Probably for the same reason that we use ".uk" as our ccTLD despite the "official" ISO standard being GB - because the average joe in the street uses "UK" in preference to "GB". As do the media and the government for that matter. The only common place we use the "GB" ISO code I can think of is on those stickers that go on cars travelling abroad.
Also, bear in mind that the full name of this green and pleasant land is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Given that the "GBP" is also the currency of Northern Ireland, "UKP" is actually more accurate.
WTF happened there! I definately typed "that foiled a plot" - the first sentence *should* have read "a US/UK operation that foiled a plot to use Osmium Tetroxide", as opposed to making it sound like the US/UK were planning on using the stuff.
The BBC (and everyone else) has been running this story about a US/UK operation to use Osmium Tetroxide in a chemical attack. Given my recollections of the Sarin gas attack on a Japanese tube station a few years back, I'm willing to have my email read if it nails fsckers preparing to do this.
I'm more concerned with the surgeons who gain their 27% speed increase from performing incisions using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel myself... On the otherhand, it certainly gets the job done for amputations: Bzzzzzt! "OK, my work here is done. Stitch that up for me please, nurse..."
Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.
That's one percent of *IT* workers. What's the percentage as a whole once you factor in the other outsource fodder employed in non-IT related places like call centers, assembly lines...
Since those jobs are mainly going overseas, that means that the many of these newly redundant people will have to take lower paid jobs, if they can find employment at all. That means less money from taxes to pay for more people on state support, which eventually means more taxes for everyone. That may well in turn put some more companies over the line and into considering outsourcing and start the cycle anew. If this does start to spiral then there's is only one result and everyone is going to suffer, big time.
And writing them for the same reason for the same people. Money from spammers.
While this sounds like a nice idea theory, and is certainly plausible, I'm actually starting to doubt it, and "stealing email addresses" is kind of required for a mass mailing worm, is it not? When this idea really hit the big time with MyDoom, I implemented a simple script to take all the IPs that had sent me a trojan via email and drop them into a local DNSBL. I also wrote a couple of SpamAssassin rules to raise a flag should one of these IPs be referenced in a spam, either by hostname in the body or in the headers.
Well, we are now nearing three months after MyDoom and I have yet to see that flag from SpamAssassin (aside from in further copies of the worm), which seems somewhat unlikely if they are really intended for mass mailing spam. So, given that spammers are probably not this patient, are these worms are being used for some other purpose than spamming? For example rather than sending spam, perhaps they are being used to host the sites mentioned in spam with those obviously disposable hostnames. Or maybe they are just a plain old bot net to scratch some disgruntled coder's personal itch.
The third possibility is that the apparent turf war between the Netsky and Bagle worm varients is real. Obviously there is latency between a PC being infected and contact being established with that PC for whatever purpose the trojan author has in mind. During that time it's entirely possible the machine could be patched or compromised by a competing trojan/worm. "Lather, rinse, repeat..." as the saying goes.
Then again, there does appear to be a new worm on the loose that is scanning for pretty much all of the exploit and backdoor ports of recent worms so perhaps the next chapter of this sorry saga is beginning.
It's right there in the story. It's a feel good thing to show the press they can be a friendly open source company, with the emphasis on "open". And look! To further demonstrate that we bear no ill will towards the open source community that continually derides us, we've released it on SourceForge, part of the same group that owns Slashdot, that bastion of MS bashing!
The fact that the tool concerned is a rather niche tool that is probably of only of interest to a relatively small number of developers is not going to factor in the press at all. Even so, I think that Microsoft is to be applauded for this, not slated; it's a big first step into a brave new world for them. Now is not the time to slap them in the face and deter them from making potentially more magnanimous releases in the future.
That's not to say I'm not still looking for the "embrance and extend" though.
One of our UK computer mags had an article on the robustness of these USB memory dongles in the last month or so. I skimmed it instore, but from memory the tests included:
Microwaving
Immersing in boiling water
Freezing in a block of ice
Sundry physical impacts
Digestion wasn't on the list, but I have no doubt that patience, a rubber glove and a dunk in disinfectant would be all that stands between ingestion, data recovery and prosecution.;)
So, when you say "100 cups of coffee", is that in total, or per personality? I think the nurse may have doubled your dosage this morning if you are worrying about this anyway, maybe you should start a class action lawsuit instead - you should be good for two signatures at least!
