The game companies can get away with all sorts of stuff because demand is huge vs. supply. I'm sure most of us at one point or another wanted to have a job that did nothing but involved games (or perhaps more correctly, to show our parents that playing games can be a job). A QA tester (which is probably where most people start) has a pretty nice job description - "Play games all day and report bugs" - sounds fairly enticing to sit in front of a computer/TV playing games - prerelease games, at that! Of course, while accurate, the true job is far more mundane, and the reality of it all sinks in (60 hour weeks, $8/hr, must find X bugs every week), and the "play" involves running into walls continually.
Others see programming as the way to go. Given the option (without knowledge of working conditions) of a boring job programming Microsoft Word, or some application using a database for insurance companies, and an "exciting programming job" as entry level game programmer, which looks more appealing?
EA and other companies have long treated employees this way - it's nothing new. Just until quite recently, it was more or less a poorly-kept industry secret (I can't recall when I first heard about it, but I knew when I graduated). Of course, I *did* apply to gaming companies, but this was more of "finding a job" rather than "I want a job in the gaming industry".
It's fixed cost centric in Canada too, yet virtually everyone here in Toronto has broadband.
Well, don't forget that around 80-90% of the population of Canada lives within 5 degrees of the 49th parallel. And tend to "ciump" around major cities, so the population density in Canada can allow for high penetration of broadband, since you can reach a large percentage of the population (greater than 50%) with just some infrastructure. Plus with 80% of Canadians on some sort of Cable TV network, it's almost all there. So all a company needs is city-infrastructure (cable is popular), and some long-distance high speed connections.
Unlike the US (I'm Canadian) which appears to have a small town every couple of miles down the Interstate.
Oh, and while bandwidth is cheap in Canada, it should be noted that the providers up here also don't want you to use that bandwidth. My provider (Shaw) decided to install (try out, to be exact) Ellacoya traffic shapers on their network. These shapers were currently set for BitTorrent traffic (apparently, my region really likes BitTorrent), and work more or less at the application level - no fussing around with ports fixes it. (If you setup an encrypted VPN link to another host, your BitTorrent speeds shot way up than if you just tried to do BitTorrent without tunnelling). (Lots of threads and news posts on Broadband Reports)
Seeing how my provider wants to also deliver VoIP services, I suspect those Ellacoyas will be deployed to "shape" non-Shaw VoIP traffic as well.
I guess the figures may be misleading. Broadband penetration may be higher, but if people are mislead into buying broadband when they really can live with dialup... sure it's faster than dialup, but not if you can only download dialup-sized bits of data before being accused of transferring too much data.
(And no, I can't get DSL. Even though I live in the middle of the freaking city with DSL all around me.)
You jest, but there are architectures that have their bits numbered the *other* way around (where bit 0 is the most significant bit, while bit n (n=15, 31, etc) is the least significant bit).
Causes more than mild confusion for the hardware designers who have to suddenly deal with A0..A29 (or A30, A31 on 32-bit systems, depending on the external bus), and likewise with D0..D31. More than once have they been wired baskwards (or the byte enables, as well). Heck, it's a great way to get software developers confused as well...
(If you really must know, it appears PowerPC is numbered this way).
Actually, there's a good reason for everyone else in the world to be able to view the web site.
Like you said: This is a political campaign site with political campaign propaganda.
You know that most of Europe and a few other countries for some reason or other backs Kerry, right (worldwide polls put Kerry at 70%, Bush at sub-20%, with only Korea and one other nation backing Bush)? And perhaps doesn't understand why Americans are so different?
Since the rest of the world is going to have to live with whoever's voted (mostly foreign policy issues), it's nice to be able to actually find out *why* Americans vote the way they do. I may not be able to vote in your election, but I sure am going to have to live with your decision. And reading the propaganda straight from the horse's mouth is the best reason to why Bush may be re-elected in.
