Actually, a little further in the agreement they specify that they are only allowed to delete your data 30 days after terminating the agreement with you. So they certainly intend to give you safety against that (the details of how you get your data back after the agreement was terminated I don't know, but at least it's nice to see that they have recognized the concern).
Hmm, for some reason that site got its links mixed up, that's not the national anthem of the GDR...
You can find the proper one here: http://www.sabon.org/hymnen/ though that page has some annoying speech playing in the background so here's a direct link too: http://home.t-online.de/home/stwessel/rico/Nationa lhymne_der_DDR.mp3
and in the lab that I'm working in we're calling our internal simulator that is sort of similar to spim "spam". What goes around comes around, I guess;)
That's pretty much what the grant proposal is suggesting... There are a number of different labs at a number of universities involved and one lab does the networking/OS research, one does research on building small computers (first prototypes are intended to be about 1cm cubed, then they will try to make them smaller), and so on. Obviously the reason for stating the grant proposal this way is that it's very hard to get a big grant for a supercluster communicating with bluetooth;)
a lot of audiophiles have built their own extremely high-quality CD players out of commercially available IDE cd drives (mostly creative drives)
sorry but you clearly don't have much of an idea of what you're talking about... first of all creative doesn't make cd drives, they buy from a wide variety of sources (often Matsushita), so if you want a predictable quality you wouldn't be buying a creative drive.
As far as quality goes though PC CD drives are about as bad as you can get, the jitter on the SP/DIF output is terrible and the analog out is even worse. The only advantage they have is that they tend to cope quite well with scratches on the media but of course you won't be able to play any "copy-protected" media so it's hardly very futureproof...
that seems pretty clever to me... it instantly filters out all those who wouldn't fall for whatever scam they're peddling anyway, saving them the bandwidth;)
Even worse, it means that regular blank DVDRs won't work since they contain a track that the drive has to follow when burning them, so you'd have to get reversed DVDRs as well... Which of course don't exist. However, it is not the XBox but the Gamecube that uses the trick of spinning the wrong way round, since the XBox uses regular PC DVD drives.
There are two protections used on the XBox against copying / unauthorized software, one physical and one software.
The BIOS in the XBox will read the bootsector of the disc from the second layer of the DVD, which it is not possible to burn (no such thing as a two-layer DVDR, and if you think about how two-layer DVDs work compared to DVDRs, I don't think they'll ever come).
Also, every "program" that wants to be run on the XBox has to be signed with MSs cryptographic key.
If you had bothered to actually read that site, then you'd know that you have to reencode the videos at lower resolution (320x240 seems to be recommended), very low bitrate (they recommend 500kbit/s) and 22KHz mono audio to ensure that the DC can decode it quickly enough.
That, to me, defeats the whole point... I'd want something where I don't have to reencode the vids and can get as close to DVD quality as possible.
The reality is that while the DC is great (and I do have one, which I bought precisely or playing around with this kind of thing), it's just a little too slow for these kind of things.
I've had to consider the same for a site that I'm working on, an online game where some users get several thousand page views each day.
Aside from the obvious tweaks to reduce bandwidth costs, that is compressing pages (implies a fairly high CPU hit but probaly not as bad if you're using perl in the first place), and finding a cheaper supplier of bandwidth, it wasn't very hard to work out that while we may loose money on some users, everything will work out just fine on average.
And of course those users are probably the very ones you don't want to drive away from your site as they may be some of the best contributors.
In sensible countries, like the Netherlands, a lot of supermarkets will put their perishables out on the street behind the shop so the homeless can come and take them. On purpose.
Of course that's a sensible country where if you tried to sue the supermarket because you took food they left for you to take and you got a stomach upset, you'd get laughed out of court but hey;)
And how exactly do you propose they do this, when each CD-R costs as much as they charge for a rental? Huh?
Also don't forget that for places like Blockbuster there is a lot more money to be made from renting out the 1% of movies that 99% of people like to watch, and it will always be cheaper to stamp them and not burn them.
After SmoothWall's rather insulting reply to the article in c't (essentially accusing the reporter of being an idiot), this is on the heise news page (heise is the publisher of c't):
Sicherheitsloch in SmoothWall (Update)(Security hole in Smoothwall)
I says that they have now found an actuall exploit for the security issues they had identified in the original article. Their advice is to close the browser after accessing smoothwall through the web interface (so I'm guessing a session id grabbing exploit of some kind).
They have sent this information to smoothwall, and smoothwall claims to have issued a patch already (that's not bad response time at least, I guess they take c't reporters more seriously now;)
Actually, certainly in Europe, but as far as I'm aware also in the US, if Apple was found to have caused this damage through "gross negligence", then they would be responsible for damages, because damages due to gross negligence on the part of the vendor is exactly what can _not_ be excluded.
