The day Blizzard insists on installing software with root privileges on my computer is when I stop playing WoW. Don't trust the client, for sure, but I absolutely distrust software you can't control or audit that wants to have superuser privileges on your computer.
And noone commented on the absurdity of the situation - rather than put in server-side checking (you got there how?), they just shut down the quest line. Anyone who's done web application programming knows that one - validate the form using JavaScript, for sure - but only to help the user. To protect your application, you must check validity (and sanity) server side too, where the user can't fiddle with your code.
That's right, being "touched" by a Taser set to stun is so much different to being "shot" with a Taser set to stun.
Try it yourself sometime. It's roughly equivalent to the difference between booted down the stairs of a nightclub by a drunk patron versus being ejected from the nightclub by a security guard who boots you down the stairs.
It doesn't matter what went on beforehand - the fact is that the security guards Tasered the guy (a process that is intended to incapacitate the target so they are easier to handle), then insisted that if he didn't get up of his own volition they'd Taser him again.
Can you see what's wrong with the scenario?
Let's take it to an extreme - you incapacitate someone by removing the Oxygen from the room they're occupying. You continue to withhold Oxygen until they comply with your demand that they leave the room. Does that make any sense at all? No, of course it doesn't.
The purpose of a Taser is to reduce the target's ability to resist manual handling. The correct procedure is "Step 1: Taser", "Step 2: Restrain", "Step 3: Relocate". Not Taser, then Taser again. I expect these officers were acting out of fear, and I doubt the significant audience they had would have made life easier for them. Their minds got to stage one of the instructions, "Step 1: Taser", then had a segmentation fault trying to load the rest of the code from long term storage. With the dozens of people present implicitly asking, "what next?" the broken processor was executing the only instruction it knew, "Step 1: Taser".
Perhaps the officers need a regular training session where they take it in turns to Taser each other and carry/drag the incapacitated/restrained ones out of the room, in much the same way we have fire drills. The aim being that this critical survival skill needs to become ingrained as instinct - permanently in L1 cache so to speak - so that on the rare occasion that the instructions actually need to be used, there's no room for your brain to screw up and get stuck at Step 1 when the important part of the procedure is Step 3.
I keep thinking of that line from the Bungie game "Halo": "Get up! Get up so I can shoot you again!"
I'd buy a tough book over a MacBook Pro, except for the fact that the ToughBook video uses shared system memory (ie: it won't run WoW fast enough to play). Even my PowerBook G4 12" (may it rest in peace) had a separate video card (sure, it was a really crappy video card).
The toughbook fills my other requirements: wireless networking, and being able to withstand being used.
There's an old joke in my family, "it was a brave diner who found out that frogs' legs are edible."
But who the heck would have been inspired to plunge their newly forged blade into the body of a still-living slave? Did he just try it once in a fit of rage?
Mac OS X is unix-like, with protected memory. Your cheat application can't go fiddling with the memory used by the game client.
The WoW client is not "dumb as possible" - it actually tells the server "I'm here now". One of the side questlines in the game was actually shut down because people were collecting hippogryph eggs from Feralas and teleporting to the hand-in NPC in Gadgetzan, then teleporting right back to the place you collect eggs from. A few XP each hand in, combined with teleporting you can level up a character much faster than any other method in the game.
The evidence to support predictions of future oil production is this: China has about 1/3 of the world's population. They do not currently use as much oil per capita as any "developed" countries. China is currently going through a process of rapid industrialisation - building factories, bringing more services to rural communities, building roads. If the Chinese were to increase their oil consumption per capita to levels equivalent to "developed" countries, there would not be enough oil available to supply them.
That is what "peak oil" is about - the availability of oil, not the production. Any market has two sides - supply and demand. At present there is more than enough supply to meet the demand, to the point where the suppliers play games with limiting production in order to boost their income. In the future, once China (and later, the third world countries in Africa) becomes a larger consumer of oil, the maximum ability to supply oil (which may well be greater than supply ability at present) will not be enough to meet the demand of the oil consuming market.
Production will continue rising, that's for certain. Demand will rise faster, and the price of oil will go up quite sharply - the price can rise as long as the market can support higher prices. Eventually there will be wars fought over oil supplies - not to secure cheap oil, but to secure any supply at all. Oil companies will start drilling up the old "uneconomic" shales that they've been sequestering for decades. They'll start breaking down heavier fractions using previously uneconomical methods to provide the diesel that is the lifeblood of mass transport all over the world.