(Note: I know that Kerry and Bush are equally bad choices (worse in some places than the other, better in other places... but really, it's a decision on two bad choices - or as we say in Canada, picking the least offensive) - yet for some reason or other, Kerry's more popular outside the US.
Bush's website will perhaps tell us why Americans are so divided to be split even on how they'll vote? And let us do the research. There may yet be something Bush does that no one outside the US knows and it's posted on his website. The international community has been wrong before - I don't know, maybe Bush is a really great guy - but at least it will help us find out why the preferences are so skewed.
Then why do I have a bloody fan on my desk that's on all year?
I don't know about anyone else, but a warm office really hurts my productivity. Heck, when the A/C goes out, I think more about the temperature than the job at hand. It's also unpleasant coming into the office after doing a little bit of exercise, and spending the next 20 minutes wiping all the sweat off. Plus, warm offices feel somewhat stuffy.
Personally, I know some offices are nice and chilly, and it can hurt productivity, but too warm is probably a lot worse than too cold. (Too warm - get a fan - if you're still hot, tough. Too cold - a heater, sweater, anything - when you're warm enough (or feeling hot), take it off.
Then again, maybe I'm weird to prefer cooler weather. Me, like airplanes, like cold air... not hot (and possibly humid) air.
Another problem is that most Li-Ion cells are only good for a couple of hundred recharge cycles. Unless you are into MP3 from your PDA, you may not need to charge everyday. The problem is that a device that fails after just two-hundred working days isn't very useful, even if the battery is easily replaced.
Actually, Li-Ion cells don't really suffer too much damage from discharge-charge cycles (as long as you keep them partially charged all the time). Full discharge/charge cycles are bad on Li-Ion cells, though.
*HOWEVER*, Li-Ion cells do age. For every day that the Li-Ion cell "lives" since the date it was put together by the battery factory, it wears out. They wear out faster if they're fully discharged (not significantly, though). So they'll last around 3-5 years since their manufacture. (Thus, buying spare batteries now to combat the effects of aging in the future is futile - i.e., a waste of money unless you need it now). Especially something to consider when buying refurbed items since the battery may have aged into significant loss of capacity while the device sat on the shelf.
This isn't something that can be made into a "cluster." Either you have to put them far enough apart there are holes in the signal or you end up with overlapping transmitters just a few hz apart - essentially "stepping on" your own signal. Either that, or you'd have to ask your listener to retune every 500 feet to another channel so you got no overlap.
Actually, what you really do is tune them to the same frequency - as long as you're using FM. FM has the wierd property that if you have two FM stations transmitting on the same frequency, the stronger station is what's received with little to no interference. This phenomenon (the Capture Effect) results in you only hearing one station on your receiver.
Thus, all you really need is to keep all the transmitters on the same frequency, and the receiver will seamlessly switch among the microtransmitters. If there are slight errors, as long as they're within the error range acceptable to a receiver, the receiver will cooperate. Might as well exploit all potential advantages. Imagine a city-wide radio transmission using microtransmitters. Quite useful. The only problem is how to distribute the signal to the transmitters...
Not really, when you think about it. Say you're at a LAN party, and you get thirsty... do you drink the stuff that makes you able to play, or do you just go thirsty or (shudder), drink water?
Then you'll have these sort of people:
Customer: Helll....o. my com...put...er does-n't work. Tech Support: Sir, did you drink the fluid in your computer? Customer: Uh... *hic*
In aviation folklore, the compass (which swings inside a fluid to help prevent inaccuracies) used to be filled with, I think, bourbon. Now, you can see how long that lasted (especially in the military), so they fill 'em up with kerosene instead. Pity the mechanic or pilot who decides to go "inspect" his plane shortly after the change.
There's also a followup episode of Black Sky on the 7th which covers last week's trials (and possibly this week's, as well). The one parent mentioned covers everything up to the launch.
At least that's what the TiVo descriptions lead me to believe.
TFA says that Canada ranks with South Korea in broadband penetration, and it has similar geography to the US.