OK, hand up. I've done this. I had a Word document that contained maybe two - three pages of text followed by a series of tables of data - total size of maybe 5MB. I wanted the document on my Clie for reference, but not at the 3MB Docs2Go was rendering it at, and PDF was even worse. So I dumped it into an Excel workbook, one worksheet per table for fast access and used odd numbered rows on the first page for the text, one paragraph per cell. With a decent left justified cell width, word wrap enabled and the grid turned off it looks fine. New file size: 300kB. Conclusion: Word's table markup is sub-optimal to say the least...
Similarly, I don't have any problems with using Excel as a basic flatfile database (never relational though, I'm not that insane) where the visual layout of the data is more important than the flexibilty of querying. That said, on a basic flat-file database you can actually perform some quite sophisticated filters using Excel's auto-filter function.
I don't think the problem is with using a spreadsheet as a word processor, database, or any of the other uses it can be shoehorned into. The problem is simply that people correctly see a spreadsheet as a jack of all trades, but forget that this implies it's a master of none, with the possible exception of what it was designed for: crunching tabulated numbers.
Just because he allegedly made over $1M doesn't mean it's all available to AOL, how much was frittered away on entertainment for example? Also doesn't seizure of property to cover debt, including damages awarded by a court, require that non-essential assets are seized first. You can't just jump straight in and seize the debtor's home if they have a Porsche, even if that does cover the value of the debt exactly.
I think it far more likely that the spammer was told to pay AOL so much in damages and, when his liquid cash assets wouldn't cover it, dumped big ticket items like the Porsche first to make up the shortfall. Of course, if AOL were given a pick list of items to seize with approximate values, I'd certainly be ticking all the status symbols first. Hell, I'd settle for the Porsche and a court order stipulating he only drive a Yugo in future...;)
It'd probably be even more "interesting" for the IRS since the truth is probably somewhere in between given the legal line some spammers walk. Several (but not all) of the interviews and exposes with spammers known to ROKSO have shown that while some do indeed have affluent lifestyles others do not. It shouldn't be too difficult to cross check a metric like what car a spammer drives and their IRS filings against what other drivers of that model car file with the IRS and flag any anomalies. Unless that kind of data is seperated by bureacracratic red-tape for privacy reasons of course.
Maybe not "die", but the stereotypical console game has small claustrophobic levels, quite unlike the spawling open areas of PC equivalents. Similarly PC based games are often seen as being more intellectually challenging as well, rather than just something to pass the time while the latest "reality" shows are on the box.
I think the real point of the article is what is going to happen to MMORGs once the console crowd gets involved in a scene they have not yet really impacted on.
For an example, take a look at Deus Ex and its sequel, Invisible War, which epitomises the sterotypes above. DX was originally written for the PC and had what often seemed huge levels, even if this was entirely down to effective design; the Hong Kong levels in particular were very impressive at this. There was quite sophisticated AI for the time and many situations could be handled a whole lot easier if you thought about what you were doing and didn't go in guns blazing.
Segue to DX:IW, designed from the ground up to accomodate the console market and much of the magic is gone. The levels are smaller; so much smaller that you seem to spend as much time loading levels as you do actually playing them because you have to move back and forth so much. As for the "universal" ammunition for projectile and energy weapons which smacks of "four control button consolitis"; puhleeze! No more rueing using your last sniper round on the minion to save time and now having to face his boss up close and personal with a melee weapon in DX:IW!
So, "Die"? No, almost certainly not, but getting hamstrung to the lowest common denominator of each aspect of the targetted platforms seems equally inevitable. All those PC game genres that take advantage of PC hardware, even trivial stuff such as having a proper keyboard, are really going to suffer if the trend continues...
I dunno. I think this kind of thing is like the stuff you see on the catwalks; it's a vastly over the top representation of what you'll actually see on the street.
Some of the stuff they are describing actually sounds somewhat similar to what we have now, for example "turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf". This is really little more than rolling a window up to its title bar and rotating it 90deg to save space on the desktop accompanied by some whizzy 3D effects. It's really just a logical progression of the simulated 3D effects GUIs obtained with the advent of 2D acceleration that utilises the latest 3D hardware to do it for "real".
True, it's not necessary, particularly resource friendly and the potential to seriously screw up the human-computer interface is greater. Even so, I won't be at all suprised to see features from this "Catwalk" on the street in Gome 3, KDE 4, Longhorn, and MacOS XI.
