I found a copy of Simmons' biography in a second hand shop and while it's an interesting read, he's a pretty dull guy. No vices apart from womanising, and it's fairly obvious that he saw music as a way of avoiding the day job, which he's managed to do for 35 years. It comes as no surprise that he mistrusts the way that the music business is going, and can't see the difference between file sharing and paid-for downloading. He is the epitome of senior music industry management - late 50s, tour jacket wearing, stuck in that notion of selling 'product'. Not being able to buy Kiss online won't trouble his income much, and it probably doesn't occur to him that more of his income these days comes from touring, merchandise and just being Gene Simmons. I can imagine that he was a slow adopter of the CD format too, and probably made sure that he got a good deal out of them before Kiss got digitised for the first time.
It has two meanings in the UK: the political party called the Conservative Party, and the traditional meaning of the word. Although still not the same as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. They're just idiots.
One small problem - that would be the government interfering in business, which is wrong. Unless it's Bell. Or Microsoft. Or a bank that needs bailing out. Anyway, in the UK, the problem was solved by creating an opt-out database but then letting the telemarketers themselves run it. It works better than you might expect although it is a specific opt-out service and the opt-out only lasts for two years. VoIP has meant that the systems can be anywhere in the world though, and callers aren't covered by it outside of the country, so they just hire rooms full of Indians.
Just coal or gas fuelled power stations. All of our nuclear power stations are in relatively isolated locations next to the sea, which provides coolant for the cores. The most striking one is probably Torness in southern Scotland because it is right next to the A1, the main road to Edinburgh. Map of nuclear power stations in Great Britain.
I have a pair of folding card style tables that cost me £12 and have provided sterling service for several years. They are better with small laptops though - anything bigger than 14.4" leaves no space on the surface and makes it's difficult to see the TV over the top. I live alone.
in a single server web/application server and database scenario for example. Where the database really only needs to communicate with the application server on loopback or localhost, the default setup probably listens on the first active IP address it finds (something is telling me that that has been the case with SQL Server for a long time, although I have to admit that I haven't installed SQL Server or Oracle of any kind for a long time either. It's then the admin's job to make it safe. I am sure that the same will apply to MySQL or Postgres although I seem to recall that the default action is to listen on localhost. It would be an interesting exercise to see if a scan fro MySQL and Postgres turned up similar results.
Let's just make sure that everyone gets that before this goes too far. It's also the work of one man, so let's not go pretending that it's an authority on anything.
Time Machine looks like a simplified interface to something like Netbackup or (more likely) Miranda to me. It's a handy thing to have natively but I was less than happy about how it works out of the box: in short it claims to take weekly full backups plus incremental changes every ten minutes. The weekly full backups are taken until the disk is full (Apple's words). I can see that a lot of people are going to get caught out by this: on my Mac Mini the full backup came to 44Gb, which on an empty 300Gb external drive (which seems to be about the most common size sold in Maplin and PCWorld these days) will come to five or six weeks of full backups.
There's no indication of what it does then: does it overwrite the oldest backup? Are you prompted to delete the oldest backup? Does it suggest you go and buy another drive? In an enterprise environment decisions would have to be made about what was kept and for what duration: you wouldn't keep everything indefinitely.
I'm going to have to see if it's possible to write some usable rules this weekend: off the top of my head, keep music and video and photos and the like backed up regularly and maybe only back the OS and applications up periodically, in the case of the OS particularly before the 10.5.1 update as I have bad feelings about it. I think there might well be some wailing and screaming from people who have just switched it on in a few weeks time when their external drive is full...
It was/is a classroom project: Hungerford is a technology oriented school. All the kids involved were so voluntarily. I'm sure there are lizards in the local and national education departments who are thinking 'hmmm...' about this but it's not any kind of policy.
I'm sure I can remember seeing a similar situation under Solaris 2.5.1 many eons ago, and it's nothing new under SMB/Samba. Finder is still appalling with network drives - try mounting your iDisk on the Desktop, which is quite easy to do by mistake if you have a.mac account, and go and make a drink while the OS tries to come to terms with connecting to a WebDAV device several thousand miles away.
