Hmmm... looks like the itunes.com domain in the US has been registered since 1998. I'm not sure, though, whether it's been Apple's possession all that time. If not, it might be interesting to look at exactly what date it came into Apple's possession. If the date is after November 7, 2000, then yeah, he'd obviously have had to be psychic.
That said, regardless of who did what first, Apple's almost certainly going to argue that someone else having an "iTunes" domain name in a commercial space in a country where they're offering their product and store, and that person doing something with said domain that pertains to music, is obviously cause for confusion.
(I dare say it's more cause for confusion than Apple being called Apple and selling music, whilst at the same time the Beatles' music company is called Apple.)
Apple has not described these as "highly critical" to my knowledge.
That label has been applied by Secunia, the Danish security company that has, in the past, gotten press for indicating that Windows is secure and OS X isn't, no matter what tests might show.
The browser fixes are potentially significant, but the bulk of the others involve services that aren't even on by default, or things that most users wouldn't deal with.
I'm considering an iMac (or eMac, but the iMac is spiffier) as a "family" computer, too. My wife and I use laptops, and our daughter (now 5) has, for the past 2-3 years, grown up with laptops, but something with a discrete keyboard and mouse would probably be more durable in the hands of a child I've nicknamed "Stitch."
"Wipe clean and reinstall" is all well and good for a current home computer, sure.
When I'm dealing with a Win9x box in the 300-500MHz category that someone's been using at a business since Cthulhu-knows-when, though... it's less of an option.
For starters, their OS media is probably conveniently buried somewhere in a storage unit, along with fascinating things like boxes of old SCO diskettes, badge-engineered copies of Windows 3.0 that could be bought from companies other than Microsoft, and... general cruft. Maybe the license key is with it. Maybe.:)
More importantly, though, they've usually got 3.2 metric sh*tloads of specialized business apps on there that only 100 people on the planet have even heard of, the media for those is even MORE lost, the companies that made them are long gone, and each app has its own misguided 1990s-vintage approach to licensing or "copy-protection" anyway. Bleah.
Nope, reformatting and recreating that steaming heap actually wouldn't take me LESS time...
I can only imagine how amazed! he'll be to find his desktop wallpaper set to "Tubgirl" and all his system sounds changed to loud, breathless spoken-word retellings of ghastly acts that are illegal in most states.
I don't touch people's home computers, for starters.
I deal with computers at businesses, 10-200 employees in general. Computers that should not be misused, on the desks of people who should know better.
Simply put, if somebody's home PC gets screwed up, it's not worth my time to fix it, since 1) they can't afford it as you've pointed out, and 2) it'll be hosed again next week.
I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to point out to my clients that hey, if they run something other than Windows, this will not happen to them.
That, and there are some malware that exist specifically to download and install new malware (or "replacement" malware if some has been removed.:)
Of course, some of the removal tools insist on having a network connection, which is stupid since more stuff infests the machine while you're trying to remove the existing junk. Sigh.:(
When I'm going through cleaning stuff out of a machine, it's usually pretty obvious what happened. There'll be a lot of evidence that the user's been going to "free"-whatever sites, or online casinos, or pr0n sites, or whatever.
Was cleaning out a machine (and this was at an office - I deal with the SMB market - and the nice lady insisted that she didn't go to any of those sites. I just smiled and nodded at all the casino web site cookies, given that Vegas is about the #1 destination for folks here.:)
Most folks blame their bosses, I've found. "He has keys, and he uses everyone else's computers after hours." Probably true, too!
In my opinion, most spyware is easy enough to get rid of using tools like Spybot-S&D, SpySweeper and AdAware. The one category that I've found harder to remove are the ones that embed themselves into the Winsock chain and redirect network features.
I cleaned out one PC last month - it wasn't infected too bad, only several dozen things for the scanners to complain about, and I've dealt with systems that had several hundred! - but even after everything seemed to be gone, its default search URL and things like that kept getting hijacked. I had to grab a tool to fix the Winsock chain; some malware had slipped itself in there and was screwing things up.
