Go to ftp.gmd.de into the if-archive directory. There are a lot of high quality text adventures made by fans of the genre. My personal favourites are: Jigsaw and Curses both by Graham Nelson and Web (I think thats the name) by Andrew Plotkin.
Jeos, as others have indicated you may have actually been probing your providers set up. There's not enough information to determine whether that is so or not. In that case be very careful about brute forcing it, if it is actually your provider that you're looking at they may become somewhat miffed.
If you're running a linux box it should be possible to set it up as a mini provider. You'd probably have to set up a DHCP server, PPP and telephony obviously. Your provider would then be taken out of the loop and the IP address of the dreamcast box would be easily detectable. If nmap or whatever still detected open ports you could be pretty sure that it was the real deal.
I think this is pretty interesting, I may run out and buy one just to check.
I did read the 'damn docs' that came with nmap. Just because people are doing it all day doesn't mean that it is ethical. If it were a Microsoft product that were initiating the examination all Hell would break loose here. There's a big difference between a neighbourhood watch that looks for suspicious activity (did a beat up van circle the block a half dozen times at 2 am?) and somebody looking through my windows to see what colour my bedspread is.
Unless you're invited to scan me its an invasion of my privacy. It may not be a major invasion but thats up to the targets personal tolerance.
Nice respect for peoples privacy there, port mapping a visitor to your web site. I'll make sure to religiously not visit it.
In any case you don't have anywhere near enough information to make a judgement on whether Jeos' 'blundered' or was 'full of it'. If the Dreamcast user on your site was connecting to you through any sort of device that does network address translation (i.e. a firewall or cablemodem sharing device such as a UMAX UGate-Plus) or the provider they were connecting through did any filtering on incoming requests then they would fail. You don't even know if the user got bored, turned off their Dreamcast and turned on their PC.
The Space Race was a product of the cold war or at least the cold war mentality though: We must beat those Ruskies to the moon because we've already lost the race into space! This is a fight for Truth, Motherhood, Apple pie and other American ideals. We can't let the communists win! The sentiment of the time allowed the American public to be charged up by the propoganda.
You're more or less co-operating scientifically with any country capabale of making use of the space station at this point, including those who don't currently embrace democracy. Things have changed a lot in thirty years. Because of this similar tactics won't work.
I feel that getting into space, both manned and unmanned, is an admirable goal. Exploration was a part of the human spirit and experience and we need to go that way again. Now anything that doesn't have immediate commercial or military application is considered a waste of money. Exploration is too fraught with danger to risk human life on and so on. The community at large imposes there own biases on people who would be willing to take risks to explore.
If the europeans in the 15th century felt the way we currently do North America would still be populated by aboriginals.
Most domain name suits have no real legal basis. They aren't violating any trademarks or infringing on patents or diluting public perception. The approach that seems to be being used to fight over domain names is trademark. Some company has a trademark over a name and so they use the trademark to try and bully small companies or private individuals. The only problem is that the legal bullying usually has no grounding. You can only trademark a name for a particular purpose. So for instance Apple Computers is free to sell computers under the Apple brand name but they can't sell records since that would infringe on Apple Records trademark. There's still some room for litigation at times of course. Apple Records sued Apple Computer for QuickTime since it could record/play back music and hence from Apple Records point of view Apple Computer was in the music business. By sticking to strict interpretations of trademark law though most cases could be thrown out of court. This isn't happening though, common sense isn't prevailing.
In the Hasbro v.s. Clue Computing case the judge should very quickly throw the case out of court. Clue Computing isn't infringing on any of Hasbro's trademarks. Unfortunately it doesn't seem there are enough common sense judges out there. We need more Judge Judy's who aren't afraid to tell somebody their case is ridiculous. As soon as the concept of common sense is applied most of these lawsuits would stop: The plaintiff's case is dismissed, the defendant's countersuit for the amount of $XXX for legal fees and punitive damages is awarded.
Trademarks are there to protect both companies and consumers. Unfortunately too many companies are misusing trademarks. Unfortunately not enough judges have the scruples or guts to call a frivolous lawsuit what it is.