This is actually a problem in the way that BSD based Unixes handle files. In fact mv[8], which is still the underlying command here, is stateless, and sequentially writes to destination and deletes from source until the filehandle closes, so if *anything* interrupts the process, the state of the file will be incorrect in both source and destination, which I would guess (I haven't looked too deeply into Unix filesystems for a very long time) would affect the way in which it is reported to the GUI: you would end up with a chunk of data that is missing inode information at both ends but that is still on the disc, so the GUI just stops reporting it. I can definitely recall this happening in CDE/Motif in Solaris 2.5.1.
However, unless you're telling it otherwise like you are here, the default action for transferring data to any external drive is copy rather than move, which is *safe*. If you want verification, use rsync, which was invented partially because of these issues over SMB/Samba. So in short, nothing new here. It's not an acceptable situation but it's an existing problem, and it's been found in Leopard because it's the latest version of the first genuine mass market Unix based OS.
I have been thinking about the use of Linux on smartphones and one of the conclusions that I came to, rightly or wrongly, is that there is a major licensing problem in the interface between the GPL software in GNU/Linux and the hardware and software employed in a telephony module, to the point that there is a fear that GPL software touching a telephony module would cause the telephony software to become unacceptably open, either from the point of view of business or regulatory authorities, and this is why there is no POTS option for Nokia's Internet Tablet range, and indeed why the iPhone is locked down. OpenMoko has broken this taboo, and will be a major advance in opening the telephony market *if* it passes FCA and European certification - there is no guarantee of this. To this end I believe that the Google telephony platform will, in its early stages at least, be a GNU/Linux OS running on an ARM processor or similar with a closed interface to the telephony systems, and with Google Gears and a Java for Mobile Telephony, which may or not be the current Mobile Java, as the developer interfaces. There would still be no direct access to the phone module, and only the only open network access would be over wi-fi unless Google manages to obtain its own pieces of the spectrum across the world or can form deals with phone providers... hmm, does that sound familiar? Right now in the UK for example, I can only see one provider even considering allowing the sort of access that Google would want, and that's the one that has no long distance infrastructure of its own and has just introduced a Skype phone that works over its network, partially to reduce its interconnect costs. Then again, as most European 3G licences will be about halfway through their life when the OS becomes available, and with the licence holders finally coming to terms with the fact that uptake is being delivered by access to data rather than blocky film clips, the promise of a share of Google's revenues might be enough to encourage the phone providers to open up - a little at least. This is all empirical but it's what the current state of telephony looks like from the view of an interested spectator. Feel free to correct me.
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.
The OpenMoko software is more important than the hardware. The Neo1973 is open hardware designed to a specification, but won't ever be a successful commercial product because no phone company is going to subsidise it. There is a bullet to be bitten, that there are few smartphone platforms that are open enough to match the aspirations of OpenMoko, but I can see it being ported to other smartphone chipsets such as those used by HTC or indeed non-dedicated chipsets like the OpenSparc S1. It wouldn't surprise me at all if was running on an iPhone in the next year either. That's where the software's strength will lie: while phones are not PCs, and are probably harder to develop drivers for (one of the reasons, I believe, why the Nokia N8x0 doesn't have a phone module), there will be a group of people who want to get it out there and onto as many phones as they can.
I just hope that the bidder doesn't think that it's the IP. There is probably enough SCO support work out there to make a viable business though, if there are people who are still paying for their support.
I had a look at a Storm spam mail a while ago and it gave a link to a fake website on a compromised machine which then prompted the user to download an executable 'for authentication', which when clicked on to run presumably became another member of the botnet, so like most viruses and scams, it requires a human element. Presumably most AV systems have now got wise to it and it wasn't as clever as originally thought.
If Comcast are as process driven as BT, they will have a cost for every line item that's been repeated more than twice, and let's not fool ourselves here, they've done it more than that.
There are other problems surrounding VoIP. It's more likely that Comcast doesn't support QoS on their routers which means that VoIP competes with all the other packets passing through the system. Neither DSL or cable are particularly suited for VoIP because of the amount of contention on the average connection, although this will vary from area to area, so your clients may have problems in some POPs but not in others.