Oh, I neglected to mention that in my dealings with spyware infected systems, although I've seen (and exorcised) spyware on everything from Windows 95 to Windows XP (SP1 for sure, not sure if I've cleaned it off an SP2 box just yet), for some strange reason none of the Mac users I support seem to have gotten any yet.
I'm a mercen... er, I mean, an independent technology consultant out in the field, and when someone has so much malware on a Windows XP box that they can't even log in to the poor beast, they're generally more than happy to pay psychic-hotline rates to get someone out there who can and will fix it for them.
I travel with a frequently-updated set of tools for exorcising various demons from PC's, and am accustomed to mucking about in the registry, winsock stacks and other oh-so-fun places to finish up the job.
Equifax consistently gave me some stupid internal error.
TransUnion gave me an error saying something was down or offline and therefore it couldn't cooperate.
One out of three... hopefully by the time you eastern folks get this, they'll all at least be functional.
THERAPEUTIC vaccine.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You''ve got to have that word in there.
It's a vaccine because it "teaches" the immune system how to deal with HIV - at least to the extent of keeping it from getting worse, and in some percentage of cases, enough to drastically lower the viral load and rate of transmission.
But it's not a PREVENTIVE vaccine like most widespread vaccines, and it can't be mass-produced since it uses material from each patient and is custom-made for them.
It's still potentially a great leap in terms of treatment of HIV/AIDS, though.
As has been pointed out over on Groklaw, under the terms of the USL-BSDI agreement, USL basically couldn't go suing anyone for doing stuff with UNIX unkless the party being sued had licensed UNIX from them.
Sooooo... by buying a SCO license, and thus establishing a contractual relationship with SCO, you basically put your name on the list of parties SCO could potentially file a lawsuit against.
I suppose so, with a little heads-up display or something. Though I've got 20/20 vision or close to it, and I'm quite accustomed to using aural cues to determine the location of things I can't readily get a visual on.
Presumably at some point this will be miniaturized to the point that it can be built into something the size of a couple hearing aids, or at worst a pair of headphones? It could be useful not just for the blind and vision-impaired, but also for people who have to work in dark or opaque environments (off the top of my head, fire rescue in thick smoke, etc).
80 million seems a little low, perhaps, since I think I've seen single 8-meter-class telescopes up on Mauna Kea cost more than that. But then, there's the cost of getting stuff up Mauna Kea, too.:)
Anyway, yes, there are certain advantages to terrestrial facilities - being far cheaper is one of them. That derives largely from the absence of the cost of getting them into orbit, of course. You can also make things so big they won't fit on a rocket, etc.
Of course, there are limitations, as well. Want to observe ultraviolet-wavelength energy? Head for space - the atmosphere absorbs most of it. Things past UV on the spectrum might also be easier to observe there.
Oh, and Hubble doesn't care about terrestrial weather. I can assure you the LBT is going to get a lot more grief from high thin cirrus clouds than Hubble does.:)
I actually work in support of this mission...
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 2, Informative
A lot of observing and imaging of comets and their dust comas, and analysis of the resulting images, is being carried out by Jana Pittichova, a postdoctoral fellow (and triathlete!) on Karen's research team, primarily using the University's 88-inch telescope atop Mauna Kea.
Being one of the operators on that telescope, I've worked with Jana on several nights - probably one-third to one-half of the Meech team's total observing this semester.
Although I understand how the observations are carried out from a purely operational and practical standpoint, I haven't seen what the actual analysis looks like... and even if I did, the odds are good that I'd need a lot of explaining, since I'm not a Ph.D. myself!
No yacht, but unless their definition of "the southwestern United States" includes Hawaii (which would make it far more technically correct than most), the top of Mauna Kea might suffice as a place to watch it.
And I'm not just referring to people in the Mac Business Unit, either. Remember that load of G5's that showed up for the XBox 2 developers? :)
(Of course, depending who you ask, those Macs may actually have wound up running some PPC64 port of Windows XP. *shudders*)
(I'd watch from the summit but it's gonna be colder up there.)
