Matt Loney of ZDNet UK is covering the story, including Andy Tanenbaum's two Euro-cents here. I don't think anyone at AdTI, least of all Ken Brown, is going to be living off royalties any time soon - "falls at the starting gate" indeed. ZD even mention AdTI's ties to Microsoft least there be any doubt, which is nice of them.:)
Yup. They are listed in the penultimate paragraph of this article at the Register. The main thing is that many of these manufacturer's also make the cases for the big players who seldom actually manufacture their own cases.
If each keystroke makes a distinctive sound, then I'd think that backspace and the cursor keys etc. would have too, wouldn't you? So if you were to type in "fe[backspace]oo" for example, it could still be interpreted as plain old "foo" once the data is analysed.
It seems to me that the only way to defeat this is to modify or otherwise conceal the noise of te keyboard. But what would be the point of doing that? If someone has been able to plant a microphone sensitive enough to detect subtle differences in your keystrokes without your knowledge, then they could have planted something else to do the job much more efficiently.
Because clueless ISPs, or those working hand-in-hand with spammers, will simply forward the report to the spammer verbatim. As a result the spammer gets a known active email address to charge extra dollars for in any potential meta spamming activities. The fact that the email address *might* generate a spam report, that *might* get the service revoked is a lesser worry.
True, but take any pictures not reported by a reasonably credible source with a pinch of salt. There are apparently a lot of pictures circulating that have been culled from a hardcore German porn flick. As you might expect these are already circulating around Usenet and the more sensational and inflamatory websites.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying? The pictures were apparently taken in December 2003, copies passed to Army CID mid-January 2004 and copies were first in the Pentagon around the start of February. Gen. Myers even knew CBS had the pictures long enough to request they not publish, at least for the time being - the potential suppression of the media being something both Senatorial and Congressional committees were quite concerned over. So from the pictures being taken to being front-page news took closer to five months than "barely an hour".
Kodak's not just on the ropes - it's practically on the floor having seriously missed the digital photography boat after PhotoCD went nowhere. This isn't the only patent case that Kodak is involved in at the moment either. There is an ongoing spat with Sony over patent violations as well where both companies have issued suits against the other about infringements pertaining to digital cameras and related technologies. In addition Kodak has been named as one of 31 defendents in a case over the use of a JPEG related patent that Forgent claims to own.
As usual, I'm betting on the lawyers being the only winners while the companies themselves suffer death by a thousand paper cuts from all of the legal documents...
That old Groklaw stuff is nothing, trust me. Check out Mr. Young's track record before marchFirst for even more revelations in this post at the Yahoo Finance board. Connections to MLM schemes, the mob, Adnan Kashoggi of Iran-Contra fame... Oh Boy!
I figure i've taken 40 some Sasser Calls. Each call takes about 7-10 minutes to clean it off and all that. So you figure, 320 minutes or 4 hours of my time. That comes to costing my company something like $40 odd dollars. Now multiply that 40 some by the thounsands of techs just like me who have to do the same thing.
Or try this: According to Microsoft 1.5m users downloaded the cleanup tool via Windows Update. This does not include users that cleaned off their systems via a third party tool from an AV vendor of course. At 10min/infection that's 15m wasted minutes or about 28 *years* of people's time wasted - and that's probably a conservative estimate. Tell me again why the current sentencing guidelines for computer crimes are too harsh...
Generally speaking, lens with large aperture(F2.8>F4>F5.6>F8, etc.) can create better images.
That could have been phrased more clearly, since it seems to imply that f/2.8 is always better than f/8. A large aperture just lets more light into the camera meaning that you can achieve the desired exposure faster, but the flipside is that you have a shallower depth of field. For landscapes, where a large depth of field is key, you will usually want to close the aperture down as far as possible and make a longer exposure to bring out the detail.
I'm with you 100% percent on the quality of the lens outweighs the number of pixels though. If I had a dollar for every lunatic that spent about a $1000 on a DSLR body then slapped a $200 kit zoom lens on the front of it with the impression that the camera is all that matters... Well, I'd probably have a 1Ds MkII instead of my 10D to be honest, but only because I already have a good selection of expensive glass.;)
Actually, it's kind of both. You need to think beyond those over simplified line drawings of a pinhole camera with a tree or vertical arrow as the "scene". A circular lens will create a circular image on the focal plane, which is where the sensor or film will hopefully lie, and since the sensor is usually rectangular part of that projection will indeed be "discarded".
However, for a point in the center of the image, reflected light from that point source will almost certainly be striking the *entire* front element of the lens, and being refracted back onto the sensor where they ideally will focus on a single point again. Instead of a single line from a point on the subject to a point on the sensor, you need to think of two conical objects (yes, 3D) joined at their equal sized bases (the lens).
