2. None of those operations are ambiguous in the way that two featureless buttons on the mouse are. There's no way anyone could confuse the actions of pressing shift and pressing option, or lose track of how many times in a row they had clicked the mouse.
You've done tech support, but somehow not noticed how thousands of people go through life double clicking on start, double clicking on links, double clicking on the "B" to make words appear bold (and wondering why it doesn't work), double clicking on file, then double clicking on save?
And the people who press the "Ctrl" button, let go, and then press "C" when you've instructed them to press Ctrl+C.
"At the same time? What do you mean, at the same time? OK, I'll press them at the same time" (proceeds to press Ctrl and C together, and letting go of Ctrl first and C next, resulting in a dozen "c" characters)
That's easily gotten around if you can get your hands on a certain famous key generator. If you use that to change your product key before you install SP1 or SP2, then you can install it on the infamous FCKGW Corporate Edition. Course, it won't look like the infamous FCKGW to the installer anymore and AFAIK, you'll look sweet and innocent to M$, too. It will also work for any XP copy that needs a new key, in case M$ refuses to activate them.
Naturally, you didn't hear this from me, and for obvious reasons, I must remain anonymous.;-)
No money was exchanged between the Mozilla Foundation and Speakeasy, as Firefox is open source and is freely available for use by anyone
Although presumably they will have entered into some arrangement with the Foundation (or The Charlton Company), seeing as Firefox is a registered trademark. This is a good thing as it can prevent people spreading bastardized versions of firefox, such as Firefox Claria edition..
I have a hardware firewall (GTA GB500), 30 character password, and all remotely personal information stored on a 256bit AES encrypted volume.
Call me ignorant but wouldn't one simple phishing/keylogging software to get your password and its all for nothing?
Or go one better; install the keyghost keystroke-logging keyboard-dongle (other brands are available).
Note that storing your information on an encrypted partition does fuck all to protect you from virusses or spyware that choose to spam X:\goatporn.jpg to your entire adressbook.
And then there's the omniscient swapfile. Did you encrypt the swapfile?
Notice that the article poster mentions his system is "as safe as XP will let him make it", but strangely no mention of the windows "syskey" option. Also no mention of hardware encryption for his hard drive.
Not to mention that all of that is moot if you're planning on running for public office, and you might be worried about your ISP/google's logs ever resurfacing from that one night you and your buddies were drunk and surfing the web for goat porn..
Why is some unix the alternative? There's a popular and commercial and well-supported platform out there for the home user. Its called a Mac. I swear, reading some of these posts its like linux is the spoiler third-party candidate.
Actually, it does have an impact on the federal government; specifically, tax breaks and other benefits that married couples receive. I'm for gay marriage, but there's no question that the feds have a stake in this other than morals.
And it would serve them right if they suddenly had to shell out millions in additional tax-breaks to gay couples. Why should the gender of your partner dictate whether or not you get a tax-break?
They'd simply have to invent gender-neutral (and fairer) tax-breaks; like tax-breaks for parents; whether it's a gay or a straight couple (or even a single mum/dad/grandparent) raising kids, they're raising the next generation of taxpayers (paying for social security for one thing) either way.
Also, what happens in a power outage/problem, usually the last remaining "life-line" is the phone, and was invaluable when the main fuse box lit up in my old house.
What, no cellphone? No neighbors? Then perhaps you should have a power generator to power you HAM radio set.
I myself know that when my cable ISP starts offering voip im dropping my phone service from the local provider.
Does your cable company offer broadband?
Why wait for your cable company to offer VOIP. Signup for Vonage, Broadvox, etc now.
Presumably because if the cable operator was offering VoIP, they'd use some sort of Quality-of-Service scheme to make sure that your packets arrive in-order and with low latency at their end - which is conveniently located on the other end of the 'last mile', so your packets aren't routed halfway around the country before they reach some sort of dedicated, qos/labelled, VoIP network.
I'd be interested to know which cable ISP doesn't offer broadband..
XML, as originally designed, is deliciously straightforward. Data is encoded into discrete, easy-to-process chunks that any given XML parser can make sense of.
No, it's a simplified version of SGML, but it's not as simple as, say, S-expressions as used in LISP.
The original XML has all sorts of nastiness; attributes (which can be easily replaced with tags), no context for tagnames (if you have a NAME tag you can't have it be syntactically incorrect for a car to have a NAME/SURNAME), in the beginning there were no schemas (so, no, a parser couldn't make sense out of "1".. is it a string? a boolean? a real number?), namespace nastiness, a zillion encodings.. I could go on..