They get flustered by pdfs, probably because they can't edit them, so odt would be a complete non-starter.
In the last few years I have worked for companies whose official defaults were not MS.doc: IBM use Lotus Word and Sun adopted StarOffice a couple of years ago, but the reality is that even they have to send.doc formatted files to the outside world or no-one can read them.
Hmm, that isn't really the case, certainly with digital in the UK. Digital decoders, and that includes satellite and through-antenna, have a lower signal tolerance than analogue. It's been estimated that digital reception through antenna fails at around 24% signal strength, whereas analogue will keep going down to about 12% and never actually fails dead, which is inevitable in a binary system. There are also increased problems with rain, which can severely affect both satellite and through-antenna systems, which is probably unavoidable but not optimal for this wet little island. Also, despite increasing our viewing choice from our five channels, the Freeview through-antenna system is lacking in bandwidth, which has lead to compromises in programming - many channels only broadcast after 7pm as there isn't the space or money for all-day service, and some channels share streams. Compression is also appalling: some channels broadcast films at near-YouTube levels, with blocky artifacts and jerky motion because there isn't the spare capacity. The system was originally promoted as offering more choice and better quality but as usual Great British compromised has ended up with something that is satisfactory but not great.
Curry's Digital, the biggest electronics chain in the UK, stopped selling video tape recorders three years ago. For that matter, DVD recorders have a pretty short shelf life until [insert new format here] takes off.
One of the selling points for the digital switch in the UK has been the availability of cheap adaptor boxes (around US$40) for existing TVs. When through-aerial digital broadcasting started in the UK, the provider, On Digital, gave out boxes for free.
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I found a copy of Simmons' biography in a second hand shop and while it's an interesting read, he's a pretty dull guy. No vices apart from womanising, and it's fairly obvious that he saw music as a way of avoiding the day job, which he's managed to do for 35 years. It comes as no surprise that he mistrusts the way that the music business is going, and can't see the difference between file sharing and paid-for downloading. He is the epitome of senior music industry management - late 50s, tour jacket wearing, stuck in that notion of selling 'product'. Not being able to buy Kiss online won't trouble his income much, and it probably doesn't occur to him that more of his income these days comes from touring, merchandise and just being Gene Simmons. I can imagine that he was a slow adopter of the CD format too, and probably made sure that he got a good deal out of them before Kiss got digitised for the first time.
It has two meanings in the UK: the political party called the Conservative Party, and the traditional meaning of the word. Although still not the same as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. They're just idiots.
One small problem - that would be the government interfering in business, which is wrong. Unless it's Bell. Or Microsoft. Or a bank that needs bailing out. Anyway, in the UK, the problem was solved by creating an opt-out database but then letting the telemarketers themselves run it. It works better than you might expect although it is a specific opt-out service and the opt-out only lasts for two years. VoIP has meant that the systems can be anywhere in the world though, and callers aren't covered by it outside of the country, so they just hire rooms full of Indians.
Just coal or gas fuelled power stations. All of our nuclear power stations are in relatively isolated locations next to the sea, which provides coolant for the cores. The most striking one is probably Torness in southern Scotland because it is right next to the A1, the main road to Edinburgh. Map of nuclear power stations in Great Britain.
I have a pair of folding card style tables that cost me £12 and have provided sterling service for several years. They are better with small laptops though - anything bigger than 14.4" leaves no space on the surface and makes it's difficult to see the TV over the top. I live alone.
in a single server web/application server and database scenario for example. Where the database really only needs to communicate with the application server on loopback or localhost, the default setup probably listens on the first active IP address it finds (something is telling me that that has been the case with SQL Server for a long time, although I have to admit that I haven't installed SQL Server or Oracle of any kind for a long time either. It's then the admin's job to make it safe. I am sure that the same will apply to MySQL or Postgres although I seem to recall that the default action is to listen on localhost. It would be an interesting exercise to see if a scan fro MySQL and Postgres turned up similar results.