The fact is that there are a lot of photographers that don't understand the finer points of optics, or need to for that matter, and are under the illusion that DSLRs are only utilising the superior glass in the center of their lenses. Given that many of them have only just grasped how the field of view crop actually works, and that it's not really the "zoom multiplier" marketing told them it was, I can't say I'm surprised. If anyone knows of a web page that explains this in laypersons terms, I'd certainly appreciate the URL though!
Re:something I don't understand
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 2, Informative
if we are so 'green aware' why don't inkjet printers ever have green ink?
Well, some of the more specialist photo printers that contain more than five colours of ink do now include a greenish shade of ink. The main reason though is that most hues of light can be simulated by mixing varying intensities of red, green and blue. This is an additive model where 100% of red, green and blue is white.
For prints however, a subtractive model is used - what you are actually seeing when you look at a print is a the light being reflected from it. You generally start with a white background and the cyan, magenta and yellow pigments block certain hues in the reflection. 100% saturation of all three pigments creates black (in theory at least), which is perceived as an absence of colour.
Relax, this is just a rally on an overall downward trend - they are still doomed. What happens is that investors think the worst is over following bad news and buy back-in; they'll dump again on the next set of bad news - SCOX has another financial coming up, and there are show and tell dates in the IBM case looming too. Then there are people who need to buy stock to cover shorts; the higher the stock goes the less they make. There's lots more insight into this kind of thing from Melanie Hollands of IT Manager's Journal right here if you are interested.
A copy is made at the uploaders end and is sent down the wire to the downloader.
That's a good point I'd overlooked. The copy of the data is indeed made on the host's PC, loaded into IP packets and sent on its merry way... Hmm. So, if I were to share a huge volume of copyrighted media but never actually had anyone download any of it, I wonder what the RIAA's take on that would be? The law prohibits making a copy, so if one of these cases actually made it to trial, presumably the RIAA would have to prove not only that the music was available, but was actually downloaded too.
Does anyone know the specific part of law that prohibits downloading?
Well, "downloading" is a little specific; I'd say "receiving" is more likely, if it's in there at all. I'd guess it would be have to be handled like receiving physical stolen goods; you'd have to prove that the recipient knew it was stolen and then accepted it anyway. I don't think the RIAA's lawyers would find this too difficult given all the press about P2P, so the only reason I can imagine they haven't tried using this law is because there isn't one (yet).
I've had similar thoughts to this one too, but not overlooking the fact that money does not need to change hands to commit copyright infringement - which would be your "swift kick".;) The RIAA's recent lawsuits have all been targetted at the people making music available to download via P2P, but surely it's the people that actually download it that are committing the copyright infringement. They are the ones that actually issue the commands that generate the copy after all; where is the additional copy created in the process of sharing a folder in Kazaa or whatever?
If I understand US fair use rights correctly, I can legally buy a CD, rip the data to MP3/OGG or whatever and store them on my hard drive for personal use. If so, then by the RIAAs logic I become a criminal the instant I share that folder on the Internet. But if we extend that line of reasoning, why not prosecute a library for copyright infringement? After all, they are willfully leaving all those books lying around where any number of Joes could come in and photocopy them.
You jest, but I'm fully expecting to see a variety of creative spellings of "sexually explicit" as spammers pretend to comply with the law while still trying to slip by filters. There's five candidates in there for simple !/1/i/I/l/| substitutions alone... Unless the spammer is also responsible for checking the spelling, and liable if it's in error, then this is not going to be as effective as it might, and even if they are liable, I'm betting adoption isn't going to be stellar.
And when thay are done sending spam?
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Virtual MDA will pay you $1 per CPU hour their program is running to relay spam around the world.
And what might "their" program do when, after approximately one CPU hour, the IP that it is running on has been blacklisted and is no longer of use for spamming? Join a DDoS net? Download and host some very dodgy software or porn? The list goes on... Still, at least you'd be able to afford a quartet of two bit lawyers when you get busted for hosting a kiddie porn site or something.
Except for a few videogames, Europe isn't exactly the hotbed of new software technology.
Oh, it's not as bad as that. Quite a lot of R&D for software happens in Europe - a lot of Microsoft's UI research is done in Cambridge (England, not Mass.) for example, KDE has a European origin, and Linux itself is from Finland. And there is the small matter of CERN inventing HTTP, the web browser and all... So, technically, for all those people who think that the WWW *is* the Internet, it was actually invented in Europe.;)
True, but unlike Y2K, this one has no expiry date. Each change to the IT infrastructure of a company is going to mean that the CEO/CFO that is now accountable due to Sarbannes-Oxley is going to be sticking their neck a little further out. Sooner or later that person is going to want (and probably get) another audit to cover their ass. Assuming they haven't already factored this into the business strategy of course; security tests on odd-numbered years, PAT tests on even-numbered years for example.