XML, as implemented today, is often little more than a thin wrapper for huge gobs of proprietary-format data. Thus, any given XML parser can identify the contents as "a huge gob of proprietary data", but can't do a damned thing with it. This is squarely due to the bad design of XML. You see, there are a lot of charaters that are verboten in XML. Like null (ascii 0). Unless you use CDATA sections. In which case you might as well embed binary stuff.
Also, in a lot of cases it makes perfect sense to embed something binary. Like, a PNG image. Already a great format, no need to botch it. Even better would be a reference to an external file and store everything in an archive file (zip..), but then again, XLink is just scary-looking.
As useful and pervasive as XML is, it's not a panacea, and it's also not really simple. It's far from the complicated (but extremely full-featured) mess that ASN.1 is, but that's about that.
FM Radio is far from CD quality hence there isnt really a need to use very high bitrate MP3s or whatever
Or consider this; since FM radio has a limited range of frequencies that come across well, songs that are intended to be widely played on FM radio (e.g. Britney Spear's latest "hit" song) are actually engineered to sound best in those frequencies. With the end result that when you hear Britney Spears on the radio, the track sounds just like it does on the CD.
Meanwhile, quality music, lovingly mixed onto CD by people who actually give a damn, sounds like crap on the radio..
In other words; if you can't hear the difference between 128kbps and higher, it might just be that you're listening to mass produced music.
As for musicians preferring 128kbps? Well, sound engineers usually don't sit on stage with zillion Watt speakers right next to their fragile precious ears for a reason..
Me, I have crap taste in music AND I'm tonedeaf, so whatever, 128kbps all the way!;-)
Why do dumb/naive people keep falling for scams like this? Each disaster these scams pop up, each time the public is warned about them, but it still works..
Is there some sort of university program I'm not aware of, pumping out mindless peons by the thousands each year so they can make the same mistake as others did last year? Apart from Hamburger University of course..
One would assume that any vulerability that could run arbitary code would be able to delete files.
Not necessarily. If the arbitrary code is run in a restricted security context (e.g. Guest User, sandbox, restricted zone/role/capability) it shouldn't be able to delete files it has no acces to. The exploit would need to run a second exploit for privilege elevation.
Thankfully, in Internet Explorer's ActiveX security model none of all that is necessary, greatly speeding up the development of worms.
Among the things MS Anti-Spyware found on my system (which is actually well-maintained, so perhaps not the best test-bed) none was a real hit, they were all false positives.
It even managed to warn against registry settings put in place by SpyBot to ensure a malicious site runs in internet explorer's restricted zone!
Also, it reported with glee that TightVNC is a dangerous hacking tool. I happen to use it to help out people, exactly the kind of people who are likely to remove it if AntiSpyware complains about it (e.g. my mom).
Then a load of DLLs that are actually dummy DLLs shipped with the "lite" version of a (once upon a time) popular ad/spyware ridden app - again, it's detecting its competition!
And then there are the residual files/empty directories/registry settings that adaware/spybot didn't remove some months ago when I tried an app that came with ad/spyware. No active components at all.
Another thing I don't like about it is that it's user interface doesn't scale properly when you've adjusted your DPI settings.
Also, its on-access scanner (for want of a better word) comes with an enormous performance hit, and is mostly concerned with Internet Explorer hacks. Those are a minor concern for me since I use firefox, and besides, Microsoft should fix IE, not ship cycle/ramhungy monitoring applications for it (though that's hardly GIANT's fault).
Yet again, the internet bandwidth gets sucked away by something it was not orginally designed for. Instead of supporting 10-20 laptops checking email and news, we'll have 2-3 phones sucking up all the bandwidth while the yuppies and teens chat.
E-mail?? News?? I hope you mean usenet newsgroups in the sci.* hierarchy with "news"! The internet is for serious research only..
Why? As I recall, MP3, ogg vorbis, and the like aren't meant for compressing voice data. They're much better at dealing with music.
There are codecs specifically meant for speech, such as http://www.speex.org/.
Speex specializes in low bandwidth voice.
If you have 128kbps to throw around, speex is overkill. MP3 may have been designed to compress music especially well, but it's held up quite well as an all-round codec. (Though there might not be much masking noises - like loud beats that obscure other sounds - in speech, the spectral range is quite limited, and MP3 picks up on that.)
And who says VOIP is for voice only? It's not uncommon for me to want to let a friend hear some music that's playing on mtv or my computer. With speech-optimized codecs, it comes out crap on the other end. Even on-hold music sounds mostly like silence and some blips on a cellphone. In fact, I've contemplated using the GSM codec to identify the speech part of music, so I can use it to produce "karaoke"/instrumental versions of music..