We'll still have oil for decades to come, just not enough.
What's worse though, isn't the fact that crude oil will rise beyond $US100/barrel, it's the amount of pollution that will be generated as a result of burning all that oil - "The Breath Of The Dragon" is the name of the scenario where there is so much smog being generated by newly industrialised nations that we get a blanket of smog all over the world - the ultimate environmental disaster.
My Christmas money is going on a iPod Nano PRODUCT (RED) 8GB model. My 3G iPod is still going strong - sure, battery is stuffed so playtime is now about 2 hours instead of 6, but at least the 40GB iPod still works as a 40GB Firewire/USB hard drive, while the Zune is a huge brick sitting on my desk wasting space while I play my music in iTunes.
The iPod Nano can fit in my shirt pocket, or it can squeeze in behind my mobile phone in the mobile phone pocket on my backpack. The Zune, being a huge brick, would have to take up space in my backpack. Along with my 3G iPod which is still functional after all these years (no battery replacement yet).
So: 3 year old iPod is still doing: calendar, contacts, music, and functions as an external hard drive. Zune would be doing: brick impressions.
Oh... I'm a Mac user by the way, so how am I supposed to load music onto the Zune for when I feel like lugging a huge brick around with me? I don't need to plug myself into a huge brick to compensate for lack of endowment. I'll buy the slim and fashionably coloured iPod Nano PRODUCT (RED) and have Apple send $10 off to help people in Africa survive against AIDS.
A useful point of reference for those not in the WoW scene: the usual way of accumulating DKP equates to somewhere in the order of 5 DKP per hour. For example, 10 DKP for turning up to a raid, 5 points for each boss. Spend four hours, kill eight bosses and you have accumulated 50 DKP.
The rate of point earning varies from guild to guild (some guilds award DKP purely on time invested, others purely by boss kills), but the fact still remains that "50 DKP MINUS" is a significant penalty to any raider - it's the WoW equivalent of being given a two week suspension the week before the grand final.
Way back when 9600 was "high speed" data access, you could lease a 9600bps line with varying levels of utilisation. For example, that line leased at 20% utilisation was charged at about one third the price of a 40% utilisation contract.
The modern equivalent is data volume quotas split up into peak/offpeak times. If you exceed the quota, you get charged more (but keep the speed), or have your bandwidth shaped (eg: 1.5Mbps normally, 70kbps shaped) in order to allow other users of that service to have some utility from it.
The real problem here is the pervasiveness of "all you can eat" (aka "unlimited") ISP contracts which aren't priced at a rate that will allow the ISP to maintain their infrastructure to service the bandwidth demand of their customers.
[quote]I think you're buying the stereotypes a bit too much there.
I shall use myself as a textbook example. I'm a reasonably informed guy when it comes to IT. I write software for a living, build my own PCs, and all that jazz.[/quote]
You write software for a living. You build your own PCs - that puts you in a group of about 1% of the population. Everyone else will use whatever computer they can buy off the shelf, and when they go to use the Internet, they'll use whatever software the manufacturer has provided for them. These are the people to whom the distinction between "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Office" is meaningless - they just sit at their computers and use the word processing, spreadsheet and email facilities without even being aware that they're using "software" running on "hardware". The stuff just happens on the screen when they type on the keyboard.
Most people I know operate in blissful ignorance of how complex their computers are - the same way most people operate in blissful ignorance of the difference between propane and natural gas fittings on their BBQ vs kitchen stove.
The approach Microsoft appears to be taking is the "frog in a pot" story - gradually turn up the heat, and the victim won't realise they're in trouble until it's far too late. Some time around now, all those CDs you bought way back when CDs first came out will fail - the media will start to delaminate, the aluminium film will start to oxidise, and the CDs will become unreadable. How then will you re-record your favourite tracks from Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation"?
By the time people realise they're trapped in DRM hell, it will be too late to go back and re-rip their music to an open standard format.
Visiting Israel gave you this deep insight into Palestinians? You say Palestinians don't care about their land - could this be because any time they try to do something with it, an Israeli tank or missile will destroy their work? Or perhaps it could be because anyone trying to walk out in a field to try ploughing the land is an open target for Israeli snipers, or at the very least risks digging up a UXO. No, there is no practical explanation for the Palestinian state of mind, they must just be lazy people with no regard for their future or the future of their families.
Amazing powers of deduction. Please explain how your point of view is not racist.
