The stock market in fact has a wealth multiplying effect, as all financial markets do: the "money" you have in $100 Yahoo shares isn't sitting in a bank account somewhere, but is instead being used by Yahoo to invest in other companies (through stock swaps), is being loaned to companies to make capital investments, is being used as collateral by individuals, etc.
You're wrong in two ways; 1) Money does not sit dormant in a bank account. It gets loaned out or invested by the bank. Banks can lend out (usually in the form of mortgages, overdraughts and credit) or otherwise invest money held in their accounts for up to 90%.
2) Money is only injected into companies like yahoo to actually invest when they issue new stock. Stock-swaps are basically using monopoly money to buy monopoly money, and aren't captical investments anyway. Post-IPO gains in a stock's price doesn't put money into the corporation's hands.
And you're kind of wrong in a third way too; if I buy $100 of Yahoo stock post-IPO, I'm buying them from some other guy who might be using that money to invest elsewhere.
On the whole, the money that is tied up in the markets (in the form of shares held by investors) isn't doing much "work"; over the long term it's comparable to a savings account.
If your aim is to stimulate the economy, you'd be better off spending money on high risk ventures that don't have as much of a zero-sum nature; e.g. venture capital, small (starter) business loans, junk bonds, etc.
The markets reflect how well the overall economy is doing mostly on account of the fact that people don't throw money into the market if they need their cash to feed hungry mouths. Other than that they only reflect how well a company or a bunch of companies is doing relative to others.
Bottom line: stop talking out of your ass about something you clearly know nothing about. You said it.
According to that msfn.org site, Microsoft has now announced that SP2 will install on all but the PCs that were also blocked from SP1.
So, if SP1 will install, so will SP2.
In the interest of preventing other people from getting their computers hacked into to form a botnet and DDOS the planet, check out how to change the CD key and a list of CD keys.
What makes it even less informative is that these "experts" are not experts in the field that's being discussed. The numbers would at least be interesting if they had actually used experts knowledgable about voting security.
Well, if you're talking about experts in electronic voting security, that's like being an expert in flying pigs.
Electronic voting is a 4 step process 1. voter enters vote 2. ? 3. all evidence is destroyed (in the process of 2) 4. the results are announced
(and all steps are performed by one party with no oversight from any other (non)partisan parties.)
Methinks I should elaborate. Scanning for open proxies is NOT a feature of the IRC protocol. IRC servers simply scan for open proxies in the same way people that generate those open proxies lists do. They connect to ports that are known to be used by proxy services.
Once you connect to a modern IRC network, the IP you're using will be portscanned. If it finds any services listening on known proxy ports (i.e. open proxies) the IRC server won't let you connect because you may be using an open proxy.
(If you're using a non-open proxy, i.e. one that doesn't allow connections from everyone, or more specifically, from the server that's trying to portscan you, you can still connect).
They don't retrieve the originally originating IP, they just look at where the connection is apparently coming from, and if it's a proxy, refuse the traffic precisely because it cloaks the origins.
"Should we let Ad companies dictate not only what we can or cannot see on televison, but what we can, or cannot access via Interent?"
Seeing as how they're paying the bills...
Well, if that's your attitude, don't come complaining about any perceived "conservative" or "liberal" bias in the media. Unless you're the advertiser paying said media to be biased the way you tell them to be, of course.
That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.
IRC servers check to see whether your connection is from an open proxy by connecting to it/portscanning; by definition IRC connections don't contain HTTP headers that reveal the originating IP address.
Also, ISPs are increasingly willing to supply data without a subpoena or warrant.
Very interesting. Can you tell me where you find proof or numbers to back this up?
Well, numbers are rather hard to come by as these unofficial requests happen quite unofficially. There is more mention of companies turning over records in the new reports (which I don't keep pasted to my door), but if you put me on the spot I'd be hard pressed to quantify it.
On the other hand, ISPs refusing the police's polite requests to turn over information without a warrant is usually an argument politicians use to want to introduce PATRIOT-ACT style no-warrant secret third-party searches..
To my knowledge there is only one ISP in the Netherlands that is unwilling to turn over information without a warrant (xs4all). Some have stated in public they will do their unquestioning best to comply with police requests (e.g. wanadoo/euronet, KPN/planet/hetnet, tiscali).
The EU is considering making it mandatory for ALL communications (of ALL citizens/companies, no due cause) to be stored for seven years, "just in case".
