Looked that one up. Looks fine to me. Granted not all Canada is Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Where are you from, coward? Sure, there are some really 'out back' areas in Canada, but I don't have to live there.
First, please note the author is Chinese. Jan, I guess is Janet, a female, very concerned with purses. I agree, China treats its visitors well. Funny, though, they asked me why I was leaving. Fortunately "work ended" is a valid reason.
Agreed, GSM cellular is far, FAR cheaper call for call than landline. It __WONT__ give you 10Mbit/s Internet though, something to think about. GSM service in Canada is quite impressive, possibly rivaling Europe. I had continueous service between Toronto and Montreal last summer.
Germany is quite ahead on the informative stoplights. They don't do it here (in Holland) because of the fear of drag racing.
Transit debit cards -- YES. Even got Europe on that one! I loved the Hong Kong system with the contactloos card system. You could brush against the sensor and not even take out your wallet. We better get that in Europe soon! Canada should consider also.
We have plenty adult playgrounds in Europe. Everybody in Europe is jealous of Canada for its great outdoors. Who needs 'adult playgrounds' when most of your country is one?
Anti-theft devices? Europe is quite good with public safety as well as Canada. Every place has another method. I'd suggest Jan (and anybody) to stay out of the USA however.
Wireless gizmos? Well anything you want! That's my claim to fame.
Parking data. Universal in Europe. Also I noticed it was all over Toronto. Janet, where are you from?
Computer seating? Even lame Windows can do that. Get real!
Oops. "Free" hemming. Jan, didn't you say at the start that you weren't going to mention the things cheap labour brings?
I am very happy I'm free to live in either Europe or Canada! The news is absolute DIRT in China. It is obviously not a free place. These are little things that mean alot to Europeans and Canadians!
Sure if PC means Windows, its about time, but don't hold your breath. The system has _extreme_ jitter, killing the bass, the harmonics from that destroy the mids and the highs sound like sandpaper on sandpaper. You know the sound -- Its not 'different' its awful!
As long as there is interoperability with Unix and similar systems and embedded systems, there is a future. Microsoft has no sound future. (read it both ways) It is _extremely_ likely all will be reverse-engineered, if necessary to acheive this. Hackers are generally very skeptical audiophiles that know cat5 cable is better than 'beastie wire' for speakers, etc. We are likely to assure this equipment is used to its best. Its HIGH quality, not HiFi. (Its WLAN, not WiFi, too.:)
Personally I like my active monitors (Genelec) connected to a EUR 25,-- soundcard with FreeBSD running on an amd64. Headphones can be useful but that is most likely an embedded solution. A small radio unit in an "Ipod" (It will always be called Ipod -- like "Walkman" is quite generic for any portable Philips cassette player with headphones.) will do wonders. Bluetooth is dirt-cheap radio, but the standard bandwidth must increase to produce convincing sound in a good set of headphones. (24*2*48000 + overhead, at a minimum.)
The only aparently safe way to use mail is in a Unix shell. I've got my doubts about webmail too. Its a bit too slow compared to on-line mailing, but it may contain other unwanted elements, depending on the mailer. I've never had a real problem with any worm using mutt, the Unix mailer.
Very recently some joker in France sent me a worm that prevented me from reporting the abuse. The solution was simple: Delete the worm, restart mutt and mail it to abuse@wanadoo.fr. (Personal note: Wanadoo sounds like wanabee, they are little known among 'my crowd' and somewhat of a worry. This is not intended as put down to the French!) So the moral here is simply if you use Unix, call it *BSD or Linux, you may not be 100% safe, but certainly safer than using Outlook which should be called "Lookout".
Zero click exploits seem hardly new to me. Aren't most exploits, atleast in the past, done without the victim being imeadiately aware? This is from the computer-litterate camp.
