A major correction needed here: Many PCI cards (probably most) will work regardless of the CPU - it really depends on the card. I have a bog standard cheap USB/Firewire card in my Sun Ultra 5 (which has a 64-bit UltraSPARC II processor) and it works admirably. Network cards aren't an issue either (perhaps they can't be used to PXE boot, but the Sun's firmware can do that without needing the firmware on the network card).
I agree with you. I'm British, but lived in the US for 7 years. I like the US quite a lot, and I find people from the US are just, well, people. It pisses me off when fellow British people go on about 'dumb Americans'. One case particularly sticks in the mind - recently, a friend was whining about how terrible it was that Americans often confused Scotland and England (he's Scottish and sensitive about that). A couple of weeks later I was talking about something going on in Texas. He was going on about how he didn't know where it was, not interested in US geography etc.
So I said, "Well you can't complain about Americans not knowing about Scotland then. Texas is bigger than France and you don't even know where it is, let alone even the most trivial bit of history about Texas, such as who Davy Crockett was - yet you expect Americans to know all about Mary Queen of Scots"
Cue much backpedaling and excuse-making. Then I really went to town on him, perhaps an easy target since I can name all 50 states and have set foot in 26 of them.
It's all tribal really; Europeans don't like Americans not because of who they are individually, it's just they aren't part of the same tribe.
On the other hand, I was asked on TWO separate occasions whether we spoke English in England when I was living in Texas. I wish I was kidding - that one is easy to deduce logically without even knowing anything other than the name of England:-/
I agree, the whole world isn't HTTP - but if a regular company isn't doing 'default deny' then they are taking serious risks. With more and more internet users behind NAT routers, networked malware is now instead of running on a machine and listening, is running on a machine and making an outbound connection to some remote host. If you don't have egress filtering, your firewall may as well not exist.
If you want to occasionally SSH to your home machine, run your sshd on port 443 and go via your company's web proxy (tools like PuTTY can use HTTP CONNECT to do ssh via a proxy on port 443). Be sure to ask your company if this is OK first though. That way they don't have to open port 22 to the world, and instead they have a logged, traceable connection.
Someone needs to get hold of your IT department and tell them they don't work in a vacuum. It *is* possible to design a good security, update, patch etc. policy - but it HAS to be done in conjunction with the rest of the business (and the rest of the business must at least understand a little bit about information security and the need for an orderly process). Your IT department management is incompetent by the sounds of it.
Canonical, the custodian of Ubuntu Linux, is an Isle of Man company. Admittedly, out of the Island's population of 76,000, there are 5,000 South Africans.
Dispatch AJAX and Warlock...
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 1
On the subject of AJAX, has anyone tried to use it from (for want of a better term) 'first principles' - i.e. not just using a toolkit to do the heavy lifting, but written a mini-project to find out what AJAX is fundamentally about?
I did this. The overall impression I get is that AJAX is the term for what is a really ugly kludge. The old RAF terminology for what AJAX is is 'graunching' - forcing components together that don't really fit. It doesn't feel elegant, it feels nasty. It feels like forcing HTTP to do what it was never designed to do. Even a simple interface has performance reminiscent of Windows 3.1 on a 386 when it's running on the latest dual Xeon workstation. Javascript generating fragments of HTML to build a user interface in particular feels like a very blunt instrument, sort of like finding a big enough hammer to pound a screw into a piece of wood instead of just drilling a pilot hole then using a screwdriver.
IIRC, nforce RAID on Windows is essentially software RAID. Many Linux distros these days (certainly the RedHattish sort) right in the installer allow you to trivially set up software RAID, and the Linux software RAID works very well and is not in the least bit tricky. So don't even bother trying to support the marginal hardware RAID that the chipset might support, just go straight with the Linux md.
Soccer (or to give it its proper name, football - because the prime way of getting the ball around the pitch is to kick it with the foot not throw it with hands) in this country is already full of overpaid, whiny wimps. The same thing will happen there too.
Flair and style goes down like a lead balloon in most board rooms? In my experience, slick talking salesmen turn the board into blobs of quivering jelly which lap up every word they say (and then make the most inane purchases against the strenuous warnings of the people who really know what they are doing).
Dell may have a much bigger proportion of the personal computer market, but Dell's margins are razor thin - they have to sell three times as much to make the same profit.
> Some of those are valid criticisms, but most of the ones you checked don't apply.
They are all valid, and here is why.