Part of the problem is the amount of money they lose on the hardware itself. At first they may make a small amount but in a short time the hardware drops down to the 150 dollar range. In order to make a profit they need to sell their high priced games. They're fear is that if their games are easily copyable sales of their games will drop to levels too low to support the firesale prices on the hardware.
I think somebody could build a killer gaming system around a cheap motherboard, a Matrox G200 (since the specs are available for writing drivers), a cheap case geared for placing under a TV and a custom video server that fired stuff directly across AGP and into the video card. Throw in easy networking and keep the tools for game development free.
There are a lot of good people who work as contractors and there are a lot of good people who work directly for companies. I started off as a contractor but the contracting agency didn't do a good job of keeping me happy when I worked for them, so I signed on to work for the company directly. The agency did go to great lengths to rectify the situation after the fact but I viewed that as 'too little, too late'. The hierarchy that allowed the problems to occur was already firmly in place.
If you want good people and you want to retain them then treat them well. This includes paying them well but more pay and/or a good signing bonus is always available around the corner. Make sure that the goals of the project is something your people can sign on to and believe in. Management's job should be to make it possible for the technical people to work, not to make the technical people work. If extraordinary effort is required in terms of hours worked then management hasn't done a good job of calculating the man-hours required. Either fix this (preferable) or supply people with the tools (ISDN and machines at a minimum) to let them work the extra hours with the smallest possible impact on their lives.
The above matters to me anyway, if I ever start waking up in the morning dreading work I know its time to quit.
QuickTime server was open sourced and possibly enough information to understand the file format. What hasn't been open sourced are CODECS (compressor/decompressors) such as Sorensen. So while you've got a system for net distributing already compressed image data you don't have an open sourced system for producing it.
As far as I know there are no open source initiatives to actually produce a CODEC for high quality and low bitrate image data.
Rumor has it that Sorensen has stated that Apple prohibits them from open sourcing their CODEC. I'm not sure how true it is. It may be closer to reality that Apple wouldn't be happy about it after paying large fees to make use of it. The other half of the equation might be that even if Apple didn't care one way or the other Sorensen still wouldn't. CODECs are expensive pieces of intellectual property to create, it may well be that Sorensen uses Apple as a convenient scape goat.
>is al gore going to be there? he is the father, after all.
This is true, however Mrs. Gore has found it in her heart, with the help of her Creator, to forgive Al his past transgressions. Though Al's bastard love child, The Internet, torments Mrs. Gore's heart, heartless bastards continue to dredge it up.
Al has had no contact with The Internet since the night of its conception, a hazy combination of free love and proscribed narcotics.
RedHat is doing the right thing. They've got to protect a number of things: 1) Their trademark, 2) their reputation, 3) stockholder value and 4) their customers. The trademark is a pretty obvious thing, you can't go and start your own distribution and call it RedHat no more than Microsoft can suddenly decide to change the name of their operating system to Linux.
In this case I'm assuming that somebody burned a RedHat 6.X tree. If this is the case from a trademark standpoint they still can't call it the RedHat distribution or at least they've got to be careful that it can't be misconstrued that its the "Official RedHat 6.0" because its not.
RedHat also provides additional services beyond just the actual Linux installation, namely some level of support. The customer needs to know that what they're buying is the real deal and is supported and so on.
These cheap distributions provide a service to customers as long as the customer actually knows what they're getting. I bought a stack of distributions from Cheap*Bytes and I knew I was just getting a dump of a distribution and not the actual distribution.
I'm not saying RedHat is selflessly thinking of only the customers interests. If they don't do this then customers will get upset which isn't good for the companies finances.
Whether or not a person takes adequate measures to secure their belongings, whether physical goods like my tidy pile of gold coins or the company network, has no bearing on the legality of the intrusion. If you abscond or destroy my personal belongings I expect you to be prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law. Whether or not the security measures (Did I lock the doors? Are the security patches up to date on the external computers on my network?) satisfy my insurance company is another matter. I'm not arguing that at all.
If the legal system takes the stance that unless you take adequate precautions any theft or damage done to your property is not a crime chaos will ensue. Any legal prohibitions against theft or intrusion will be moot since by definition if you've been intruded on you didn't take adequate precautions against that particular intruder.
