Next thing you'll be telling me that with a warrant the police can secretly wiretap someone's phone, secretly look up details, secretly set up surveillance, and other secret things, all without telling the suspect that they are doing these things. Telling the suspect wouldn't make these techniques useless, so I can't imagine them being done in secret.
In all seriousness, I have also run into people that won't give up on that OS [Mac OS 9]. The amazing part to me is that they don't really have to. Certain tasks do not change and despite the lack of support from Apple and software vendors most of those system are running smoothly.
I'm having real trouble finding motivation to ditch OS 9, though it's partly due to not having a decent newer machine to run Mac OS X. It's not helped by a recent successful hack of the video driver for a 1996-era PowerMac 8500 to support 1920x1080 natively, allowing VGA connection of an LCD with perfect pixel lock. For Unix tasks, there's an ssh client.
However the new Classilla browser might have changed all that. I'll have to dig out the iMac and see how it does.
It's a nice step up, albeit a bit slower and more memory-hungry. I used IE 5 on Mac OS 9 for over 10 years, but switch to Classilla earlier this year. It'a amazing how many sites I can see properly on this old machine now. It has some issues, but it's a big step up (and it has tabs!). The main thing that sucks is no simple menu that shows the previous 10 or so pages you visited. You have to open a terrible history window that sorts sites by day, and within each, by host.
My gas and utility companies charge a $1-$1.50 "convenience fee" to pay online. Why I'd want to pay for the hassle of using their awful online sites is beyond me. With a mailing, I merely pay $0.44 for the stamp, and have the added bonus of not exposing my credit card number to interception online.
The gas company also periodically sends mailings about how you can read your own meter yourself. If they want to reduce the outrageous $9.75 customer fee per month, I might consider reading my own meter. Ditto for eliminating the physical mailing.
And then there's automatic bill payment. I'm sure I'd have to pay a convenience fee for that, despite the fact that this makes it more likely to overdraw my account. With a paper bill, I know when the money is being withdrawn, and can delay it if money is tight for that month (sure, I might pay a few-dollar late fee, but that beats $25+ for an insufficient funds fee).
US intelligence agencies are advising top US IT executives to weigh their laptops before and after visiting China as one of many precautions against corporate espionage.
This is very good advice, as it would instantly catch the loss of weight if any data was stolen from the laptop. You hear of data theft all the time, and all it takes is something low-tech like a scale to detect it.
Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections 'secure' and are responsible for what happens on them.'
In other words, we should always use encryption, and be sure it has no backdoors for untrusted entities like governments? Sounds good to me!
Why do number of miles driven matter? I'd think the central concern is wear on roads, which is also dependent on the weight of the vehicle. So they want to charge based on weight*miles. Guess what? A vehicle's gasoline usage is closely related to this; big heavy vehicle, more gasoline used per mile. So they could just increase the gasoline tax.
Its an MP3 player... Why the fuck does it have a camera on it?
The ipod is just keeping up with cellphones. Pretty soon, it'll even let you make phone calls! Sure, the iPhone already does, but why not have the iPod do it as well?
Moral of the story for me (but I've already learned this in the past): before you even start spending time accumulating data in some format or with some service, be sure you can easily migrate that data out of said format or service. As a last resort you can almost always manually look at each piece of data and re-enter it in some other format, but the time and energy required to do that often exceeds the value of the data, effectively resulting in the data being unusable if you need to change formats/services.
Imagine you've been driving your car for years, and have accumulated lots of map notes, music, and playlists in your car's navigation and music systems. When you decide you want to buy a new car from a different manufacturer, you're free to do so, but you can't simply transfer all your settings to the new vehicle, even though it has similar systems. The only way to move it all over is to manually re-enter/recopy each item, which would take many hours.
Heh, I read the quote you called "brilliant", expecting non-sarcasm, and thought the authors were saying that they got a result they didn't expect, and had previously lumped some categories together because they expected them to not matter much, but had now un-lumped them to be sure the result wasn't biased towards their expectation. I thought "yeah, they're being honest, and when they found an unexpected result, realized they were still biasing against it, so improved things in a way that had the side-effect of supporting the unexpected result even more" but I see it's the total opposite.