Yeah, but in Canada, 95% of the population is less than 5 degrees north of the 49th, and that population tend to clump near the cities. And given that there still are people who are on partyline phones (I think they've only recently got individual phones when a microwave link was established)...
In addition, Canada has a very high percentage of the population that subscribes to cable TV, so the infrastructure to actually do broadband is there. We may have similar geography to the US (larger country, actually), but when you have a population distribution as whacked as it is here (we love to hug the border), as well as infrastructure penetration, it makes broadband access easy. (In urban areas, there are only two types of TV - cable, and satellite. OTA is very rare. In the sticks, they tend to have satellite (C-Band or DSS), since pretty much the only OTA channels is CBC and a couple of others.
The best I've used before XChat was XiRCON - a damn nice client. It's main selling point was that it used TCL inside of it. There were a *lot* of nice features implemented in TCL scripts for it - notably, inline tab completion, "autocorrect" (though it got annoying when you meant to type "U" and hit space to get "you" instead), and a few others.
Sadly, though, its TCL engine was dated, and hacks to fix it to a later revieion worked, but chewed up CPU.
It's a closed source piece of freeware. Wish it was released open-source. It was a really nice alternative to mIRC. Then came along XChat...
His point is that Real would pull the exact same shit if Apple suddenly reverse-engineered the Real streaming file format, incorporated it into the next QuickTime and advertised QuickTime as "FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH REAL MEDIA." What Real is doing right now stands to hurt Apple more from an image standpoint. What happens when people download a song from Real's store and put it on their iPods, but then update the firmware, and the song no longer works? Who are people going to bitch to? Apple. After all, it was their change that broke the song, right? It was working fine before the firmware update, after all. Who has to handle all the calls to tech support? That would be Apple.
A neat trick that Apple can do is in future firmware updates break the DRM by detecting a Real file, decoding it, and saving it back uncompressed and in WAV format, ready for the taking. Then the iPod just removes the old Real file and uses the uncompressed WAV version. User wonders why iPod runs out of space quicker on Real files, and either decides something's awful with Real, or buys a larger iPod. And then some person would notice the real files were... ahem... unprotected...
Don't forget that with Windows CE, when you do a hard reset, it's like formatting a hard drive. Any updates you have on, will be erased and need to reinstalled. For some users, that would need to happen pretty regularly. It's because of this, that most Windows CE updates are in the form of ROM updates, and these don't usually make it to consumers, and when they do, are a pain to install. There are ways around it, but Microsoft isn't showing any effort, perhaps now they will. Everytime I reset, I have to install the updates for Pocket MSN and Pocket IE from flash card again.
Except that quite often, the new generation of PDAs have come with a *LOT* of onboard non-volatile storage. Come to think of it, I've seen iPaqs come with backup software that backup the RAM disk to built-in flash. And now a lot of PocketPCs come with non-volatile flash for user data storage (it's not just for PocketPC anymore). So hard-resetting the device will remove the virus, but if it was stored in the flashdisk, then well, it's just waiting to be reactivated.
Oh, you can also persist the Windows Registry to flash as well. A carefully written app can easily set up a registry key to autorun on boot (one string, and a DWORD), then call the registry-persisting functions to write that key to flash. Then on next bootup, Windows CE will helpfully restore the registry, then tun through its initialization.
Now, most of the low-end PDAs still use a backup battery and RAM, leaving the high end ones to have the "backup to onboard memory" feature, as well as a user-writable storage area without having to have a storage card handy.
How would Real react if a third-party created software that took their audio files and did this? I bet they wouldn't be talking about *choice* then.
They sued. They got injunctions. That's how.
(A long while ago, there was a little program called StreamBox that did nothing but download Real rtsp streams onto your hard drive. It was later modified to download streaming WMA as well. And this isn't some crappy faux soundcard - nor a proxy server. It acted like the client, and downloaded the file. As such, it only worked in real time (since the servers only streamed audio at that rate).)