Very nice piece of propaganda, by the way - it even got moderated to "insightful" on Slashdot!
At the beginning of their statement, Sony BMG Canada says that Sony BMG Canada sources all their material from Sony BMG USA. Then at the end, they say that Sony BMG Canada will not use the specific technology that was the trigger for the injunctions in the USA - this is like saying, "we buy our apples from the USA... we will make sure all the apples that we make will not have fruit fly in them."
I wish people would read these arguments before accepting them in their court hearings...
Note that the judgement you refer to makes no reference to the important qualifier in the statement, "sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration."
It seems to me that making a copy of something implies that you could refer to the copy later at whim. When I browse a web page, that page is gone when I open a new web page, close the browser, shut down the computer, etc.
Once the definition of "transitory duration" can be clarified to mean "while the viewing environment is not disturbed", then I'll start accepting the argument that browsing a web page is somehow copyright violation. If, however, "a period of more than a transitory duration" means that the copy must be perceivable, reproducable or otherwise communicable after the user has cleared the browser cache and moved on to a new web page, I will have faith that the legal system is not yet totally insane.
Two BlackHats - who have reputations at stake - claim that there is a vulnerability in any OS due to poorly written network device drivers. They proceed to demonstrate the vulnerability using a specific setup on video. Assuming the flaw does exist, what is the reason for using the third party wireless adaptor? My guess is that the drivers for that adaptor are more reliably cracked than the drivers for the specific chipset used in the on-board wireless adaptor.
Since the same company writes the shame shoddy code for the Windows, Mac OS X and other OS drivers for that card, you'd expect the same flaws to be present, especially since all those platforms use the same machine code. The lowest level of the driver could be using exactly the same machine code, and the exploit was carefully crafted to clobber the stack with a specific set of instructions that only work reliably when using that USB WiFi adaptor on that particular MacBook.
The contrived nature of the presentation doesn't mean this is a fraud.
The proof of concept exploit could simply be extremely dependent on factors which they didn't have time to adapt for, before presenting at the BlackHat conference.
So accept the fact that these guys claim there is a flaw, and hope to goodness that the drivers get fixed before someone else writes a more reliable exploit.
12" PowerBook G4, 1.25GB of RAM, and I found that opening up the Dashboard would not just drop frames but stall for a little. This may have been due to the Widgets I had running - the AirPort scanner, weather, calculator and iTunes. The processor was part of the problem - I'd be watching the Activity Monitor in the dock, and processor usage would skyrocket. Having the same widgets on this iMac I'm using now, the processor hardly lifts a finger.
On my PowerBook, I'd press the Dashboard button (the top mouse button on my Logitech MX510), the screen would go grey, then I'd see the widgets just suddenly appear after a brief interval. On my iMac G5, the screen goes grey and the Widgets smoothly transition in from "offscreen".
It was faster for me to Command+Tab to iTunes to switch tracks than to open the Dashboard.
The main thing I like about the Spaces implementation is that you don't have a virtual desktop widget sitting around cluttering your screen real estate. With Spaces, the "bird's eye view" of your multiple desktops is available exactly (and only) when you need it - that is, when you ask for it.
No funky task bar buttons competing for space with the "you have USB devices inserted" icon, no floating window to obscure other windows (goodness knows I have enough floating palettes with iPhoto and GarageBand running already) - it's very tidy and (dare I say it) "Mac OS X-y".
Vista lists it as a feature and Leopard isn't shipping yet.
But Leopard has Time Machine which was demonstrated at WWDC in front of a live audience. Where's the live demo of Microsoft Windows Vista's versioning in action?
The problem with the G4 PowerBook isn't the processor or the RAM, it's the fact that pretty much all the graphics is done by the CPU. Later model Macs have better video cards, and all that Exposé eye candy is handled by the video card.
I too had many problems with using the iTunes widget on my PowerBook - I got around the problem by using a "multimedia" keyboard. Yes, I can't use it when I don't have space for a keyboard or time to pull out the keyboard and plug it in, but I'd be listening to my iPod if I wasn't at my desk.
Adding more RAM will save the time of swapping to disk, but the bigger problem I had was simply the time it took to do the funky animations associated with Exposé. You're stuck with that until you upgrade your laptop.
You know how it goes - "I don' think she can take much more o' this capt'n!" Followed a couple of minutes later by "Oh, we just modulated the phase variance of the gobbledy gook."