It wouldn't take that much brains to jam sattelites from home dishes. 2m dishes are more common in Southern California than swimming pools! (and far more common elsewhere) It may take quite some power, but pulsing a magnetron tuned to the right frequency would do the trick. EXTREME care must be taken to not burn out the mixer and/or LNA of the satellite itself. In the US, one must be mindful of the FEDS but they certainly have better things to do. Feeding more than about 100W to a 5m dish is pushing the safety of the satellite. With some very simple arithmetic, that is 625W in a std 2m dish and 2.5kW in a 'monster 1m' European dish. Pulsing a magnetron (kind of like the thing in your nuker) it is possible to get a mega-watt or more, so be VERY careful if you try this at home.
Alternately if 1000 people put a watt into their 2m dish from many areas, a similar effect would be acheived and there would be no possibility of tracking down the signals.
Certainly if you are to do this stuff, know what you are doing and know the laws against it! Ofcourse this is old hat. In an election year, everything is marketed to look new.....
I will go as far to say my very respected bank, Postbank NV, Nederland might be playing with Windows. I've never seen a BSOD or a Windows popup (the ultimate embarassment for a financial institution) it seems there may be some NT in use, all BOSD and pop-ups suppressed) They do use PCs which sadly are labeled as Windows machines.
Postbank is dedicated to Unix where it matters -- Solaris and more recently OpenBSD. Going offtopic a bit, a group of hackers challenged a crashed XP system for giving the times for our NS trein (wrong ofcourse, but a demand for a refund failed.)
Best advice: Emulate Windows but NEVER give in to Microsoft for 'mission critical' software. Unix is universal in Nederland and Windows is simply embarassment. Its time to see the Inferiour Operating System see it demise. The i386 is dead and so is Microsoft.
This is utterly disgraceful to use the word 'hacker' this way. My views mirror those of most hackers and are quite well known. This is low. Hacktivists are nothing more than mouse clickers on low bandwidth connections. This is lower than script kiddies.
I am 100% against Bush, as are a sizable majority of Europeans. It is nice to see Americans turn against him and he'll do himself in without the help of hacktivists and violent protesters. There are simply better ways to replace George W. Bush!
There is also "one phone", over time the novelty of even the biggest, most complex machine (the thrust to develop Unix) ever built by mankind becomes commonplace and loses it proper name.
Allot of people have and carry a 'phone'. I can just see the day when people refer to their $250 terminal as an 'internet'. What next, a 'unix'?
NOS, here in Holland is sending its feed to one provider only, KPN, and using their infrastructure as a 'giant lan'. (Actually it's a mbone setup on the fake 'A' range like 227.0.0.0/8.) KPN does not offer great bandwidth, so it may require a few ADSL lines coming into a real provider to proxy it fully.
Apart from a stunt like the above, (which is probably going to cost KPN its Internet business) it is technically difficult to limit a true netcast. I was rather surprised how easy it was to get on the BBC netcast without paying. This is only for hack sake. The price BBC charges is fair and I intend to subscribe. They should completely ditch the.ram (RealAudio) format if they want to sell more subscriptions. ADPCM (.wmf) works and is not patentable and the MPEG formats, particularly 4, are far better. BBC is known for innovation, so when they get MPEG4 and.ogg audio in a streaming container like.avi they have lots of new customers.
What does it take to hijack a cable TV head-end or an STL? (studio transmitter link) If your TV tells you to "put your head between your legs and...." wouldn't it be prudent to verify the information? While most pranksters would rather play an "XXX" film or get some political message accross a more devious action is certainly more thinkable than the unthinkable.
If you are not directly in an emergency, atleast take an effort to verify it. On 11 september 2001 my inital reaction was that it may be a 'super hack' and someone (some group) had managed to take control of all the news media from the US to Europe. In the tech company I was working, this was seen as a real possibility. Only after a couple calls actually confirmed it, did the shock and horror of it really set in.
While one should never trust one type of media, verification from multiple sources is very secure. EBS has served its purpose and EAS is certainly obsolete. It is however just one more source of information, little as it may actually represent.