You put a dead bolt on your door and religiously lock it, you make sure all your windows are closed and locked. I throw a brick through your window and steal your prized lint collection. Since you had the audacity to have windows on your dwelling you are therefore not worthy of being protected by the law. I walk away without a blemish on my record.
The truth is just about all computers exposed to the internet at large take adequate precautions to justify protection. Unless they leave the site up without password protection and post notices that intrusion is explicitly allowed they're afforded protection by the law.
Insurance companies and the stock holders are of course entitled to more stringent measures. If a lack of these more stringent measures results in theft of services and intellectual property or a loss of service then they are entitled to make the company pay. They do this by either not honouring their insurance policy or dumping their stock and deflating the value of the company. The company is still entitled to seeing any criminals rot in jail.
To borrow and extend a rather colourful phrase from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: If you don't want to be the wife of the convict with the most cigarettes, don't do the crime.
Cann your home insurance and file a theft claim. And tell them you left the front door unlocked. See what they say. Sane with auto insurance companies. If you're ripped off for being stupid, they'll compensate you less, if at all. Blame is not something that rests all on you or all on the thief, but a question of who bears what percentage of the blame. What would you expect to happen if your wife parked your new convertible Ferrari on the street in the middle of Watts and left it there over the weekend. Would you feel 100% relaxed and not worry because 'the law' says the theifs bear all of the guilt? Would you place zero blame on your wife? I wonder.
So in other words if you happen to forget to lock the door to your abode I can feel free to walk out with your computer, tv set or anything else that catches my eye? What was your address?
The Amiga may be vapour ware, only time will tell. But since Amiga's already run on PowerPC chips your concept of the Amiga state of the art is wildly inaccurate. Not that you should let reality get in the way of your posturing.
There are a lot of valid points that can be made about the viability of the Amiga in the long run. Similar cases on differing points can be made for the BeOS, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, MacOS, MacOS X, FreeBSD and Linux. If you'd have mentioned the reluctance of development houses to port software to anything but Windows you'd have a point. If you'd have mentioned the high costs of manufacturing a new niche player in the hardware arena you'd have a point. However, your position can best be summarized by:
Have you ever had a relative who laid on his deathbed for years and years and refused to just keel over and die?
Those are braindead posturers. Boy I wish they'd just roll over and die already...
The real loser isn't MS, its users who needed anon
on
Hotmail Cracked Badly
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· Score: 2
There are a lot of people who were doing illegal things through Hotmail who are potentially under surveilance through this insecurity. I don't really care about them. (I'm not talking about the person who occasionaly forgets that Microsoft Word or Quake 2 or whatever is a commercial product, but more the people who put up a tonne of stuff and use it to generate money whether through banner ads or subscriptions) I am concerned for the people who wanted anonimity for legitimate reasons. Maybe they were anonymously subscribed to sexual abuse survivor mailing lists or online support groups for the differently gendered.
A lot of people are going to state that these people were stupid for relying on a Microsoft service, but where are they supposed to go? It isn't stupidity so much as a lack of education. This is compounded by the people who are technically capable of doing the educating. Too many of them are too busy looking down at the unwashed masses to communicate the options and hazards involved with the various options.
A few years ago there was a true anonymous mail service based in (I think) Finland. It was something like penet.fi (its been awhile) which did do the job of servicing users anonymously well. The machine which did the work wasn't even physically connected to the internet except by UUCP connections over a phone line several times a day. Latency was large, but it did provide security.
There are probably others (I don't use anonymous email myself, I do use services that allow me a perpetual email address for non-critical stuff, like providing head hunters a consistant address) but the only thing you really hear about are Hotmail or Lycos etc.
No its not useless as a piece of evidence. Linear colour maps aren't appropriate for all purposes. In this particular case the colour map was chosen to highlight features of interest to astrophysicists.
Non linear colour maps are all over the place. They're much more common than linear maps. Go buy some Fuji Velvia for your 35 mm camera. It takes awfully nice portraits doesn't it? It's because the colour map is tweaked to provide pleasing flesh tones.
This isn't any different than a mathemetician using a logarithmic scale to do a plot of a function with exponential growth.
They probably take the system as a whole, which is smart. No searching around for the obscure cable to hook up some device. Not everything is standardized and the smart move is to go overboard and just take a working setup rather than find out his SCSI devices were hooked up via those delicate 68 pin high density connectors.