> (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected > Less than with any other scheme I know of, and each affect will be on an individual > basis between the two parties involved, no third party will be able to affect > anyone else's email transaction.
They would still be affected. On a big mailing list, the problem of lusers accidentally pressing 'Collect fee' will be enough to cost real money (and it sort of happens already - most people who run mailing lists have had someone whine about spam who actually subscribed).
> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money > Wrong. Did you read the system? How often does Paypal or Western Union refuse to > pay on a payment they've verified?
PayPal certainly seems to have attracted quite a lot of criticism for its handling of customer accounts. Without a centrally controlled web of trust, how are you going to stop repudiation?
> (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once > Not at all. It can be phased in gradually.
Which will be kind of pointless, because everyone else will stick to the free email system rather than use this. How is the critical mass of users going to build if the system is a waste of time at first because hardly anyone participates? Especially as the new system has to compete with the existing one, requiring extra work - when many people already have adequate spam filters provided by their ISP or simply don't get spam at all (my work email address has not received a single spam, there is no spam filtering, and I've had this address for 3 years now).
> (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email > Part of the beauty of the plan is that it requires no centrally controlling ]# > authority for email for any part of implementation or adoption.
See above (PKI web of trust required to prevent a spammer repudiating their identity to refuse to cough up the dough).
> (x) Open relays in foreign countries > Will have no affect on it.
If there is no PKI web of trust, they will.
> (x) Asshats > It account perfectly for asshats. That's the whole point, to deal with the kind of > jerks who send spam.
What about an asshat who decides he doesn't like Theo de Raadt, joins misc@openbsd.org with 1000 accounts, then collects the micropayment on each of the accounts for a day's worth of traffic?
> (x) Jurisdictional problems > I'm really getting the impression you didn't even read my idea...
Jurisdictional problems because sooner or later an asshat (see above) will cause a court case to happen.
> (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes > There are no taxes involved.
OK, I'll give you this one -- for now. But eventually governments would add some kind of tax to the micropayment system, just like they have sales tax now. It would be too big of a target to not tax if it were ever popular.
> (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP > For the umptenth time, SENDING ATTACHMENTS OR EMAIL TEXT DOES NOT REQUIRE CHANGES > IN SMTP! It is, in fact, exactly what smtp does.
My mistake, this shouldn't have been checked.
> (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes > Will do what?
Use stolen identities to send mail with someone else's micropayments (i.e. the owner of said Windows machine) as an example.
> (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft > How?
See above
> (x) Technically illiterate politicians > This isn't a legislative solution. People can adopt this unless politicians explicitly outlaw insurance or micropayments or something.
A consequence of the above two.
> (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves > How can a dishonest spammer get around this?
Why does everything have to be a such-and-such "experience". I don't want a patching experience at all, I want to have it happen in such a way that it's a non experience. They make it sound like it should be a movie or a fun fair by calling everything a such-and-such "experience"!
A nitpick: customers not consumers hold the edge. A consumer follows the herd. A customer on the other hand makes decisions. If the customer doesn't like DRM, they don't buy things that use the DRM they don't like. A consumer doesn't care, they just want to consume the shite marketed towards them.
As a customer (please - if you think of yourself as a giant sucking mouth consumer, this is what happens) you are king. Don't want DRM music? Don't buy it. There are places where you can buy music without DRM (and some of these places give the option of downloading in lossless formats).
When that executive of a recording industry association in Europe (I forget which one) said that 'being able to listen to the music you bought off us on a Mac or Linux is a privilege and not a right' he was entirely wrong. No, his association companies receiving my money is a privilege and not a right, and a privilege I can revoke at any time.
If you don't like DRM, be a customer not a consumer - revoke the offending company's privileges and buy your music elsewhere. Musical ability is extremely common in the human population, and the internet has made it easier than ever for people to distribute their work. What the record companies put out is in the main the cult of the personality.
That's called dynamic braking (rather than regenerative): the energy isn't stored for later use. It's just a way to make the brake shoes last longer on diesel locomotives.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I wouldn't use that Maxtor as a video recording device on my Dad's racing motorcycle though - it wouldn't even last to the bottom of Bray Hill on the Isle of Man TT circuit. The only practical solution at the moment is tape (and it worries me what a battering that helical scan head on my portable video recorder is getting on road circuits). I'd much rather have a solid state video recorder than tape - especially if the recorder can be made smaller.