Totally totally lame. It's almost like that sappy YouTube video where you read it forward and get one message, but if you read it in reverse, you get the "good" one. So here, if you do the opposite of what they say, you do have some good advice.
The problem is with the audience for science, not science. Don't dumb science down, make it more "interesting", bla bla; fix the audience. The fact that science isn't popular is a symptom of a larger problem with the audience, not an isolated problem due to something with science. Well, perhaps attempts to dumb down or make more interesting science has contributed. I know I am very put off by most current science articles, with their stupid wit and over-simplification of things. But if I pick up things written 50 years ago, I a much more interested and enjoy reading them, since the authors just present the facts, without any wit or slang, and let the science itself entertain me.
I think that most people would prefer an all-or-nothing approach. Give me one Wifi experience or forget it. Having to keep track of a new login method every 200-500 feet is a hassle.
So tell your wireless system to ignore access points that require any sort of login. Then you can pretend they don't exist, and that there's simply less hassle-free WiFi coverage. If you were near the library or mall, you'd see that there's Wifi. Elsewhere, no.
If this happened to me and Apple/Amazon helped me recover my device I would be quite grateful. In the end I would be more loyal to them [...]
And if you bought such a device used and then had the seller disable it via the company, what would your response be? That's why it's a tradeoff, and apparently they determined that it tilts in favor of not disabling simply because the original owner calls.
I'm thinking one difference is that you can contact the the node's host and tell him to get his act together and secure his machine, whereas contacting the Windows hosts of each node of a botnet is quite a bit more difficult, and even if you did, you'd unlikely convince the operator to secure the machine (or even understand what a botnet is).
Never mind that; your computer must be on to receive a call, otherwise it goes to voicemail. And no, you can't use it with a tiny Linux box that has a USB port; it only works with Windows or Intel Macs. Might as well just use a software-only phone.
Slightly reworded: From a business perspective, never write an "application program". You're too vulnerable to the whims of the operating system under which your application runs. If you want to write one for fun, fine, but it's not a sound basis for a business venture.
Thoughts? Is it just a matter of scale, where the OS has many times more "plug-ins" than an application, and thus less-likely to change drastically or disappear?
Slashdot Mirror
Next thing you'll be telling me that with a warrant the police can secretly wiretap someone's phone, secretly look up details, secretly set up surveillance, and other secret things, all without telling the suspect that they are doing these things. Telling the suspect wouldn't make these techniques useless, so I can't imagine them being done in secret.
Simple solution: wrap the box in aluminum foil. As a bonus, you definitely keep the CPU control rays out. Definitely.
I'm having real trouble finding motivation to ditch OS 9, though it's partly due to not having a decent newer machine to run Mac OS X. It's not helped by a recent successful hack of the video driver for a 1996-era PowerMac 8500 to support 1920x1080 natively, allowing VGA connection of an LCD with perfect pixel lock. For Unix tasks, there's an ssh client.
It's a nice step up, albeit a bit slower and more memory-hungry. I used IE 5 on Mac OS 9 for over 10 years, but switch to Classilla earlier this year. It'a amazing how many sites I can see properly on this old machine now. It has some issues, but it's a big step up (and it has tabs!). The main thing that sucks is no simple menu that shows the previous 10 or so pages you visited. You have to open a terrible history window that sorts sites by day, and within each, by host.
That's funny, because they haven't found me ye...uhh... posting anon oh crap. Yeah, Mac OS X Snow Panther rocks! It's so fast on my PowerMa Intel Mac.
My gas and utility companies charge a $1-$1.50 "convenience fee" to pay online. Why I'd want to pay for the hassle of using their awful online sites is beyond me. With a mailing, I merely pay $0.44 for the stamp, and have the added bonus of not exposing my credit card number to interception online.
The gas company also periodically sends mailings about how you can read your own meter yourself. If they want to reduce the outrageous $9.75 customer fee per month, I might consider reading my own meter. Ditto for eliminating the physical mailing.
And then there's automatic bill payment. I'm sure I'd have to pay a convenience fee for that, despite the fact that this makes it more likely to overdraw my account. With a paper bill, I know when the money is being withdrawn, and can delay it if money is tight for that month (sure, I might pay a few-dollar late fee, but that beats $25+ for an insufficient funds fee).
This is very good advice, as it would instantly catch the loss of weight if any data was stolen from the laptop. You hear of data theft all the time, and all it takes is something low-tech like a scale to detect it.