I don't see any technical reason why not provided that the two inner layers are far enough apart to avoid interference while burning. Of course the same applies to the current 4.7GB disks and I can't recall seeing any dual sided versions of those anywhere. In short; don't hold your breath if you were thinking of putting the entire LoTR trilogy on a three disk "portable edition".
And when the hardware box has a 0-day exploit and a worm gets loose before the patch, what then? All of your boxes are potentially vulnerable instead, that's what. Trusting your security to a single product, hardware or software, is a disaster waiting to happen, and for some of ISS's customers its probably happening right now.
Pretty much all SOHO routers have a firewall capabilty these days, and there are free "personal" firewall systems for all majors OSs. If you are connected to the net and have a clue about security, you'll be using both and monitoring both white and blackhat security sites daily. That all patches are applied as soon as prudent goes without saying of course...
This just smacks of using the reputation of Project Gutenberg to make a few bucks from those who don't like ASCII and can't generate their own.PDF from the original. I personally don't have a problem with them charging a nominal fee for the.PDF generation and hosting, even if it is really little more than writing a script to add markup to the original ASCII. Those who proofread for PG are entitled to feel differently of course.
I think in this case, since PG2 is not really and evolution of PG they might have done better going for a similarly themed, but different name. The domain "projectcaxton.com" currently appears to be available, for instance...
Don't mess around with cursive, just print and blend your letters as appropriate.
That's the crux of it I think. I gave up on pure cursive a *long* time ago because even I couldn't read it. Instead I've developed a hybrid style that provides reasonable legibility of print with the speed of cursive. So while I'd say I print, I do flow together certain letters in the cursive style where it comes naturally - letters with tails on the right like "a" and "d" and so on. I also inconsistently use a few cursive style letters to enable them to flow as well, a looped "l" for example, depending on the surrounding letters. At least people don't have to work out which way up the page belongs or reach for the migraine tablets afterward, which is the main thing.;)
One other thing I've noticed though; I can't print block capitals for more than a sentence or so without getting a quite intense pain in my wrist. I need to stop and flex my wrist for a few seconds between sentences and no amount of adjusting my writing "posture" has enabled me to get around this. I'd say it was something like RSI, but I can quite happily print regular case or type for hours on end. The only thing I can think of is that it's down to the more angular nature of the uppercase alphabet.
Doesn't that depend on what the state of SCO's story was last August, or earlier given this was probably hammered out June/July? The basic premise of SCO's case has moved around so much it's hard to recall what happened when, but a quick back track to last August in the Caldera topic right here on Slashdot reveals that this was when they announced the $699 racket. It was also just after the whole code under NDA thing, so it's reasonable to assume that CA really did see the whole thing as little more than the contract dispute between SCO and IBM when they negiotiated the deal.
Actually, I think the EV1 announcement has inadvertantly done SCO *far* more harm than good. The senior execs at SCO must have been thinking the announcement would be taken as a ringing endorsement of SCOsource and lead to further revenue, otherwise why make the announcement? Also, they certainly need a boost for SCOsource - after all, it is supposedly their new cash cow and just $20,000 revenue in the last quarter according to their last financial is hardly a good sign, is it?
So, we have the gleeful announcement from SCO/EV1 that a seven figure sum has been paid to SCOsource, cushioning the ~10% fall in stock price after somewhat grim financials and announcements of the latest lawsuits. However, we also have the biggest backlash you could possibly imagine; EV1 has kissed goodbye to a few million dollars (a no refund clause is in the contract), lost an unknown amount of custom to its competitors and been tarnished with the same brush as SCO. You'd have to be a complete moron to consider buying a SCOsource license for "protection" and risk having your customers find out now, which leave less funds for the lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, bear in mind that the full name of this green and pleasant land is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Given that the "GBP" is also the currency of Northern Ireland, "UKP" is actually more accurate.
How on Earth could you have missed "Train hotspotting"? ;)
WTF happened there! I definately typed "that foiled a plot" - the first sentence *should* have read "a US/UK operation that foiled a plot to use Osmium Tetroxide", as opposed to making it sound like the US/UK were planning on using the stuff.
The BBC (and everyone else) has been running this story about a US/UK operation to use Osmium Tetroxide in a chemical attack. Given my recollections of the Sarin gas attack on a Japanese tube station a few years back, I'm willing to have my email read if it nails fsckers preparing to do this.
I'm more concerned with the surgeons who gain their 27% speed increase from performing incisions using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel myself... On the otherhand, it certainly gets the job done for amputations: Bzzzzzt! "OK, my work here is done. Stitch that up for me please, nurse..."
Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.
Since those jobs are mainly going overseas, that means that the many of these newly redundant people will have to take lower paid jobs, if they can find employment at all. That means less money from taxes to pay for more people on state support, which eventually means more taxes for everyone. That may well in turn put some more companies over the line and into considering outsourcing and start the cycle anew. If this does start to spiral then there's is only one result and everyone is going to suffer, big time.
While this sounds like a nice idea theory, and is certainly plausible, I'm actually starting to doubt it, and "stealing email addresses" is kind of required for a mass mailing worm, is it not? When this idea really hit the big time with MyDoom, I implemented a simple script to take all the IPs that had sent me a trojan via email and drop them into a local DNSBL. I also wrote a couple of SpamAssassin rules to raise a flag should one of these IPs be referenced in a spam, either by hostname in the body or in the headers.
Well, we are now nearing three months after MyDoom and I have yet to see that flag from SpamAssassin (aside from in further copies of the worm), which seems somewhat unlikely if they are really intended for mass mailing spam. So, given that spammers are probably not this patient, are these worms are being used for some other purpose than spamming? For example rather than sending spam, perhaps they are being used to host the sites mentioned in spam with those obviously disposable hostnames. Or maybe they are just a plain old bot net to scratch some disgruntled coder's personal itch.
The third possibility is that the apparent turf war between the Netsky and Bagle worm varients is real. Obviously there is latency between a PC being infected and contact being established with that PC for whatever purpose the trojan author has in mind. During that time it's entirely possible the machine could be patched or compromised by a competing trojan/worm. "Lather, rinse, repeat..." as the saying goes.
Then again, there does appear to be a new worm on the loose that is scanning for pretty much all of the exploit and backdoor ports of recent worms so perhaps the next chapter of this sorry saga is beginning.
The fact that the tool concerned is a rather niche tool that is probably of only of interest to a relatively small number of developers is not going to factor in the press at all. Even so, I think that Microsoft is to be applauded for this, not slated; it's a big first step into a brave new world for them. Now is not the time to slap them in the face and deter them from making potentially more magnanimous releases in the future.
That's not to say I'm not still looking for the "embrance and extend" though.
- Microwaving
- Immersing in boiling water
- Freezing in a block of ice
- Sundry physical impacts
Digestion wasn't on the list, but I have no doubt that patience, a rubber glove and a dunk in disinfectant would be all that stands between ingestion, data recovery and prosecution.So, when you say "100 cups of coffee", is that in total, or per personality? I think the nurse may have doubled your dosage this morning if you are worrying about this anyway, maybe you should start a class action lawsuit instead - you should be good for two signatures at least!
Similarly, I don't have any problems with using Excel as a basic flatfile database (never relational though, I'm not that insane) where the visual layout of the data is more important than the flexibilty of querying. That said, on a basic flat-file database you can actually perform some quite sophisticated filters using Excel's auto-filter function.
I don't think the problem is with using a spreadsheet as a word processor, database, or any of the other uses it can be shoehorned into. The problem is simply that people correctly see a spreadsheet as a jack of all trades, but forget that this implies it's a master of none, with the possible exception of what it was designed for: crunching tabulated numbers.
I think it far more likely that the spammer was told to pay AOL so much in damages and, when his liquid cash assets wouldn't cover it, dumped big ticket items like the Porsche first to make up the shortfall. Of course, if AOL were given a pick list of items to seize with approximate values, I'd certainly be ticking all the status symbols first. Hell, I'd settle for the Porsche and a court order stipulating he only drive a Yugo in future... ;)
It'd probably be even more "interesting" for the IRS since the truth is probably somewhere in between given the legal line some spammers walk. Several (but not all) of the interviews and exposes with spammers known to ROKSO have shown that while some do indeed have affluent lifestyles others do not. It shouldn't be too difficult to cross check a metric like what car a spammer drives and their IRS filings against what other drivers of that model car file with the IRS and flag any anomalies. Unless that kind of data is seperated by bureacracratic red-tape for privacy reasons of course.
For an example, take a look at Deus Ex and its sequel, Invisible War, which epitomises the sterotypes above. DX was originally written for the PC and had what often seemed huge levels, even if this was entirely down to effective design; the Hong Kong levels in particular were very impressive at this. There was quite sophisticated AI for the time and many situations could be handled a whole lot easier if you thought about what you were doing and didn't go in guns blazing.