Let's just make sure that everyone gets that before this goes too far. It's also the work of one man, so let's not go pretending that it's an authority on anything.
Time Machine looks like a simplified interface to something like Netbackup or (more likely) Miranda to me. It's a handy thing to have natively but I was less than happy about how it works out of the box: in short it claims to take weekly full backups plus incremental changes every ten minutes. The weekly full backups are taken until the disk is full (Apple's words). I can see that a lot of people are going to get caught out by this: on my Mac Mini the full backup came to 44Gb, which on an empty 300Gb external drive (which seems to be about the most common size sold in Maplin and PCWorld these days) will come to five or six weeks of full backups.
There's no indication of what it does then: does it overwrite the oldest backup? Are you prompted to delete the oldest backup? Does it suggest you go and buy another drive? In an enterprise environment decisions would have to be made about what was kept and for what duration: you wouldn't keep everything indefinitely.
I'm going to have to see if it's possible to write some usable rules this weekend: off the top of my head, keep music and video and photos and the like backed up regularly and maybe only back the OS and applications up periodically, in the case of the OS particularly before the 10.5.1 update as I have bad feelings about it. I think there might well be some wailing and screaming from people who have just switched it on in a few weeks time when their external drive is full...
Nice to see that ./ has its finger on the pulse.
It was/is a classroom project: Hungerford is a technology oriented school. All the kids involved were so voluntarily. I'm sure there are lizards in the local and national education departments who are thinking 'hmmm...' about this but it's not any kind of policy.
I'm sure I can remember seeing a similar situation under Solaris 2.5.1 many eons ago, and it's nothing new under SMB/Samba. Finder is still appalling with network drives - try mounting your iDisk on the Desktop, which is quite easy to do by mistake if you have a .mac account, and go and make a drink while the OS tries to come to terms with connecting to a WebDAV device several thousand miles away.
This is actually a problem in the way that BSD based Unixes handle files. In fact mv[8], which is still the underlying command here, is stateless, and sequentially writes to destination and deletes from source until the filehandle closes, so if *anything* interrupts the process, the state of the file will be incorrect in both source and destination, which I would guess (I haven't looked too deeply into Unix filesystems for a very long time) would affect the way in which it is reported to the GUI: you would end up with a chunk of data that is missing inode information at both ends but that is still on the disc, so the GUI just stops reporting it. I can definitely recall this happening in CDE/Motif in Solaris 2.5.1.
However, unless you're telling it otherwise like you are here, the default action for transferring data to any external drive is copy rather than move, which is *safe*. If you want verification, use rsync, which was invented partially because of these issues over SMB/Samba.
So in short, nothing new here. It's not an acceptable situation but it's an existing problem, and it's been found in Leopard because it's the latest version of the first genuine mass market Unix based OS.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't so sensible.
I have been thinking about the use of Linux on smartphones and one of the conclusions that I came to, rightly or wrongly, is that there is a major licensing problem in the interface between the GPL software in GNU/Linux and the hardware and software employed in a telephony module, to the point that there is a fear that GPL software touching a telephony module would cause the telephony software to become unacceptably open, either from the point of view of business or regulatory authorities, and this is why there is no POTS option for Nokia's Internet Tablet range, and indeed why the iPhone is locked down. OpenMoko has broken this taboo, and will be a major advance in opening the telephony market *if* it passes FCA and European certification - there is no guarantee of this.
To this end I believe that the Google telephony platform will, in its early stages at least, be a GNU/Linux OS running on an ARM processor or similar with a closed interface to the telephony systems, and with Google Gears and a Java for Mobile Telephony, which may or not be the current Mobile Java, as the developer interfaces. There would still be no direct access to the phone module, and only the only open network access would be over wi-fi unless Google manages to obtain its own pieces of the spectrum across the world or can form deals with phone providers... hmm, does that sound familiar?
Right now in the UK for example, I can only see one provider even considering allowing the sort of access that Google would want, and that's the one that has no long distance infrastructure of its own and has just introduced a Skype phone that works over its network, partially to reduce its interconnect costs.
