The clarify here: The issue is that the Sony MemoryVault USB drives (NOT MemorySticks) include a fingerprint reader, which combined with a driver and (presumably) encryption software, provides a "secure data vault" on the USB drive.
The malware aspect comes in because the Sony software installs a driver for the fingerprint reader in a special hidden directory, presumably with the intention of making the driver more difficult to tamper with and/or bypass. The idea here is that if an attacker can tamper with the driver they can have the tampered driver send a false "correct read" signal to the vault which would expose the content to attackers. Vista's driver protection basically works the same way by preventing you from editing sections of the registry and editing/deleting certain files. So, in theory anyway, if Sony updates the driver for Vista this behavior shouldn't be necessary (not that it is now) beacuse Sony can make it a "signed" driver that this more difficult to tamper with. The driver might also contain some sort of obsucated code (I'm that familiar with this kind of driver hacking).
On the grand scale of software that breaks Windows conventions, this is a rather petty example. There are anti-virus tools and debuggers that tamper with the kernel. There is DRM software that breaks other apps on your system. There are virtual disk drives that can destroy your entire Windows install, Really, one hidden driver ain't so bad.
Here's a question: Does the uninstaller remove this hidden driver cleanly? If so, what's the problem?
You shouldn't be using this Sony software anyway. Do you really want to stick you confidential data into a propretary database coobbled together in a weekend by a few chumps at Sony? There are far more robust and flexible password vaults out there. Many are free.
Does any of you know if you can use the fingerprint reader without installing Sony's software?
Vista, in contrast, is in the same situation that XP was in when it was new: No drivers available for a lot of older hardware, because the hardware vendor does not sell it anymore and couldn't care less. Contrary to what most people seem to think, Vista includes almost EVERY driver and lots more than were included on the WinXPSP2 CD. Also, you CAN use XP drivers in Vista if you want to. Vista bitches, and there might be some bugs, but you can do it pretty easily. Out of my pile of storage controllers and network cards I could only find ONE controller that outright refused to work in Vista. One of the network cards would randomly drop packets, but I think that was the card.
Vista also has pretty steep hardware requirements (in practice), meaning that you really shouldn't be running it on older hardware anyway. I'd argue that this is more true for Vista than any previous MS OS. Lest you bitch about this, I have several systems that can't run RHEL5 because the requirements went up from RHEL4.
The "protection" offered by the laws written by the large media companies still apply even of the copyright holder is a small media company or even an individual artist. In a nutshell, small artists don't need copyright protections anywhere near what we have now. They do not need permanent copyright (that's what we have in the USA right now). They do not need criminal penalties for duplication. In fact, the complexity of the current laws hurts artists drastically because it dramatically increases their legal expenses.
the distribution monopoly... it is the most fragile part of the situation today. It's not as fragile as you think. The big labels (through content labeling, royalties, and other dirty tricks) have effectively made it ILLEGAL to sell music in the USA if you're not a big label. This is a HUGE barrier to entry for competitors. In fact, it basically rules out any possible competition in the USA.
The big problem isn't distribution really, it's promotion. Record labels are basically advertising firms. Any indie band could put MP3s of their music on their web site, but without advertising, payola, concert promotion, etc. nobody will hear about them. I believe that right now, indies can put their music on iTunes with little hassle, but nobody will ever find it because they have to search for it. If they want the "top results" in searches or preferred placement, they have to pay for it. And here's the problem, they have to compete with the big labels (who have A LOT more money) for that preferred placement.
Even if the distribution model changed tomorrow, promotion is still a big issue. And even if all the big labels collapsed tomorrow, they would quickly be replaced with big PR firms that would basically operate the same way. A "reboot" if you will would simply shatter the power of the current labels, then big ones will arise again. Re-shatter. Think about AT&T. Was broken up because it got too much power, now it (and Verizon and Sprint) probably need to be broken up again. In other words, I see this as an ongoing battle.
Steel Battalion for Xbox has more precise controls than MechAssault, but it also cost $200 when it came out.
This is a terrible analogy. Steel Battalion was so expensive because it had an elaborate custom controller. Like virtually all console games with custom controllers (Guitar Hero is a notable exception) it sold very poorly. This has little to do with how well the controller worked. Without exception, every fan of mech games (a la Mechwarrior) I've spoken to and every review I've read said that Steel Battalion's control was superior. By a very wide margin. Most mech game fans consider Mechassault to be "dumbed down" for the console (this is very accurate) and preferred Steel Batallion on the XBOX or Armored Core on the PS2.
However, I'll fully admit that PC combat sims (of which mech sims are a subgenre) are dying/dead. The same thing happened to PC adventure games. It's not the end of PC gaming.
Console gaming is much cheaper. I just spent $800 on a Dell PC that sucks at games (not Dell's fault; I'm not using it for games.) For $400 you can be set with an Xbox.
This depends on the position you're in. The typical bottlenecks in most cheap-ass $500 PCs you buy nowadays are video card (major) and memory (minor). A decent video card will cost you $150 and another 1GB of memory will cost you $50. So 500 + 150 + 50 = $700 gets you a decent gaming desktop. Decent gaming laptops still don't really exist.
So at $400 the 360 is clearly cheaper, unless you add in the cost of a High Definition TV. Realistically, a HDTV is going to cost you $750 for something small (Find one that's cheaper and I'll tell you what's wrong with it. A little bit of experience has taught me that cheap HDTVs are total shit). So if you want a good display, and don't already have a HDTV, that 360 will cost you $1150. And you can get a pretty good gaming PC for $1150.
Also, XBOX Live costs money. Most PC matching services for games are free, you only have to pay for a game that is third-party hosted on dedicated high bandwidth lines. It pisses me off a bit that MS charges $30 a month for online play and doesn't even bother to provide dedicated game servers.
You're also ignoring the fact that most people NEED a PC for all sorts of other tasks. Users who have an expensive console and DON'T have a PC or laptop are quite rare. I can only think of one person I know where this applies.