It's a PR job. It's like the plot of an action movie - you get to the chase and the gun fight where you actually worry that the protagonist might cop a bullet to the head, but then he miraculously manages to shoot three of his assailants with his last two bullets and goes on to save the world. Everyone cheers and worships the hero du jour.
Microsoft Windows Vista will be on shelves before Christmas, with SP1 in January, SP2 in March, SP3 in May and a few dozen security updates sprinkled in for effect.
Out of the first 20 computers I ever saw running Windows 95 or Windows 98, only 3 had the original media or any indication that a valid licence was installed. 5 of them were ambiguous (Win95 came preinstalled). The rest were acknowledged to be "borrowed" from the office.
Most of the PCs (just over half) I have been supporting for people at home have no supporting paperwork.
These days I tell people, "no licence key, no support." It's cut my (volunteered) tech support down incredibly.
The Windows Genuine Advantage is a Microsoft Windows XP thing, which is a recent development. Microsoft Windows market penetration has long since passed its huge growth rate (if you look at a %market over time graph, it started at 0% way back in 1980, gradually built up to a huge gradient towards the end of the 20th Century, and has now tapered off). People aren't installing Windows onto machines that used to be running DOS anymore. They're installing Windows XP onto machines which were previously running Windows 98. The legitimate way to do this is go and buy an upgrade pack, and the price of that upgrade pack is quite reasonable considering the price of a brand new Windows XP licence - given the choice of using an illegal copy of Windows XP or paying $138 or so for a Windows XP upgrade pack, most people I know will go for the pretty green box with the printed manual and silk-screened CDs.
I stand by my argument that Microsoft Windows 95 and 98 got a massive market penetration due to copyright violations. "Legitimate" copies of Windows XP will replace those illegal Windows 98 installations as the users upgrade to hardware that doesn't support Windows 98.
Then please explain MS's 95% marketshare versus Apple's 5%?
A pirated copy of Windows 95 will work on any white-box PC. System 7, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X only ever worked on Apple hardware.
That is my explanation for why Microsoft's operating system became so widespread so quickly - you can't beat (illegally obtained) free software running on cheap hardware when it comes to scratching the information processing itch, and scratching the itch for $500 instead of $2000 means you'll put up with a lot of problems.
I expect Mac OS X to take up a lot more marketshare once Microsoft starts enforcing their "Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage" program (both the software and the marketing/legal program behind it).
In Australia we have 000 for life threatening emergencies, and 131444 (a toll free number) for "immediate" police assistance.
Of course, there's also the option of keeping my bluetooth headset on, since most times when I'm home I'm raiding in WoW and connected to Ventrilo... but the headset isn't so good at capturing noise that's away from my face (which is a good thing for a conferencing microphone, bad thing for trying to capture a crime in progress).
So it's okay for the police to arrest and hold someone without charge who is already a "bad man". Padilla was reported to have been a nasty man. Whose reporting do you believe?
What if he was only in court on charges, and no conviction had been made? Would you still support preventative detention? Would you support imprisonment on suspicion since he's obviously a shady character, after all he's in court on charges?
What if it was someone you didn't know, and had only been seen before as an annoying soap-box speechmaker in the local mall? Or your neighbour in the apartment block, who you don't actually know but seems like a quiet enough old lady who couldn't possibly be doing anything wrong?
The fact is that it doesn't matter who the target is, it's still a contravention of basic human rights to detain someone when they haven't committed a crime. Here in Australia, John W Howard's government has pushed through a series of laws dealing with preventative detention - the idea being that if the police don't like you enough, they'll put you in gaol just in case you might have done something wrong if left in the wild.
The Padilla case is just the thin edge of the wedge: pick on someone publicly visible. Get the people used to the idea that the Government is acting in their interests by taking custody of dangerous people. Next it will be someone not so visible in the public eye. This next show victim will not have such a colourful past. The idea will be to stretch the public's acceptance of "dangerous people".
Eventually people will simply be disappearing off the street because they're politically inconvenient, or pose an embarassment to the various state and federal authorities (eg: the speculation that the guy in the original story was being arrested for tripping over a Witness Protection Program subject who was assigned a real SSN by mistake).
The worst thing is, most people reading that statement would interpret it as, "I have a committment to my guild to fulfil" as opposed to, "I've let a game dictate my life, so I don't have time to RTFA and post a meaningful comment on Slashdot."
Slashdot Mirror
The day Blizzard insists on installing software with root privileges on my computer is when I stop playing WoW. Don't trust the client, for sure, but I absolutely distrust software you can't control or audit that wants to have superuser privileges on your computer.
