--a revolutionary car bigger than a SmartCar but smaller than a Mini Cooper
--a revolutionary porridge heater that will heat porridge warmer than "too cold," but colder than "too hot"
--a revolutionary Budweiser bigger than a 10-ounce but smaller than a 12-ounce.
Laboratory prototypes of the latter include a 10.5-ounce Bud, an 11-ounce Bud, and an 11.5-ounce Bud. "Really, they give you practically everything that 12-ounce Bud does," said a FlipStart spokesman, appropriately named Budd.
...yeah, I know it isn't security software, but an upgrade that costs 2.5 times as much as buying new seems on topicl
And, no, we didn't buy the Mac version and run it on our PC. I just used the Mac browser to navigate by hand to the PC products page. Once I knew where the $19.95 Basic version was offered, I went back to my wife's PC and located the same page by browsing manually. What was happening was that the Quicken software preloaded on the hard drive takes you automatically to an "upgrade" page which fails to show you your cheapest and most appropriate option. Possibly this isn't pure evil; perhaps it is because "Quicken New User Edition" is really "Quicken Basic Edition" with a key feature crippled, and perhaps the salesware doesn't take account of this and assumes that it makes no sense to migrate from "Basic" to Basic, not realizing that your "Basic" isn't really Basic.
My wife recently bought a new computer with Windows XP to replace her aging Windows 98 machine and asked me to help with the migration. There was really only one piece of software she wanted to migrate: Quicken. I was brooding over ways and means. When she booted up her new HP machine, she said, "Oh, look! We don't need to worry about it. It comes with Quicken."
On closer inspection, it came with something called Quicken "New User Edition." It did absolutely everything she needed to do with one small exception: it wouldn't import a file from a previous version of Quicken like, for example, the Windows 98 file with five years of our financial life in it.
But fortunately it automatically offered to sell us an upgrade. Of the alternatives on offer was something called "Quicken Deluxe Edition 2006" which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $39.95. It did many more things than my wife needed to do, but it would import older Quicken files So I shrugged, and said, "Well, gee, I dunno, seems like a lot, I suppose, line of least resistance, what the heck."
But, when she typed in her credit card number and tried to buy it, it popped up the web browser with a message saying yes, we could get Quicken Deluxe 2006, but wouldn't we rather get Quicken Deluxe 2007, which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $49.95? We looked at each other. My wife says, rather disgusted, "You know, I'm never going to upgrade Quicken again if I can avoid it, so I suppose I should start out with the most recent version." I said, "Yeah, I guess so, but, wait just a minute."
I hurried over to my Mac, which hadn't been contamined with any versions of the Quicken software, and when I went to their website from a virgin machine, it offered me a choice that the browser on her machine had not offered: something called "Quicken Basic," which had exactly the same functionality as "Quicken New User Edition" plus the ability to import older Quicken files. For $19.95. Full price for a brand new purchase, not an upgrade.
In other words, those bastards had not only included an artificially crippled version of Quicken Basic in the HP software offering, which was bad enough, but they deliberately programmed all the auto-update-salesware to hide the cheapest and most appropriate version of the software.
I wish I could tell you that we decided not to buy any version of Quicken, but in the end of course we bought the $19.95 version.
It's things like this that really build long-term customer loyalty. My wife had always had good feelings about Quicken itself and the company that publishes it. Now she still has good feelings about Quicken but she's quite pissed off at Intuit. (And she holds grudges. Believe me.)
I just don't believe it. Validation time delays, and long cooling-off periods after too many unsuccessful attempts are such elementary security that I honestly can't believe Microsoft overlooked it.
Maybe maybe maybe one lucky hacker hit the jackpot and scored one key once or something like that.
I don't believe for an instant that a brute-force attack on a 25-digit number is going to score many legitimate activation keys that a) have actually been shipped to real customers and b) have not yet been used. There are only a few billions of people in this great world, and there are an awful lot of 25-digit numbers.