And the Streambox guys did it by reverse-engineering the protocol. Heck, I remember an even older program (XFileGet) that did a similar thing, but broke when Real changed protocols. Funny now that the shoe's on the other foot.
What's funny is that "in a way" SCO is being irreparably harmed by the injunction, as they now have a lot less power to threaten other companies. Their power to threaten and intimidate, which was based on smoke and mirrors anyway, is being irreparably harmed.
We could say that this already happened when they filed their lawsuit against IBM in the first place, then basically just trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel finding WMDs... err... evidence. So it can be argued they already did the irreparable harm to themselves, and any more harm the stay gives them just goes against what already was irraparably lost.
So manufacturers can build shit quality crap that breaks, and then you pay to cover their shit quality crap? You pay to cover their shit quality crap? People are happy to do this?
Most people are, actually. Because if it means you can buy a DVD player for $30 ($15 on sale), vs. having to pay $50 for it (and know it was well built... (though at $50...)), most people would go for the $30 option.
In much of North America, Price is Number One. If you can sell an item for $X, and your competitor can sell a shoddily made item for $(X-Y%), that'll break in 91 days, you'll find that unless your product fills a specific niche (say, audiophile), your competitor gets the sale. Doubly so if your competitor's products aren't very differentiated from your own (e.g., computers, DVD players) and typically perform the same.
Makes me wonder why stores carry $200 DVD players, when $100 and $30 DVD players are nearby. Certainly not very many people must buy them... (especially when the $30 ones have most of the features (or more) of the $200 ones!).
Yes, what you say is true, but in order to obtain LM hashes, you must be either a domain admin (for AD retrieval) or a local admin.
Funny. I cracked the administrator password of XP (Pro, on a domain, with encrypted hashes), *without* admin access (that was the reason I cracked it - I needed admin access!).
What I did, was boot Knoppix, and copy over the SYSTEM and SAM registry hives. Most apps will crack with just the SAM hive. However, the SYSTEM hive contains the encryption key to the SAM hive, and a little app known as SAMinside (another l0phtcrack app), *does* understand how to crack this more secure hash.
Heck, there was a way to do it, so you could get the hashes, import them into l0phtcrack and use it to crack.
All it took were a couple of demo/shareware apps (l0phtcrack, SAMinside), and a Knoppix CD (to get at SAM and SYSTEM hives, via NTFS driver). And a 3rd party machine.
And no, none of those apps would work on the machine in question - locked down. I cracked it on my own Win2k machine.
There have been so many phone telemarketing scams lately that it's not worth it to even donate over the phone - same with door-to-door solicitations.
With all the legitimate charities saying "We don't solicit via the phone" and "we don't solicit via door-to-door", and the scams using telemarketing and door-to-door, it's just easier to say "we don't give over the phone."
Speaking of which, wasn't there a time when the PowerPC chip first came out, that MacOS actually ran *FASTER* with swap on (up to a very complicated formula)? So if you had X RAM, and zero swap, your system would perform OK, but if you added Y swap (where Y = magic_formula(x)), your powermac would improve performance 10% or so?
Heck, even that went against conventional wisdom of the day (don't use swap at all), but it was supposed to make a difference. Still can't remember why, other than perhaps MacOS' awful memory manager...
Since this is basically reverse-engineered service manuals, anyone know where one can find the *official* ones? I've Googled a few, but most aren't up-to-date, and the one I use doesn't have the new manuals yet. (It had the new manuals for the refresh before last... they move so quickly!)
Anyone got any good links (other than paying $$$ to become a Apple-certified repair tech?).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends.
The game companies can get away with all sorts of stuff because demand is huge vs. supply. I'm sure most of us at one point or another wanted to have a job that did nothing but involved games (or perhaps more correctly, to show our parents that playing games can be a job). A QA tester (which is probably where most people start) has a pretty nice job description - "Play games all day and report bugs" - sounds fairly enticing to sit in front of a computer/TV playing games - prerelease games, at that! Of course, while accurate, the true job is far more mundane, and the reality of it all sinks in (60 hour weeks, $8/hr, must find X bugs every week), and the "play" involves running into walls continually.