And noone commented on the absurdity of the situation - rather than put in server-side checking (you got there how?), they just shut down the quest line. Anyone who's done web application programming knows that one - validate the form using JavaScript, for sure - but only to help the user. To protect your application, you must check validity (and sanity) server side too, where the user can't fiddle with your code.
That's right, being "touched" by a Taser set to stun is so much different to being "shot" with a Taser set to stun.
Try it yourself sometime. It's roughly equivalent to the difference between booted down the stairs of a nightclub by a drunk patron versus being ejected from the nightclub by a security guard who boots you down the stairs.
It doesn't matter what went on beforehand - the fact is that the security guards Tasered the guy (a process that is intended to incapacitate the target so they are easier to handle), then insisted that if he didn't get up of his own volition they'd Taser him again.
Can you see what's wrong with the scenario?
Let's take it to an extreme - you incapacitate someone by removing the Oxygen from the room they're occupying. You continue to withhold Oxygen until they comply with your demand that they leave the room. Does that make any sense at all? No, of course it doesn't.
The purpose of a Taser is to reduce the target's ability to resist manual handling. The correct procedure is "Step 1: Taser", "Step 2: Restrain", "Step 3: Relocate". Not Taser, then Taser again. I expect these officers were acting out of fear, and I doubt the significant audience they had would have made life easier for them. Their minds got to stage one of the instructions, "Step 1: Taser", then had a segmentation fault trying to load the rest of the code from long term storage. With the dozens of people present implicitly asking, "what next?" the broken processor was executing the only instruction it knew, "Step 1: Taser".
Perhaps the officers need a regular training session where they take it in turns to Taser each other and carry/drag the incapacitated/restrained ones out of the room, in much the same way we have fire drills. The aim being that this critical survival skill needs to become ingrained as instinct - permanently in L1 cache so to speak - so that on the rare occasion that the instructions actually need to be used, there's no room for your brain to screw up and get stuck at Step 1 when the important part of the procedure is Step 3.
I keep thinking of that line from the Bungie game "Halo": "Get up! Get up so I can shoot you again!"
I'd buy a tough book over a MacBook Pro, except for the fact that the ToughBook video uses shared system memory (ie: it won't run WoW fast enough to play). Even my PowerBook G4 12" (may it rest in peace) had a separate video card (sure, it was a really crappy video card).
The toughbook fills my other requirements: wireless networking, and being able to withstand being used.
There's an old joke in my family, "it was a brave diner who found out that frogs' legs are edible."
But who the heck would have been inspired to plunge their newly forged blade into the body of a still-living slave? Did he just try it once in a fit of rage?
Mac OS X is unix-like, with protected memory. Your cheat application can't go fiddling with the memory used by the game client.
The WoW client is not "dumb as possible" - it actually tells the server "I'm here now". One of the side questlines in the game was actually shut down because people were collecting hippogryph eggs from Feralas and teleporting to the hand-in NPC in Gadgetzan, then teleporting right back to the place you collect eggs from. A few XP each hand in, combined with teleporting you can level up a character much faster than any other method in the game.
The evidence to support predictions of future oil production is this: China has about 1/3 of the world's population. They do not currently use as much oil per capita as any "developed" countries. China is currently going through a process of rapid industrialisation - building factories, bringing more services to rural communities, building roads. If the Chinese were to increase their oil consumption per capita to levels equivalent to "developed" countries, there would not be enough oil available to supply them.
That is what "peak oil" is about - the availability of oil, not the production. Any market has two sides - supply and demand. At present there is more than enough supply to meet the demand, to the point where the suppliers play games with limiting production in order to boost their income. In the future, once China (and later, the third world countries in Africa) becomes a larger consumer of oil, the maximum ability to supply oil (which may well be greater than supply ability at present) will not be enough to meet the demand of the oil consuming market.
Production will continue rising, that's for certain. Demand will rise faster, and the price of oil will go up quite sharply - the price can rise as long as the market can support higher prices. Eventually there will be wars fought over oil supplies - not to secure cheap oil, but to secure any supply at all. Oil companies will start drilling up the old "uneconomic" shales that they've been sequestering for decades. They'll start breaking down heavier fractions using previously uneconomical methods to provide the diesel that is the lifeblood of mass transport all over the world.
We'll still have oil for decades to come, just not enough.