PC games are buggy as hell. Try playing Battlefield: 2142 and tell me with a straight face that the experience of PC FPS games is better than the experience of Xbox FPS games.
The BF2142 experience is better because it actually exists. The player cap is much higher than Halo or any other console game. There are more play types. I don't play BF2142 much, but I liked it better than Halo (on the PC) for multiplayer. The "floating fortress" levels are bad ass. PC users are willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience to be on the cutting edge.
And most of the bugs you're talking about are Vista-specific, BF2142 was released long before Vista and wasn't tested on it. It's like complaining that games written for the XBOX are buggy on the XBOX360 (Oh wait, they are!).
doesn't work on widescreen monitors
This isn't true. You can set an arbitrary res in the ini files. At least you could in BF2.
Halo 2, and other Xbox FPS games have a small fraction of the experience-ruining bugs of PC games.
You might not be be aware of this, but exhaustive QA of console games is now largely a thing of the past for various reasons, mainly the greatly increased complexity of games and the cost of development (particularly staff). This means that QA is much briefer than it used to be and is occasionally outsourced to idiots (I'm looking at you EA). There are PS2 and XBOX games that shipped with showstopping bugs (Front Mission 4 and KOTOR 2 come to mind). XBOX360 games typically have almost as many patches as PC games (the PS3 seems to have
The scanner on one of the prototypes was broken, nobody seriously disputes this. But another identical prototype (identical except for being broken) was available and even tested, but the FCC CHOSE not to use the test performed on the non-broken prototype. And remember, the Philips prototype worked perfectly. Even if the MS device was a total failure, they only needed one working prototype from the White Spaces Coalition. Again, this isn't a "evil Microsoft" story.
This is Microsoft trying not to accuse FCC Commissioners of outright sabotage, though this is likely what happened. It's very convenient that the prototype "broke" in exactly the way the opponents of the "white space" initiative wanted. The same interests (TV Broadcasters) that heavily bribed* the FCC Commissioners. Commissioners also had a backup they chose not to use. An earlier (extremely similar) Philips device worked perfectly.
This is not the "MS tech doesn't work" story the submitter tried to spin it as, but a "government screwing consumers" story.
* "Campaign contributions" are bribes. "Above board" donations are made to campaigns and they're married with smaller "under the table" bribes. A $10,000 cash bribe seems a lot bigger if it's married to a $100,000 "legitimate" campaign contribution.
1st: No, it's valid because they had an ongoing agreement with the ARC, which the ARC has now decided to ignore. J&J is perfectly within their rights to enforce that agreement. RTFA The trademark is VOID if it's sufficiently diluted. Anyone, including the Red Cross, can freely use it. Common sense tells me this applies to the near-ubiquitous "red cross" symbol. This is what *I* would argue in court.
Even non-profits have to dedicate some of their resources to keeping themselves going, and many times, the people at the top can wind up with very handsome salaries, especially for so-called charity organizations. No doubt about it. So what? SOME of the money going into the pockets of the fat cats is somehow worse than ALL of the money going to the fat cats? When J&J has anything near the record of public service the ARC has, this point might have some relevance. It doesn't matter if the ARC is somewhat corrupt as long as the credibly provide public services.
American Red Cross != International Red Cross. The ARC operates internationally. And they work with the IRC providing funds, staff, and equipment. Read their web site.
Particularly since this isn't an issue interfering with their charitable work, it's an issue dealing with them as a commercial enterprise (selling first-aid equipment). Not being allowed to sell (or distribute, as in GIVE THE FUCK AWAY) first-aid equipment doesn't interfere with the charitable work of the Red Cross, a medical services organization? Are you insane?
Let's turn it around: Why should J&J be allowed to enforce a diluted trademark from 1886, shouldn't these things expire? And shouldn't they be more narrow? The original trademark was for aspirin. There is also the fact that the American Red Cross predates their trademark application by a number of years and that the red cross was used for CENTURIES for medical equipment and staff before J&J applied for a trademark.
You're the one that needs to check you facts bub. Common sense says the "red cross" trademark should be void. J&J is not non-profit. And yeah, distributing first aid gear is and important part of the Red Cross' work.
Chinese goods in China!=Goods made in China marketed overseas. Sometimes they're as good (my shoes), sometimes they're not (bikes). You seem to have missed the recent stories about American children poisoned by toxic paint on Chinese-made children's toys. It's all pretty crappy. Just like the cheap Korean and Japanese crap we used to buy, only moreso. Of course, South Korea and Japan were democracies that eventually improved. Better quality of life for citizens led to better products for export. I'm more dubious of China's ability to make the same transition. (The US imposed democracy on South Korean nd Japn by force, remember?)
All these knock off really just make the "real" items kind of worthless. You do understand that many of the "knock-offs" are made in the very same factories as the "real" LV bags, they just don't have the branding (and associated price), don't you?
I mean I have always used Apples because they focused more on work and less on the toy aspect, Since when? The Apple II was touted as a games machine and for housewives to use for recipes (really!) not as a workstation or professional computer system. Ditto for the Mac basically. The only job role where Macs have had a strong presence is desktop graphics and sound editing, not programming, fileservers, databases, or other traditional computer "work".
Apples have pretty much always been boutique computers, pricey and fashionable. This very perception is largely why Windows won the corporate desktop.
I'd just like to note that I heard EXACTLY the same things about XP (it's just a hack of Win2k) and they were even more justified then, but everyone is using Windows XP now, aren't they?
Vista isn't fatally broken. It has better hardware support, by a wide margin, than any previous Microsoft OS. Aero is pretty. It *IS* marginally more secure. Some of the new apps are nice. Desktop search is nice.
People bitching about things being in the wrong place can always switch to "Classic" views. There's even a Theme to make this easy.
Besides, you might actually want patches in the future.