Others see programming as the way to go. Given the option (without knowledge of working conditions) of a boring job programming Microsoft Word, or some application using a database for insurance companies, and an "exciting programming job" as entry level game programmer, which looks more appealing?
EA and other companies have long treated employees this way - it's nothing new. Just until quite recently, it was more or less a poorly-kept industry secret (I can't recall when I first heard about it, but I knew when I graduated). Of course, I *did* apply to gaming companies, but this was more of "finding a job" rather than "I want a job in the gaming industry".
It's fixed cost centric in Canada too, yet virtually everyone here in Toronto has broadband.
Well, don't forget that around 80-90% of the population of Canada lives within 5 degrees of the 49th parallel. And tend to "ciump" around major cities, so the population density in Canada can allow for high penetration of broadband, since you can reach a large percentage of the population (greater than 50%) with just some infrastructure. Plus with 80% of Canadians on some sort of Cable TV network, it's almost all there. So all a company needs is city-infrastructure (cable is popular), and some long-distance high speed connections.
Unlike the US (I'm Canadian) which appears to have a small town every couple of miles down the Interstate.
Oh, and while bandwidth is cheap in Canada, it should be noted that the providers up here also don't want you to use that bandwidth. My provider (Shaw) decided to install (try out, to be exact) Ellacoya traffic shapers on their network. These shapers were currently set for BitTorrent traffic (apparently, my region really likes BitTorrent), and work more or less at the application level - no fussing around with ports fixes it. (If you setup an encrypted VPN link to another host, your BitTorrent speeds shot way up than if you just tried to do BitTorrent without tunnelling). (Lots of threads and news posts on Broadband Reports)
Seeing how my provider wants to also deliver VoIP services, I suspect those Ellacoyas will be deployed to "shape" non-Shaw VoIP traffic as well.
I guess the figures may be misleading. Broadband penetration may be higher, but if people are mislead into buying broadband when they really can live with dialup... sure it's faster than dialup, but not if you can only download dialup-sized bits of data before being accused of transferring too much data.
(And no, I can't get DSL. Even though I live in the middle of the freaking city with DSL all around me.)
You jest, but there are architectures that have their bits numbered the *other* way around (where bit 0 is the most significant bit, while bit n (n=15, 31, etc) is the least significant bit).
Causes more than mild confusion for the hardware designers who have to suddenly deal with A0..A29 (or A30, A31 on 32-bit systems, depending on the external bus), and likewise with D0..D31. More than once have they been wired baskwards (or the byte enables, as well). Heck, it's a great way to get software developers confused as well...
(If you really must know, it appears PowerPC is numbered this way).
Actually, there's a good reason for everyone else in the world to be able to view the web site.
Like you said: This is a political campaign site with political campaign propaganda.
You know that most of Europe and a few other countries for some reason or other backs Kerry, right (worldwide polls put Kerry at 70%, Bush at sub-20%, with only Korea and one other nation backing Bush)? And perhaps doesn't understand why Americans are so different?
Since the rest of the world is going to have to live with whoever's voted (mostly foreign policy issues), it's nice to be able to actually find out *why* Americans vote the way they do. I may not be able to vote in your election, but I sure am going to have to live with your decision. And reading the propaganda straight from the horse's mouth is the best reason to why Bush may be re-elected in.
(Note: I know that Kerry and Bush are equally bad choices (worse in some places than the other, better in other places... but really, it's a decision on two bad choices - or as we say in Canada, picking the least offensive) - yet for some reason or other, Kerry's more popular outside the US.