How many brute-force tries were they able to make? Let's say a billion. If they were able to get even one key by brute force in a billion tries, then one-in-a-billion 25-digit numbers must be valid activation keys, or 1^16. If there are ten billion extant copies of Vista, then the chances that a valid key has already been assigned would be one in a million.
So, of every key found by hackers using brute force, only one in a million will collide with an already-issued key.
No, this will not be a customer-relations nightmare for Microsoft, regardless of whether they elect to be nice or nasty when it happens.
Apple's discussion groups, to name one, just because I'm familiar with it.
"Censorship" is the wrong word because it refers to the removal of information by government officials, and as far as I know neither Apple nor Dell is the government, yet. (Not even Microsoft is the government. Yet.) I don't think the Terms and Conditions of company-sponsored forums generally include a Bill of Rights. Nor do they generally promise that you will be able to read everything that anyone else has posted.
Infuriating? Sure. Surprising? No. The forums are there to boost the company, and whenever any Forum becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Corporation to alter or to abolish it.
(Remember Prodigy in the good old days? They would remove forum items as being "off-topic." Any attempt to discuss why the items were removed would be removed as "off-topic." Any attempt to criticize Prodigy in any way would be removed as "off-topic." And when users tried to get around the forum restrictions by organizing mailing lists, Prodigy promptly changed the previously-free email to twenty-five free emails per month, and a significant charge--$0.25 each, IIRC--for any beyond that!)
2) Present a forty-page Terms and Conditions agreement in a 300-by-75 pixel window, with an all-your-images-are-belong-to-us clause three-fourths of the way down.
3) Wait for people to upload and edit you-know-what-kinds of images.
(...bought my first Mac in February, 1984... with a teller's check... for $3000... and no way to print anythingbecause the ImageWriter because no cable was yet available...)...the article sure reads like a Slashvertisement for "Pfeiffer's full report."
And, speaking as someone who personally perceives and is annoyed by logy, sticky, frictionlike behavior in Windows' UI... how the heck can you take an article seriously when it claims minuscule differences ("Windows XP scored 0.40 and Vista/Aero 0.52") in undefined metrics that are undoubtedly influenced by the hardware configuration?
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista on a PC with 1 Gig of RAM and an ordinary video card has higher "friction" than Mac OS X... isn't it possible that it would outperform a Mac if you gave it the spiffiest video card and 4 gig? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista "needs" more powerful hardware and that in a year or so, a cheap PC with Vista will have it and perform with less friction than a comparably cheap Mac? If this were true, one could justifiably criticize Microsoft for high cost of ownership, software bloat, and selling wine before its time... but it would only be a rather qualified knock on Vista.
I'm always puzzled by the oceans of ink wasted on speculations like this one. Obviously some people (presumably many at Apple) expect the iPhone to succeed and some expect it to fail. Some will be wrong and some will be right. I'm not sure what the point of articles like this is, unless it is an effort by those who would benefit by an iPhone failure to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, a negative buzz as it were.
"Apple doesn't have an unblemished record when it comes to introducing innovative new devices?" Well, big whoop. Neither does Microsoft (remember Microsoft Bob?), IBM (remember the four-inch floppy? No? Thought you didn't), whatever.
Innovation is always risky. And success or failure can turn on a hair. If a few breaks had gone Apple's way the Newton might have succeeded. Conversely, a few turns in the other direction and the Mac might have failed (anyone remember just how bleak things looked in late 1985?)
I still love Steve Jobs for saying that "the killer app for cell phones is making calls." Maybe that's just a slick Steve Jobs talking point... or maybe Apple's iPhone team believes it to the core, and they've made something that'sreally good for making calls. With all his blathering of whether it's innovative or not, and whether it's overpriced or not, David Haskins never addresses the question of how good it is for making calls.
People happily buy "overpriced" iPods because they're really good for listening to music. If it turns out that the average cell-phone user thinks iPhones are really good for making calls it will succeed. But we won't know that until a lot of iPhones are in the flesh-and-blood sweaty greasy hands of a lot of real customers.
... all of whom will be cottage-industry entrepreneurs whose business plans called for them to get a 10% share of the market for third-party applications running on T-Mobile phones.