With 1 million writes, that's more than sufficient for space to store data and programs, but not good enough for swap space. An (expensive) solution to swap space is to just add more RAM to the machine and turn off swap.
It doesn't work for WMV3. Unfortunately, WMV3 seems to be the default video format for short clips. I have not received a short video clip in any other format recently. Why both Apple and Microsoft can't just settle on standard MPEG-4 that anyone can play instead of duplicating effort and inventing proprietary formats, I don't know. Oh, yes I do - Microsoft are making sure they don't lose their monopoly!
Instead of inventing something new, why not just use an SElinux policy? Pretty much every distro has SElinux now (it's a standard part of the kernel), and RedHattish-type distros already come with SElinux policies and SElinux turned on by default.
The patent isn't over FAT, the patent is over storing long filenames in FAT, i.e. MICROS~1 instead of Microsoft. Therefore, cameras etc. just need to not support this method of long filenames to avoid the patent.
But how many people ARE taught how to properly brake? Probably only a tiny fraction of drivers. For the rest, ABS will get them stopped much quicker. There's also the question of recurrency - even if you *are* taught to brake properly, how often do you practise it so to have a level of proficiency where you'd be better off without ABS? How many drivers are taken to skid pans?
Unfortunately, politicians are too timid to actually do anything about road safety and training issues; if I were king there'd be a biennial driving review (just like pilots have a biennial flight review) where the driver must demonstrate competence, including emergency manuevers (i.e. taken to a skid pan, emergency braking checked etc.) Those who don't make the grade don't get their license renewed until they do.
you however are obviously still a child and possibly a "sKript kiddie." i have never seen a mature adult use the word luser .
At least I know how to capitalize when writing in the English language, though (seeing as we are resorting to ad-hominen attacks).
You obviously are pretty new to the Internet. The term 'luser' was coined in the mid 1970s on ITS (incompatible Timesharing System), and has been in common usage (particularly amongst system administrators who have to deal with idiots such as the one the article refers to) ever since.
The guy is a vandal, and if you ran servers exposed to the internet, you'd be extremely tired of their continuous attacks by now. He deserves the book to be thrown at him for his vandalism.
A major correction needed here: Many PCI cards (probably most) will work regardless of the CPU - it really depends on the card. I have a bog standard cheap USB/Firewire card in my Sun Ultra 5 (which has a 64-bit UltraSPARC II processor) and it works admirably. Network cards aren't an issue either (perhaps they can't be used to PXE boot, but the Sun's firmware can do that without needing the firmware on the network card).
I agree with you. I'm British, but lived in the US for 7 years. I like the US quite a lot, and I find people from the US are just, well, people. It pisses me off when fellow British people go on about 'dumb Americans'. One case particularly sticks in the mind - recently, a friend was whining about how terrible it was that Americans often confused Scotland and England (he's Scottish and sensitive about that). A couple of weeks later I was talking about something going on in Texas. He was going on about how he didn't know where it was, not interested in US geography etc.
:-/
So I said, "Well you can't complain about Americans not knowing about Scotland then. Texas is bigger than France and you don't even know where it is, let alone even the most trivial bit of history about Texas, such as who Davy Crockett was - yet you expect Americans to know all about Mary Queen of Scots"
Cue much backpedaling and excuse-making. Then I really went to town on him, perhaps an easy target since I can name all 50 states and have set foot in 26 of them.
It's all tribal really; Europeans don't like Americans not because of who they are individually, it's just they aren't part of the same tribe.
On the other hand, I was asked on TWO separate occasions whether we spoke English in England when I was living in Texas. I wish I was kidding - that one is easy to deduce logically without even knowing anything other than the name of England
I agree, the whole world isn't HTTP - but if a regular company isn't doing 'default deny' then they are taking serious risks. With more and more internet users behind NAT routers, networked malware is now instead of running on a machine and listening, is running on a machine and making an outbound connection to some remote host. If you don't have egress filtering, your firewall may as well not exist.
If you want to occasionally SSH to your home machine, run your sshd on port 443 and go via your company's web proxy (tools like PuTTY can use HTTP CONNECT to do ssh via a proxy on port 443). Be sure to ask your company if this is OK first though. That way they don't have to open port 22 to the world, and instead they have a logged, traceable connection.
Someone needs to get hold of your IT department and tell them they don't work in a vacuum. It *is* possible to design a good security, update, patch etc. policy - but it HAS to be done in conjunction with the rest of the business (and the rest of the business must at least understand a little bit about information security and the need for an orderly process). Your IT department management is incompetent by the sounds of it.