Studios, local stations, etc all actually pay for the privilege of having their data listed, but they don't compose it in a friendly, terse format, or organize metadata (episode number, actors, original airdate, etc) in a standardized, convenient way. That task is left to TMS' peons Total crap. There is a VERY strict format that must be followed. I know it used to be on handwritten forms, but now I think they have some sort of web service where the data is entered by the studios, local stations, etc. If they don't enter it correctly, it doesn't show up in the guide. The only thing TMS checks is the show title and (sometimes) the rating. If you look at the raw data you will see entire networks missing all metadata (G4 comes to mind) and inaccurate information (the rating for Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares changes every episode, but the guide lists every episode as TV-14).
This is part of the reason I'm not eager to pay for guide data. A fucking trained monkey could run the system and keep it accurate, but it's often wildly inaccurate anyway.
Here's a link to the press release from NPD Group. From the bottom of the press release:
Methodology The report is based on online survey responses from 6,260 members of NPD's online consumer panel. These respondents, comprised of males and females ages 6 to 44, are qualified owners of at least one next generation system (PS3, PSP, Wii, NDS, Xbox 360). In addition, non-owners were captured in order to further probe on next generation system purchase intent and other areas. Fieldwork was conducted from April 4-10, 2007.
Begin to understand the problems? How many 6-year-olds use streaming media, and how many of the respondents have PS3s? Only a fraction of respondents so we have a limited sample size. And it was an ONLINE survey, everyone could easily have been lying. Read: They were too cheap for focus groups.
As others have pointed out, somewhat confusingly, whenever possible you should NOT try to remove a virus in situ (while Windows is running).
Option #1. The ideal situation is to pull the hard drive from the system, drop in in another, and then examine the drive. This will give to maximum forensic flexibility to fix the drive with a wide variety of tools.
Option #2. If the above isn't feasible, use a bootable LiveCD of some kind to boot into a CD-based "recovery OS" that will allow you the edit the registry, run recovery tools, etc. I recommend a Windows-based LiveCD like Ultimate Boot CD for Windowshttp://www.ubcd4win.com/ for recovery of Windows systems.
Option #3. If neither of the above options is available, at minimum, reboot into Safe Mode to do the virus recovery.
I'm not a snob with the whole "oh games without a mouse all suck!" crap that you see around here so often. The FPS genre was designed with keyboard and mouse in mind. Mice are far more precise than using controllers, and that's a fact. This is perhaps best illustrated by the recent game Shadowrun, one of the few FPS with both console and PC play, in which console players are given auto-aim and the cone of fire is limited for PC players to keep the PC players from stomping all over the console players in multiplayer games.
Halo is fun, don't get me wrong, but it controls better (and looks better) on the PC. Some genres, like FPS, RTS, MMORPG, and 4X strategy, just work better on the PC.
From what I've been able to tell, OEL is just RHEL with Oracle support instead of RedHat support. Do people actually want this? Why didn't Oracle just work with RedHat/SUSE/etc. rather than fork? Money? Issues with RedHat Inc.?
Something I always like to point out is that even if climate change/global warming is total bullshit there are LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of good reasons to pursue the primary policy recommendation, dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels. Few of these reasons are seriously in dispute:
1. Smog 2. Other forms of air pollution 3. Acid raid 4. Asthma at epidemic levels 5. Habitat destruction caused by oil exploration and spills 6. Wildlife killed by oil exploration and spills 7. Ground water pollution caused by oil products and additives 8. Reduced use of oil would weaken corrupt regimes like Saudi Arabia and Sudan
And a lot more I can't think of or are a bit oblique. Like the fact that spending all their time in cars is turning Americans into fat tubs of lard.
If a handful companies have a monopoly on distribution (and they do), and they collude to screw artists (and they do), and they bribe lawmakers with large sums of cash to make laws favoring the big companies (and they do), there is not much small artists can do about it beyond civil disobediance. Big artists that are already part of the system are reluctant to upset the apple cart, and more importantly, can't really do anything because they were forced to sign away many of their rights. Most would have to accept a massive pay cut to break away from the big studios and so don't bother.
That's the situation with music, tv and movies are more complicated. Especially TV. TV is freely broadcast, and the notion that broadcasters retain permanent ownership of broadcasts after transmission has always stuck in my craw. All YouTube is doing is a complicated version of the already legally protected "timeshifting". As far as I'm concerned, broadcasters only own the INITIAL broadcast, once they've sent it out publicly it's effectively in the public domain. Broadcasters have a choice between advertising and paid content. For example, I don't think my argument applies to HBO or programming on HBO as that is a paid service.
No. They lost because they were _wrong_. No, if you understand the background of this case it was largely because they were outspent by Novell and IBM. And as others have pointed out, there is virtually no chance that a private citizen (like Linus Torvalds) could have defended himself from such a lawsuit.
OTOH, The total failure of this attack probably means that Linux is safe from being sued out of existence for the foreseeable future, I suspect it will even provide cover to distributions doing questionably legal things, like distributing DeCSS.
It's the American Red Cross thats going agaisnt this by licensing (for profit) the red cross symbol. IMHO, J&J is actually in the right here. I was going to mod the parent, but I decided not to let this attack slide.
1st: It is extremely unlikely that J&J's trademark is valid simply due to dilution. What does that mean? You can lose a trademark if it becomes too popular or too generic (like "scotch tape") no matter how vigorously you enforce it. This is clearly the case with the red cross symbol.
2nd: The Red Cross is non-profit. All of the money they make for licensing goes to help sick and dying people around the world, as opposed to J&J lining the pockets of a few rich shareholders. There is no moral equivalence here.
2nd: I do not give if fuck if J&J has a valid trademark, nor should you. The Red Cross is a VITAL, I repeat, international VITAL services and relief. Virtually NOTHING ON EARTH is more important that keeping the Red Cross going. Interference with their mandate is not acceptable. In fact, if the US government allows these suits to process they are probably in violation of international humanitarian law.
This is and incredibly vicious and immoral action on the part of J&J and they should be punished for it.