What's the point of this? First, its not true P2P if a central server is involved. It has been proven that no watermark system can work no matter how much funding is pumped in. It has also been shown that any watermark can be detected and stripped out, even if it is encrypted, due to the nature of how watermarks actually work. All DRM will fail in the end as will DMCA and any other laws trying to protect it. Forget it.
Most people will pay for something they really want anyways. Most 'pirated' matterial is ditched. There are cryptographic methods to make micro-payments that don't require a 'bank'. This whole method may look clever to some, but absolutely __nothing__ is new! Don't forget the rule is "try before you buy". This is a general principle of copyright law (fair use) and its not likely to change anytime soon. Internet is 'airplay', 'airplay' is good advertising. When did that change?
It so happens I agree with this in principle. Chances are most drugs simply don't work or even reduce performance, have a very short-lived effect or simply have dangerous side-effects and long term effects that would put off use if there was simply more known. In the present atmosphere, it is hard to determine what the truth is.
By making a whole issue of this, one message (perhaps very wrong) is loud and clear: Drugs will make you a better performer. We actually don't know what the truth is. If the matter was more open, athletes and their doctors could make more 'informed' decisions. Like in nations that play "War on Drugs", the problem can only get worse as education becomes unreliable or non-existant. The problem is prohibition and not the substances and techniques used.
Olympic (and other) athletes must be absurdly cautious with everything they eat, every supliment they take and of course, think twice before taking any prescribed or OTC medication. I've been told by some of the athletes themselves that one cup of coffee is fine but the second may get you in trouble. Now that all medal winners will be tested; Who will they be able to trust? Since there are so many banned substances, many easy to detect, it would be too simple get the medal of someone stripped. It has become much like the situation of government agents planting drugs on someone for an easy bust.
How history repeats. The Pakistani Brain is said to be the first virus 'in the wild' and it is a true virus. Another form of illegal copy protection was tried by a rather respected engineering software company. If you forgot the dongle, the whole LAN (except for the Unix machines) slowed down to a snail's pace. The solution was to re-install Windows95. Even for a small company this was very expensive. The vendor offered a non-protected version to make up for this. They hopefully removed what was probably the first true Windows virus. (True viruses are _extremely_ rare.)
Is there any question who to sue? Any use of malware for copy protection is unjustified and clearly in violation of the law in most places. This kind of crap has been tried before and it never benefits anyone.
Great stuff -- Enforce no mobile phones!
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There must be (a possibly bigger) market in blocking mobile phones? Make the tuned circuits resonate at lower frequencies (larger) and block mobile phones. Its so obvious as a legal way to enforce 'quiet zones' in so many places. Modern mobile phones are at 800, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz. Larger elements and the added bonus mobile phones are close to harmonic intervals makes for a simplified design.
There is quite a bit of information (in books, not http) how to do this. Is about as 'hi-tech' as anti-theft tags on CDs. At five or ten bucks a m^2 there would definitely be a market for a variety of purposes, and frequencies, including wlan. This beats the hell out of active jamming. Except for perhaps the US, this is definitely NOT patentable.
What's this "broadcast flag" shit? I guess anything is possible over there these days. If you can run a compiler, seriously, use mplayer and forget about copy protection/DRM stuff for good.
This is redundant, but not knowing what its going to cost beforehand is the downfall of Open Group. $45,000 is one thing, half a million is another matter.
Linux has indeed been repackaged and registered. (To avoid flames from those that don't already know, I won't say which ones.) Linux as in say Gentoo and BSD in say FreeBSD are very successful now and it would be hard to justify the value in risking so much money for a seemingly worthless qualification.
I'm sure Suse (Novel) and Redhat will actually seek registration as commercial products. If X/Open would agree to fixed priced terms, they would do far more business. (Are you seeing this Open Group?) All things considered, this is like the MSCE scam and might have a negative impact.
The above mentioned BSD and Linux have treated me very well on a number of hardware platforms. Keep up the good work.
