever completely overcome the stigma...
Actually, I can see this as a prime reason to adopt the technology....
If a user has access to sensitive material stored on network fileservers, the GPS could be used to make sure that the laptop was actually IN a secured area before allowing its user access. It'd be just one more added layer of security.
If you don't want to access the corporate network, you don't have to have the GPS reporting application running.
That having been said, if it's a company-owned computer, then the company is well within its rights to demand that such an application is always active when the computer is in use.
Well, maybe for the same reason that This guy wrote a webserver using Postscript.
Or how about a GPS LoJack powered directly by the person's heart?
I would love to see electronic prosthesis not need an external battery, assuming they could generate sufficient power. (No, I have not read TFA)
And I can definately see benefits to having LoJacked people.... But there are definate concerns.
Like all technology, it's neither good nor evil. How it gets used, on the other hand, is a different story.
BTW: The latest Epsons print directly onto coated CD/DVDs with no sticky label and no stomper.
That's right, they do.... with a water soluable ink.
Take a wet sponge to the printed disk, and the image gets all sorts of messed up.
With these disks (and with thermal transfer printers) you don't have that problem.
I've been eyeing a few different thermal transfer units, including a few that'll do full color. Maybe I'll wait a while to see what these drives will cost, and more importantly, the cost of the media.
DOOD....
Get with the times!
Einstein is dead.
These days, it's all about Hawking.
Here is a link to over a thousand libraries licensed under the GPL (NOT the LGPL):
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=%2Blibrary§ion
MANUFACTURERS of Blu-Ray PLAYERS are being required to support the ENTIRE collection of codecs that they specify (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, etc) so that a CONTENT PROVIDER (read: the company making the discs) CAN CHOOSE which codec to use.
This means that if Paramount Pictures decides that they're going to exclusively use the VC-1 codec when transferring their movie catalogue to the Blu-Ray format, then that's it. You're not going to play ANY of their movies on a linux (let alone a Solaris, Irix, or MacOS) box without violating the license of the codec. That is, unless Microsoft decides to open the source, or at least start releasing binaries for the other OSes.
Plus, it gives Microsoft the power to mandate that all Blu-Ray players run some embedded form of Windows...
That having been said, given that HD DVD has already chosen to support VC-1, I can kind of understand the Blu-Ray folks wanting to jump on the bandwagon... If both groups support the same collection of codecs, it gives rise to the hope that we'll eventually see Dual-Format players. Sound familiar, anyone? (DVD +/-R)
The article spends a fair amount of time talking about how they dealt with their proverbial "sticks in the mud" and talking about a few of the benefits of running linux vs. Windows, and then finishes up with the following paragraph:
Think what MS could do if they could just sit up and say, "You know what? No PCI-33 devices will be supported in the next Windows. It's the latest and fastest or it's nothing.
This is already happening. Upgrade a pre-existing system to XP, and you lose all of the ISA peripherals. They're not detected by XP, and drivers aren't available.
Regardless of what you think they should do to this slogan due to the OpenSSH buffer overflows, here's an excerpt from the email I just got from the security-announce@openbsd.org mailing list:
---------
A buffer overflow in sendmail's address parsing routines has been
found by Michal Zalewski. The bug appears to be remotely exploitable
on Linux and while it will be more difficult to exploit on OpenBSD
it still looks to be possible.
---------
Blacklists are great, but they've got strictly limited utility - The originating IP needs to be listed with some blacklist maintainer for it to do you any good.
But I noticed something about the spam that makes it past the blacklist - my mailserver happens to be the only one listed in the headers. That is, the email went from the spammer's workstation directly to my mailserver, and into my inbox.
All of the 'legitimate' email I receive either goes through one or more mailservers before it reaches mine, or comes from an IP address that I have explicitly told sendmail is OK to relay.
What I'd like to see happen when a computer tries passing off an email is:
1) do a DNS lookup on name the computer gave in its HELO to make sure it matches the machine's actual IP address.
2) If it does, check to make sure that there exists a valid MX record for it somewhere. If so, THEN check the RBLs, and block or allow as appropriate.
3) If not, check to see if relaying is explicitly allowed for that IP. If not, block it.