Right, "political in nature". And these politics are aimed at embarassing the US. No they're not. Nobody in Iraq seriously expects the US to stick around much longer, most of the violence is about control of a future Iraq and future Iraqi government.
shifting the burden of proof onto me If the past 4 years or so hasn't convinced you that the Iraqi invasion was a massive clusterfuck I don't know what will. I think the burden is on YOU to convince ME and the other 75% of Americans who think the war is and was a bad idea why we should continue this nonsense.
Power plants are a legitimate target. Not in my book they're not. Power is required to provide basic services, like clean water. And how are hospitals supposed to operate without power? And why were non-military government buildings hit? Those deadly bureaucrats?
Of course, you were. Fallujah was actually (re)taken by force, after giving the residents several days to get out Once an enemy is using a building to fight, the building (even a hospital) becomes a legal target. So it's okay to attack hospitals if they're warned first? The risk of the enemy falsely using the sign of the red cross/crescent has always been there, but as civilized people we have decided that medical personell and facilities should be protected in war. So yeah, even if the enemy was attacking from the hospital, it was off-limits. Just because they aren't following the law, doesn't mean you get to break it.
The power troubles plaguing Iraq now are mostly due to the insurgents' sabotage of the power lines: "15 of the 17 high voltage lines running into Baghdad have been sabotaged". Can't blame it on US weaponry... Yes and no. There is still inadequate power infrastructure, but after reading that article and a bit more it seems that Iraq's infrastructure situation is a bit rosier that I had thought. It cites several water treatment plants as going online. And several new hospitals have been constructed or repaired recently. It still isn't anywhere near pre-invasion levels.
And I was talking more about the infrastructure destroyed during the initial invasion. I realize that many of the problems now (like power cuts and attacks on oil lines) are caused by insurgent attack.
They are too low-tech to prevail, but high-tech enough to be a pain -- mostly for Iraqis, though. In the war of attrition, they are winning. There seems to be little doubt that they can maintain their preset level of activity, which amounts to little more than harassment, indefinitely. This is not true of the United States. Virtually all of the other "coalition partners" have peeled away, and those remaining will leave soon. Morale is very low in the US military and many soldiers are effectively forced to stay and fight. Recruitment is low, and mercenaries aren't filling the gap. And all of this is ignoring the truly awesome cost of the endeavor in Iraq. This is simply not sustainable. It's not a matter of "if" we leave Iraq, but "how soon".
You seem to be quite obsessed with calling biometry a scam, yet you have nothing to back it up.
That's not what I said. What I said is that "biometrics in BANKING (in the USA) is... a scam to shift LIABILITY", and that IS accurate.
I'll try to explain this:
Whatever the cost of the biometrics system is, it is not zero. Therefore, for a BANK (a profitable enterprise) to deploy the system it must cost them MONEY which they then pass on to consumers. Since, in the USA, banks have government insurance (plus tax write-offs) against theft and fraud, they have little incentive to deploy elaborate security systems since their losses are not that great. Since consumers benefit from this same insurance, they also have little incentive to adopt elaborate security measures. The government is soaking up losses, but they can send guys with guns to get the people committing theft and fraud.
Of course, the ideal situation in the minds of many is to shift responsibility onto the consumer, and that's where biometrics comes in. The insurance doesn't apply to "middlemen" like Visa, who can often end up footing the bill on fraud. So they wish to push intrusive biometrics systems on consumers to protect their losses, while at the same time pushing to shift fraud liability onto consumers and merchants.
Note: I'm talking about wide consumer deployment here. Employing biometrics for bank employees internally is an entirely different matter which is far more practical.
I don't see why the vast majority of us shall give up basic conveniences just because some folks think they don't need that newfangled thing called the intarweb.
How is your bank forcing you use biometrics a "convenience"? This gets back to the point I made above: Assuming there is no PRACTICAL decrease in theft and fraud when using biometric systems, what is the benefit to the consumer?
Or to put it another way: I don't see why the vast majority of us shall give up basic conveniences just to accommodate hackers in Russia.
An this is 2007. 4 years have passed, and facial recognition has improved to the point where it is better than the human brain (see the face recognition vendor test 2006). That was even posted here on slashdot, but you may have chosen to ignore the facts.
I couldn't find the/. article you mentioned, but I'm willing to concede that I'm not familiar with the state of the art in terms of facial recognition. However, 4 years seems a limited track record to me. And again, there's a big difference between, for example, trained casino employees and casino GUESTS. I'm talking about a PUBLIC deployment here.
Certainly there have been such deployments of fingerprint systems that turned out well, so there is nothing about "biometrics" per se preventing such deployments.
If you think that you can impose trade sanctions against Russia, it is you who sounds seriously deluded. And let's not comment on your suggestion of raids... The international community can not even solve the Kosovo problem against Serbias (and hence Russias) will.
Certainly *I* can't impose trade sanctions on Russia, I was speaking (obviously) of the US and EU governments. If they WON'T impose sanctions, again, that's a political problem. And, to be blunt, the Kosovars don't have any money, so nobody really cares. Tell it to the people in Rwanda.
You can safely assume that banks are not run by idiots and they will not use it if it doesn't work well.
I have done IT consulting for US financial institutions and I can assure you that none of the big or small players are seriously considering deployment of biometrics to banking customers, except in a very limited way. For example, I know of one bank that is using fingerprint tracking for those dealing in large ($10,000+) amounts of cash and another that is using fingerprint recognition for safe deposit boxes. I've worked on deplo
who happily kill fellow Iraqis just to embarrass us No, this isn't happening. Some Iraqis are being killed for collaborating, but the majority of the violence between Iraqis is political in nature.
References? Look it up. The Lancet report is pretty definitive.
You are told? Very interesting... By who? By sources within the intelligence community. I don't know anyone in the Pentagon per se. There are leaks everywhere in case you hadn't heard. Supposedly the Pentagon is also keeping track of refugees and so there might be some confusion there. Everyone agrees there are millions of refugees in Iraq, but I've only heard the 1,000,000 (as of May 2007) dead figure from this specific leak. I personally think it's a little high, but it's the closest thing to an "official" number I've ever heard.