What's worse though, isn't the fact that crude oil will rise beyond $US100/barrel, it's the amount of pollution that will be generated as a result of burning all that oil - "The Breath Of The Dragon" is the name of the scenario where there is so much smog being generated by newly industrialised nations that we get a blanket of smog all over the world - the ultimate environmental disaster.
Sure it's got wireless, but it's a huge brick.
My Christmas money is going on a iPod Nano PRODUCT (RED) 8GB model. My 3G iPod is still going strong - sure, battery is stuffed so playtime is now about 2 hours instead of 6, but at least the 40GB iPod still works as a 40GB Firewire/USB hard drive, while the Zune is a huge brick sitting on my desk wasting space while I play my music in iTunes.
The iPod Nano can fit in my shirt pocket, or it can squeeze in behind my mobile phone in the mobile phone pocket on my backpack. The Zune, being a huge brick, would have to take up space in my backpack. Along with my 3G iPod which is still functional after all these years (no battery replacement yet).
So: 3 year old iPod is still doing: calendar, contacts, music, and functions as an external hard drive. Zune would be doing: brick impressions.
Oh... I'm a Mac user by the way, so how am I supposed to load music onto the Zune for when I feel like lugging a huge brick around with me? I don't need to plug myself into a huge brick to compensate for lack of endowment. I'll buy the slim and fashionably coloured iPod Nano PRODUCT (RED) and have Apple send $10 off to help people in Africa survive against AIDS.
A useful point of reference for those not in the WoW scene: the usual way of accumulating DKP equates to somewhere in the order of 5 DKP per hour. For example, 10 DKP for turning up to a raid, 5 points for each boss. Spend four hours, kill eight bosses and you have accumulated 50 DKP.
The rate of point earning varies from guild to guild (some guilds award DKP purely on time invested, others purely by boss kills), but the fact still remains that "50 DKP MINUS" is a significant penalty to any raider - it's the WoW equivalent of being given a two week suspension the week before the grand final.
Impose bandwidth and download limits.
Way back when 9600 was "high speed" data access, you could lease a 9600bps line with varying levels of utilisation. For example, that line leased at 20% utilisation was charged at about one third the price of a 40% utilisation contract.
The modern equivalent is data volume quotas split up into peak/offpeak times. If you exceed the quota, you get charged more (but keep the speed), or have your bandwidth shaped (eg: 1.5Mbps normally, 70kbps shaped) in order to allow other users of that service to have some utility from it.
The real problem here is the pervasiveness of "all you can eat" (aka "unlimited") ISP contracts which aren't priced at a rate that will allow the ISP to maintain their infrastructure to service the bandwidth demand of their customers.
[quote]I think you're buying the stereotypes a bit too much there.
I shall use myself as a textbook example. I'm a reasonably informed guy when it comes to IT. I write software for a living, build my own PCs, and all that jazz.[/quote]
You write software for a living. You build your own PCs - that puts you in a group of about 1% of the population. Everyone else will use whatever computer they can buy off the shelf, and when they go to use the Internet, they'll use whatever software the manufacturer has provided for them. These are the people to whom the distinction between "Microsoft Windows" and "Microsoft Office" is meaningless - they just sit at their computers and use the word processing, spreadsheet and email facilities without even being aware that they're using "software" running on "hardware". The stuff just happens on the screen when they type on the keyboard.
Most people I know operate in blissful ignorance of how complex their computers are - the same way most people operate in blissful ignorance of the difference between propane and natural gas fittings on their BBQ vs kitchen stove.
The approach Microsoft appears to be taking is the "frog in a pot" story - gradually turn up the heat, and the victim won't realise they're in trouble until it's far too late. Some time around now, all those CDs you bought way back when CDs first came out will fail - the media will start to delaminate, the aluminium film will start to oxidise, and the CDs will become unreadable. How then will you re-record your favourite tracks from Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation"?
By the time people realise they're trapped in DRM hell, it will be too late to go back and re-rip their music to an open standard format.
Visiting Israel gave you this deep insight into Palestinians? You say Palestinians don't care about their land - could this be because any time they try to do something with it, an Israeli tank or missile will destroy their work? Or perhaps it could be because anyone trying to walk out in a field to try ploughing the land is an open target for Israeli snipers, or at the very least risks digging up a UXO. No, there is no practical explanation for the Palestinian state of mind, they must just be lazy people with no regard for their future or the future of their families.
Amazing powers of deduction. Please explain how your point of view is not racist.