The far older Unix talk, write and even mail still work the best. Understandably UDP can be hard to set up on limited "Internet" connections and most don't have their own MTA anymore. However this is all interoperatable and often p2p. Even mail used on the commandline is faster than any of the popular IM services, if you (or your company) have a MTA.
If you can't figure out how to make it work over NAT or are stuck with DHCP, get a shell account. Even in the clear, it is presumably more trusted than dealing with large companies. On a common trusted server, its all encrypted anyways. Its worked for me long before any IM services existed and its always nicer to use the commandline, though clickity-click scripts could be developed.
Maybe some take it a bit hard, but the days you can "type yourself to a fortune" are aparently gone. Since supporting hardware is about the only purpose of any software, it should be completely open. (as well as the hardware) People want something to show and a new gadget is just the thing.
From my perspective: "Software is a necessary evil". Even if the software costs 10x more to develop, people buy the hardware and the software is "free". It works for me and presumably this is also the prevailing opinion.
If you have a great new gadget, isn't it really stupid not to open the source and allow it to work on any platform? Its sickening how many pieces of Windows software need to be reverse-engineered to have a reliable product. These companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Software is a part of hardware and belongs within the hardware relm. If everyone can see your source code, many, many more will buy your gadget.
The days of software without hardware are essentially gone. You can copy software with no effort. It takes special knowledge and allot of experience to copy hardware. Therefore its very safe to allow both to be open. There are a few areas where custom software is the solution. In most cases the solutions will come from individual programmers or small companies. The big corporate days are over! Thank God.
Its not that Intel will go away anytime soon, but AMD appears to be ahead, certainly with 64bit (amd64) processors and perhaps even with its 32bit offerings. Intel seems to play down the 64-bit processors, perhaps because Microsoft won't have a true 64-bit OS for many years to come.
In the Unix world, we've had 64-bit OS's for many years running on SPARC, alpha and now amd64. My "64-bit future" started over ten years ago! There is certainly a 32-bit market created largely by M$, but M$ and 32-bit systems are past their prime. If I was Intel, I'd push the 64-bit hardware no matter how loud M$ cries foul.
It certainly seems, IMO, that AMD sees Unix as the future and produces far more compatible products. The Taiwanese motherbord makers should realise this too and stop fooling themselves. I'd gladly pay double for a mobo with quality features and less non-sence. Asus already seems to be doing this. The new (fairly low-cost 32-bit) A7V600 is a good example. It didn't take long to get all features, and more, useful or otherwise, to work under FreeBSD. (Even works well with 1.5GB RAM @ 400MHz while a maximum of 1GB is supported, presumably for Windows.) The Gigabyte GA7N-400 was an expensive disaster; Windows this and Windows that. I looks like it could work well with Linux, 400MHz RAM and a athlonXP-3200+.
I use computers for mathematical and logical pursuits. A "power user" in otherwords. I'm not impressed with gaming and 'cheap' polygon rendering. It takes a computing power of a true sort to produce holograms, stronger crypto, and related calculation intensive results. I do use a dual-Xenon, but its been a chore to tame. It was given to me with Win-XP installed! Linux-2.6.x seems very promising and FreeBSD-5.x might even be better? While all this is high-end equipment, its worth noting that Linux on a athlon-1200 is much faster (upto 10x) than Win-XP on the dual-Xenon! If people could only realise what they already have.
In closing, I don't see allot of merrit in using the latest Intel systems. The amd64 (Opteron/Athlon64-FX) will be the fastest thing on the affordable market for some time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
"A good dog don't shit in his own back yard"
"A broken clock tells the correct time twice a day"
Journalists have many expressions for this.
I think you mis-spelled "Canadian", eh?
Looked that one up. Looks fine to me. Granted not all Canada is Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Where are you from, coward? Sure, there are some really 'out back' areas in Canada, but I don't have to live there.
Wow, quite cool. Next will be Paraquat proof pot! Remember all that 'California Gold' 25 years ago. ;)
PS: Coke and pot do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for me.