Target lists including these structures have leaked from the Pentagon. There is gun camera footage showing hospitals (and ambulances) being deliberately targeted.
That would be a war-crime. Even if it happened, it would not be on any official list Just so you know, I was talking about civilian structures destroyed during the initial "shock and awe" invasion. Typing "iraq shock awe power plant" into Google revealed numerous articles by major newspapers in which official military spokesmen and "anonymous officials" confirm they were targeted. They same is true of television, radio, and newspapers (I didn't mention this earlier). Arabic media confirms the University was targeted and destroyed. While I can't find the specific article about the leaked target list, if you were aware of the SIZE of the facilities we're talking about (many acres) and the fact that they're typically isolated from other areas, it makes it very difficult to believe they weren't targeted deliberately (this is especially true in the case of power plants and water treatment).
However, I was able to find numerous references to the attack on Fallujah, where medical facilities were targeted, such as this onehttp://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/it ems/1208.
Laughable. If this were true, there'd be no electricity in Iraq today. Typo. What I meant to say was "ALMOST none of this has been rebuilt."
Yes, we DID bomb almost every power plant in Iraq. Most of them numerous times (not counting the Gulf War and previous bombing campaigns). Immediately after "shock and awe" there was no mains power in Iraq. Unlike most of the infrastructure in Iraq, we did return some of these plants to partial operation (mainly to get the oil flowing). There was also major repair of oil facilities and significant investment in new media (new tv and radio stations). There is power for 4 hours a day in Baghdad and one or hours outside (or not at all), down from 12 hours per day before "shock and awe". That's about it for infrastructure repair. The destroyed schools, water treatment, sewage treatment, and hospitals remain pretty much destroyed.
There's two possibilities:
1. The US military deliberately attacked civilian facilities in Iraq. 2. The US military can't distinguish between military and civilian targets and/or can't shoot straight.
Either way, it seems to be like a very good idea to impose strict rules of engagement on the use of artillery and aircraft in Iraq, especially in urban areas (read: don't use them) and in future conflicts.
Give me the minutes of that specific meeting which include this talk and I might think otherwise. If you won't take Stallman's word for it I don't know what to tell you. The description for Williams' book is vague enough that it could be firmware, or it could mean driver software or something else. When *I* heard Stallman talk about it he was clearly talking about firmware, and his recent public comments seem to support this interpretation. And even if you ARE right, it doesn't change the fact that Stallman clearly INTENDED that people be allowed to modify firmware. That's what he's been saying publicly.
In Stallman's mind, the controversial sections of GPL V3 merely close a loophole. Do you really believe that Stallman INTENDED to allow vendors to sell proprietary "black boxes" based mostly or entirely on GPL code? You don't know Stallman very well if you do.
Korean War -- which was not a disaster either. The conflicts are not comparable. Korea was a conventional war against a standing army of 350,000 heavily backed by the Chinese, and eventually, the Soviets vs. coalition forces of about 150,000. In Iraq, we have best equipped and trained force of 150,000 solders ever assembled and they're getting their asses handed to them by 10,000 insurgents.
BTW, your figure of 600,000 is a very rough estimate of the upper boundary of the real number (which nobody knows). Your figure includes, for example, the estimated number of children not born due to the conflict -- the methodology simply looked at how large the population should've been using the pre-war growth rates vs. the number of people present (in various regions of the country). Figures from other conflicts tend to count the actual victims.. The 600,000 figure includes those directly killed in the conflict with bombs, bullets, etc. as of the beginning of 2006. About half (300,000) were killed by Coalition air attack, with the remaining 300,000 split fairly evenly between the Coalition forces and local milita. As time has gone on, a larger percentage of the deaths has been local milita and "local killings" certainly now account for the majority of deaths in Iraq. However, the #1 cause of violent death in Iraq is still probably Coalition air attack closely followed by milita assassinations.
And those are lowball estimates. I'm told that internal Pentagon numbers put the figures closer to 1,000,000.
US never targeted these, and -- thanks to our technology -- we avoided destroying most of these things. If any got destroyed accidentally, we rebuilt them quickly. Yes, we did. There is not one iota of doubt on this. Target lists including these structures have leaked from the Pentagon. There is gun camera footage showing hospitals (and ambulances) being deliberately targeted. We destroyed all but one power plant in the nation (we bombed ALL of them, one survived), and all but two or three sewage and water treatment plants (which couldn't operate due to lack of power) and bombed countless hospitals and industrial facilities. None of this has been rebuilt.
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The clarify here: The issue is that the Sony MemoryVault USB drives (NOT MemorySticks) include a fingerprint reader, which combined with a driver and (presumably) encryption software, provides a "secure data vault" on the USB drive.
The malware aspect comes in because the Sony software installs a driver for the fingerprint reader in a special hidden directory, presumably with the intention of making the driver more difficult to tamper with and/or bypass. The idea here is that if an attacker can tamper with the driver they can have the tampered driver send a false "correct read" signal to the vault which would expose the content to attackers. Vista's driver protection basically works the same way by preventing you from editing sections of the registry and editing/deleting certain files. So, in theory anyway, if Sony updates the driver for Vista this behavior shouldn't be necessary (not that it is now) beacuse Sony can make it a "signed" driver that this more difficult to tamper with. The driver might also contain some sort of obsucated code (I'm that familiar with this kind of driver hacking).
On the grand scale of software that breaks Windows conventions, this is a rather petty example. There are anti-virus tools and debuggers that tamper with the kernel. There is DRM software that breaks other apps on your system. There are virtual disk drives that can destroy your entire Windows install, Really, one hidden driver ain't so bad.
Here's a question: Does the uninstaller remove this hidden driver cleanly? If so, what's the problem?
You shouldn't be using this Sony software anyway. Do you really want to stick you confidential data into a propretary database coobbled together in a weekend by a few chumps at Sony? There are far more robust and flexible password vaults out there. Many are free.