The UK already keeps 7 years worth of actual recordings (not just traffic information) of all international voice calls, which is how the 7 year term came into the proposal - it's now being weakened down to 2 years, mostly over concerns of costs, rather than privacy.
Let's consider that filtering software you were talking about. It would have to be capable of realtime filtering. Not really, they just store all packets headed to/from a particular customer in a giant-ass log and figure it out later, just like you would using ethereal.
There are real-time, hardware based filtering solutions, but those are mostly used by spooks, and hardly likely to be effective, given how much words like "bomb" and "terrorist" crop up in conversations these days.
The focus is on retaining data so you can later sift through it to confirm suspicions that hadn't formed at the time. From there you can reconstruct suspect's networks etc.
I think I saw some of that hardware referenced on cryptome.org years back, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Even if what you say is true, this will just be a huge waste of money Indeed. If you're into programming network sniffers, some of that money might be headed your way.
Some interesting resources are "privacy international, echelon watch, epic, etc.
That's probably not an initiative by Microsoft itself to fight the good fight, but rather to ensure that the XBox isn't designated to be a cryptographic device, which would trigger numerous export/import restrictions (in the US, but also in Wassenaar agreement countries).
Interesting that they would encrypt the game data itself though. You could use a game map as a Ouija board..
I think you give national authorities far too much credit for competence in the IT arena.
Heaven forbid! They are massively incompetent. But that doesn't prevent them from agressively (over)using laws to tap willy-nilly. They will use pretty dinky equipment, due to their fudged up procurement procedures, but in the end it will get the job done, usually by indiscriminately intercepting way too much traffic, rather than too little.
(Also consider that your data center likely didn't provide any CALEA equipment themselves; a CO owned by a telecomms provider will have dedicated tapping ports for voice and modem traffic, and more than likely DSL lines also have these dedicated tapping ports).
To give an example of government incompetence; Dutch tapping equipment and software, which when installed can tap all data traffic at an ISP and is relied upon to only store the information identified by a warrant, is made by an Israeli company. The software cannot be maintained easily, because the entire interface is in Hebrew, and it's all closed source anyway. There is no way to check for backdoors in the software. Israel by the way, has one of the most agressive foreign intelligence/security agencies in the world..
If governments were less incompetent, it would also be easier to trust them to keep abuses in check. As it is, if they will be storing all communications for 7 years, you can trust them to give access to their databases to a host of minimum wage workers, eager to be corrupted.
This keeps coming up here on/. whenever the FCC talks about "VoIP". They're not talking about all computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects, they're talking about VoIP services that result in a network of people you can "dial" that more or less resemble a phone network. It's those that they're regulating and basically putting on the same playing field as existing phone services.
Which would include Pulver's FreeWorldDialup by your definition, though the FCC isn't concerned with them in the slightest, since they don't terminate voice traffic on copper.
While "voice-over-IP" seems like a broad term, it's come to mean (or rather, has always been taken to mean), well, exactly your definition (which is only partly regulated by the FCC), whereas people usually refer to computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects that don't conform to that definition simply as "voice-chat" (or audio conferencing). For example, nobody calls those XBox live voice features VoIP.
On the flip side, nobody calls VoIP "streaming audio" even though it is. True, it's unicast and bi-directional, but even so.
So the use of VoIP was actually almost spot on. The FCC is to impose tapping on VoIP providers, except those it doesn't regulate, which includes, but is not limited to pulver's freeworlddialup and foreign companies. I think the last part can be skipped for clarity since the FCC usually regulates only those it regulates, rather than those it doesn't.. do. that. to.
In Europe there's tapping legislation that forces each and every provider of a "public network" to provide tapping capabilities. That means that tapping might occur at any hop along the way that is in the EU, be it the DSL or dialup connection (btw, that also ends up in a traditional, yet modernized, CO), the DSL provider, your ISP, their backbone, etc. etc.
Probably the CO where the DSL line is hooked up to is the preferential point-of-tapping, since that way you also catch packets that might go astray (e.g. spoofed packets).
Tapping software is advanced enough (and why shouldn't it be) to filter out and reconstruct VOIP streams.
It's unlikely that the authority to tap is used sparingly (i.e. used only on one end of the conversation). For example, in The Netherlands a warrant to tap a line extends not to just one phone line, but any one that calls that phone line can get tapped as well, regardless of suspicion (so, if you call Don Vito, and his line is tapped, your line will now also be tapped, just to see if you'll call any other mobsters).