The legal definition of gross negligence according to lectlaw is:
GROSS NEGLIGENCE - Failure to use even the slightest amount of care in a way that shows Recklessness or willful disregard for the safety of others.
Or more applicable to this case (from here):
Gross negligence Any action or an omission in reckless disregard of the consequences to the safety or property of another. Sometimes referred to as "very great negligence" and it is more then just neglect of ordinary care towards others or just inadvertence. Also known as the Latin term culpa lata.
Of course, IANAL, but my gut feeling would be that gross negligence would not be applicable in this case... gross negligence is basicaly one step short of intentional damage.
I can read german, so I'll just give the jist of that article...
From comparing images of the original / cheat versions, as well as nvidia versions of the same scenes, they have come to the conclusion that ati is reducing the colour depth of at least some, if not all textures to 16bit from 32bit(this is very obvious on the ammo count picture).
Also it would appear that ATI uses a lower texture detail level (the article speculates on tweaking the LOD to give precedence to lower quality mipmap layers, hence presumably allowing more texture data to fit in the cards caches), apparent on the face and the floor texture.
From discussions I read on a german newssite from people who've tried this system it depends on a cookie to keep state.
So you needn't worry about other people in your flat being affected, however disabling cookies might defeat the system at the moment.
It would be theoretically possible to delay the download of the last 2/3 of the page until the banner has downloaded, however this would probably cause too many problems in real life.
As with any such systems it's not meant to discourage someone really determined but only make shure that 99% of pages get served with their banner.
An obvious solution would be to send a text ad to a non-graphical browser. It'd be a bit awkward having to keep a list of all the text-only browsers but certainly doable.
This doesn't mean that they would... Let's face it most big websites, with the exception of google, don't care one slightest bit.
From what I understood of the article, each of these dots is either on or off so you would get essentially 3bit colour resolution.
You'd have to use dithering to reproduce photos or video, so the image quality will suck close up (Yes I know that's how printers work too, and I've seen the results from the first inkjets with resolution comparable to what this is promised to do. Not pretty up close).
Slashdot Mirror
Google are working on this: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-17-n30.html
They're using Goog-411 to get voice samples to train their speech recognition engine.
Actually, a little further in the agreement they specify that they are only allowed to delete your data 30 days after terminating the agreement with you. So they certainly intend to give you safety against that (the details of how you get your data back after the agreement was terminated I don't know, but at least it's nice to see that they have recognized the concern).
Hmm, for some reason that site got its links mixed up, that's not the national anthem of the GDR...
a lhymne_der_DDR.mp3
;)
You can find the proper one here: http://www.sabon.org/hymnen/ though that page has some annoying speech playing in the background so here's a direct link too: http://home.t-online.de/home/stwessel/rico/Nation
Enjoy
and in the lab that I'm working in we're calling our internal simulator that is sort of similar to spim "spam". What goes around comes around, I guess ;)
Don't cockroaches react to certain chemicals that can be used as bait?
So you could send them out, then use a bait-laden trap to capture them again. I don't really see it working as an early-warning system though...
RMS has been to some of the discussions about software patents at the European Parliament... I met him there a couple months ago.
That's pretty much what the grant proposal is suggesting... There are a number of different labs at a number of universities involved and one lab does the networking/OS research, one does research on building small computers (first prototypes are intended to be about 1cm cubed, then they will try to make them smaller), and so on. ;)
Obviously the reason for stating the grant proposal this way is that it's very hard to get a big grant for a supercluster communicating with bluetooth
well, minidisc always stores your recording in a compressed (ATRAC) format so what do you expect? ;)
What always amuses me is the number of people who claim to hate mp3 but love Minidisc... odd ;)
a lot of audiophiles have built their own extremely high-quality CD players out of commercially available IDE cd drives (mostly creative drives)
sorry but you clearly don't have much of an idea of what you're talking about... first of all creative doesn't make cd drives, they buy from a wide variety of sources (often Matsushita), so if you want a predictable quality you wouldn't be buying a creative drive.
As far as quality goes though PC CD drives are about as bad as you can get, the jitter on the SP/DIF output is terrible and the analog out is even worse. The only advantage they have is that they tend to cope quite well with scratches on the media but of course you won't be able to play any "copy-protected" media so it's hardly very futureproof...
somebody mod this down didn't even read the article.
that seems pretty clever to me... it instantly filters out all those who wouldn't fall for whatever scam they're peddling anyway, saving them the bandwidth ;)
Even worse, it means that regular blank DVDRs won't work since they contain a track that the drive has to follow when burning them, so you'd have to get reversed DVDRs as well... Which of course don't exist. However, it is not the XBox but the Gamecube that uses the trick of spinning the wrong way round, since the XBox uses regular PC DVD drives.
There are two protections used on the XBox against copying / unauthorized software, one physical and one software.
The BIOS in the XBox will read the bootsector of the disc from the second layer of the DVD, which it is not possible to burn (no such thing as a two-layer DVDR, and if you think about how two-layer DVDs work compared to DVDRs, I don't think they'll ever come).