Very nice piece of propaganda, by the way - it even got moderated to "insightful" on Slashdot!
At the beginning of their statement, Sony BMG Canada says that Sony BMG Canada sources all their material from Sony BMG USA. Then at the end, they say that Sony BMG Canada will not use the specific technology that was the trigger for the injunctions in the USA - this is like saying, "we buy our apples from the USA ... we will make sure all the apples that we make will not have fruit fly in them."
I wish people would read these arguments before accepting them in their court hearings...
Note that the judgement you refer to makes no reference to the important qualifier in the statement, "sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration."
It seems to me that making a copy of something implies that you could refer to the copy later at whim. When I browse a web page, that page is gone when I open a new web page, close the browser, shut down the computer, etc.
Once the definition of "transitory duration" can be clarified to mean "while the viewing environment is not disturbed", then I'll start accepting the argument that browsing a web page is somehow copyright violation. If, however, "a period of more than a transitory duration" means that the copy must be perceivable, reproducable or otherwise communicable after the user has cleared the browser cache and moved on to a new web page, I will have faith that the legal system is not yet totally insane.
Two BlackHats - who have reputations at stake - claim that there is a vulnerability in any OS due to poorly written network device drivers. They proceed to demonstrate the vulnerability using a specific setup on video. Assuming the flaw does exist, what is the reason for using the third party wireless adaptor? My guess is that the drivers for that adaptor are more reliably cracked than the drivers for the specific chipset used in the on-board wireless adaptor.
Since the same company writes the shame shoddy code for the Windows, Mac OS X and other OS drivers for that card, you'd expect the same flaws to be present, especially since all those platforms use the same machine code. The lowest level of the driver could be using exactly the same machine code, and the exploit was carefully crafted to clobber the stack with a specific set of instructions that only work reliably when using that USB WiFi adaptor on that particular MacBook.
The contrived nature of the presentation doesn't mean this is a fraud.
The proof of concept exploit could simply be extremely dependent on factors which they didn't have time to adapt for, before presenting at the BlackHat conference.
So accept the fact that these guys claim there is a flaw, and hope to goodness that the drivers get fixed before someone else writes a more reliable exploit.
12" PowerBook G4, 1.25GB of RAM, and I found that opening up the Dashboard would not just drop frames but stall for a little. This may have been due to the Widgets I had running - the AirPort scanner, weather, calculator and iTunes. The processor was part of the problem - I'd be watching the Activity Monitor in the dock, and processor usage would skyrocket. Having the same widgets on this iMac I'm using now, the processor hardly lifts a finger.
On my PowerBook, I'd press the Dashboard button (the top mouse button on my Logitech MX510), the screen would go grey, then I'd see the widgets just suddenly appear after a brief interval. On my iMac G5, the screen goes grey and the Widgets smoothly transition in from "offscreen".
It was faster for me to Command+Tab to iTunes to switch tracks than to open the Dashboard.
The main thing I like about the Spaces implementation is that you don't have a virtual desktop widget sitting around cluttering your screen real estate. With Spaces, the "bird's eye view" of your multiple desktops is available exactly (and only) when you need it - that is, when you ask for it.
No funky task bar buttons competing for space with the "you have USB devices inserted" icon, no floating window to obscure other windows (goodness knows I have enough floating palettes with iPhoto and GarageBand running already) - it's very tidy and (dare I say it) "Mac OS X-y".
But Leopard has Time Machine which was demonstrated at WWDC in front of a live audience. Where's the live demo of Microsoft Windows Vista's versioning in action?
The problem with the G4 PowerBook isn't the processor or the RAM, it's the fact that pretty much all the graphics is done by the CPU. Later model Macs have better video cards, and all that Exposé eye candy is handled by the video card.
I too had many problems with using the iTunes widget on my PowerBook - I got around the problem by using a "multimedia" keyboard. Yes, I can't use it when I don't have space for a keyboard or time to pull out the keyboard and plug it in, but I'd be listening to my iPod if I wasn't at my desk.
Adding more RAM will save the time of swapping to disk, but the bigger problem I had was simply the time it took to do the funky animations associated with Exposé. You're stuck with that until you upgrade your laptop.
You know how it goes - "I don' think she can take much more o' this capt'n!" Followed a couple of minutes later by "Oh, we just modulated the phase variance of the gobbledy gook."