This of course results in masses of data (much of it duplicated) that the police would have to sort through - that is truly a growth market. Write software for it and become rich.
Also, ISPs are increasingly willing to supply data without a subpoena or warrant.
Using codes and stegonagraphy won't always be much help. For example, a Dutch blackmailer was arrested when he looked at a car-ad that contained coded information about the drop-off point of the money he'd demanded. Turned out that the ad was only clicked on about 3 times (he should have picked a more popular model), so placing an ad wasn't really that "broadcast" as he'd thought. Also, the anonymous proxy service that he paid for ratted him (or at least his credit-card number) out immediately.
The bottom line is that the internet is FAR from a safe haven for terrorists, or even common criminals. Actual real life terrorists are far more likely to use 50 year old spying techniques that still work well (like deap-drop boxes, placing ads in papers, etc.).
Of course, the more people come to realise this, the less useful all these measures become; to get a bit political, the potential for abuse is enormous. The EU is considering making it mandatory for ALL communications (of ALL citizens/companies, no due cause) to be stored for seven years, "just in case".
Just think what a political/economical opponent could do with seven years' worth of your most intimate communications (while terrorists are happily communicating using WWII spying techniques). A bit more than that Nixon dude could ever have achieved with those pesky tapes.
According to reliable sources (an anonymous forum post from google) "Each number is a multiplier used on a basic frequency of 3.375 MHz" - it relates to the analogue bandwidth (i.e. information) stored per pixel. In digital formats the representation may be quite different; in YUV formats all values are represented with 8 bits, but 2 pixels share the U and V information (it's only sampled once).
Horizontally, television has an analogue signal. How would you quantify that?
I'd quantify it as 720 luminance samples and 360 chrominance samples per line; effectively 720 pixels with 4:2:2 sampling. Perfectly in line with CCIR-601, or as its known, ITU-R Recommendation BT.601-5 (10/95) (AKA "broadcast quality")
(Note that "analogue" does not imply infinite definition; CCIR-604 specifies certain bandwidth and signal-to-noise requirements, including maximum deviation; digital source material is better quality than the analogue broadcast; of course, with NTSC, this isn't hard.)
I never quite bought the re-ordering of files. Especially the part where they "put all the often used files at the beginning of the disk". I mean, how is the beginning of the disk easier to access than any other part? It only becomes easier to access if the diskhead spends a lot of time hovering over there, rather than scattered all over the place. As soon as it needs to pick up a "rarely-used" data file from some remote region of the disk you incur an old-stylee seek time twice for the privilige..
In fact, with all that multi-tasking going on these days, it makes sense to use striping RAID, which is pretty much fragmenting stuff on purpose, only spread over two or more disks.
Note that defragmenting programs still make an attempt to move files that are used most often to one part of the disk - this is pretty much the only reason windows spends all that time updating "last modified" dates on files. Dirms does this too, and all the commercial apps do as well.
One pet peeve of mine is that no defragmentation program bothers to empty the internet explorer (let alone mozilla) cache and %temp%. Virusscanners don't bother either.
(Come to think of it, emptying %temp% once in a while can boost performance significantly, on XP mostly due to the insane amounts of disk space wasted there, and on windows 98 and the like because it will contain files that confuse it).
For your defragmentation needs, you could also try buzzsaw.
Also, sysinternal's pagedefrag and contig are pretty usefull.
Not that defragmenting your hard drive will give you enormous performance boosts, though.
The first thing I do when I sit down in front of an XP machine is turn of the unnecessary themes/skinning, animations and shadows, unwanted services (services.msc), unwanted start up programs (try sysinternal's autoruns), and of course the adaware/spybot thing.
Also, I usually set the swap file to be some fixed number of megabytes (4 times RAM or some ludicrous amount like that), and make sure IE's and mozilla's cache sizes are pretty minimal (i.e. 10MB should be enough) if the machine is on a broadband connection.
If these programs can do anything more to optimize my setup, they're welcome, but I wonder what exactly they do..
Ditto what the other respondants said. Security through obscurity is better than no security. It gives the coders a chance to fix the problem _right_, not just plug it with a blacklist or something. Once the problem is fixed (or after the next release after the fix), security bugs are opened up.
On the one hand, it prevents some blackhats from thinking "OMG! That's a pretty serious bug right there! I'm gonna write an exploit for it!".