Does any of you know if you can use the fingerprint reader without installing Sony's software?
No drivers available for a lot of older hardware, because the hardware vendor does not sell it anymore and couldn't care less. Contrary to what most people seem to think, Vista includes almost EVERY driver and lots more than were included on the WinXPSP2 CD. Also, you CAN use XP drivers in Vista if you want to. Vista bitches, and there might be some bugs, but you can do it pretty easily. Out of my pile of storage controllers and network cards I could only find ONE controller that outright refused to work in Vista. One of the network cards would randomly drop packets, but I think that was the card.
Vista also has pretty steep hardware requirements (in practice), meaning that you really shouldn't be running it on older hardware anyway. I'd argue that this is more true for Vista than any previous MS OS. Lest you bitch about this, I have several systems that can't run RHEL5 because the requirements went up from RHEL4.
The big problem isn't distribution really, it's promotion. Record labels are basically advertising firms. Any indie band could put MP3s of their music on their web site, but without advertising, payola, concert promotion, etc. nobody will hear about them. I believe that right now, indies can put their music on iTunes with little hassle, but nobody will ever find it because they have to search for it. If they want the "top results" in searches or preferred placement, they have to pay for it. And here's the problem, they have to compete with the big labels (who have A LOT more money) for that preferred placement.
Even if the distribution model changed tomorrow, promotion is still a big issue. And even if all the big labels collapsed tomorrow, they would quickly be replaced with big PR firms that would basically operate the same way. A "reboot" if you will would simply shatter the power of the current labels, then big ones will arise again. Re-shatter. Think about AT&T. Was broken up because it got too much power, now it (and Verizon and Sprint) probably need to be broken up again. In other words, I see this as an ongoing battle.
Steel Battalion for Xbox has more precise controls than MechAssault, but it also cost $200 when it came out.
This is a terrible analogy. Steel Battalion was so expensive because it had an elaborate custom controller. Like virtually all console games with custom controllers (Guitar Hero is a notable exception) it sold very poorly. This has little to do with how well the controller worked. Without exception, every fan of mech games (a la Mechwarrior) I've spoken to and every review I've read said that Steel Battalion's control was superior. By a very wide margin. Most mech game fans consider Mechassault to be "dumbed down" for the console (this is very accurate) and preferred Steel Batallion on the XBOX or Armored Core on the PS2.
However, I'll fully admit that PC combat sims (of which mech sims are a subgenre) are dying/dead. The same thing happened to PC adventure games. It's not the end of PC gaming.
Console gaming is much cheaper. I just spent $800 on a Dell PC that sucks at games (not Dell's fault; I'm not using it for games.) For $400 you can be set with an Xbox.
This depends on the position you're in. The typical bottlenecks in most cheap-ass $500 PCs you buy nowadays are video card (major) and memory (minor). A decent video card will cost you $150 and another 1GB of memory will cost you $50. So 500 + 150 + 50 = $700 gets you a decent gaming desktop. Decent gaming laptops still don't really exist.
So at $400 the 360 is clearly cheaper, unless you add in the cost of a High Definition TV. Realistically, a HDTV is going to cost you $750 for something small (Find one that's cheaper and I'll tell you what's wrong with it. A little bit of experience has taught me that cheap HDTVs are total shit). So if you want a good display, and don't already have a HDTV, that 360 will cost you $1150. And you can get a pretty good gaming PC for $1150.
Also, XBOX Live costs money. Most PC matching services for games are free, you only have to pay for a game that is third-party hosted on dedicated high bandwidth lines. It pisses me off a bit that MS charges $30 a month for online play and doesn't even bother to provide dedicated game servers.
You're also ignoring the fact that most people NEED a PC for all sorts of other tasks. Users who have an expensive console and DON'T have a PC or laptop are quite rare. I can only think of one person I know where this applies.
PC games are buggy as hell. Try playing Battlefield: 2142 and tell me with a straight face that the experience of PC FPS games is better than the experience of Xbox FPS games.
The BF2142 experience is better because it actually exists. The player cap is much higher than Halo or any other console game. There are more play types. I don't play BF2142 much, but I liked it better than Halo (on the PC) for multiplayer. The "floating fortress" levels are bad ass. PC users are willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience to be on the cutting edge.
And most of the bugs you're talking about are Vista-specific, BF2142 was released long before Vista and wasn't tested on it. It's like complaining that games written for the XBOX are buggy on the XBOX360 (Oh wait, they are!).
doesn't work on widescreen monitors
This isn't true. You can set an arbitrary res in the ini files. At least you could in BF2.
Halo 2, and other Xbox FPS games have a small fraction of the experience-ruining bugs of PC games.
You might not be be aware of this, but exhaustive QA of console games is now largely a thing of the past for various reasons, mainly the greatly increased complexity of games and the cost of development (particularly staff). This means that QA is much briefer than it used to be and is occasionally outsourced to idiots (I'm looking at you EA). There are PS2 and XBOX games that shipped with showstopping bugs (Front Mission 4 and KOTOR 2 come to mind). XBOX360 games typically have almost as many patches as PC games (the PS3 seems to have
The Ars Technica article has a lot of good detail:r osoft-fcc-used-broken-white-spaces-device-for-test -neglected-backup-unit.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070814-mic
The scanner on one of the prototypes was broken, nobody seriously disputes this. But another identical prototype (identical except for being broken) was available and even tested, but the FCC CHOSE not to use the test performed on the non-broken prototype. And remember, the Philips prototype worked perfectly. Even if the MS device was a total failure, they only needed one working prototype from the White Spaces Coalition. Again, this isn't a "evil Microsoft" story.
This is Microsoft trying not to accuse FCC Commissioners of outright sabotage, though this is likely what happened. It's very convenient that the prototype "broke" in exactly the way the opponents of the "white space" initiative wanted. The same interests (TV Broadcasters) that heavily bribed* the FCC Commissioners. Commissioners also had a backup they chose not to use. An earlier (extremely similar) Philips device worked perfectly.