First, please note the author is Chinese. Jan, I guess is Janet, a female, very concerned with purses. I agree, China treats its visitors well. Funny, though, they asked me why I was leaving. Fortunately "work ended" is a valid reason.
Agreed, GSM cellular is far, FAR cheaper call for call than landline. It __WONT__ give you 10Mbit/s Internet though, something to think about. GSM service in Canada is quite impressive, possibly rivaling Europe. I had continueous service between Toronto and Montreal last summer.
Germany is quite ahead on the informative stoplights. They don't do it here (in Holland) because of the fear of drag racing.
Transit debit cards -- YES. Even got Europe on that one! I loved the Hong Kong system with the contactloos card system. You could brush against the sensor and not even take out your wallet. We better get that in Europe soon! Canada should consider also.
We have plenty adult playgrounds in Europe. Everybody in Europe is jealous of Canada for its great outdoors. Who needs 'adult playgrounds' when most of your country is one?
Anti-theft devices? Europe is quite good with public safety as well as Canada. Every place has another method. I'd suggest Jan (and anybody) to stay out of the USA however.
Wireless gizmos? Well anything you want! That's my claim to fame.
Parking data. Universal in Europe. Also I noticed it was all over Toronto. Janet, where are you from?
Computer seating? Even lame Windows can do that. Get real!
Oops. "Free" hemming. Jan, didn't you say at the start that you weren't going to mention the things cheap labour brings?
I am very happy I'm free to live in either Europe or Canada! The news is absolute DIRT in China. It is obviously not a free place. These are little things that mean alot to Europeans and Canadians!
Why am I wasting my time with this?
Sure if PC means Windows, its about time, but don't hold your breath. The system has _extreme_ jitter, killing the bass, the harmonics from that destroy the mids and the highs sound like sandpaper on sandpaper. You know the sound -- Its not 'different' its awful!
:)
As long as there is interoperability with Unix and similar systems and embedded systems, there is a future. Microsoft has no sound future. (read it both ways) It is _extremely_ likely all will be reverse-engineered, if necessary to acheive this. Hackers are generally very skeptical audiophiles that know cat5 cable is better than 'beastie wire' for speakers, etc. We are likely to assure this equipment is used to its best. Its HIGH quality, not HiFi. (Its WLAN, not WiFi, too.
Personally I like my active monitors (Genelec) connected to a EUR 25,-- soundcard with FreeBSD running on an amd64. Headphones can be useful but that is most likely an embedded solution. A small radio unit in an "Ipod" (It will always be called Ipod -- like "Walkman" is quite generic for any portable Philips cassette player with headphones.) will do wonders. Bluetooth is dirt-cheap radio, but the standard bandwidth must increase to produce convincing sound in a good set of headphones. (24*2*48000 + overhead, at a minimum.)
Sure, that is easy to make. Lets hope its done.
The only aparently safe way to use mail is in a Unix shell. I've got my doubts about webmail too. Its a bit too slow compared to on-line mailing, but it may contain other unwanted elements, depending on the mailer. I've never had a real problem with any worm using mutt, the Unix mailer.
Very recently some joker in France sent me a worm that prevented me from reporting the abuse. The solution was simple: Delete the worm, restart mutt and mail it to abuse@wanadoo.fr. (Personal note: Wanadoo sounds like wanabee, they are little known among 'my crowd' and somewhat of a worry. This is not intended as put down to the French!) So the moral here is simply if you use Unix, call it *BSD or Linux, you may not be 100% safe, but certainly safer than using Outlook which should be called "Lookout".
Zero click exploits seem hardly new to me. Aren't most exploits, atleast in the past, done without the victim being imeadiately aware? This is from the computer-litterate camp.