We're perfectly happy with our 100-pound 27" CRT-based television receiver and the quality of the pictures we receive over the air, with one exception: we don't get channel 2, the local PBS affiliate, very well. I'd love to be ready for the HDTV switchover, and, even if it never happens, I'd still love to be able to view a downconverted version of WGBH's HDTV signal, which should be pretty good (since our UHF reception is very good).
Every six months or so I wander into a Best Buy or a Tweeter and ask.
Not only do they not have them, they often don't seem to know what I'm talking about.
Since my understanding is that The Plan, when they pull the plug on VHF/UHF, is for people that can't afford all-new TVs to buy downconverters... and that The Price is supposed to be in the $20 range.. you'd think that _a few_ would be available _now_, for, say, $100?
None available, at any price, through normal retail channels. In my (admittedly limited) personal experience.
I don't believe for a minute that this is anything more but passive-aggressive behavior on the part of the Canadians for our treating them as we still hated them for being on the Loyalist side in the American Revolution.
I can't believe a passport is required for a trip to Canada. Canada, for gosh sakes.
All that crap I learned in school about how friendly the two countries were and how informal border formalities were and how it was the longest unguarded border in the world... and now this.
A few years ago my wife and I took our first trip to Europe, and we were concerned because our destination was The Netherlands and we were flying into Antwerp. I was saying to our friends that it was all well and good that we could save time on the flight, but I was leery of running into border formalities, especially when tired and jet-lagged. Our friends kept laughing, and saying that there was nothing at the Belgium-Netherlands border, nothing at all, not so much as a kiosk or a friendly uniformed guy to wave at us.
We didn't believe them. It was true.
We were less aware of crossing this national border than we were of crossing from Massachusetts into New York (where the pavement changes texture, and there are toll boths and big signs telling us how glad Eliot Spitzer is to see us).
Our border crossing at Niagara Falls a few years ago, where we had to wait in a line of cars for about three minutes and wave a birth certificate at an official, looked like an ordeal by comparison.
And now? Passports and background checks? Holy cow, what are things coming to? How long before we build a concrete wall?
What are the chances that Norton Internet Security will uninstall itself gracefully via the Add/Remove Programs control panel? (I certainly plan to set a System Restore checkpoint before trying it!)
Symantec says "SystemDoctor is a Security Risk that may give exaggerated reports of threats on the computer. The program then prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats."
I completed the unpleasant task of helping my wife get started with a new HP computer, preloaded with Windows XP Home and a plethora of shovelware. We spent hours watching dialogs pop up suggesting that we download this, register that, and update the other.
Practically the first thing that happened was that Norton Internet Security popped up a huge scary dialog warning us that we hadn't turned it on. The next thing was a huge scary dialog saying that it had found a security risk in her system. The problem it had found was that it apparently ships with no virus definitions at all, and required about twenty minutes over broadband to download and install some seventeen thousand of them. The next thing was a huge scary dialog saying that we needed to register with Symantec (presumably so that it can give us a huge scary warning at the end of the free 60-day trial).
The next thing was a huge scary warning that we needed to turn off Windows Firewall, which to Microsoft's credit is apparently preinstalled turned on and functioning, so that we could use Norton Internet Security's firewall instead.
The next thing was a huge scary warning that we had attempted to change Internet Explorer's home page from an AOL signup offer to my wife's existing "my Yahoo" page.
Every time she launched an application a little yellow flag would rise up from the taskbar to tell her that Norton Internet Security noticed that she had launched an application.
And from time to time it puts up a message box with no apparent purpose other than to tell her that Norton Internet Security is running properly. "Exaggerated reports of threats on the computer?" "Prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats?" To be fair, although it did prompt her to register, I don't believe it will prompt her for a purchase until the end of the sixty days.
But the thing is the most intrusive, obnoxious, offensive piece of crap I've ever seen. It makes Clippy look adorable by comparison.
Presumably she needs more than just an antivirus program (ClamAV). If anyone has any recommendations on a well-behaved, friendly security program for Windows XP that isn't in your face all the time, I'd love to hear it.