I wonder if there's a software upgrade that enables telephone companies to use 64/56kbps ogg (though obviously mono) codecs instead of G.711/G.723.
If you break open a firecraker (many will come apart just by applying pressure to the middle with your thumbs, holding the ends with your indexfingers, like snapping a twig) and light the exposed ends of scary explosives, all they'll do is fizzle a bit and make pretty sparks.
Without containment, there's no pressure to build up, and explosives typically don't explode, but just burn quite rapidly.
So, reinforcing firecrackers can make them a lot louder/destructive.
I believe that the reason calls to Cuba cost more is the tax charged by the Cuban government on international phone calls, but I could be wrong.
I'd hazard a guess and say that there's not much competition going on in Cuban telecommunications, Communist governments not being too big on deregulation and capitalist enterprise.
Today two out of the three I received (new e-mail address they obviously haven't found yet) were telling me to increase how well I can please a woman with exercises and drugs to increase my penis size. It is rather disturbing. One thing I want to know... do men actually think that increasing your penis size will make women ecstatic?
No. Spams that sell penis enlargements aren't actually profitable. There are just some spammers out there with a serious chicks-with-dicks fetish.
Dual processor is very, very useful. Even for lowly non-server use.
You see, I have a dual cpu system, and for the longest time I thought XP must be the most stable windows OS evar!
Turns out the OS never really crashes because there's always a cpu left to bring up the ctrl-alt-del screen with, so you can kill all the OS processes on the other CPU that DID crash..
Slashdot Mirror
2. None of those operations are ambiguous in the way that two featureless buttons on the mouse are. There's no way anyone could confuse the actions of pressing shift and pressing option, or lose track of how many times in a row they had clicked the mouse.
You've done tech support, but somehow not noticed how thousands of people go through life double clicking on start, double clicking on links, double clicking on the "B" to make words appear bold (and wondering why it doesn't work), double clicking on file, then double clicking on save?
And the people who press the "Ctrl" button, let go, and then press "C" when you've instructed them to press Ctrl+C.
"At the same time? What do you mean, at the same time? OK, I'll press them at the same time" (proceeds to press Ctrl and C together, and letting go of Ctrl first and C next, resulting in a dozen "c" characters)
*shudders*
That's easily gotten around if you can get your hands on a certain famous key generator. If you use that to change your product key before you install SP1 or SP2, then you can install it on the infamous FCKGW Corporate Edition. Course, it won't look like the infamous FCKGW to the installer anymore and AFAIK, you'll look sweet and innocent to M$, too. It will also work for any XP copy that needs a new key, in case M$ refuses to activate them.
;-)
Naturally, you didn't hear this from me, and for obvious reasons, I must remain anonymous.
Yeah, there's so much more information in your post than on http://www.polarhome.com:713/~opensrc/cdkey.html. I wonder how you sleep at night worrying about the Federales..
No money was exchanged between the Mozilla Foundation and Speakeasy, as Firefox is open source and is freely available for use by anyone
Although presumably they will have entered into some arrangement with the Foundation (or The Charlton Company), seeing as Firefox is a registered trademark. This is a good thing as it can prevent people spreading bastardized versions of firefox, such as Firefox Claria edition..
I have a hardware firewall (GTA GB500), 30 character password, and all remotely personal information stored on a 256bit AES encrypted volume.
Call me ignorant but wouldn't one simple phishing/keylogging software to get your password and its all for nothing?
Or go one better; install the keyghost keystroke-logging keyboard-dongle (other brands are available).
Note that storing your information on an encrypted partition does fuck all to protect you from virusses or spyware that choose to spam X:\goatporn.jpg to your entire adressbook.
And then there's the omniscient swapfile. Did you encrypt the swapfile?
Notice that the article poster mentions his system is "as safe as XP will let him make it", but strangely no mention of the windows "syskey" option. Also no mention of hardware encryption for his hard drive.
Not to mention that all of that is moot if you're planning on running for public office, and you might be worried about your ISP/google's logs ever resurfacing from that one night you and your buddies were drunk and surfing the web for goat porn..
>Most people won't switch to *nix from windows
Why is some unix the alternative? There's a popular and commercial and well-supported platform out there for the home user. Its called a Mac. I swear, reading some of these posts its like linux is the spoiler third-party candidate.
MacOS/X is based on BSD. A *nix.
Now, AtariOS on the other hand, there's a winner!