It makes jobs for IT professionals (and IT not-so-professionals), stimulates the economy and hopefully increases security across the board. What is there not to like about this part of the law? I just wish we had something similar in the UK.
Um, go back and read the post again, because I didn't say (or even imply) that "UKP" was the official currency symbol. In fact I actually only referred to it directly as "GBP" with the comment that "UKP" would be more accurate since the United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland, whereas Great Britain does not.
Please don't spout forth if not understanding the post.;)
The actual tracks the trains run on are obviously not electrified, but quite a lot of the rail network is electrified, and quite often twice when you are near a mainline station. Some local train services and the London Underground use a third rail to carry power while the Intercity system and some other local train services use overhead cables, as do most (all?) of the tram type systems. Many mainline stations therefore have to support both power arrangements on the same sections of track - ain't standards great!
It's all irrelevent for the large number of diesel and the few steam trains plying the tourist trade that are still in service of course.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by the snippet of Perl at the bottom of the error message I'd say it's part of the Mason CMS.
Matt Loney of ZDNet UK is covering the story, including Andy Tanenbaum's two Euro-cents here. I don't think anyone at AdTI, least of all Ken Brown, is going to be living off royalties any time soon - "falls at the starting gate" indeed. ZD even mention AdTI's ties to Microsoft least there be any doubt, which is nice of them. :)
Yup. They are listed in the penultimate paragraph of this article at the Register. The main thing is that many of these manufacturer's also make the cases for the big players who seldom actually manufacture their own cases.
It seems to me that the only way to defeat this is to modify or otherwise conceal the noise of te keyboard. But what would be the point of doing that? If someone has been able to plant a microphone sensitive enough to detect subtle differences in your keystrokes without your knowledge, then they could have planted something else to do the job much more efficiently.
Because clueless ISPs, or those working hand-in-hand with spammers, will simply forward the report to the spammer verbatim. As a result the spammer gets a known active email address to charge extra dollars for in any potential meta spamming activities. The fact that the email address *might* generate a spam report, that *might* get the service revoked is a lesser worry.
True, but take any pictures not reported by a reasonably credible source with a pinch of salt. There are apparently a lot of pictures circulating that have been culled from a hardcore German porn flick. As you might expect these are already circulating around Usenet and the more sensational and inflamatory websites.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying? The pictures were apparently taken in December 2003, copies passed to Army CID mid-January 2004 and copies were first in the Pentagon around the start of February. Gen. Myers even knew CBS had the pictures long enough to request they not publish, at least for the time being - the potential suppression of the media being something both Senatorial and Congressional committees were quite concerned over. So from the pictures being taken to being front-page news took closer to five months than "barely an hour".
As usual, I'm betting on the lawyers being the only winners while the companies themselves suffer death by a thousand paper cuts from all of the legal documents...
Well, if he gets sent to jail at least she should know how to bake him a CD with a file on it.
And a few more at The BBC, Sky News, CNN... None of them have a great deal of detail yet though, nor is there any mention of the connection between Sasser and Skynet alledged in the code of one of the varients.
That old Groklaw stuff is nothing, trust me. Check out Mr. Young's track record before marchFirst for even more revelations in this post at the Yahoo Finance board. Connections to MLM schemes, the mob, Adnan Kashoggi of Iran-Contra fame... Oh Boy!
Or try this: According to Microsoft 1.5m users downloaded the cleanup tool via Windows Update. This does not include users that cleaned off their systems via a third party tool from an AV vendor of course. At 10min/infection that's 15m wasted minutes or about 28 *years* of people's time wasted - and that's probably a conservative estimate. Tell me again why the current sentencing guidelines for computer crimes are too harsh...
Then again, I suppose it does take some network connectivity to build a Beowulf cluster...
That could have been phrased more clearly, since it seems to imply that f/2.8 is always better than f/8. A large aperture just lets more light into the camera meaning that you can achieve the desired exposure faster, but the flipside is that you have a shallower depth of field. For landscapes, where a large depth of field is key, you will usually want to close the aperture down as far as possible and make a longer exposure to bring out the detail.
I'm with you 100% percent on the quality of the lens outweighs the number of pixels though. If I had a dollar for every lunatic that spent about a $1000 on a DSLR body then slapped a $200 kit zoom lens on the front of it with the impression that the camera is all that matters... Well, I'd probably have a 1Ds MkII instead of my 10D to be honest, but only because I already have a good selection of expensive glass. ;)
Actually, it's kind of both. You need to think beyond those over simplified line drawings of a pinhole camera with a tree or vertical arrow as the "scene". A circular lens will create a circular image on the focal plane, which is where the sensor or film will hopefully lie, and since the sensor is usually rectangular part of that projection will indeed be "discarded".