If a car is impounded just about everything inside of it is as well, they don't take the time to ensure that the dust buster isn't a container for a half pound of cocaine and hand it off to the perpetrator.
This is scary, but I can see having a lot of fun manipulating the results. For instance get together with my fellow engineers and purchase a book such as Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Suddenly it looks like the number one purchased book at my company are nude photos of oriental sex workers.
The drawback is the lengthly conversation with Human Resources that would result.
It isn't a bad article for ZDnet. Little technical details, but thats ZDnet. If they did have any technical details you can be assured they'd be wrong. I don't know what a 'general workhorse server' is and it would've been useful to see what services he feels a 'general workhorse server' requires.
Chances are he was just talking through his hat, that for balance reasons he needed a counterpoint. Not being particularily competent he invented 'general workhorse servers' and figured nobody would task him on a definition.
I just bought a SuperMicro case with a 300 watt supply, forgot the model number. It looks fairly nice for a peecee box and is roomy enough that I wasn't bleeding after I put my linux-intel box together.
That should be on the horizon for consumer type people soon, if it hasn't happened already in a manner of speaking. Right now things such as 3D now and other SIMD extensions are additional processing power and are quite close to having an additional processor on the same die. They accelerate a sub genus of instructions much like math coprocessors did in the 80's to early 90's. They've of course been assimilated into the main core for quite some time now as well.
If Moore's law holds out by 2010 we'll have approximately 8 times the number of transistors in a socket as we do presently. So instead of ~20 million it'll be around ~160 million. That's a lot of transistors. More massive onchip cache will be one of the first improvements and maybe a moderate bump in bus width. I say only a moderate increase because more density on a motherboard is expensive and isn't scaling at the same speed as circuit density. Chances are you'll see 2 or 4 way SMP on consumer processors instead. You also might see true system integration: RAM, ROM, CPU and graphics subsystems etc, this would be for what is now the sub 1000 dollar market.
There've been a few good comments on biology, astrophysics and many other sciences. There've been a few good comments on Linux as well. Most comments aren't good. Anyway it's news for nerds, not news for programmers or Linux zealots or Microsoft bashers although it may feel that way sometimes.
This is science, technology and medicine in action, it is news for nerds and it is stuff that matters.
This might work, it'd also open up the opportunity for workers to abuse it to though. I've got my H1-B and am started on my way towards green card nirvana, I can cross the street and make 30K more. See ya!
Which is fine if thats the fair market value, obviously they were being underpayed. A lot of companies do targetted recruiting though. Persons working on certain projects at certain companies is offerered incentives to move. I've often wondered how on earth they find out who's on what project (or even what projects are under development), it smacks of corporate espionage.
There's the ever popular offer to work at start ups who are going public 'real soon now' and who are confident that 'your options will be worth millions' as well. The company who went through the legal expense for the H1-B and green card application then loses the employee.
Again I'm not sure what the answer is if there is one other than for people considering working abroad to make sure they're pretty self educated on where they're going to work.
Those tax free >$100,000 (with free room and board) offers to work in Saudi Arabia looked very enticing in university until you found some of the devils hiding in the details.
Well, they can underpay me in the future but so far that hasn't happened. All my raises and bonuses etc. have been good. If they suddenly get bad I know one of two things has happened: management has changed to embrace the sweat shop mentality or I'm considered to be underperforming. I'd also leave. I've been offered substantially more to work at other jobs but I enjoy this one. It's an engineers market if you realize its an engineers market.
I'm in the US on an H1B visa from Canada. From what I've seen I'm not underpayed. It's fairly easy to figure out during performance reviews what your position in the grand scheme of pay scales is. It's pointed to you on a bar graph. I also live in the midwest, not the left coast or the right coast. With the existing salary cap I would and have refused to work in California.
I'm sure there are unscrupulous companies or managers who do lure foreigners (ok, I'm not really a foreigner, I had a pretty good clue as to what prevailing wages were) with promises of peace, prosperity and good old American apple pie if you only indenture yourself to us for say five years.