Segue to DX:IW, designed from the ground up to accomodate the console market and much of the magic is gone. The levels are smaller; so much smaller that you seem to spend as much time loading levels as you do actually playing them because you have to move back and forth so much. As for the "universal" ammunition for projectile and energy weapons which smacks of "four control button consolitis"; puhleeze! No more rueing using your last sniper round on the minion to save time and now having to face his boss up close and personal with a melee weapon in DX:IW!
So, "Die"? No, almost certainly not, but getting hamstrung to the lowest common denominator of each aspect of the targetted platforms seems equally inevitable. All those PC game genres that take advantage of PC hardware, even trivial stuff such as having a proper keyboard, are really going to suffer if the trend continues...
Some of the stuff they are describing actually sounds somewhat similar to what we have now, for example "turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf". This is really little more than rolling a window up to its title bar and rotating it 90deg to save space on the desktop accompanied by some whizzy 3D effects. It's really just a logical progression of the simulated 3D effects GUIs obtained with the advent of 2D acceleration that utilises the latest 3D hardware to do it for "real".
True, it's not necessary, particularly resource friendly and the potential to seriously screw up the human-computer interface is greater. Even so, I won't be at all suprised to see features from this "Catwalk" on the street in Gome 3, KDE 4, Longhorn, and MacOS XI.
I don't see any technical reason why not provided that the two inner layers are far enough apart to avoid interference while burning. Of course the same applies to the current 4.7GB disks and I can't recall seeing any dual sided versions of those anywhere. In short; don't hold your breath if you were thinking of putting the entire LoTR trilogy on a three disk "portable edition".
Wait until SCO get's a hold of this! Perhaps they'll be suing Google afterall.
And when the hardware box has a 0-day exploit and a worm gets loose before the patch, what then? All of your boxes are potentially vulnerable instead, that's what. Trusting your security to a single product, hardware or software, is a disaster waiting to happen, and for some of ISS's customers its probably happening right now.
Pretty much all SOHO routers have a firewall capabilty these days, and there are free "personal" firewall systems for all majors OSs. If you are connected to the net and have a clue about security, you'll be using both and monitoring both white and blackhat security sites daily. That all patches are applied as soon as prudent goes without saying of course...
Given that most of my remaining floppies got made into Starship Enterprises, the Federation logo would be a logical evolutionary step for me...
I think in this case, since PG2 is not really and evolution of PG they might have done better going for a similarly themed, but different name. The domain "projectcaxton.com" currently appears to be available, for instance...
That's the crux of it I think. I gave up on pure cursive a *long* time ago because even I couldn't read it. Instead I've developed a hybrid style that provides reasonable legibility of print with the speed of cursive. So while I'd say I print, I do flow together certain letters in the cursive style where it comes naturally - letters with tails on the right like "a" and "d" and so on. I also inconsistently use a few cursive style letters to enable them to flow as well, a looped "l" for example, depending on the surrounding letters. At least people don't have to work out which way up the page belongs or reach for the migraine tablets afterward, which is the main thing. ;)
One other thing I've noticed though; I can't print block capitals for more than a sentence or so without getting a quite intense pain in my wrist. I need to stop and flex my wrist for a few seconds between sentences and no amount of adjusting my writing "posture" has enabled me to get around this. I'd say it was something like RSI, but I can quite happily print regular case or type for hours on end. The only thing I can think of is that it's down to the more angular nature of the uppercase alphabet.
Like this, you mean? There are other similar products too, but the Archos range were the first ones I saw.
Doesn't that depend on what the state of SCO's story was last August, or earlier given this was probably hammered out June/July? The basic premise of SCO's case has moved around so much it's hard to recall what happened when, but a quick back track to last August in the Caldera topic right here on Slashdot reveals that this was when they announced the $699 racket. It was also just after the whole code under NDA thing, so it's reasonable to assume that CA really did see the whole thing as little more than the contract dispute between SCO and IBM when they negiotiated the deal.
So, we have the gleeful announcement from SCO/EV1 that a seven figure sum has been paid to SCOsource, cushioning the ~10% fall in stock price after somewhat grim financials and announcements of the latest lawsuits. However, we also have the biggest backlash you could possibly imagine; EV1 has kissed goodbye to a few million dollars (a no refund clause is in the contract), lost an unknown amount of custom to its competitors and been tarnished with the same brush as SCO. You'd have to be a complete moron to consider buying a SCOsource license for "protection" and risk having your customers find out now, which leave less funds for the lawyers.