Also, every "program" that wants to be run on the XBox has to be signed with MSs cryptographic key.
Only the X-Box uses two-layer DVDs, not CDs, and there is no way (and I seriously doubt it is physically possible) to burn a two-layer DVD.
If you had bothered to actually read that site, then you'd know that you have to reencode the videos at lower resolution (320x240 seems to be recommended), very low bitrate (they recommend 500kbit/s) and 22KHz mono audio to ensure that the DC can decode it quickly enough.
That, to me, defeats the whole point... I'd want something where I don't have to reencode the vids and can get as close to DVD quality as possible.
The reality is that while the DC is great (and I do have one, which I bought precisely or playing around with this kind of thing), it's just a little too slow for these kind of things.
Absolutely... I now feel completely indifferent about this book.
I've had to consider the same for a site that I'm working on, an online game where some users get several thousand page views each day.
Aside from the obvious tweaks to reduce bandwidth costs, that is compressing pages (implies a fairly high CPU hit but probaly not as bad if you're using perl in the first place), and finding a cheaper supplier of bandwidth, it wasn't very hard to work out that while we may loose money on some users, everything will work out just fine on average.
And of course those users are probably the very ones you don't want to drive away from your site as they may be some of the best contributors.
In sensible countries, like the Netherlands, a lot of supermarkets will put their perishables out on the street behind the shop so the homeless can come and take them. On purpose.
;)
Of course that's a sensible country where if you tried to sue the supermarket because you took food they left for you to take and you got a stomach upset, you'd get laughed out of court but hey
Actually, I did click on quite a few earlier on while I was checking out potential hosts for a website :)
Of course you're not going to click on them if you're not going to buy something.
And how exactly do you propose they do this, when each CD-R costs as much as they charge for a rental? Huh?
Also don't forget that for places like Blockbuster there is a lot more money to be made from renting out the 1% of movies that 99% of people like to watch, and it will always be cheaper to stamp them and not burn them.
After SmoothWall's rather insulting reply to the article in c't (essentially accusing the reporter of being an idiot), this is on the heise news page (heise is the publisher of c't): ;)
Sicherheitsloch in SmoothWall (Update)(Security hole in Smoothwall)
I says that they have now found an actuall exploit for the security issues they had identified in the original article. Their advice is to close the browser after accessing smoothwall through the web interface (so I'm guessing a session id grabbing exploit of some kind).
They have sent this information to smoothwall, and smoothwall claims to have issued a patch already (that's not bad response time at least, I guess they take c't reporters more seriously now
Actually, certainly in Europe, but as far as I'm aware also in the US, if Apple was found to have caused this damage through "gross negligence", then they would be responsible for damages, because damages due to gross negligence on the part of the vendor is exactly what can _not_ be excluded.
The legal definition of gross negligence according to lectlaw is:
GROSS NEGLIGENCE - Failure to use even the slightest amount of care in a way that shows Recklessness or willful disregard for the safety of others.
Or more applicable to this case (from here):
Gross negligence
Any action or an omission in reckless disregard of the consequences to the safety or property of another. Sometimes referred to as "very great negligence" and it is more then just neglect of ordinary care towards others or just inadvertence. Also known as the Latin term culpa lata.
Of course, IANAL, but my gut feeling would be that gross negligence would not be applicable in this case... gross negligence is basicaly one step short of intentional damage.
I can read german, so I'll just give the jist of that article...
From comparing images of the original / cheat versions, as well as nvidia versions of the same scenes, they have come to the conclusion that ati is reducing the colour depth of at least some, if not all textures to 16bit from 32bit(this is very obvious on the ammo count picture).
Also it would appear that ATI uses a lower texture detail level (the article speculates on tweaking the LOD to give precedence to lower quality mipmap layers, hence presumably allowing more texture data to fit in the cards caches), apparent on the face and the floor texture.
From discussions I read on a german newssite from people who've tried this system it depends on a cookie to keep state.
So you needn't worry about other people in your flat being affected, however disabling cookies might defeat the system at the moment.
It would be theoretically possible to delay the download of the last 2/3 of the page until the banner has downloaded, however this would probably cause too many problems in real life.
As with any such systems it's not meant to discourage someone really determined but only make shure that 99% of pages get served with their banner.
An obvious solution would be to send a text ad to a non-graphical browser. It'd be a bit awkward having to keep a list of all the text-only browsers but certainly doable.
This doesn't mean that they would... Let's face it most big websites, with the exception of google, don't care one slightest bit.
From what I understood of the article, each of these dots is either on or off so you would get essentially 3bit colour resolution.
You'd have to use dithering to reproduce photos or video, so the image quality will suck close up (Yes I know that's how printers work too, and I've seen the results from the first inkjets with resolution comparable to what this is promised to do. Not pretty up close).