Bush's website will perhaps tell us why Americans are so divided to be split even on how they'll vote? And let us do the research. There may yet be something Bush does that no one outside the US knows and it's posted on his website. The international community has been wrong before - I don't know, maybe Bush is a really great guy - but at least it will help us find out why the preferences are so skewed.
Then why do I have a bloody fan on my desk that's on all year?
I don't know about anyone else, but a warm office really hurts my productivity. Heck, when the A/C goes out, I think more about the temperature than the job at hand. It's also unpleasant coming into the office after doing a little bit of exercise, and spending the next 20 minutes wiping all the sweat off. Plus, warm offices feel somewhat stuffy.
Personally, I know some offices are nice and chilly, and it can hurt productivity, but too warm is probably a lot worse than too cold. (Too warm - get a fan - if you're still hot, tough. Too cold - a heater, sweater, anything - when you're warm enough (or feeling hot), take it off.
Then again, maybe I'm weird to prefer cooler weather. Me, like airplanes, like cold air... not hot (and possibly humid) air.
Another problem is that most Li-Ion cells are only good for a couple of hundred recharge cycles. Unless you are into MP3 from your PDA, you may not need to charge everyday.
The problem is that a device that fails after just two-hundred working days isn't very useful, even if the battery is easily replaced.
Actually, Li-Ion cells don't really suffer too much damage from discharge-charge cycles (as long as you keep them partially charged all the time). Full discharge/charge cycles are bad on Li-Ion cells, though.
*HOWEVER*, Li-Ion cells do age. For every day that the Li-Ion cell "lives" since the date it was put together by the battery factory, it wears out. They wear out faster if they're fully discharged (not significantly, though). So they'll last around 3-5 years since their manufacture. (Thus, buying spare batteries now to combat the effects of aging in the future is futile - i.e., a waste of money unless you need it now). Especially something to consider when buying refurbed items since the battery may have aged into significant loss of capacity while the device sat on the shelf.
This isn't something that can be made into a "cluster." Either you have to put them far enough apart there are holes in the signal or you end up with overlapping transmitters just a few hz apart - essentially "stepping on" your own signal. Either that, or you'd have to ask your listener to retune every 500 feet to another channel so you got no overlap.
Actually, what you really do is tune them to the same frequency - as long as you're using FM. FM has the wierd property that if you have two FM stations transmitting on the same frequency, the stronger station is what's received with little to no interference. This phenomenon (the Capture Effect) results in you only hearing one station on your receiver.
Thus, all you really need is to keep all the transmitters on the same frequency, and the receiver will seamlessly switch among the microtransmitters. If there are slight errors, as long as they're within the error range acceptable to a receiver, the receiver will cooperate. Might as well exploit all potential advantages. Imagine a city-wide radio transmission using microtransmitters. Quite useful. The only problem is how to distribute the signal to the transmitters...
A computer with Guinness inside? BRILLIANT!
Not really, when you think about it. Say you're at a LAN party, and you get thirsty... do you drink the stuff that makes you able to play, or do you just go thirsty or (shudder), drink water?
Then you'll have these sort of people:
Customer: Helll....o. my com...put...er does-n't work.
Tech Support: Sir, did you drink the fluid in your computer?
Customer: Uh... *hic*
In aviation folklore, the compass (which swings inside a fluid to help prevent inaccuracies) used to be filled with, I think, bourbon. Now, you can see how long that lasted (especially in the military), so they fill 'em up with kerosene instead. Pity the mechanic or pilot who decides to go "inspect" his plane shortly after the change.
There's also a followup episode of Black Sky on the 7th which covers last week's trials (and possibly this week's, as well). The one parent mentioned covers everything up to the launch.
At least that's what the TiVo descriptions lead me to believe.
TFA says that Canada ranks with South Korea in broadband penetration, and it has similar geography to the US.
Yeah, but in Canada, 95% of the population is less than 5 degrees north of the 49th, and that population tend to clump near the cities. And given that there still are people who are on partyline phones (I think they've only recently got individual phones when a microwave link was established)...