This exists in any business. Most people only see the typical designer clothes sweatshops because 20/20 runs an editorial or expose on them. There are also the equivalent to sweat shops in the technical field, adult entertainment, farming and so on. Raising the maximum amount on the H1B won't stop these sweat shops as they're obviously already shelling out well under the maximum H1B amount. Raising the H1B amount will however allow companies to get more talented people which is really what the country and industry should want.
I'm not sure how to fight sweat shops unless you made it illegal to underpay somebody, but who's to define underpayed? An electrical engineer with a MASc and 8 years of experience shall not be payed less than this: XXX. If that engineer is in California then the amount shall be 2*XXX.
Eventually you've got to rely on the integrity of companies and the pride of workers unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to ftp.gmd.de into the if-archive directory. There are a lot of high quality text adventures made by fans of the genre. My personal favourites are: Jigsaw and Curses both by Graham Nelson and Web (I think thats the name) by Andrew Plotkin.
Jeos, as others have indicated you may have actually been probing your providers set up. There's not enough information to determine whether that is so or not. In that case be very careful about brute forcing it, if it is actually your provider that you're looking at they may become somewhat miffed.
If you're running a linux box it should be possible to set it up as a mini provider. You'd probably have to set up a DHCP server, PPP and telephony obviously. Your provider would then be taken out of the loop and the IP address of the dreamcast box would be easily detectable. If nmap or whatever still detected open ports you could be pretty sure that it was the real deal.
I think this is pretty interesting, I may run out and buy one just to check.
I did read the 'damn docs' that came with nmap. Just because people are doing it all day doesn't mean that it is ethical. If it were a Microsoft product that were initiating the examination all Hell would break loose here. There's a big difference between a neighbourhood watch that looks for suspicious activity (did a beat up van circle the block a half dozen times at 2 am?) and somebody looking through my windows to see what colour my bedspread is.
Unless you're invited to scan me its an invasion of my privacy. It may not be a major invasion but thats up to the targets personal tolerance.
Nice respect for peoples privacy there, port mapping a visitor to your web site. I'll make sure to religiously not visit it.
In any case you don't have anywhere near enough information to make a judgement on whether Jeos' 'blundered' or was 'full of it'. If the Dreamcast user on your site was connecting to you through any sort of device that does network address translation (i.e. a firewall or cablemodem sharing device such as a UMAX UGate-Plus) or the provider they were connecting through did any filtering on incoming requests then they would fail. You don't even know if the user got bored, turned off their Dreamcast and turned on their PC.
The Space Race was a product of the cold war or at least the cold war mentality though: We must beat those Ruskies to the moon because we've already lost the race into space! This is a fight for Truth, Motherhood, Apple pie and other American ideals. We can't let the communists win! The sentiment of the time allowed the American public to be charged up by the propoganda.
You're more or less co-operating scientifically with any country capabale of making use of the space station at this point, including those who don't currently embrace democracy. Things have changed a lot in thirty years. Because of this similar tactics won't work.
I feel that getting into space, both manned and unmanned, is an admirable goal. Exploration was a part of the human spirit and experience and we need to go that way again. Now anything that doesn't have immediate commercial or military application is considered a waste of money. Exploration is too fraught with danger to risk human life on and so on. The community at large imposes there own biases on people who would be willing to take risks to explore.
If the europeans in the 15th century felt the way we currently do North America would still be populated by aboriginals.
Most domain name suits have no real legal basis. They aren't violating any trademarks or infringing on patents or diluting public perception. The approach that seems to be being used to fight over domain names is trademark. Some company has a trademark over a name and so they use the trademark to try and bully small companies or private individuals. The only problem is that the legal bullying usually has no grounding. You can only trademark a name for a particular purpose. So for instance Apple Computers is free to sell computers under the Apple brand name but they can't sell records since that would infringe on Apple Records trademark. There's still some room for litigation at times of course. Apple Records sued Apple Computer for QuickTime since it could record/play back music and hence from Apple Records point of view Apple Computer was in the music business. By sticking to strict interpretations of trademark law though most cases could be thrown out of court. This isn't happening though, common sense isn't prevailing.
In the Hasbro v.s. Clue Computing case the judge should very quickly throw the case out of court. Clue Computing isn't infringing on any of Hasbro's trademarks. Unfortunately it doesn't seem there are enough common sense judges out there. We need more Judge Judy's who aren't afraid to tell somebody their case is ridiculous. As soon as the concept of common sense is applied most of these lawsuits would stop: The plaintiff's case is dismissed, the defendant's countersuit for the amount of $XXX for legal fees and punitive damages is awarded.