On the other hand, no non-mozilla developer who happens to be looking in bugzilla can say "OMG! That's a pretty serious bug right there! I'm gonna write a patch for it, and submit it right NOW".
Given the fact that that XUL bug was know for, what, a year, they might have considered letting some one else take a stab at solving it... You know, what with the whole open source idea being that many eyes fix bugs..
One thing I thought of since I've dealt with environments where games shouldn't be played (University computer labs) is why didn't he just change the permissions on them? It sounds like they were in an NT or Active Directory domain, it's pretty unlikely the boss had administrator access since this guy was the designated support person for his division (he has the policy on support personnel up too, it says one person in each division/dept. will be granted administrator access for their part of the domain tree). He could have avoided this mess and forced the issue with the higher-ups by simply changing the permissions on solitaire to be administrator only or even nobody. It's likely the boss wouldn't have pushed the issue too hard as it would make him look bad trying to get access to a game restored. The guy could have also locked access to solitaire on all computers in his division to make it a policy issue, not a direct confrontation of his boss.
The problem with that is that the boss could still download games (hard to prevent unless you're using XP clients with 2003 servers, and use software restriction policies (which are likely to cause some distress when people find out they can't run some mission-critical application that's not in the whitelist; like winzip or whatever).
And even then, he can go online and play flash games.
Is it just me, or are stored procedures used mostly for trying to shoehorn non-relational data into the relational data?
You know what I'm on about.. The umpteenth stored procedure to do some recursion to manage some sort of tree in a rdbms. Can't do recursive SQL (usually), so we'll solve it in a stored procedure (rather than take a small performance hit and sort it out in the application logic), because a tree just doesn't fit all too well in a relational model (unlike, say, in a hierarchical model)..
While I'm sure pros love the optimization capabilities SPs give them, and some might enjoy the abstraction that can be achieved, I think this is what suckers most people into the SP camp..
(Of course, SPs can be downright evil, in that they encourage vendor lock-in to quite an extent, but then, switching to a different RDBMS is hard anyway).
I'd bother more about security then stability with WinCE. Keepeng in mind MS security track records (IE anyone ?) and the new communication media like WiFi , Bluetooth, SMS I'm afraid the proliferation of WinCE phones spell disaster. Phone spamming, adware, trojans... Symbian don't use Interner Explorer at least.
What security? There is no security in win ce (that includes no check on which programs try to access the internet, phonedialling, etc. which is a nice way to rack up GPRS bandwidth and 1-900 charges).
There's only a password feature for when you turn it on, or if it hasn't been used for x minutes, similar to windows 95 - I haven't tried it yet, but it's said to be easily circumvented.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.;)
Well, according to dictionary.com
inconceivable Audio pronunciation of "inconceivable" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nkn-sv-bl) adj.
1. Impossible to comprehend or grasp fully: inconceivable folly; an inconceivable disaster.
2. So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible; unbelievable: an inconceivable victory against all odds.
I was aiming for sense 2, the first, there.
Though in another lemma it also lists "not explicable by the human intellect, or by any known principles or agencies", which pretty much sums up windows CE in its entirety.
Win CE crashes more often than Win XP and that's too much!
My Win XP setup is fairly stable (also helped by the fact the dual cpu means one cpu is usually still there to do ctrl-alt-del magic), but the instability of wince is almost inconceivable.. It should remind you more of windows 95. It hangs on to all the design mistakes ever made in Windows, and then adds some.
Unfortunately, it has such a strong foothold in the PDA market, that the companies that produce components for iPaqs and such are likely to offer wince support by default. Whereas if you were to go with linux, good luck finding energy-efficient GPUs and touchscreens etc. that are supported.
It also doesn't help that there's not much in the way of device-friendly linux APIs.. Running X on a small device is a bit too much; opie is there, but not much else.. Microsoft have even crammed a stripped down version of directX into their pocketPC OS. *shudder*
You have to wonder who dropped the ball over at Sun that they don't have a Java OS for handhelds. And lament the rape of symbian by Nokia. (No, you're thinking of a sybian, different thing entirely).
Slashdot Mirror
The stock market in fact has a wealth multiplying effect, as all financial markets do: the "money" you have in $100 Yahoo shares isn't sitting in a bank account somewhere, but is instead being used by Yahoo to invest in other companies (through stock swaps), is being loaned to companies to make capital investments, is being used as collateral by individuals, etc.