It wouldn't take that much brains to jam sattelites from home dishes. 2m dishes are more common in Southern California than swimming pools! (and far more common elsewhere) It may take quite some power, but pulsing a magnetron tuned to the right frequency would do the trick. EXTREME care must be taken to not burn out the mixer and/or LNA of the satellite itself. In the US, one must be mindful of the FEDS but they certainly have better things to do. Feeding more than about 100W to a 5m dish is pushing the safety of the satellite. With some very simple arithmetic, that is 625W in a std 2m dish and 2.5kW in a 'monster 1m' European dish. Pulsing a magnetron (kind of like the thing in your nuker) it is possible to get a mega-watt or more, so be VERY careful if you try this at home.
Alternately if 1000 people put a watt into their 2m dish from many areas, a similar effect would be acheived and there would be no possibility of tracking down the signals.
Certainly if you are to do this stuff, know what you are doing and know the laws against it! Ofcourse this is old hat. In an election year, everything is marketed to look new.....
Linux is Unix if they say so or not!
I will go as far to say my very respected bank, Postbank NV, Nederland might be playing with Windows. I've never seen a BSOD or a Windows popup (the ultimate embarassment for a financial institution) it seems there may be some NT in use, all BOSD and pop-ups suppressed) They do use PCs which sadly are labeled as Windows machines.
Postbank is dedicated to Unix where it matters -- Solaris and more recently OpenBSD. Going offtopic a bit, a group of hackers challenged a crashed XP system for giving the times for our NS trein (wrong ofcourse, but a demand for a refund failed.)
Best advice: Emulate Windows but NEVER give in to Microsoft for 'mission critical' software. Unix is universal in Nederland and Windows is simply embarassment. Its time to see the Inferiour
Operating System see it demise. The i386 is dead and so is Microsoft.
This is utterly disgraceful to use the word 'hacker' this way. My views mirror those of most hackers and are quite well known. This is low. Hacktivists are nothing more than mouse clickers on low bandwidth connections. This is lower than script kiddies.
I am 100% against Bush, as are a sizable majority of Europeans. It is nice to see Americans turn against him and he'll do himself in without the help of hacktivists and violent protesters. There are simply better ways to replace George W. Bush!
Right :-)
/etc/resolv.conf .....
# ifconfig fxp0 inet 192.168.101.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
Oh,
# route add default 192.168.101.1
# vi
Seriously i (decapitalised) don't see them ever resolving anything. Wired is tired. Yes, they ship all those ads overseas too. It costs a bundle.
Finally remember they ripped off Mondo (Reality Hackers and even something else before that) for the whole concept.
R.I.P.
There is also "one phone", over time the novelty of even the biggest, most complex machine (the thrust to develop Unix) ever built by mankind becomes commonplace and loses it proper name.
Allot of people have and carry a 'phone'. I can just see the day when people refer to their $250 terminal as an 'internet'. What next, a 'unix'?
The mobile phone is the Internet for the poor!
(Damn right, that would in realative terms, buy one hell of a machine for many of us in the west.)
I think allot of people don't know what a 'TV out' is then.
NOS, here in Holland is sending its feed to one provider only, KPN, and using their infrastructure as a 'giant lan'. (Actually it's a mbone setup on the fake 'A' range like 227.0.0.0/8.) KPN does not offer great bandwidth, so it may require a few ADSL lines coming into a real provider to proxy it fully.
.ram (RealAudio) format if they want to sell more subscriptions. ADPCM (.wmf) works and is not patentable and the MPEG formats, particularly 4, are far better. BBC is known for innovation, so when they get MPEG4 and .ogg audio in a streaming container like .avi they have lots of new customers.
Apart from a stunt like the above, (which is probably going to cost KPN its Internet business) it is technically difficult to limit a true netcast. I was rather surprised how easy it was to get on the BBC netcast without paying. This is only for hack sake. The price BBC charges is fair and I intend to subscribe. They should completely ditch the
What does it take to hijack a cable TV head-end or an STL? (studio transmitter link) If your TV tells you to "put your head between your legs and ...." wouldn't it be prudent to verify the information? While most pranksters would rather play an "XXX" film or get some political message accross a more devious action is certainly more thinkable than the unthinkable.