Canonical, the custodian of Ubuntu Linux, is an Isle of Man company. Admittedly, out of the Island's population of 76,000, there are 5,000 South Africans.
On the subject of AJAX, has anyone tried to use it from (for want of a better term) 'first principles' - i.e. not just using a toolkit to do the heavy lifting, but written a mini-project to find out what AJAX is fundamentally about?
I did this. The overall impression I get is that AJAX is the term for what is a really ugly kludge. The old RAF terminology for what AJAX is is 'graunching' - forcing components together that don't really fit. It doesn't feel elegant, it feels nasty. It feels like forcing HTTP to do what it was never designed to do. Even a simple interface has performance reminiscent of Windows 3.1 on a 386 when it's running on the latest dual Xeon workstation. Javascript generating fragments of HTML to build a user interface in particular feels like a very blunt instrument, sort of like finding a big enough hammer to pound a screw into a piece of wood instead of just drilling a pilot hole then using a screwdriver.
IIRC, nforce RAID on Windows is essentially software RAID. Many Linux distros these days (certainly the RedHattish sort) right in the installer allow you to trivially set up software RAID, and the Linux software RAID works very well and is not in the least bit tricky. So don't even bother trying to support the marginal hardware RAID that the chipset might support, just go straight with the Linux md.
Your photograph is a biometric. (To nit-pick, we have had biometric passports for decades because they've always contained this particular biometric).
If Apple sold OS X for any PC, Microsoft would simply crush them. It's easy enough to do: just drop MS Office. How attractive would OS X be then?
Soccer (or to give it its proper name, football - because the prime way of getting the ball around the pitch is to kick it with the foot not throw it with hands) in this country is already full of overpaid, whiny wimps. The same thing will happen there too.
Flair and style goes down like a lead balloon in most board rooms? In my experience, slick talking salesmen turn the board into blobs of quivering jelly which lap up every word they say (and then make the most inane purchases against the strenuous warnings of the people who really know what they are doing).
Dell may have a much bigger proportion of the personal computer market, but Dell's margins are razor thin - they have to sell three times as much to make the same profit.
> Some of those are valid criticisms, but most of the ones you checked don't apply.
They are all valid, and here is why.
> (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
> Less than with any other scheme I know of, and each affect will be on an individual
> basis between the two parties involved, no third party will be able to affect
> anyone else's email transaction.
They would still be affected. On a big mailing list, the problem of lusers accidentally pressing 'Collect fee' will be enough to cost real money (and it sort of happens already - most people who run mailing lists have had someone whine about spam who actually subscribed).
> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
> Wrong. Did you read the system? How often does Paypal or Western Union refuse to
> pay on a payment they've verified?
PayPal certainly seems to have attracted quite a lot of criticism for its handling of customer accounts. Without a centrally controlled web of trust, how are you going to stop repudiation?
> (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
> Not at all. It can be phased in gradually.
Which will be kind of pointless, because everyone else will stick to the free email system rather than use this. How is the critical mass of users going to build if the system is a waste of time at first because hardly anyone participates? Especially as the new system has to compete with the existing one, requiring extra work - when many people already have adequate spam filters provided by their ISP or simply don't get spam at all (my work email address has not received a single spam, there is no spam filtering, and I've had this address for 3 years now).
> (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
> Part of the beauty of the plan is that it requires no centrally controlling ]#
> authority for email for any part of implementation or adoption.
See above (PKI web of trust required to prevent a spammer repudiating their identity to refuse to cough up the dough).
> (x) Open relays in foreign countries
> Will have no affect on it.
If there is no PKI web of trust, they will.
> (x) Asshats
> It account perfectly for asshats. That's the whole point, to deal with the kind of
> jerks who send spam.
What about an asshat who decides he doesn't like Theo de Raadt, joins misc@openbsd.org with 1000 accounts, then collects the micropayment on each of the accounts for a day's worth of traffic?
> (x) Jurisdictional problems
> I'm really getting the impression you didn't even read my idea...
Jurisdictional problems because sooner or later an asshat (see above) will cause a court case to happen.
> (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
> There are no taxes involved.
OK, I'll give you this one -- for now. But eventually governments would add some kind of tax to the micropayment system, just like they have sales tax now. It would be too big of a target to not tax if it were ever popular.