You're wrong in two ways;
1) Money does not sit dormant in a bank account. It gets loaned out or invested by the bank. Banks can lend out (usually in the form of mortgages, overdraughts and credit) or otherwise invest money held in their accounts for up to 90%.
2) Money is only injected into companies like yahoo to actually invest when they issue new stock.
Stock-swaps are basically using monopoly money to buy monopoly money, and aren't captical investments anyway. Post-IPO gains in a stock's price doesn't put money into the corporation's hands.
And you're kind of wrong in a third way too; if I buy $100 of Yahoo stock post-IPO, I'm buying them from some other guy who might be using that money to invest elsewhere.
On the whole, the money that is tied up in the markets (in the form of shares held by investors) isn't doing much "work"; over the long term it's comparable to a savings account.
If your aim is to stimulate the economy, you'd be better off spending money on high risk ventures that don't have as much of a zero-sum nature; e.g. venture capital, small (starter) business loans, junk bonds, etc.
The markets reflect how well the overall economy is doing mostly on account of the fact that people don't throw money into the market if they need their cash to feed hungry mouths. Other than that they only reflect how well a company or a bunch of companies is doing relative to others.
Bottom line: stop talking out of your ass about something you clearly know nothing about.
You said it.
According to that msfn.org site, Microsoft has now announced that SP2 will install on all but the PCs that were also blocked from SP1.
So, if SP1 will install, so will SP2.
In the interest of preventing other people from getting their computers hacked into to form a botnet and DDOS the planet, check out how to change the CD key and a list of CD keys.
What makes it even less informative is that these "experts" are not experts in the field that's being discussed. The numbers would at least be interesting if they had actually used experts knowledgable about voting security.
Well, if you're talking about experts in electronic voting security, that's like being an expert in flying pigs.
Electronic voting is a 4 step process
1. voter enters vote
2. ?
3. all evidence is destroyed (in the process of 2)
4. the results are announced
(and all steps are performed by one party with no oversight from any other (non)partisan parties.)
Methinks I should elaborate. Scanning for open proxies is NOT a feature of the IRC protocol. IRC servers simply scan for open proxies in the same way people that generate those open proxies lists do. They connect to ports that are known to be used by proxy services.
Once you connect to a modern IRC network, the IP you're using will be portscanned. If it finds any services listening on known proxy ports (i.e. open proxies) the IRC server won't let you connect because you may be using an open proxy.
(If you're using a non-open proxy, i.e. one that doesn't allow connections from everyone, or more specifically, from the server that's trying to portscan you, you can still connect).
They don't retrieve the originally originating IP, they just look at where the connection is apparently coming from, and if it's a proxy, refuse the traffic precisely because it cloaks the origins.
There is no voodoo involved.
"Should we let Ad companies dictate not only what we can or cannot see on televison, but what we can, or cannot access via Interent?"
Seeing as how they're paying the bills...
Well, if that's your attitude, don't come complaining about any perceived "conservative" or "liberal" bias in the media. Unless you're the advertiser paying said media to be biased the way you tell them to be, of course.
That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.
IRC servers check to see whether your connection is from an open proxy by connecting to it/portscanning; by definition IRC connections don't contain HTTP headers that reveal the originating IP address.
This just shows that DRM, while being so vilely derided on slashdot, can actually be used for evil, as well as for evil.
Surely Intel has patented this technique before publishing in an academic conference.
Which doesn't prevent AMD from using it, since they've cross-licensed all their stuff.
StephenGalton.Com is still available. Not surprising given this particular individuals net-savviness (hint: none).
OMG my identity will be subpoenad for making that comment!!!!111hundredeleventyone
Also, ISPs are increasingly willing to supply data without a subpoena or warrant.
Very interesting. Can you tell me where you find proof or numbers to back this up?
Well, numbers are rather hard to come by as these unofficial requests happen quite unofficially. There is more mention of companies turning over records in the new reports (which I don't keep pasted to my door), but if you put me on the spot I'd be hard pressed to quantify it.
On the other hand, ISPs refusing the police's polite requests to turn over information without a warrant is usually an argument politicians use to want to introduce PATRIOT-ACT style no-warrant secret third-party searches..
To my knowledge there is only one ISP in the Netherlands that is unwilling to turn over information without a warrant (xs4all). Some have stated in public they will do their unquestioning best to comply with police requests (e.g. wanadoo/euronet, KPN/planet/hetnet, tiscali).