However, for a point in the center of the image, reflected light from that point source will almost certainly be striking the *entire* front element of the lens, and being refracted back onto the sensor where they ideally will focus on a single point again. Instead of a single line from a point on the subject to a point on the sensor, you need to think of two conical objects (yes, 3D) joined at their equal sized bases (the lens).
The fact is that there are a lot of photographers that don't understand the finer points of optics, or need to for that matter, and are under the illusion that DSLRs are only utilising the superior glass in the center of their lenses. Given that many of them have only just grasped how the field of view crop actually works, and that it's not really the "zoom multiplier" marketing told them it was, I can't say I'm surprised. If anyone knows of a web page that explains this in laypersons terms, I'd certainly appreciate the URL though!
Well, some of the more specialist photo printers that contain more than five colours of ink do now include a greenish shade of ink. The main reason though is that most hues of light can be simulated by mixing varying intensities of red, green and blue. This is an additive model where 100% of red, green and blue is white.
For prints however, a subtractive model is used - what you are actually seeing when you look at a print is a the light being reflected from it. You generally start with a white background and the cyan, magenta and yellow pigments block certain hues in the reflection. 100% saturation of all three pigments creates black (in theory at least), which is perceived as an absence of colour.
Relax, this is just a rally on an overall downward trend - they are still doomed. What happens is that investors think the worst is over following bad news and buy back-in; they'll dump again on the next set of bad news - SCOX has another financial coming up, and there are show and tell dates in the IBM case looming too. Then there are people who need to buy stock to cover shorts; the higher the stock goes the less they make. There's lots more insight into this kind of thing from Melanie Hollands of IT Manager's Journal right here if you are interested.
That's a good point I'd overlooked. The copy of the data is indeed made on the host's PC, loaded into IP packets and sent on its merry way... Hmm. So, if I were to share a huge volume of copyrighted media but never actually had anyone download any of it, I wonder what the RIAA's take on that would be? The law prohibits making a copy, so if one of these cases actually made it to trial, presumably the RIAA would have to prove not only that the music was available, but was actually downloaded too.
Does anyone know the specific part of law that prohibits downloading?
Well, "downloading" is a little specific; I'd say "receiving" is more likely, if it's in there at all. I'd guess it would be have to be handled like receiving physical stolen goods; you'd have to prove that the recipient knew it was stolen and then accepted it anyway. I don't think the RIAA's lawyers would find this too difficult given all the press about P2P, so the only reason I can imagine they haven't tried using this law is because there isn't one (yet).
If I understand US fair use rights correctly, I can legally buy a CD, rip the data to MP3/OGG or whatever and store them on my hard drive for personal use. If so, then by the RIAAs logic I become a criminal the instant I share that folder on the Internet. But if we extend that line of reasoning, why not prosecute a library for copyright infringement? After all, they are willfully leaving all those books lying around where any number of Joes could come in and photocopy them.
You jest, but I'm fully expecting to see a variety of creative spellings of "sexually explicit" as spammers pretend to comply with the law while still trying to slip by filters. There's five candidates in there for simple !/1/i/I/l/| substitutions alone... Unless the spammer is also responsible for checking the spelling, and liable if it's in error, then this is not going to be as effective as it might, and even if they are liable, I'm betting adoption isn't going to be stellar.
And what might "their" program do when, after approximately one CPU hour, the IP that it is running on has been blacklisted and is no longer of use for spamming? Join a DDoS net? Download and host some very dodgy software or porn? The list goes on... Still, at least you'd be able to afford a quartet of two bit lawyers when you get busted for hosting a kiddie porn site or something.
Oh, it's not as bad as that. Quite a lot of R&D for software happens in Europe - a lot of Microsoft's UI research is done in Cambridge (England, not Mass.) for example, KDE has a European origin, and Linux itself is from Finland. And there is the small matter of CERN inventing HTTP, the web browser and all... So, technically, for all those people who think that the WWW *is* the Internet, it was actually invented in Europe. ;)
True, but unlike Y2K, this one has no expiry date. Each change to the IT infrastructure of a company is going to mean that the CEO/CFO that is now accountable due to Sarbannes-Oxley is going to be sticking their neck a little further out. Sooner or later that person is going to want (and probably get) another audit to cover their ass. Assuming they haven't already factored this into the business strategy of course; security tests on odd-numbered years, PAT tests on even-numbered years for example.
It makes jobs for IT professionals (and IT not-so-professionals), stimulates the economy and hopefully increases security across the board. What is there not to like about this part of the law? I just wish we had something similar in the UK.
Please don't spout forth if not understanding the post. ;)
It's all irrelevent for the large number of diesel and the few steam trains plying the tourist trade that are still in service of course. ;)