> (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
> For the umptenth time, SENDING ATTACHMENTS OR EMAIL TEXT DOES NOT REQUIRE CHANGES
> IN SMTP! It is, in fact, exactly what smtp does.
My mistake, this shouldn't have been checked.
> (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
> Will do what?
Use stolen identities to send mail with someone else's micropayments (i.e. the owner of said Windows machine) as an example.
> (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
> How?
See above
> (x) Technically illiterate politicians
> This isn't a legislative solution. People can adopt this unless politicians explicitly outlaw insurance or micropayments or something.
A consequence of the above two.
> (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
> How can a dishonest spammer get around this?
Why does everything have to be a such-and-such "experience". I don't want a patching experience at all, I want to have it happen in such a way that it's a non experience. They make it sound like it should be a movie or a fun fair by calling everything a such-and-such "experience"!
A nitpick: customers not consumers hold the edge. A consumer follows the herd. A customer on the other hand makes decisions. If the customer doesn't like DRM, they don't buy things that use the DRM they don't like. A consumer doesn't care, they just want to consume the shite marketed towards them.
As a customer (please - if you think of yourself as a giant sucking mouth consumer, this is what happens) you are king. Don't want DRM music? Don't buy it. There are places where you can buy music without DRM (and some of these places give the option of downloading in lossless formats).
When that executive of a recording industry association in Europe (I forget which one) said that 'being able to listen to the music you bought off us on a Mac or Linux is a privilege and not a right' he was entirely wrong. No, his association companies receiving my money is a privilege and not a right, and a privilege I can revoke at any time.
If you don't like DRM, be a customer not a consumer - revoke the offending company's privileges and buy your music elsewhere. Musical ability is extremely common in the human population, and the internet has made it easier than ever for people to distribute their work. What the record companies put out is in the main the cult of the personality.
That's called dynamic braking (rather than regenerative): the energy isn't stored for later use. It's just a way to make the brake shoes last longer on diesel locomotives.
Sorry, it has to be done:
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I wouldn't use that Maxtor as a video recording device on my Dad's racing motorcycle though - it wouldn't even last to the bottom of Bray Hill on the Isle of Man TT circuit. The only practical solution at the moment is tape (and it worries me what a battering that helical scan head on my portable video recorder is getting on road circuits). I'd much rather have a solid state video recorder than tape - especially if the recorder can be made smaller.
With 1 million writes, that's more than sufficient for space to store data and programs, but not good enough for swap space. An (expensive) solution to swap space is to just add more RAM to the machine and turn off swap.
It doesn't work for WMV3. Unfortunately, WMV3 seems to be the default video format for short clips. I have not received a short video clip in any other format recently. Why both Apple and Microsoft can't just settle on standard MPEG-4 that anyone can play instead of duplicating effort and inventing proprietary formats, I don't know. Oh, yes I do - Microsoft are making sure they don't lose their monopoly!
Instead of inventing something new, why not just use an SElinux policy? Pretty much every distro has SElinux now (it's a standard part of the kernel), and RedHattish-type distros already come with SElinux policies and SElinux turned on by default.
The patent isn't over FAT, the patent is over storing long filenames in FAT, i.e. MICROS~1 instead of Microsoft. Therefore, cameras etc. just need to not support this method of long filenames to avoid the patent.
But how many people ARE taught how to properly brake? Probably only a tiny fraction of drivers. For the rest, ABS will get them stopped much quicker. There's also the question of recurrency - even if you *are* taught to brake properly, how often do you practise it so to have a level of proficiency where you'd be better off without ABS? How many drivers are taken to skid pans?
Unfortunately, politicians are too timid to actually do anything about road safety and training issues; if I were king there'd be a biennial driving review (just like pilots have a biennial flight review) where the driver must demonstrate competence, including emergency manuevers (i.e. taken to a skid pan, emergency braking checked etc.) Those who don't make the grade don't get their license renewed until they do.
At least I know how to capitalize when writing in the English language, though (seeing as we are resorting to ad-hominen attacks).
You obviously are pretty new to the Internet. The term 'luser' was coined in the mid 1970s on ITS (incompatible Timesharing System), and has been in common usage (particularly amongst system administrators who have to deal with idiots such as the one the article refers to) ever since.
The guy is a vandal, and if you ran servers exposed to the internet, you'd be extremely tired of their continuous attacks by now. He deserves the book to be thrown at him for his vandalism.