Actually, it does have an impact on the federal government; specifically, tax breaks and other benefits that married couples receive. I'm for gay marriage, but there's no question that the feds have a stake in this other than morals.
And it would serve them right if they suddenly had to shell out millions in additional tax-breaks to gay couples. Why should the gender of your partner dictate whether or not you get a tax-break?
They'd simply have to invent gender-neutral (and fairer) tax-breaks; like tax-breaks for parents; whether it's a gay or a straight couple (or even a single mum/dad/grandparent) raising kids, they're raising the next generation of taxpayers (paying for social security for one thing) either way.
98.5% of feminists agree: yay for the gay!
Induction charging is not new, and it's no panacea.
It would however be very useful for watertight cellphones, in much the same way as it's used with cordless rechargeable tootbrushes.
Not that there are many ruggedized/waterproof cellphone models available. Kind of spoils the replacement market.
Good head/ear phones can do bass very well. SO if the player can't, then yes, it's a problem.
Trouble is, the subway you're riding does an even better job at producing bass.
Also, what happens in a power outage/problem, usually the last remaining "life-line" is the phone, and was invaluable when the main fuse box lit up in my old house.
What, no cellphone? No neighbors? Then perhaps you should have a power generator to power you HAM radio set.
Presumably because if the cable operator was offering VoIP, they'd use some sort of Quality-of-Service scheme to make sure that your packets arrive in-order and with low latency at their end - which is conveniently located on the other end of the 'last mile', so your packets aren't routed halfway around the country before they reach some sort of dedicated, qos/labelled, VoIP network.
I'd be interested to know which cable ISP doesn't offer broadband..
How could someone not know HTML, yet be able to write googles algorithm? Dont most programmers laugh at the easyness of html?
Yeah. And French is easy too. Ten year olds speak it!
XML, as originally designed, is deliciously straightforward. Data is encoded into discrete, easy-to-process chunks that any given XML parser can make sense of.
No, it's a simplified version of SGML, but it's not as simple as, say, S-expressions as used in LISP.
The original XML has all sorts of nastiness; attributes (which can be easily replaced with tags), no context for tagnames (if you have a NAME tag you can't have it be syntactically incorrect for a car to have a NAME/SURNAME), in the beginning there were no schemas (so, no, a parser couldn't make sense out of "1".. is it a string? a boolean? a real number?), namespace nastiness, a zillion encodings.. I could go on..
XML, as implemented today, is often little more than a thin wrapper for huge gobs of proprietary-format data. Thus, any given XML parser can identify the contents as "a huge gob of proprietary data", but can't do a damned thing with it.
This is squarely due to the bad design of XML. You see, there are a lot of charaters that are verboten in XML. Like null (ascii 0). Unless you use CDATA sections. In which case you might as well embed binary stuff.
Also, in a lot of cases it makes perfect sense to embed something binary. Like, a PNG image. Already a great format, no need to botch it. Even better would be a reference to an external file and store everything in an archive file (zip..), but then again, XLink is just scary-looking.
As useful and pervasive as XML is, it's not a panacea, and it's also not really simple. It's far from the complicated (but extremely full-featured) mess that ASN.1 is, but that's about that.
FM Radio is far from CD quality hence there isnt really a need to use very high bitrate MP3s or whatever
;-)
Or consider this; since FM radio has a limited range of frequencies that come across well, songs that are intended to be widely played on FM radio (e.g. Britney Spear's latest "hit" song) are actually engineered to sound best in those frequencies. With the end result that when you hear Britney Spears on the radio, the track sounds just like it does on the CD.
Meanwhile, quality music, lovingly mixed onto CD by people who actually give a damn, sounds like crap on the radio..
In other words; if you can't hear the difference between 128kbps and higher, it might just be that you're listening to mass produced music.
As for musicians preferring 128kbps? Well, sound engineers usually don't sit on stage with zillion Watt speakers right next to their fragile precious ears for a reason..
Me, I have crap taste in music AND I'm tonedeaf, so whatever, 128kbps all the way!
(MPEG artifacts in video drive me nuts, though)
Why do dumb/naive people keep falling for scams like this? Each disaster these scams pop up, each time the public is warned about them, but it still works..
Is there some sort of university program I'm not aware of, pumping out mindless peons by the thousands each year so they can make the same mistake as others did last year? Apart from Hamburger University of course..
Then again, University of Miami law professor Enrique Fernandez-Barros somehow managed to become part of a 419 scam in which $1.68 million got lost...
One would assume that any vulerability that could run arbitary code would be able to delete files.