Trademarks are there to protect both companies and consumers. Unfortunately too many companies are misusing trademarks. Unfortunately not enough judges have the scruples or guts to call a frivolous lawsuit what it is.
Part of the problem is the amount of money they lose on the hardware itself. At first they may make a small amount but in a short time the hardware drops down to the 150 dollar range. In order to make a profit they need to sell their high priced games. They're fear is that if their games are easily copyable sales of their games will drop to levels too low to support the firesale prices on the hardware.
I think somebody could build a killer gaming system around a cheap motherboard, a Matrox G200 (since the specs are available for writing drivers), a cheap case geared for placing under a TV and a custom video server that fired stuff directly across AGP and into the video card. Throw in easy networking and keep the tools for game development free.
There are a lot of good people who work as contractors and there are a lot of good people who work directly for companies. I started off as a contractor but the contracting agency didn't do a good job of keeping me happy when I worked for them, so I signed on to work for the company directly. The agency did go to great lengths to rectify the situation after the fact but I viewed that as 'too little, too late'. The hierarchy that allowed the problems to occur was already firmly in place.
If you want good people and you want to retain them then treat them well. This includes paying them well but more pay and/or a good signing bonus is always available around the corner. Make sure that the goals of the project is something your people can sign on to and believe in. Management's job should be to make it possible for the technical people to work, not to make the technical people work. If extraordinary effort is required in terms of hours worked then management hasn't done a good job of calculating the man-hours required. Either fix this (preferable) or supply people with the tools (ISDN and machines at a minimum) to let them work the extra hours with the smallest possible impact on their lives.
The above matters to me anyway, if I ever start waking up in the morning dreading work I know its time to quit.
QuickTime server was open sourced and possibly enough information to understand the file format. What hasn't been open sourced are CODECS (compressor/decompressors) such as Sorensen. So while you've got a system for net distributing already compressed image data you don't have an open sourced system for producing it.
As far as I know there are no open source initiatives to actually produce a CODEC for high quality and low bitrate image data.
Rumor has it that Sorensen has stated that Apple prohibits them from open sourcing their CODEC. I'm not sure how true it is. It may be closer to reality that Apple wouldn't be happy about it after paying large fees to make use of it. The other half of the equation might be that even if Apple didn't care one way or the other Sorensen still wouldn't. CODECs are expensive pieces of intellectual property to create, it may well be that Sorensen uses Apple as a convenient scape goat.
This is true, however Mrs. Gore has found it in her heart, with the help of her Creator, to forgive Al his past transgressions. Though Al's bastard love child, The Internet, torments Mrs. Gore's heart, heartless bastards continue to dredge it up.
Al has had no contact with The Internet since the night of its conception, a hazy combination of free love and proscribed narcotics.
RedHat is doing the right thing. They've got to protect a number of things: 1) Their trademark, 2) their reputation, 3) stockholder value and 4) their customers. The trademark is a pretty obvious thing, you can't go and start your own distribution and call it RedHat no more than Microsoft can suddenly decide to change the name of their operating system to Linux.
In this case I'm assuming that somebody burned a RedHat 6.X tree. If this is the case from a trademark standpoint they still can't call it the RedHat distribution or at least they've got to be careful that it can't be misconstrued that its the "Official RedHat 6.0" because its not.
RedHat also provides additional services beyond just the actual Linux installation, namely some level of support. The customer needs to know that what they're buying is the real deal and is supported and so on.
These cheap distributions provide a service to customers as long as the customer actually knows what they're getting. I bought a stack of distributions from Cheap*Bytes and I knew I was just getting a dump of a distribution and not the actual distribution.
I'm not saying RedHat is selflessly thinking of only the customers interests. If they don't do this then customers will get upset which isn't good for the companies finances.
If the legal system takes the stance that unless you take adequate precautions any theft or damage done to your property is not a crime chaos will ensue. Any legal prohibitions against theft or intrusion will be moot since by definition if you've been intruded on you didn't take adequate precautions against that particular intruder.