In addition, Canada has a very high percentage of the population that subscribes to cable TV, so the infrastructure to actually do broadband is there. We may have similar geography to the US (larger country, actually), but when you have a population distribution as whacked as it is here (we love to hug the border), as well as infrastructure penetration, it makes broadband access easy. (In urban areas, there are only two types of TV - cable, and satellite. OTA is very rare. In the sticks, they tend to have satellite (C-Band or DSS), since pretty much the only OTA channels is CBC and a couple of others.
The best I've used before XChat was XiRCON - a damn nice client. It's main selling point was that it used TCL inside of it. There were a *lot* of nice features implemented in TCL scripts for it - notably, inline tab completion, "autocorrect" (though it got annoying when you meant to type "U" and hit space to get "you" instead), and a few others.
Sadly, though, its TCL engine was dated, and hacks to fix it to a later revieion worked, but chewed up CPU.
It's a closed source piece of freeware. Wish it was released open-source. It was a really nice alternative to mIRC. Then came along XChat...
His point is that Real would pull the exact same shit if Apple suddenly reverse-engineered the Real streaming file format, incorporated it into the next QuickTime and advertised QuickTime as "FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH REAL MEDIA." What Real is doing right now stands to hurt Apple more from an image standpoint. What happens when people download a song from Real's store and put it on their iPods, but then update the firmware, and the song no longer works? Who are people going to bitch to? Apple. After all, it was their change that broke the song, right? It was working fine before the firmware update, after all. Who has to handle all the calls to tech support? That would be Apple.
... ahem ... unprotected...
A neat trick that Apple can do is in future firmware updates break the DRM by detecting a Real file, decoding it, and saving it back uncompressed and in WAV format, ready for the taking. Then the iPod just removes the old Real file and uses the uncompressed WAV version. User wonders why iPod runs out of space quicker on Real files, and either decides something's awful with Real, or buys a larger iPod. And then some person would notice the real files were
No, it won't. It will make it a lot bigger, though.
So I won't be getting spam about making various body parts 300% bigger (rather than a measly 30%)?
Don't forget that with Windows CE, when you do a hard reset, it's like formatting a hard drive. Any updates you have on, will be erased and need to reinstalled. For some users, that would need to happen pretty regularly.
It's because of this, that most Windows CE updates are in the form of ROM updates, and these don't usually make it to consumers, and when they do, are a pain to install.
There are ways around it, but Microsoft isn't showing any effort, perhaps now they will. Everytime I reset, I have to install the updates for Pocket MSN and Pocket IE from flash card again.
Except that quite often, the new generation of PDAs have come with a *LOT* of onboard non-volatile storage. Come to think of it, I've seen iPaqs come with backup software that backup the RAM disk to built-in flash. And now a lot of PocketPCs come with non-volatile flash for user data storage (it's not just for PocketPC anymore). So hard-resetting the device will remove the virus, but if it was stored in the flashdisk, then well, it's just waiting to be reactivated.
Oh, you can also persist the Windows Registry to flash as well. A carefully written app can easily set up a registry key to autorun on boot (one string, and a DWORD), then call the registry-persisting functions to write that key to flash. Then on next bootup, Windows CE will helpfully restore the registry, then tun through its initialization.
Now, most of the low-end PDAs still use a backup battery and RAM, leaving the high end ones to have the "backup to onboard memory" feature, as well as a user-writable storage area without having to have a storage card handy.
How would Real react if a third-party created software that took their audio files and did this? I bet they wouldn't be talking about *choice* then.
They sued. They got injunctions. That's how.
(A long while ago, there was a little program called StreamBox that did nothing but download Real rtsp streams onto your hard drive. It was later modified to download streaming WMA as well. And this isn't some crappy faux soundcard - nor a proxy server. It acted like the client, and downloaded the file. As such, it only worked in real time (since the servers only streamed audio at that rate).)