The EU is considering making it mandatory for ALL communications (of ALL citizens/companies, no due cause) to be stored for seven years, "just in case".
Same here. Haven't heard a word of this.
Just google for it.
The UK already keeps 7 years worth of actual recordings (not just traffic information) of all international voice calls, which is how the 7 year term came into the proposal - it's now being weakened down to 2 years, mostly over concerns of costs, rather than privacy.
Let's consider that filtering software you were talking about. It would have to be capable of realtime filtering.
Not really, they just store all packets headed to/from a particular customer in a giant-ass log and figure it out later, just like you would using ethereal.
There are real-time, hardware based filtering solutions, but those are mostly used by spooks, and hardly likely to be effective, given how much words like "bomb" and "terrorist" crop up in conversations these days.
The focus is on retaining data so you can later sift through it to confirm suspicions that hadn't formed at the time. From there you can reconstruct suspect's networks etc.
I think I saw some of that hardware referenced on cryptome.org years back, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Even if what you say is true, this will just be a huge waste of money
Indeed. If you're into programming network sniffers, some of that money might be headed your way.
Some interesting resources are "privacy international, echelon watch, epic, etc.
That's probably not an initiative by Microsoft itself to fight the good fight, but rather to ensure that the XBox isn't designated to be a cryptographic device, which would trigger numerous export/import restrictions (in the US, but also in Wassenaar agreement countries).
Interesting that they would encrypt the game data itself though. You could use a game map as a Ouija board..
I think you give national authorities far too much credit for competence in the IT arena.
Heaven forbid! They are massively incompetent. But that doesn't prevent them from agressively (over)using laws to tap willy-nilly. They will use pretty dinky equipment, due to their fudged up procurement procedures, but in the end it will get the job done, usually by indiscriminately intercepting way too much traffic, rather than too little.
(Also consider that your data center likely didn't provide any CALEA equipment themselves; a CO owned by a telecomms provider will have dedicated tapping ports for voice and modem traffic, and more than likely DSL lines also have these dedicated tapping ports).
To give an example of government incompetence; Dutch tapping equipment and software, which when installed can tap all data traffic at an ISP and is relied upon to only store the information identified by a warrant, is made by an Israeli company. The software cannot be maintained easily, because the entire interface is in Hebrew, and it's all closed source anyway. There is no way to check for backdoors in the software. Israel by the way, has one of the most agressive foreign intelligence/security agencies in the world..
If governments were less incompetent, it would also be easier to trust them to keep abuses in check. As it is, if they will be storing all communications for 7 years, you can trust them to give access to their databases to a host of minimum wage workers, eager to be corrupted.
This keeps coming up here on /. whenever the FCC talks about "VoIP". They're not talking about all computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects, they're talking about VoIP services that result in a network of people you can "dial" that more or less resemble a phone network. It's those that they're regulating and basically putting on the same playing field as existing phone services.
Which would include Pulver's FreeWorldDialup by your definition, though the FCC isn't concerned with them in the slightest, since they don't terminate voice traffic on copper.
While "voice-over-IP" seems like a broad term, it's come to mean (or rather, has always been taken to mean), well, exactly your definition (which is only partly regulated by the FCC), whereas people usually refer to computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects that don't conform to that definition simply as "voice-chat" (or audio conferencing). For example, nobody calls those XBox live voice features VoIP.
On the flip side, nobody calls VoIP "streaming audio" even though it is. True, it's unicast and bi-directional, but even so.
So the use of VoIP was actually almost spot on. The FCC is to impose tapping on VoIP providers, except those it doesn't regulate, which includes, but is not limited to pulver's freeworlddialup and foreign companies. I think the last part can be skipped for clarity since the FCC usually regulates only those it regulates, rather than those it doesn't.. do. that. to.
(Ouch, that's a crummy sentence, time for bed).
In Europe there's tapping legislation that forces each and every provider of a "public network" to provide tapping capabilities. That means that tapping might occur at any hop along the way that is in the EU, be it the DSL or dialup connection (btw, that also ends up in a traditional, yet modernized, CO), the DSL provider, your ISP, their backbone, etc. etc.
Probably the CO where the DSL line is hooked up to is the preferential point-of-tapping, since that way you also catch packets that might go astray (e.g. spoofed packets).
Tapping software is advanced enough (and why shouldn't it be) to filter out and reconstruct VOIP streams.