You put a dead bolt on your door and religiously lock it, you make sure all your windows are closed and locked. I throw a brick through your window and steal your prized lint collection. Since you had the audacity to have windows on your dwelling you are therefore not worthy of being protected by the law. I walk away without a blemish on my record.
The truth is just about all computers exposed to the internet at large take adequate precautions to justify protection. Unless they leave the site up without password protection and post notices that intrusion is explicitly allowed they're afforded protection by the law.
Insurance companies and the stock holders are of course entitled to more stringent measures. If a lack of these more stringent measures results in theft of services and intellectual property or a loss of service then they are entitled to make the company pay. They do this by either not honouring their insurance policy or dumping their stock and deflating the value of the company. The company is still entitled to seeing any criminals rot in jail.
To borrow and extend a rather colourful phrase from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: If you don't want to be the wife of the convict with the most cigarettes, don't do the crime.
So in other words if you happen to forget to lock the door to your abode I can feel free to walk out with your computer, tv set or anything else that catches my eye? What was your address?
The Amiga may be vapour ware, only time will tell. But since Amiga's already run on PowerPC chips your concept of the Amiga state of the art is wildly inaccurate. Not that you should let reality get in the way of your posturing.
There are a lot of valid points that can be made about the viability of the Amiga in the long run. Similar cases on differing points can be made for the BeOS, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, MacOS, MacOS X, FreeBSD and Linux. If you'd have mentioned the reluctance of development houses to port software to anything but Windows you'd have a point. If you'd have mentioned the high costs of manufacturing a new niche player in the hardware arena you'd have a point. However, your position can best be summarized by:
Have you ever had a relative who laid on his deathbed for years and years and refused to just keel over and die?
Those are braindead posturers. Boy I wish they'd just roll over and die already...
There are a lot of people who were doing illegal things through Hotmail who are potentially under surveilance through this insecurity. I don't really care about them. (I'm not talking about the person who occasionaly forgets that Microsoft Word or Quake 2 or whatever is a commercial product, but more the people who put up a tonne of stuff and use it to generate money whether through banner ads or subscriptions) I am concerned for the people who wanted anonimity for legitimate reasons. Maybe they were anonymously subscribed to sexual abuse survivor mailing lists or online support groups for the differently gendered.
A lot of people are going to state that these people were stupid for relying on a Microsoft service, but where are they supposed to go? It isn't stupidity so much as a lack of education. This is compounded by the people who are technically capable of doing the educating. Too many of them are too busy looking down at the unwashed masses to communicate the options and hazards involved with the various options.
A few years ago there was a true anonymous mail service based in (I think) Finland. It was something like penet.fi (its been awhile) which did do the job of servicing users anonymously well. The machine which did the work wasn't even physically connected to the internet except by UUCP connections over a phone line several times a day. Latency was large, but it did provide security.
There are probably others (I don't use anonymous email myself, I do use services that allow me a perpetual email address for non-critical stuff, like providing head hunters a consistant address)
but the only thing you really hear about are Hotmail or Lycos etc.
No its not useless as a piece of evidence. Linear colour maps aren't appropriate for all purposes. In this particular case the colour map was chosen to highlight features of interest to astrophysicists.
Non linear colour maps are all over the place. They're much more common than linear maps. Go buy some Fuji Velvia for your 35 mm camera. It takes awfully nice portraits doesn't it? It's because the colour map is tweaked to provide pleasing flesh tones.
This isn't any different than a mathemetician using a logarithmic scale to do a plot of a function with exponential growth.
They probably take the system as a whole, which is smart. No searching around for the obscure cable to hook up some device. Not everything is standardized and the smart move is to go overboard and just take a working setup rather than find out his SCSI devices were hooked up via those delicate 68 pin high density connectors.
If a car is impounded just about everything inside of it is as well, they don't take the time to ensure that the dust buster isn't a container for a half pound of cocaine and hand it off to the perpetrator.
This is scary, but I can see having a lot of fun manipulating the results. For instance get together with my fellow engineers and purchase a book such as Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Suddenly it looks like the number one purchased book at my company are nude photos of oriental sex workers.
The drawback is the lengthly conversation with Human Resources that would result.