P. S. The reason we bought a machine with XP is that my wife has been stalling on a much-needed upgrade for about three years now, and what she read about Vista was what convinced her that we needed to run out immediately while we could still get a machine preloaded with XP. Do you think she is being included in these statistics that show that Vista has boosted PC sales...
As far as I know, CDDB is based simply on matching the sequence and length of the tracks on the disk, with some fuzz factors so that the match doesn't have to be perfect. I find it simply amazing that CDDB works.
I've personally experienced the shock of inserting a CD that I copied from an LP and having CDDB identify it (because there was a CD version of the same album), particularly impressive since there was often a second or two difference in the lengths of my tracks and the CD tracks.
I believe if Hatto's husband hadn't copied the contents of entire CDs as a whole, but had mixed up the track order or combined different albums, the fraud might have escaped detection by CDDB. (Of course, a sufficiently bizarre track order might have raised suspicions of its own)
Clearly, then, humankind has the right, nay the obligation to expand throughout the universe.
We should terraform any planets that are not already Earthlike, use the energy of however many stars it takes to achieve our goals, and find some black hole into which to pitch any planets that become inconveniently polluted.
Any semi-intelligent life we encounter along the way will obviously be inferior, since it has not colonized the universe first. If it gets in our way (or even if it doesn't) we should trample it under our jackboots, but only if necessary. Whenever possible we should altruistically force them to accept the inestimable benefits of the English language, democracy, and McDonald's hamburgers.
"My job is to pertect the American people from cyberattack. When we find IP packets that are in that country that are hurting our computers, we're going to do something about it.... Does this mean I'm looking for a pretext to start a war with China? No. It means I'm trying to protect our computers. That's what that means.
Despite our warrantless wiretaps, I don't think we know who picked up the phone and said.Hackers, go do this,. but we know it's a vital part of the Chinese government."
Secretary of States Bill Gates added "For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with China. We are not planning a war with China. Yes, we do have contingency plans for wars with every other country in the world, but not China. And even it we did, we have not taken any actual final decisions to act on them in the immediately foreseeable future. We have just sent elint-equipped cruisers to the East China Sea, but those are just there to help Taiwan with its streaming internet video capacity."
In response to a question from reporters as to whether cyberattacks originating from other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, had been observed, Gates said "That's classified information. And besides, who cares? We're not talking about Saudi Arabia, we're talking about China."
Can an RFID sensor read a tag if there are dozens (hundreds, thousands, tetrazillions) of tags within range? Like space junk, will the accumulation of RFID junk eventually render the technology useless?
If the end-user experience is bad, it doesn't matter who's to blame.
When microcomputers were new, a colleague of mine was raving about his North Star Advantage. He couldn't praise it too much. I asked him if it was reliable. He said it had been absolutely 100% reliable. So I asked if I could drop in that afternoon and have him show me WordStar, the hot new program I'd heard so much about.
There was a pause.
"Well, I can't do that today," he says. "I'm waiting for a new power supply. The old one failed again last week."
"But I thought you said your computer had been 100% reliable," I said.
"Oh, the computer has been completely reliable. It's just the power supply that keeps failing."
It may have been the power supply's fault, not the computer's, but, nevertheless, the effect was the same: he couldn't run WordStar.
(And just to fend off any misunderstandings: he was talking about the power supply North Star provided as an integral part of the system...)
Slashdot Mirror
NASA could have been kinder. Whatever her situation, losing her paycheck isn't going to reduce the stress on her or help her recover.
How's NASA going to look if it turns out that her bizarre behavior was the result of something like a brain tumor?
Can't even imagine what her kids are going to make of it all.
The FlipStart team is also working on:
--a revolutionary car bigger than a SmartCar but smaller than a Mini Cooper
--a revolutionary porridge heater that will heat porridge warmer than "too cold," but colder than "too hot"
--a revolutionary Budweiser bigger than a 10-ounce but smaller than a 12-ounce.