Then again, as most European 3G licences will be about halfway through their life when the OS becomes available, and with the licence holders finally coming to terms with the fact that uptake is being delivered by access to data rather than blocky film clips, the promise of a share of Google's revenues might be enough to encourage the phone providers to open up - a little at least.
This is all empirical but it's what the current state of telephony looks like from the view of an interested spectator. Feel free to correct me.
Hmmm, let me think... it's probably recommended by the US government for countries that aren't the USA.
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. The United States of America is still a banana republic. What is so difficult about full and open scrutiny? The first principle of any electronic voting system is that it should be open. There can be no proprietary code. It doesn't matter if Joe Six-pack can't read it, as long as someone who is independent from the government and the contractor can.
The OpenMoko software is more important than the hardware. The Neo1973 is open hardware designed to a specification, but won't ever be a successful commercial product because no phone company is going to subsidise it. There is a bullet to be bitten, that there are few smartphone platforms that are open enough to match the aspirations of OpenMoko, but I can see it being ported to other smartphone chipsets such as those used by HTC or indeed non-dedicated chipsets like the OpenSparc S1. It wouldn't surprise me at all if was running on an iPhone in the next year either. That's where the software's strength will lie: while phones are not PCs, and are probably harder to develop drivers for (one of the reasons, I believe, why the Nokia N8x0 doesn't have a phone module), there will be a group of people who want to get it out there and onto as many phones as they can.
I just hope that the bidder doesn't think that it's the IP. There is probably enough SCO support work out there to make a viable business though, if there are people who are still paying for their support.
We've all got flying cars in Europe now. No, really.
Lord British has got one all ready.
Similar principles, similar components, and a whole lot less dangerous when something stops working. Far better at getting across country too.
I had a look at a Storm spam mail a while ago and it gave a link to a fake website on a compromised machine which then prompted the user to download an executable 'for authentication', which when clicked on to run presumably became another member of the botnet, so like most viruses and scams, it requires a human element. Presumably most AV systems have now got wise to it and it wasn't as clever as originally thought.
If Comcast are as process driven as BT, they will have a cost for every line item that's been repeated more than twice, and let's not fool ourselves here, they've done it more than that.
There are other problems surrounding VoIP. It's more likely that Comcast doesn't support QoS on their routers which means that VoIP competes with all the other packets passing through the system. Neither DSL or cable are particularly suited for VoIP because of the amount of contention on the average connection, although this will vary from area to area, so your clients may have problems in some POPs but not in others.
They get flustered by pdfs, probably because they can't edit them, so odt would be a complete non-starter.
.doc: IBM use Lotus Word and Sun adopted StarOffice a couple of years ago, but the reality is that even they have to send .doc formatted files to the outside world or no-one can read them.
In the last few years I have worked for companies whose official defaults were not MS
c:\ ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 5.7.1000]
Ha! I knew it!
Hmm, that isn't really the case, certainly with digital in the UK. Digital decoders, and that includes satellite and through-antenna, have a lower signal tolerance than analogue. It's been estimated that digital reception through antenna fails at around 24% signal strength, whereas analogue will keep going down to about 12% and never actually fails dead, which is inevitable in a binary system. There are also increased problems with rain, which can severely affect both satellite and through-antenna systems, which is probably unavoidable but not optimal for this wet little island. Also, despite increasing our viewing choice from our five channels, the Freeview through-antenna system is lacking in bandwidth, which has lead to compromises in programming - many channels only broadcast after 7pm as there isn't the space or money for all-day service, and some channels share streams. Compression is also appalling: some channels broadcast films at near-YouTube levels, with blocky artifacts and jerky motion because there isn't the spare capacity. The system was originally promoted as offering more choice and better quality but as usual Great British compromised has ended up with something that is satisfactory but not great.
Curry's Digital, the biggest electronics chain in the UK, stopped selling video tape recorders three years ago. For that matter, DVD recorders have a pretty short shelf life until [insert new format here] takes off.
One of the selling points for the digital switch in the UK has been the availability of cheap adaptor boxes (around US$40) for existing TVs. When through-aerial digital broadcasting started in the UK, the provider, On Digital, gave out boxes for free.