If you are not directly in an emergency, atleast take an effort to verify it. On 11 september 2001 my inital reaction was that it may be a 'super hack' and someone (some group) had managed to take control of all the news media from the US to Europe. In the tech company I was working, this was seen as a real possibility. Only after a couple calls actually confirmed it, did the shock and horror of it really set in.
While one should never trust one type of media, verification from multiple sources is very secure. EBS has served its purpose and EAS is certainly obsolete. It is however just one more source of information, little as it may actually represent.
What's the point of this? First, its not true P2P if a central server is involved. It has been proven that no watermark system can work no matter how much funding is pumped in. It has also been shown that any watermark can be detected and stripped out, even if it is encrypted, due to the nature of how watermarks actually work. All DRM will fail in the end as will DMCA and any other laws trying to protect it. Forget it.
Most people will pay for something they really want anyways. Most 'pirated' matterial is ditched. There are cryptographic methods to make micro-payments that don't require a 'bank'. This whole method may look clever to some, but absolutely __nothing__ is new! Don't forget the rule is "try before you buy". This is a general principle of copyright law (fair use) and its not likely to change anytime soon. Internet is 'airplay', 'airplay' is good advertising. When did that change?
It so happens I agree with this in principle. Chances are most drugs simply don't work or even reduce performance, have a very short-lived effect or simply have dangerous side-effects and long term effects that would put off use if there was simply more known. In the present atmosphere, it is hard to determine what the truth is.
By making a whole issue of this, one message (perhaps very wrong) is loud and clear: Drugs will make you a better performer. We actually don't know what the truth is. If the matter was more open, athletes and their doctors could make more 'informed' decisions. Like in nations that play "War on Drugs", the problem can only get worse as education becomes unreliable or non-existant. The problem is prohibition and not the substances and techniques used.
Olympic (and other) athletes must be absurdly cautious with everything they eat, every supliment they take and of course, think twice before taking any prescribed or OTC medication. I've been told by some of the athletes themselves that one cup of coffee is fine but the second may get you in trouble. Now that all medal winners will be tested; Who will they be able to trust? Since there are so many banned substances, many easy to detect, it would be too simple get the medal of someone stripped. It has become much like the situation of government agents planting drugs on someone for an easy bust.
How history repeats. The Pakistani Brain is said to be the first virus 'in the wild' and it is a true virus. Another form of illegal copy protection was tried by a rather respected engineering software company. If you forgot the dongle, the whole LAN (except for the Unix machines) slowed down to a snail's pace. The solution was to re-install Windows95. Even for a small company this was very expensive. The vendor offered a non-protected version to make up for this. They hopefully removed what was probably the first true Windows virus. (True viruses are _extremely_ rare.)
Is there any question who to sue? Any use of malware for copy protection is unjustified and clearly in violation of the law in most places. This kind of crap has been tried before and it never benefits anyone.
There must be (a possibly bigger) market in blocking mobile phones? Make the tuned circuits resonate at lower frequencies (larger) and block mobile phones. Its so obvious as a legal way to enforce 'quiet zones' in so many places. Modern mobile phones are at 800, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz. Larger elements and the added bonus mobile phones are close to harmonic intervals makes for a simplified design.
There is quite a bit of information (in books, not http) how to do this. Is about as 'hi-tech' as anti-theft tags on CDs. At five or ten bucks a m^2 there would definitely be a market for a variety of purposes, and frequencies, including wlan. This beats the hell out of active jamming. Except for perhaps the US, this is definitely NOT patentable.
What's this "broadcast flag" shit? I guess anything is possible over there these days. If you can run a compiler, seriously, use mplayer and forget about copy protection/DRM stuff for good.
This is redundant, but not knowing what its going to cost beforehand is the downfall of Open Group. $45,000 is one thing, half a million is another matter.
Linux has indeed been repackaged and registered. (To avoid flames from those that don't already know, I won't say which ones.) Linux as in say Gentoo and BSD in say FreeBSD are very successful now and it would be hard to justify the value in risking so much money for a seemingly worthless qualification.