Laboratory prototypes of the latter include a 10.5-ounce Bud, an 11-ounce Bud, and an 11.5-ounce Bud. "Really, they give you practically everything that 12-ounce Bud does," said a FlipStart spokesman, appropriately named Budd.
...always have your Ubuntu mug, your Debian mug, and your iPod lying on your desk.
...yeah, I know it isn't security software, but an upgrade that costs 2.5 times as much as buying new seems on topicl
And, no, we didn't buy the Mac version and run it on our PC. I just used the Mac browser to navigate by hand to the PC products page. Once I knew where the $19.95 Basic version was offered, I went back to my wife's PC and located the same page by browsing manually. What was happening was that the Quicken software preloaded on the hard drive takes you automatically to an "upgrade" page which fails to show you your cheapest and most appropriate option. Possibly this isn't pure evil; perhaps it is because "Quicken New User Edition" is really "Quicken Basic Edition" with a key feature crippled, and perhaps the salesware doesn't take account of this and assumes that it makes no sense to migrate from "Basic" to Basic, not realizing that your "Basic" isn't really Basic.
My wife recently bought a new computer with Windows XP to replace her aging Windows 98 machine and asked me to help with the migration. There was really only one piece of software she wanted to migrate: Quicken. I was brooding over ways and means. When she booted up her new HP machine, she said, "Oh, look! We don't need to worry about it. It comes with Quicken."
On closer inspection, it came with something called Quicken "New User Edition." It did absolutely everything she needed to do with one small exception: it wouldn't import a file from a previous version of Quicken like, for example, the Windows 98 file with five years of our financial life in it.
But fortunately it automatically offered to sell us an upgrade. Of the alternatives on offer was something called "Quicken Deluxe Edition 2006" which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $39.95. It did many more things than my wife needed to do, but it would import older Quicken files So I shrugged, and said, "Well, gee, I dunno, seems like a lot, I suppose, line of least resistance, what the heck."
But, when she typed in her credit card number and tried to buy it, it popped up the web browser with a message saying yes, we could get Quicken Deluxe 2006, but wouldn't we rather get Quicken Deluxe 2007, which could be ours at a special upgrade price of just $49.95? We looked at each other. My wife says, rather disgusted, "You know, I'm never going to upgrade Quicken again if I can avoid it, so I suppose I should start out with the most recent version." I said, "Yeah, I guess so, but, wait just a minute."
I hurried over to my Mac, which hadn't been contamined with any versions of the Quicken software, and when I went to their website from a virgin machine, it offered me a choice that the browser on her machine had not offered: something called "Quicken Basic," which had exactly the same functionality as "Quicken New User Edition" plus the ability to import older Quicken files. For $19.95. Full price for a brand new purchase, not an upgrade.
In other words, those bastards had not only included an artificially crippled version of Quicken Basic in the HP software offering, which was bad enough, but they deliberately programmed all the auto-update-salesware to hide the cheapest and most appropriate version of the software.
I wish I could tell you that we decided not to buy any version of Quicken, but in the end of course we bought the $19.95 version.
It's things like this that really build long-term customer loyalty. My wife had always had good feelings about Quicken itself and the company that publishes it. Now she still has good feelings about Quicken but she's quite pissed off at Intuit. (And she holds grudges. Believe me.)
Why didn't he simply show a repeat of the same thing he demonstrated before--a takeover of the machine?
Because "a magician never repeats a trick."
I just don't believe it. Validation time delays, and long cooling-off periods after too many unsuccessful attempts are such elementary security that I honestly can't believe Microsoft overlooked it.
Maybe maybe maybe one lucky hacker hit the jackpot and scored one key once or something like that.
I don't believe for an instant that a brute-force attack on a 25-digit number is going to score many legitimate activation keys that a) have actually been shipped to real customers and b) have not yet been used. There are only a few billions of people in this great world, and there are an awful lot of 25-digit numbers.
How many brute-force tries were they able to make? Let's say a billion. If they were able to get even one key by brute force in a billion tries, then one-in-a-billion 25-digit numbers must be valid activation keys, or 1^16. If there are ten billion extant copies of Vista, then the chances that a valid key has already been assigned would be one in a million.