It isn't a bad article for ZDnet. Little technical details, but thats ZDnet. If they did have any technical details you can be assured they'd be wrong. I don't know what a 'general workhorse server' is and it would've been useful to see what services he feels a 'general workhorse server' requires.
Chances are he was just talking through his hat, that for balance reasons he needed a counterpoint. Not being particularily competent he invented 'general workhorse servers' and figured nobody would task him on a definition.
I just bought a SuperMicro case with a 300 watt supply, forgot the model number. It looks fairly nice for a peecee box and is roomy enough that I wasn't bleeding after I put my linux-intel box together.
That should be on the horizon for consumer type people soon, if it hasn't happened already in a manner of speaking. Right now things such as 3D now and other SIMD extensions are additional processing power and are quite close to having an additional processor on the same die. They accelerate a sub genus of instructions much like math coprocessors did in the 80's to early 90's. They've of course been assimilated into the main core for quite some time now as well.
If Moore's law holds out by 2010 we'll have approximately 8 times the number of transistors in a socket as we do presently. So instead of ~20 million it'll be around ~160 million. That's a lot of transistors. More massive onchip cache will be one of the first improvements and maybe a moderate bump in bus width. I say only a moderate increase because more density on a motherboard is expensive and isn't scaling at the same speed as circuit density. Chances are you'll see 2 or 4 way SMP on consumer processors instead. You also might see true system integration: RAM, ROM, CPU and graphics subsystems etc, this would be for what is now the sub 1000 dollar market.
There've been a few good comments on biology, astrophysics and many other sciences. There've been a few good comments on Linux as well. Most comments aren't good. Anyway it's news for nerds, not news for programmers or Linux zealots or Microsoft bashers although it may feel that way sometimes.
This is science, technology and medicine in action, it is news for nerds and it is stuff that matters.
This might work, it'd also open up the opportunity for workers to abuse it to though. I've got my H1-B and am started on my way towards green card nirvana, I can cross the street and make 30K more. See ya!
Which is fine if thats the fair market value, obviously they were being underpayed. A lot of companies do targetted recruiting though. Persons working on certain projects at certain companies is offerered incentives to move. I've often wondered how on earth they find out who's on what project (or even what projects are under development), it smacks of corporate espionage.
There's the ever popular offer to work at start ups who are going public 'real soon now' and who are confident that 'your options will be worth millions' as well. The company who went through the legal expense for the H1-B and green card application then loses the employee.
Again I'm not sure what the answer is if there is one other than for people considering working abroad to make sure they're pretty self educated on where they're going to work.
Those tax free >$100,000 (with free room and board) offers to work in Saudi Arabia looked very enticing in university until you found some of the devils hiding in the details.
Well, they can underpay me in the future but so far that hasn't happened. All my raises and bonuses etc. have been good. If they suddenly get bad I know one of two things has happened: management has changed to embrace the sweat shop mentality or I'm considered to be underperforming. I'd also leave. I've been offered substantially more to work at other jobs but I enjoy this one. It's an engineers market if you realize its an engineers market.
I'm in the US on an H1B visa from Canada. From what I've seen I'm not underpayed. It's fairly easy to figure out during performance reviews what your position in the grand scheme of pay scales is. It's pointed to you on a bar graph. I also live in the midwest, not the left coast or the right coast. With the existing salary cap I would and have refused to work in California.
I'm sure there are unscrupulous companies or managers who do lure foreigners (ok, I'm not really a foreigner, I had a pretty good clue as to what prevailing wages were) with promises of peace, prosperity and good old American apple pie if you only indenture yourself to us for say five years.
This exists in any business. Most people only see the typical designer clothes sweatshops because 20/20 runs an editorial or expose on them. There are also the equivalent to sweat shops in the technical field, adult entertainment, farming and so on. Raising the maximum amount on the H1B won't stop these sweat shops as they're obviously already shelling out well under the maximum H1B amount. Raising the H1B amount will however allow companies to get more talented people which is really what the country and industry should want.
I'm not sure how to fight sweat shops unless you made it illegal to underpay somebody, but who's to define underpayed? An electrical engineer with a MASc and 8 years of experience shall not be payed less than this: XXX. If that engineer is in California then the amount shall be 2*XXX.
Eventually you've got to rely on the integrity of companies and the pride of workers unfortunately.