It's unlikely that the authority to tap is used sparingly (i.e. used only on one end of the conversation). For example, in The Netherlands a warrant to tap a line extends not to just one phone line, but any one that calls that phone line can get tapped as well, regardless of suspicion (so, if you call Don Vito, and his line is tapped, your line will now also be tapped, just to see if you'll call any other mobsters).
This of course results in masses of data (much of it duplicated) that the police would have to sort through - that is truly a growth market. Write software for it and become rich.
Also, ISPs are increasingly willing to supply data without a subpoena or warrant.
Using codes and stegonagraphy won't always be much help. For example, a Dutch blackmailer was arrested when he looked at a car-ad that contained coded information about the drop-off point of the money he'd demanded. Turned out that the ad was only clicked on about 3 times (he should have picked a more popular model), so placing an ad wasn't really that "broadcast" as he'd thought. Also, the anonymous proxy service that he paid for ratted him (or at least his credit-card number) out immediately.
The bottom line is that the internet is FAR from a safe haven for terrorists, or even common criminals. Actual real life terrorists are far more likely to use 50 year old spying techniques that still work well (like deap-drop boxes, placing ads in papers, etc.).
Of course, the more people come to realise this, the less useful all these measures become; to get a bit political, the potential for abuse is enormous. The EU is considering making it mandatory for ALL communications (of ALL citizens/companies, no due cause) to be stored for seven years, "just in case".
Just think what a political/economical opponent could do with seven years' worth of your most intimate communications (while terrorists are happily communicating using WWII spying techniques). A bit more than that Nixon dude could ever have achieved with those pesky tapes.
According to reliable sources (an anonymous forum post from google) "Each number is a multiplier used on a basic frequency of 3.375 MHz" - it relates to the analogue bandwidth (i.e. information) stored per pixel. In digital formats the representation may be quite different; in YUV formats all values are represented with 8 bits, but 2 pixels share the U and V information (it's only sampled once).
Here is some linkange.
Horizontally, television has an analogue signal. How would you quantify that?
I'd quantify it as 720 luminance samples and 360 chrominance samples per line; effectively 720 pixels with 4:2:2 sampling. Perfectly in line with CCIR-601, or as its known, ITU-R Recommendation BT.601-5 (10/95) (AKA "broadcast quality")
(Note that "analogue" does not imply infinite definition; CCIR-604 specifies certain bandwidth and signal-to-noise requirements, including maximum deviation; digital source material is better quality than the analogue broadcast; of course, with NTSC, this isn't hard.)
I never quite bought the re-ordering of files. Especially the part where they "put all the often used files at the beginning of the disk". I mean, how is the beginning of the disk easier to access than any other part? It only becomes easier to access if the diskhead spends a lot of time hovering over there, rather than scattered all over the place. As soon as it needs to pick up a "rarely-used" data file from some remote region of the disk you incur an old-stylee seek time twice for the privilige..
In fact, with all that multi-tasking going on these days, it makes sense to use striping RAID, which is pretty much fragmenting stuff on purpose, only spread over two or more disks.
Note that defragmenting programs still make an attempt to move files that are used most often to one part of the disk - this is pretty much the only reason windows spends all that time updating "last modified" dates on files. Dirms does this too, and all the commercial apps do as well.
One pet peeve of mine is that no defragmentation program bothers to empty the internet explorer (let alone mozilla) cache and %temp%. Virusscanners don't bother either.
(Come to think of it, emptying %temp% once in a while can boost performance significantly, on XP mostly due to the insane amounts of disk space wasted there, and on windows 98 and the like because it will contain files that confuse it).
For your defragmentation needs, you could also try buzzsaw.
Also, sysinternal's pagedefrag and contig are pretty usefull.
Not that defragmenting your hard drive will give you enormous performance boosts, though.
The first thing I do when I sit down in front of an XP machine is turn of the unnecessary themes/skinning, animations and shadows, unwanted services (services.msc), unwanted start up programs (try sysinternal's autoruns), and of course the adaware/spybot thing.
Also, I usually set the swap file to be some fixed number of megabytes (4 times RAM or some ludicrous amount like that), and make sure IE's and mozilla's cache sizes are pretty minimal (i.e. 10MB should be enough) if the machine is on a broadband connection.
If these programs can do anything more to optimize my setup, they're welcome, but I wonder what exactly they do..
Ditto what the other respondants said. Security through obscurity is better than no security. It gives the coders a chance to fix the problem _right_, not just plug it with a blacklist or something. Once the problem is fixed (or after the next release after the fix), security bugs are opened up.