So, of every key found by hackers using brute force, only one in a million will collide with an already-issued key.
No, this will not be a customer-relations nightmare for Microsoft, regardless of whether they elect to be nice or nasty when it happens.
Apple's discussion groups, to name one, just because I'm familiar with it.
"Censorship" is the wrong word because it refers to the removal of information by government officials, and as far as I know neither Apple nor Dell is the government, yet. (Not even Microsoft is the government. Yet.) I don't think the Terms and Conditions of company-sponsored forums generally include a Bill of Rights. Nor do they generally promise that you will be able to read everything that anyone else has posted.
Infuriating? Sure. Surprising? No. The forums are there to boost the company, and whenever any Forum becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Corporation to alter or to abolish it.
(Remember Prodigy in the good old days? They would remove forum items as being "off-topic." Any attempt to discuss why the items were removed would be removed as "off-topic." Any attempt to criticize Prodigy in any way would be removed as "off-topic." And when users tried to get around the forum restrictions by organizing mailing lists, Prodigy promptly changed the previously-free email to twenty-five free emails per month, and a significant charge--$0.25 each, IIRC--for any beyond that!)
1) Create online photo-editing service.
2) Present a forty-page Terms and Conditions agreement in a 300-by-75 pixel window, with an all-your-images-are-belong-to-us clause three-fourths of the way down.
3) Wait for people to upload and edit you-know-what-kinds of images.
4) Profit!
(...bought my first Mac in February, 1984... with a teller's check... for $3000... and no way to print anythingbecause the ImageWriter because no cable was yet available...) ...the article sure reads like a Slashvertisement for "Pfeiffer's full report."
And, speaking as someone who personally perceives and is annoyed by logy, sticky, frictionlike behavior in Windows' UI... how the heck can you take an article seriously when it claims minuscule differences ("Windows XP scored 0.40 and Vista/Aero 0.52") in undefined metrics that are undoubtedly influenced by the hardware configuration?
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista on a PC with 1 Gig of RAM and an ordinary video card has higher "friction" than Mac OS X... isn't it possible that it would outperform a Mac if you gave it the spiffiest video card and 4 gig? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista "needs" more powerful hardware and that in a year or so, a cheap PC with Vista will have it and perform with less friction than a comparably cheap Mac? If this were true, one could justifiably criticize Microsoft for high cost of ownership, software bloat, and selling wine before its time... but it would only be a rather qualified knock on Vista.
I'm always puzzled by the oceans of ink wasted on speculations like this one. Obviously some people (presumably many at Apple) expect the iPhone to succeed and some expect it to fail. Some will be wrong and some will be right. I'm not sure what the point of articles like this is, unless it is an effort by those who would benefit by an iPhone failure to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, a negative buzz as it were.
"Apple doesn't have an unblemished record when it comes to introducing innovative new devices?" Well, big whoop. Neither does Microsoft (remember Microsoft Bob?), IBM (remember the four-inch floppy? No? Thought you didn't), whatever.
Innovation is always risky. And success or failure can turn on a hair. If a few breaks had gone Apple's way the Newton might have succeeded. Conversely, a few turns in the other direction and the Mac might have failed (anyone remember just how bleak things looked in late 1985?)
I still love Steve Jobs for saying that "the killer app for cell phones is making calls." Maybe that's just a slick Steve Jobs talking point... or maybe Apple's iPhone team believes it to the core, and they've made something that'sreally good for making calls. With all his blathering of whether it's innovative or not, and whether it's overpriced or not, David Haskins never addresses the question of how good it is for making calls.
People happily buy "overpriced" iPods because they're really good for listening to music. If it turns out that the average cell-phone user thinks iPhones are really good for making calls it will succeed. But we won't know that until a lot of iPhones are in the flesh-and-blood sweaty greasy hands of a lot of real customers.
No. I have a television receiver... a VHF/UHF NTSC receiver... otherwise known as a television set. One big box with a big CRT in it.
I'm being told that I could buy a DTV receiver and use it to drive the television receiver.