In other words, we should always use encryption, and be sure it has no backdoors for untrusted entities like governments? Sounds good to me!
Give the 1 fist gesture a try sometime, though I must warn you it may result in loss of some keycaps from time to time.
Why do number of miles driven matter? I'd think the central concern is wear on roads, which is also dependent on the weight of the vehicle. So they want to charge based on weight*miles. Guess what? A vehicle's gasoline usage is closely related to this; big heavy vehicle, more gasoline used per mile. So they could just increase the gasoline tax.
The ipod is just keeping up with cellphones. Pretty soon, it'll even let you make phone calls! Sure, the iPhone already does, but why not have the iPod do it as well?
Moral of the story for me (but I've already learned this in the past): before you even start spending time accumulating data in some format or with some service, be sure you can easily migrate that data out of said format or service. As a last resort you can almost always manually look at each piece of data and re-enter it in some other format, but the time and energy required to do that often exceeds the value of the data, effectively resulting in the data being unusable if you need to change formats/services.
Imagine you've been driving your car for years, and have accumulated lots of map notes, music, and playlists in your car's navigation and music systems. When you decide you want to buy a new car from a different manufacturer, you're free to do so, but you can't simply transfer all your settings to the new vehicle, even though it has similar systems. The only way to move it all over is to manually re-enter/recopy each item, which would take many hours.
Heh, I read the quote you called "brilliant", expecting non-sarcasm, and thought the authors were saying that they got a result they didn't expect, and had previously lumped some categories together because they expected them to not matter much, but had now un-lumped them to be sure the result wasn't biased towards their expectation. I thought "yeah, they're being honest, and when they found an unexpected result, realized they were still biasing against it, so improved things in a way that had the side-effect of supporting the unexpected result even more" but I see it's the total opposite. Totally totally lame. It's almost like that sappy YouTube video where you read it forward and get one message, but if you read it in reverse, you get the "good" one. So here, if you do the opposite of what they say, you do have some good advice.
The problem is with the audience for science, not science. Don't dumb science down, make it more "interesting", bla bla; fix the audience. The fact that science isn't popular is a symptom of a larger problem with the audience, not an isolated problem due to something with science. Well, perhaps attempts to dumb down or make more interesting science has contributed. I know I am very put off by most current science articles, with their stupid wit and over-simplification of things. But if I pick up things written 50 years ago, I a much more interested and enjoy reading them, since the authors just present the facts, without any wit or slang, and let the science itself entertain me.
Your scanner could connect and then determine whether a known web page was able to be fetched without a login page replacing it.
So tell your wireless system to ignore access points that require any sort of login. Then you can pretend they don't exist, and that there's simply less hassle-free WiFi coverage. If you were near the library or mall, you'd see that there's Wifi. Elsewhere, no.
Maybe they don't want their electronic devices to have a "useless to buy used and then have remotely bricked" reputation.
And if you bought such a device used and then had the seller disable it via the company, what would your response be? That's why it's a tradeoff, and apparently they determined that it tilts in favor of not disabling simply because the original owner calls.
And until then, we can use the panels to capture energy from the huge fusion reaction that's fairly close to Earth.
I'm thinking one difference is that you can contact the the node's host and tell him to get his act together and secure his machine, whereas contacting the Windows hosts of each node of a botnet is quite a bit more difficult, and even if you did, you'd unlikely convince the operator to secure the machine (or even understand what a botnet is).
Maybe the year of the Linux desktop is near, with the OS finally getting a botnet that doesn't require Wine to run. Take that, Apple!
Yeah, I found Firefox a memory hog, but Gran Paradiso is excellent. They got the look and feel so similar too, it's amazing.
Never mind that; your computer must be on to receive a call, otherwise it goes to voicemail. And no, you can't use it with a tiny Linux box that has a USB port; it only works with Windows or Intel Macs. Might as well just use a software-only phone.
Slightly reworded: From a business perspective, never write an "application program". You're too vulnerable to the whims of the operating system under which your application runs. If you want to write one for fun, fine, but it's not a sound basis for a business venture.
Thoughts? Is it just a matter of scale, where the OS has many times more "plug-ins" than an application, and thus less-likely to change drastically or disappear?