I'm sure Suse (Novel) and Redhat will actually seek registration as commercial products. If X/Open would agree to fixed priced terms, they would do far more business. (Are you seeing this Open Group?) All things considered, this is like the MSCE scam and might have a negative impact.
The above mentioned BSD and Linux have treated me very well on a number of hardware platforms. Keep up the good work.
The far older Unix talk, write and even mail still work the best. Understandably UDP can be hard to set up on limited "Internet" connections and most don't have their own MTA anymore. However this is all interoperatable and often p2p. Even mail used on the commandline is faster than any of the popular IM services, if you (or your company) have a MTA.
If you can't figure out how to make it work over NAT or are stuck with DHCP, get a shell account. Even in the clear, it is presumably more trusted than dealing with large companies. On a common trusted server, its all encrypted anyways. Its worked for me long before any IM services existed and its always nicer to use the commandline, though clickity-click scripts could be developed.
Maybe some take it a bit hard, but the days you can "type yourself to a fortune" are aparently gone. Since supporting hardware is about the only purpose of any software, it should be completely open. (as well as the hardware) People want something to show and a new gadget is just the thing.
From my perspective: "Software is a necessary evil". Even if the software costs 10x more to develop, people buy the hardware and the software is "free". It works for me and presumably this is also the prevailing opinion.
If you have a great new gadget, isn't it really stupid not to open the source and allow it to work on any platform? Its sickening how many pieces of Windows software need to be reverse-engineered to have a reliable product. These companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Software is a part of hardware and belongs within the hardware relm. If everyone can see your source code, many, many more will buy your gadget.
The days of software without hardware are essentially gone. You can copy software with no effort. It takes special knowledge and allot of experience to copy hardware. Therefore its very safe to allow both to be open. There are a few areas where custom software is the solution. In most cases the solutions will come from individual programmers or small companies. The big corporate days are over! Thank God.
Its not that Intel will go away anytime soon, but AMD appears to be ahead, certainly with 64bit (amd64) processors and perhaps even with its 32bit offerings. Intel seems to play down the 64-bit processors, perhaps because Microsoft won't have a true 64-bit OS for many years to come.
In the Unix world, we've had 64-bit OS's for many years running on SPARC, alpha and now amd64. My "64-bit future" started over ten years ago! There is certainly a 32-bit market created largely by M$, but M$ and 32-bit systems are past their prime. If I was Intel, I'd push the 64-bit hardware no matter how loud M$ cries foul.
It certainly seems, IMO, that AMD sees Unix as the future and produces far more compatible products. The Taiwanese motherbord makers should realise this too and stop fooling themselves. I'd gladly pay double for a mobo with quality features and less non-sence. Asus already seems to be doing this. The new (fairly low-cost 32-bit) A7V600 is a good example. It didn't take long to get all features, and more, useful or otherwise, to work under FreeBSD. (Even works well with 1.5GB RAM @ 400MHz while a maximum of 1GB is supported, presumably for Windows.) The Gigabyte GA7N-400 was an expensive disaster; Windows this and Windows that. I looks like it could work well with Linux, 400MHz RAM and a athlonXP-3200+.
I use computers for mathematical and logical pursuits. A "power user" in otherwords. I'm not impressed with gaming and 'cheap' polygon rendering. It takes a computing power of a true sort to produce holograms, stronger crypto, and related calculation intensive results. I do use a dual-Xenon, but its been a chore to tame. It was given to me with Win-XP installed! Linux-2.6.x seems very promising and FreeBSD-5.x might even be better? While all this is high-end equipment, its worth noting that Linux on a athlon-1200 is much faster (upto 10x) than Win-XP on the dual-Xenon! If people could only realise what they already have.
In closing, I don't see allot of merrit in using the latest Intel systems. The amd64 (Opteron/Athlon64-FX) will be the fastest thing on the affordable market for some time to come.