Not necessarily. If the arbitrary code is run in a restricted security context (e.g. Guest User, sandbox, restricted zone/role/capability) it shouldn't be able to delete files it has no acces to. The exploit would need to run a second exploit for privilege elevation.
Thankfully, in Internet Explorer's ActiveX security model none of all that is necessary, greatly speeding up the development of worms.
Among the things MS Anti-Spyware found on my system (which is actually well-maintained, so perhaps not the best test-bed) none was a real hit, they were all false positives.
It even managed to warn against registry settings put in place by SpyBot to ensure a malicious site runs in internet explorer's restricted zone!
Also, it reported with glee that TightVNC is a dangerous hacking tool. I happen to use it to help out people, exactly the kind of people who are likely to remove it if AntiSpyware complains about it (e.g. my mom).
Then a load of DLLs that are actually dummy DLLs shipped with the "lite" version of a (once upon a time) popular ad/spyware ridden app - again, it's detecting its competition!
And then there are the residual files/empty directories/registry settings that adaware/spybot didn't remove some months ago when I tried an app that came with ad/spyware. No active components at all.
Another thing I don't like about it is that it's user interface doesn't scale properly when you've adjusted your DPI settings.
Also, its on-access scanner (for want of a better word) comes with an enormous performance hit, and is mostly concerned with Internet Explorer hacks. Those are a minor concern for me since I use firefox, and besides, Microsoft should fix IE, not ship cycle/ramhungy monitoring applications for it (though that's hardly GIANT's fault).
In other words, I'm underwhelmed.
Yet again, the internet bandwidth gets sucked away by something it was not orginally designed for. Instead of supporting 10-20 laptops checking email and news, we'll have 2-3 phones sucking up all the bandwidth while the yuppies and teens chat.
E-mail?? News?? I hope you mean usenet newsgroups in the sci.* hierarchy with "news"! The internet is for serious research only..
Why? As I recall, MP3, ogg vorbis, and the like aren't meant for compressing voice data. They're much better at dealing with music.
There are codecs specifically meant for speech, such as http://www.speex.org/.
Speex specializes in low bandwidth voice.
If you have 128kbps to throw around, speex is overkill. MP3 may have been designed to compress music especially well, but it's held up quite well as an all-round codec. (Though there might not be much masking noises - like loud beats that obscure other sounds - in speech, the spectral range is quite limited, and MP3 picks up on that.)
And who says VOIP is for voice only? It's not uncommon for me to want to let a friend hear some music that's playing on mtv or my computer. With speech-optimized codecs, it comes out crap on the other end. Even on-hold music sounds mostly like silence and some blips on a cellphone. In fact, I've contemplated using the GSM codec to identify the speech part of music, so I can use it to produce "karaoke"/instrumental versions of music..
I wonder if there's a software upgrade that enables telephone companies to use 64/56kbps ogg (though obviously mono) codecs instead of G.711/G.723.
Dude! I warned you about mentioning midgets in your post! Now you've exposed Rent-a-Midget for their true purpose, you're gonna be in deep shit!
If you break open a firecraker (many will come apart just by applying pressure to the middle with your thumbs, holding the ends with your indexfingers, like snapping a twig) and light the exposed ends of scary explosives, all they'll do is fizzle a bit and make pretty sparks.
Without containment, there's no pressure to build up, and explosives typically don't explode, but just burn quite rapidly.
So, reinforcing firecrackers can make them a lot louder/destructive.
I believe that the reason calls to Cuba cost more is the tax charged by the Cuban government on international phone calls, but I could be wrong.
I'd hazard a guess and say that there's not much competition going on in Cuban telecommunications, Communist governments not being too big on deregulation and capitalist enterprise.
Today two out of the three I received (new e-mail address they obviously haven't found yet) were telling me to increase how well I can please a woman with exercises and drugs to increase my penis size. It is rather disturbing. One thing I want to know... do men actually think that increasing your penis size will make women ecstatic?
No. Spams that sell penis enlargements aren't actually profitable. There are just some spammers out there with a serious chicks-with-dicks fetish.
Isn't that blatently illegal?
It's DRM, therefore it MUST be legal. Doesn't it say something like that in the windows media player license agreement?
Dual processor is very, very useful. Even for lowly non-server use.
You see, I have a dual cpu system, and for the longest time I thought XP must be the most stable windows OS evar!
Turns out the OS never really crashes because there's always a cpu left to bring up the ctrl-alt-del screen with, so you can kill all the OS processes on the other CPU that DID crash..
What good is a $5 million fine when the spammer can't even pay a $50,000 one?
If you don't pay your fines, you go to prison.