This is not the "MS tech doesn't work" story the submitter tried to spin it as, but a "government screwing consumers" story.
* "Campaign contributions" are bribes. "Above board" donations are made to campaigns and they're married with smaller "under the table" bribes. A $10,000 cash bribe seems a lot bigger if it's married to a $100,000 "legitimate" campaign contribution.
Let's turn it around: Why should J&J be allowed to enforce a diluted trademark from 1886, shouldn't these things expire? And shouldn't they be more narrow? The original trademark was for aspirin. There is also the fact that the American Red Cross predates their trademark application by a number of years and that the red cross was used for CENTURIES for medical equipment and staff before J&J applied for a trademark.
You're the one that needs to check you facts bub. Common sense says the "red cross" trademark should be void. J&J is not non-profit. And yeah, distributing first aid gear is and important part of the Red Cross' work.
Can you elaborate on this? I've never run into the sorts of problems you describe with Oracle on Solaris.
Apples have pretty much always been boutique computers, pricey and fashionable. This very perception is largely why Windows won the corporate desktop.
I'd just like to note that I heard EXACTLY the same things about XP (it's just a hack of Win2k) and they were even more justified then, but everyone is using Windows XP now, aren't they?
Vista isn't fatally broken. It has better hardware support, by a wide margin, than any previous Microsoft OS. Aero is pretty. It *IS* marginally more secure. Some of the new apps are nice. Desktop search is nice.
People bitching about things being in the wrong place can always switch to "Classic" views. There's even a Theme to make this easy.
Besides, you might actually want patches in the future.
This is part of the reason I'm not eager to pay for guide data. A fucking trained monkey could run the system and keep it accurate, but it's often wildly inaccurate anyway.
Here's a link to the press release from NPD Group. From the bottom of the press release:
Methodology
The report is based on online survey responses from 6,260 members of NPD's online consumer panel. These respondents, comprised of males and females ages 6 to 44, are qualified owners of at least one next generation system (PS3, PSP, Wii, NDS, Xbox 360). In addition, non-owners were captured in order to further probe on next generation system purchase intent and other areas. Fieldwork was conducted from April 4-10, 2007.
Begin to understand the problems? How many 6-year-olds use streaming media, and how many of the respondents have PS3s? Only a fraction of respondents so we have a limited sample size. And it was an ONLINE survey, everyone could easily have been lying. Read: They were too cheap for focus groups.
As others have pointed out, somewhat confusingly, whenever possible you should NOT try to remove a virus in situ (while Windows is running).
Option #1. The ideal situation is to pull the hard drive from the system, drop in in another, and then examine the drive. This will give to maximum forensic flexibility to fix the drive with a wide variety of tools.
Option #2. If the above isn't feasible, use a bootable LiveCD of some kind to boot into a CD-based "recovery OS" that will allow you the edit the registry, run recovery tools, etc. I recommend a Windows-based LiveCD like Ultimate Boot CD for Windowshttp://www.ubcd4win.com/ for recovery of Windows systems.
Option #3. If neither of the above options is available, at minimum, reboot into Safe Mode to do the virus recovery.
Halo is fun, don't get me wrong, but it controls better (and looks better) on the PC. Some genres, like FPS, RTS, MMORPG, and 4X strategy, just work better on the PC.
From what I've been able to tell, OEL is just RHEL with Oracle support instead of RedHat support. Do people actually want this? Why didn't Oracle just work with RedHat/SUSE/etc. rather than fork? Money? Issues with RedHat Inc.?
Something I always like to point out is that even if climate change/global warming is total bullshit there are LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of good reasons to pursue the primary policy recommendation, dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels. Few of these reasons are seriously in dispute:
1. Smog
2. Other forms of air pollution
3. Acid raid
4. Asthma at epidemic levels
5. Habitat destruction caused by oil exploration and spills
6. Wildlife killed by oil exploration and spills
7. Ground water pollution caused by oil products and additives
8. Reduced use of oil would weaken corrupt regimes like Saudi Arabia and Sudan
And a lot more I can't think of or are a bit oblique. Like the fact that spending all their time in cars is turning Americans into fat tubs of lard.
If a handful companies have a monopoly on distribution (and they do), and they collude to screw artists (and they do), and they bribe lawmakers with large sums of cash to make laws favoring the big companies (and they do), there is not much small artists can do about it beyond civil disobediance. Big artists that are already part of the system are reluctant to upset the apple cart, and more importantly, can't really do anything because they were forced to sign away many of their rights. Most would have to accept a massive pay cut to break away from the big studios and so don't bother.
That's the situation with music, tv and movies are more complicated. Especially TV. TV is freely broadcast, and the notion that broadcasters retain permanent ownership of broadcasts after transmission has always stuck in my craw. All YouTube is doing is a complicated version of the already legally protected "timeshifting". As far as I'm concerned, broadcasters only own the INITIAL broadcast, once they've sent it out publicly it's effectively in the public domain. Broadcasters have a choice between advertising and paid content. For example, I don't think my argument applies to HBO or programming on HBO as that is a paid service.
OTOH, The total failure of this attack probably means that Linux is safe from being sued out of existence for the foreseeable future, I suspect it will even provide cover to distributions doing questionably legal things, like distributing DeCSS.
1st: It is extremely unlikely that J&J's trademark is valid simply due to dilution. What does that mean? You can lose a trademark if it becomes too popular or too generic (like "scotch tape") no matter how vigorously you enforce it. This is clearly the case with the red cross symbol.
2nd: The Red Cross is non-profit. All of the money they make for licensing goes to help sick and dying people around the world, as opposed to J&J lining the pockets of a few rich shareholders. There is no moral equivalence here.
2nd: I do not give if fuck if J&J has a valid trademark, nor should you. The Red Cross is a VITAL, I repeat, international VITAL services and relief. Virtually NOTHING ON EARTH is more important that keeping the Red Cross going. Interference with their mandate is not acceptable. In fact, if the US government allows these suits to process they are probably in violation of international humanitarian law.