And the Streambox guys did it by reverse-engineering the protocol. Heck, I remember an even older program (XFileGet) that did a similar thing, but broke when Real changed protocols. Funny now that the shoe's on the other foot.
Yes, the iPronto runs Linux. MontaVista had a nice press release on it at one LinuxWorld expo or another.
Question is - anyone find the shell yet?
What's funny is that "in a way" SCO is being irreparably harmed by the injunction, as they now have a lot less power to threaten other companies. Their power to threaten and intimidate, which was based on smoke and mirrors anyway, is being irreparably harmed.
We could say that this already happened when they filed their lawsuit against IBM in the first place, then basically just trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel finding WMDs... err... evidence. So it can be argued they already did the irreparable harm to themselves, and any more harm the stay gives them just goes against what already was irraparably lost.
So manufacturers can build shit quality crap that breaks, and then you pay to cover their shit quality crap? You pay to cover their shit quality crap? People are happy to do this?
Most people are, actually. Because if it means you can buy a DVD player for $30 ($15 on sale), vs. having to pay $50 for it (and know it was well built... (though at $50...)), most people would go for the $30 option.
In much of North America, Price is Number One. If you can sell an item for $X, and your competitor can sell a shoddily made item for $(X-Y%), that'll break in 91 days, you'll find that unless your product fills a specific niche (say, audiophile), your competitor gets the sale. Doubly so if your competitor's products aren't very differentiated from your own (e.g., computers, DVD players) and typically perform the same.
Makes me wonder why stores carry $200 DVD players, when $100 and $30 DVD players are nearby. Certainly not very many people must buy them... (especially when the $30 ones have most of the features (or more) of the $200 ones!).
Yes, what you say is true, but in order to obtain LM hashes, you must be either a domain admin (for AD retrieval) or a local admin.
Funny. I cracked the administrator password of XP (Pro, on a domain, with encrypted hashes), *without* admin access (that was the reason I cracked it - I needed admin access!).
What I did, was boot Knoppix, and copy over the SYSTEM and SAM registry hives. Most apps will crack with just the SAM hive. However, the SYSTEM hive contains the encryption key to the SAM hive, and a little app known as SAMinside (another l0phtcrack app), *does* understand how to crack this more secure hash.
Heck, there was a way to do it, so you could get the hashes, import them into l0phtcrack and use it to crack.
All it took were a couple of demo/shareware apps (l0phtcrack, SAMinside), and a Knoppix CD (to get at SAM and SYSTEM hives, via NTFS driver). And a 3rd party machine.
And no, none of those apps would work on the machine in question - locked down. I cracked it on my own Win2k machine.
There have been so many phone telemarketing scams lately that it's not worth it to even donate over the phone - same with door-to-door solicitations.
With all the legitimate charities saying "We don't solicit via the phone" and "we don't solicit via door-to-door", and the scams using telemarketing and door-to-door, it's just easier to say "we don't give over the phone."
I never thought "too much money on hand" is a problem, at least to me. It usually is the other way around.
Speaking of which, wasn't there a time when the PowerPC chip first came out, that MacOS actually ran *FASTER* with swap on (up to a very complicated formula)? So if you had X RAM, and zero swap, your system would perform OK, but if you added Y swap (where Y = magic_formula(x)), your powermac would improve performance 10% or so?
Heck, even that went against conventional wisdom of the day (don't use swap at all), but it was supposed to make a difference. Still can't remember why, other than perhaps MacOS' awful memory manager...
Since this is basically reverse-engineered service manuals, anyone know where one can find the *official* ones? I've Googled a few, but most aren't up-to-date, and the one I use doesn't have the new manuals yet. (It had the new manuals for the refresh before last... they move so quickly!)
Anyone got any good links (other than paying $$$ to become a Apple-certified repair tech?).
That's why it's usually stated as "This side towards enemy", thereby eliminating the confusing "which way is front" question.
Except, unless our ints are of infinite length, there will be a case where x is greater than x+1...