I'm asking why I'd need my television receiver if I had a DTV receiver.
... all of whom will be cottage-industry entrepreneurs whose business plans called for them to get a 10% share of the market for third-party applications running on T-Mobile phones.
...why would I even want to keep my analog receiver?
Or do you mean "tuner?"
We're perfectly happy with our 100-pound 27" CRT-based television receiver and the quality of the pictures we receive over the air, with one exception: we don't get channel 2, the local PBS affiliate, very well. I'd love to be ready for the HDTV switchover, and, even if it never happens, I'd still love to be able to view a downconverted version of WGBH's HDTV signal, which should be pretty good (since our UHF reception is very good).
Every six months or so I wander into a Best Buy or a Tweeter and ask.
Not only do they not have them, they often don't seem to know what I'm talking about.
Since my understanding is that The Plan, when they pull the plug on VHF/UHF, is for people that can't afford all-new TVs to buy downconverters... and that The Price is supposed to be in the $20 range.. you'd think that _a few_ would be available _now_, for, say, $100?
None available, at any price, through normal retail channels. In my (admittedly limited) personal experience.
Something about this does not make sense...
Something
Just wondering.
A combination of Shutterfly and National Cash Register?
A computer architecture with virtual registers?
A Department of Motor Vehicles for helicars?
I don't believe for a minute that this is anything more but passive-aggressive behavior on the part of the Canadians for our treating them as we still hated them for being on the Loyalist side in the American Revolution.
I can't believe a passport is required for a trip to Canada. Canada, for gosh sakes.
All that crap I learned in school about how friendly the two countries were and how informal border formalities were and how it was the longest unguarded border in the world... and now this.
A few years ago my wife and I took our first trip to Europe, and we were concerned because our destination was The Netherlands and we were flying into Antwerp. I was saying to our friends that it was all well and good that we could save time on the flight, but I was leery of running into border formalities, especially when tired and jet-lagged. Our friends kept laughing, and saying that there was nothing at the Belgium-Netherlands border, nothing at all, not so much as a kiosk or a friendly uniformed guy to wave at us.
We didn't believe them. It was true.
We were less aware of crossing this national border than we were of crossing from Massachusetts into New York (where the pavement changes texture, and there are toll boths and big signs telling us how glad Eliot Spitzer is to see us).
Our border crossing at Niagara Falls a few years ago, where we had to wait in a line of cars for about three minutes and wave a birth certificate at an official, looked like an ordeal by comparison.
And now? Passports and background checks? Holy cow, what are things coming to? How long before we build a concrete wall?
It's a crying shame.
One last question.
What are the chances that Norton Internet Security will uninstall itself gracefully via the Add/Remove Programs control panel? (I certainly plan to set a System Restore checkpoint before trying it!)
Symantec says "SystemDoctor is a Security Risk that may give exaggerated reports of threats on the computer. The program then prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats."
I completed the unpleasant task of helping my wife get started with a new HP computer, preloaded with Windows XP Home and a plethora of shovelware. We spent hours watching dialogs pop up suggesting that we download this, register that, and update the other.
Practically the first thing that happened was that Norton Internet Security popped up a huge scary dialog warning us that we hadn't turned it on. The next thing was a huge scary dialog saying that it had found a security risk in her system. The problem it had found was that it apparently ships with no virus definitions at all, and required about twenty minutes over broadband to download and install some seventeen thousand of them. The next thing was a huge scary dialog saying that we needed to register with Symantec (presumably so that it can give us a huge scary warning at the end of the free 60-day trial).
The next thing was a huge scary warning that we needed to turn off Windows Firewall, which to Microsoft's credit is apparently preinstalled turned on and functioning, so that we could use Norton Internet Security's firewall instead.
The next thing was a huge scary warning that we had attempted to change Internet Explorer's home page from an AOL signup offer to my wife's existing "my Yahoo" page.
Every time she launched an application a little yellow flag would rise up from the taskbar to tell her that Norton Internet Security noticed that she had launched an application.