It's a PR job. It's like the plot of an action movie - you get to the chase and the gun fight where you actually worry that the protagonist might cop a bullet to the head, but then he miraculously manages to shoot three of his assailants with his last two bullets and goes on to save the world. Everyone cheers and worships the hero du jour.
Microsoft Windows Vista will be on shelves before Christmas, with SP1 in January, SP2 in March, SP3 in May and a few dozen security updates sprinkled in for effect.
Out of the first 20 computers I ever saw running Windows 95 or Windows 98, only 3 had the original media or any indication that a valid licence was installed. 5 of them were ambiguous (Win95 came preinstalled). The rest were acknowledged to be "borrowed" from the office.
Most of the PCs (just over half) I have been supporting for people at home have no supporting paperwork.
These days I tell people, "no licence key, no support." It's cut my (volunteered) tech support down incredibly.
The Windows Genuine Advantage is a Microsoft Windows XP thing, which is a recent development. Microsoft Windows market penetration has long since passed its huge growth rate (if you look at a %market over time graph, it started at 0% way back in 1980, gradually built up to a huge gradient towards the end of the 20th Century, and has now tapered off). People aren't installing Windows onto machines that used to be running DOS anymore. They're installing Windows XP onto machines which were previously running Windows 98. The legitimate way to do this is go and buy an upgrade pack, and the price of that upgrade pack is quite reasonable considering the price of a brand new Windows XP licence - given the choice of using an illegal copy of Windows XP or paying $138 or so for a Windows XP upgrade pack, most people I know will go for the pretty green box with the printed manual and silk-screened CDs.
I stand by my argument that Microsoft Windows 95 and 98 got a massive market penetration due to copyright violations. "Legitimate" copies of Windows XP will replace those illegal Windows 98 installations as the users upgrade to hardware that doesn't support Windows 98.
A pirated copy of Windows 95 will work on any white-box PC. System 7, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X only ever worked on Apple hardware.
That is my explanation for why Microsoft's operating system became so widespread so quickly - you can't beat (illegally obtained) free software running on cheap hardware when it comes to scratching the information processing itch, and scratching the itch for $500 instead of $2000 means you'll put up with a lot of problems.
I expect Mac OS X to take up a lot more marketshare once Microsoft starts enforcing their "Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage" program (both the software and the marketing/legal program behind it).
911 is for life threatening emergencies.
... but the headset isn't so good at capturing noise that's away from my face (which is a good thing for a conferencing microphone, bad thing for trying to capture a crime in progress).
In Australia we have 000 for life threatening emergencies, and 131444 (a toll free number) for "immediate" police assistance.
Of course, there's also the option of keeping my bluetooth headset on, since most times when I'm home I'm raiding in WoW and connected to Ventrilo
Yeah, I've already got Squid set up to do this automatically on April 1 every year.
Call it an Easter Egg for my replacement, the Pakistani guy sitting next to me who's still learning English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
So it's okay for the police to arrest and hold someone without charge who is already a "bad man". Padilla was reported to have been a nasty man. Whose reporting do you believe?
What if he was only in court on charges, and no conviction had been made? Would you still support preventative detention? Would you support imprisonment on suspicion since he's obviously a shady character, after all he's in court on charges?
What if it was someone you didn't know, and had only been seen before as an annoying soap-box speechmaker in the local mall? Or your neighbour in the apartment block, who you don't actually know but seems like a quiet enough old lady who couldn't possibly be doing anything wrong?
The fact is that it doesn't matter who the target is, it's still a contravention of basic human rights to detain someone when they haven't committed a crime. Here in Australia, John W Howard's government has pushed through a series of laws dealing with preventative detention - the idea being that if the police don't like you enough, they'll put you in gaol just in case you might have done something wrong if left in the wild.
The Padilla case is just the thin edge of the wedge: pick on someone publicly visible. Get the people used to the idea that the Government is acting in their interests by taking custody of dangerous people. Next it will be someone not so visible in the public eye. This next show victim will not have such a colourful past. The idea will be to stretch the public's acceptance of "dangerous people".
Eventually people will simply be disappearing off the street because they're politically inconvenient, or pose an embarassment to the various state and federal authorities (eg: the speculation that the guy in the original story was being arrested for tripping over a Witness Protection Program subject who was assigned a real SSN by mistake).
The worst thing is, most people reading that statement would interpret it as, "I have a committment to my guild to fulfil" as opposed to, "I've let a game dictate my life, so I don't have time to RTFA and post a meaningful comment on Slashdot."