This is and incredibly vicious and immoral action on the part of J&J and they should be punished for it.
And I was talking more about the infrastructure destroyed during the initial invasion. I realize that many of the problems now (like power cuts and attacks on oil lines) are caused by insurgent attack. They are too low-tech to prevail, but high-tech enough to be a pain -- mostly for Iraqis, though. In the war of attrition, they are winning. There seems to be little doubt that they can maintain their preset level of activity, which amounts to little more than harassment, indefinitely. This is not true of the United States. Virtually all of the other "coalition partners" have peeled away, and those remaining will leave soon. Morale is very low in the US military and many soldiers are effectively forced to stay and fight. Recruitment is low, and mercenaries aren't filling the gap. And all of this is ignoring the truly awesome cost of the endeavor in Iraq. This is simply not sustainable. It's not a matter of "if" we leave Iraq, but "how soon".
You seem to be quite obsessed with calling biometry a scam, yet you have nothing to back it up.
That's not what I said. What I said is that "biometrics in BANKING (in the USA) is ... a scam to shift LIABILITY", and that IS accurate.
I'll try to explain this:
Whatever the cost of the biometrics system is, it is not zero. Therefore, for a BANK (a profitable enterprise) to deploy the system it must cost them MONEY which they then pass on to consumers. Since, in the USA, banks have government insurance (plus tax write-offs) against theft and fraud, they have little incentive to deploy elaborate security systems since their losses are not that great. Since consumers benefit from this same insurance, they also have little incentive to adopt elaborate security measures. The government is soaking up losses, but they can send guys with guns to get the people committing theft and fraud.
Of course, the ideal situation in the minds of many is to shift responsibility onto the consumer, and that's where biometrics comes in. The insurance doesn't apply to "middlemen" like Visa, who can often end up footing the bill on fraud. So they wish to push intrusive biometrics systems on consumers to protect their losses, while at the same time pushing to shift fraud liability onto consumers and merchants.
Note: I'm talking about wide consumer deployment here. Employing biometrics for bank employees internally is an entirely different matter which is far more practical.
I don't see why the vast majority of us shall give up basic conveniences just because some folks think they don't need that newfangled thing called the intarweb.
How is your bank forcing you use biometrics a "convenience"? This gets back to the point I made above: Assuming there is no PRACTICAL decrease in theft and fraud when using biometric systems, what is the benefit to the consumer?
Or to put it another way: I don't see why the vast majority of us shall give up basic conveniences just to accommodate hackers in Russia.
An this is 2007. 4 years have passed, and facial recognition has improved to the point where it is better than the human brain (see the face recognition vendor test 2006). That was even posted here on slashdot, but you may have chosen to ignore the facts.
I couldn't find the /. article you mentioned, but I'm willing to concede that I'm not familiar with the state of the art in terms of facial recognition. However, 4 years seems a limited track record to me. And again, there's a big difference between, for example, trained casino employees and casino GUESTS. I'm talking about a PUBLIC deployment here.
Certainly there have been such deployments of fingerprint systems that turned out well, so there is nothing about "biometrics" per se preventing such deployments.
If you think that you can impose trade sanctions against Russia, it is you who sounds seriously deluded. And let's not comment on your suggestion of raids ... The international community can not even solve the Kosovo problem against Serbias (and hence Russias) will.
Certainly *I* can't impose trade sanctions on Russia, I was speaking (obviously) of the US and EU governments. If they WON'T impose sanctions, again, that's a political problem. And, to be blunt, the Kosovars don't have any money, so nobody really cares. Tell it to the people in Rwanda.
You can safely assume that banks are not run by idiots and they will not use it if it doesn't work well.
I have done IT consulting for US financial institutions and I can assure you that none of the big or small players are seriously considering deployment of biometrics to banking customers, except in a very limited way. For example, I know of one bank that is using fingerprint tracking for those dealing in large ($10,000+) amounts of cash and another that is using fingerprint recognition for safe deposit boxes. I've worked on deplo
However, I was able to find numerous references to the attack on Fallujah, where medical facilities were targeted, such as this onehttp://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/i
Yes, we DID bomb almost every power plant in Iraq. Most of them numerous times (not counting the Gulf War and previous bombing campaigns). Immediately after "shock and awe" there was no mains power in Iraq. Unlike most of the infrastructure in Iraq, we did return some of these plants to partial operation (mainly to get the oil flowing). There was also major repair of oil facilities and significant investment in new media (new tv and radio stations). There is power for 4 hours a day in Baghdad and one or hours outside (or not at all), down from 12 hours per day before "shock and awe". That's about it for infrastructure repair. The destroyed schools, water treatment, sewage treatment, and hospitals remain pretty much destroyed.
There's two possibilities:
1. The US military deliberately attacked civilian facilities in Iraq.
2. The US military can't distinguish between military and civilian targets and/or can't shoot straight.
Either way, it seems to be like a very good idea to impose strict rules of engagement on the use of artillery and aircraft in Iraq, especially in urban areas (read: don't use them) and in future conflicts.
In Stallman's mind, the controversial sections of GPL V3 merely close a loophole. Do you really believe that Stallman INTENDED to allow vendors to sell proprietary "black boxes" based mostly or entirely on GPL code? You don't know Stallman very well if you do.
And those are lowball estimates. I'm told that internal Pentagon numbers put the figures closer to 1,000,000. US never targeted these, and -- thanks to our technology -- we avoided destroying most of these things. If any got destroyed accidentally, we rebuilt them quickly. Yes, we did. There is not one iota of doubt on this. Target lists including these structures have leaked from the Pentagon. There is gun camera footage showing hospitals (and ambulances) being deliberately targeted. We destroyed all but one power plant in the nation (we bombed ALL of them, one survived), and all but two or three sewage and water treatment plants (which couldn't operate due to lack of power) and bombed countless hospitals and industrial facilities. None of this has been rebuilt.