And from time to time it puts up a message box with no apparent purpose other than to tell her that Norton Internet Security is running properly. "Exaggerated reports of threats on the computer?" "Prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats?" To be fair, although it did prompt her to register, I don't believe it will prompt her for a purchase until the end of the sixty days.
But the thing is the most intrusive, obnoxious, offensive piece of crap I've ever seen. It makes Clippy look adorable by comparison.
Presumably she needs more than just an antivirus program (ClamAV). If anyone has any recommendations on a well-behaved, friendly security program for Windows XP that isn't in your face all the time, I'd love to hear it.
P. S. The reason we bought a machine with XP is that my wife has been stalling on a much-needed upgrade for about three years now, and what she read about Vista was what convinced her that we needed to run out immediately while we could still get a machine preloaded with XP. Do you think she is being included in these statistics that show that Vista has boosted PC sales...
As far as I know, CDDB is based simply on matching the sequence and length of the tracks on the disk, with some fuzz factors so that the match doesn't have to be perfect. I find it simply amazing that CDDB works.
I've personally experienced the shock of inserting a CD that I copied from an LP and having CDDB identify it (because there was a CD version of the same album), particularly impressive since there was often a second or two difference in the lengths of my tracks and the CD tracks.
I believe if Hatto's husband hadn't copied the contents of entire CDs as a whole, but had mixed up the track order or combined different albums, the fraud might have escaped detection by CDDB. (Of course, a sufficiently bizarre track order might have raised suspicions of its own)
So, we'd better re-read Shaw's Back to Methuselah and figure out how to extend human life, as a necessary precondition to The Conquest of Space.
Clearly, then, humankind has the right, nay the obligation to expand throughout the universe.
We should terraform any planets that are not already Earthlike, use the energy of however many stars it takes to achieve our goals, and find some black hole into which to pitch any planets that become inconveniently polluted.
Any semi-intelligent life we encounter along the way will obviously be inferior, since it has not colonized the universe first. If it gets in our way (or even if it doesn't) we should trample it under our jackboots, but only if necessary. Whenever possible we should altruistically force them to accept the inestimable benefits of the English language, democracy, and McDonald's hamburgers.
"My job is to pertect the American people from cyberattack. When we find IP packets that are in that country that are hurting our computers, we're going to do something about it. ... Does this mean I'm looking for a pretext to start a war with China? No. It means I'm trying to protect our computers. That's what that means.
.Hackers, go do this,. but we know it's a vital part of the Chinese government."
Despite our warrantless wiretaps, I don't think we know who picked up the phone and said
Secretary of States Bill Gates added "For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with China. We are not planning a war with China. Yes, we do have contingency plans for wars with every other country in the world, but not China. And even it we did, we have not taken any actual final decisions to act on them in the immediately foreseeable future. We have just sent elint-equipped cruisers to the East China Sea, but those are just there to help Taiwan with its streaming internet video capacity."
In response to a question from reporters as to whether cyberattacks originating from other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, had been observed, Gates said "That's classified information. And besides, who cares? We're not talking about Saudi Arabia, we're talking about China."
That "dusting" remark made me wonder:
Can an RFID sensor read a tag if there are dozens (hundreds, thousands, tetrazillions) of tags within range? Like space junk, will the accumulation of RFID junk eventually render the technology useless?
Microsoft apologists always blame the drivers.
If the end-user experience is bad, it doesn't matter who's to blame.
When microcomputers were new, a colleague of mine was raving about his North Star Advantage. He couldn't praise it too much. I asked him if it was reliable. He said it had been absolutely 100% reliable. So I asked if I could drop in that afternoon and have him show me WordStar, the hot new program I'd heard so much about.
There was a pause.
"Well, I can't do that today," he says. "I'm waiting for a new power supply. The old one failed again last week."
"But I thought you said your computer had been 100% reliable," I said.
"Oh, the computer has been completely reliable. It's just the power supply that keeps failing."
It may have been the power supply's fault, not the computer's, but, nevertheless, the effect was the same: he couldn't run WordStar.
(And just to fend off any misunderstandings: he was talking about the power supply North Star provided as an integral part of the system...)