On the one hand, it prevents some blackhats from thinking "OMG! That's a pretty serious bug right there! I'm gonna write an exploit for it!".
On the other hand, no non-mozilla developer who happens to be looking in bugzilla can say "OMG! That's a pretty serious bug right there! I'm gonna write a patch for it, and submit it right NOW".
Given the fact that that XUL bug was know for, what, a year, they might have considered letting some one else take a stab at solving it... You know, what with the whole open source idea being that many eyes fix bugs..
A babelfish English->Russian->English translation works out as "Flesh is willingly ready but spirit it is weak", which is pretty close to the mark.
One thing I thought of since I've dealt with environments where games shouldn't be played (University computer labs) is why didn't he just change the permissions on them? It sounds like they were in an NT or Active Directory domain, it's pretty unlikely the boss had administrator access since this guy was the designated support person for his division (he has the policy on support personnel up too, it says one person in each division/dept. will be granted administrator access for their part of the domain tree). He could have avoided this mess and forced the issue with the higher-ups by simply changing the permissions on solitaire to be administrator only or even nobody. It's likely the boss wouldn't have pushed the issue too hard as it would make him look bad trying to get access to a game restored. The guy could have also locked access to solitaire on all computers in his division to make it a policy issue, not a direct confrontation of his boss.
The problem with that is that the boss could still download games (hard to prevent unless you're using XP clients with 2003 servers, and use software restriction policies (which are likely to cause some distress when people find out they can't run some mission-critical application that's not in the whitelist; like winzip or whatever).
And even then, he can go online and play flash games.
Is it just me, or are stored procedures used mostly for trying to shoehorn non-relational data into the relational data?
You know what I'm on about.. The umpteenth stored procedure to do some recursion to manage some sort of tree in a rdbms. Can't do recursive SQL (usually), so we'll solve it in a stored procedure (rather than take a small performance hit and sort it out in the application logic), because a tree just doesn't fit all too well in a relational model (unlike, say, in a hierarchical model)..
While I'm sure pros love the optimization capabilities SPs give them, and some might enjoy the abstraction that can be achieved, I think this is what suckers most people into the SP camp..
(Of course, SPs can be downright evil, in that they encourage vendor lock-in to quite an extent, but then, switching to a different RDBMS is hard anyway).
I'd bother more about security then stability with WinCE. Keepeng in mind MS security track records (IE anyone ?) and the new communication media like WiFi , Bluetooth, SMS I'm afraid the proliferation of WinCE phones spell disaster. Phone spamming, adware, trojans ... Symbian don't use Interner Explorer at least.
What security? There is no security in win ce (that includes no check on which programs try to access the internet, phonedialling, etc. which is a nice way to rack up GPRS bandwidth and 1-900 charges).
There's only a password feature for when you turn it on, or if it hasn't been used for x minutes, similar to windows 95 - I haven't tried it yet, but it's said to be easily circumvented.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ;)
Well, according to dictionary.com
inconceivable Audio pronunciation of "inconceivable" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nkn-sv-bl)
adj.
1. Impossible to comprehend or grasp fully: inconceivable folly; an inconceivable disaster.
2. So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible; unbelievable: an inconceivable victory against all odds.
I was aiming for sense 2, the first, there.
Though in another lemma it also lists "not explicable by the human intellect, or by any known principles or agencies", which pretty much sums up windows CE in its entirety.
Win CE crashes more often than Win XP and that's too much!
My Win XP setup is fairly stable (also helped by the fact the dual cpu means one cpu is usually still there to do ctrl-alt-del magic), but the instability of wince is almost inconceivable.. It should remind you more of windows 95. It hangs on to all the design mistakes ever made in Windows, and then adds some.
Unfortunately, it has such a strong foothold in the PDA market, that the companies that produce components for iPaqs and such are likely to offer wince support by default. Whereas if you were to go with linux, good luck finding energy-efficient GPUs and touchscreens etc. that are supported.
It also doesn't help that there's not much in the way of device-friendly linux APIs.. Running X on a small device is a bit too much; opie is there, but not much else.. Microsoft have even crammed a stripped down version of directX into their pocketPC OS. *shudder*
You have to wonder who dropped the ball over at Sun that they don't have a Java OS for handhelds. And lament the rape of symbian by Nokia. (No, you're thinking of a sybian, different thing entirely).