The most convenient airports are ITO and KOA in that order. :)
That said, regardless of who did what first, Apple's almost certainly going to argue that someone else having an "iTunes" domain name in a commercial space in a country where they're offering their product and store, and that person doing something with said domain that pertains to music, is obviously cause for confusion.
(I dare say it's more cause for confusion than Apple being called Apple and selling music, whilst at the same time the Beatles' music company is called Apple.)
The first instance of "case-sensitive" should, indeed, read "case-insensitive."
(The second instance of "case-sensitive" is correct as written.)
Apple has not described these as "highly critical" to my knowledge.
That label has been applied by Secunia, the Danish security company that has, in the past, gotten press for indicating that Windows is secure and OS X isn't, no matter what tests might show.
The browser fixes are potentially significant, but the bulk of the others involve services that aren't even on by default, or things that most users wouldn't deal with.
Sky falling, next 10 miles.
I'm considering an iMac (or eMac, but the iMac is spiffier) as a "family" computer, too. My wife and I use laptops, and our daughter (now 5) has, for the past 2-3 years, grown up with laptops, but something with a discrete keyboard and mouse would probably be more durable in the hands of a child I've nicknamed "Stitch."
"Wipe clean and reinstall" is all well and good for a current home computer, sure.
:)
When I'm dealing with a Win9x box in the 300-500MHz category that someone's been using at a business since Cthulhu-knows-when, though... it's less of an option.
For starters, their OS media is probably conveniently buried somewhere in a storage unit, along with fascinating things like boxes of old SCO diskettes, badge-engineered copies of Windows 3.0 that could be bought from companies other than Microsoft, and... general cruft. Maybe the license key is with it. Maybe.
More importantly, though, they've usually got 3.2 metric sh*tloads of specialized business apps on there that only 100 people on the planet have even heard of, the media for those is even MORE lost, the companies that made them are long gone, and each app has its own misguided 1990s-vintage approach to licensing or "copy-protection" anyway. Bleah.
Nope, reformatting and recreating that steaming heap actually wouldn't take me LESS time...
Yep, LSPFIX rules. I'm pretty sure that's the one I used to get rid of the last shreds of evilness on the computer last month. :)
I can only imagine how amazed! he'll be to find his desktop wallpaper set to "Tubgirl" and all his system sounds changed to loud, breathless spoken-word retellings of ghastly acts that are illegal in most states.
I'll be waiting for the follow-up... ;)
I deal with computers at businesses, 10-200 employees in general. Computers that should not be misused, on the desks of people who should know better.
Simply put, if somebody's home PC gets screwed up, it's not worth my time to fix it, since 1) they can't afford it as you've pointed out, and 2) it'll be hosed again next week.
I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to point out to my clients that hey, if they run something other than Windows, this will not happen to them.
Of course, some of the removal tools insist on having a network connection, which is stupid since more stuff infests the machine while you're trying to remove the existing junk. Sigh.
When I'm going through cleaning stuff out of a machine, it's usually pretty obvious what happened. There'll be a lot of evidence that the user's been going to "free"-whatever sites, or online casinos, or pr0n sites, or whatever.
Was cleaning out a machine (and this was at an office - I deal with the SMB market - and the nice lady insisted that she didn't go to any of those sites. I just smiled and nodded at all the casino web site cookies, given that Vegas is about the #1 destination for folks here. :)
Most folks blame their bosses, I've found. "He has keys, and he uses everyone else's computers after hours." Probably true, too!
Don't forget to also offer spyware removal services! Get 'em coming and going..
In my opinion, most spyware is easy enough to get rid of using tools like Spybot-S&D, SpySweeper and AdAware. The one category that I've found harder to remove are the ones that embed themselves into the Winsock chain and redirect network features.
I cleaned out one PC last month - it wasn't infected too bad, only several dozen things for the scanners to complain about, and I've dealt with systems that had several hundred! - but even after everything seemed to be gone, its default search URL and things like that kept getting hijacked. I had to grab a tool to fix the Winsock chain; some malware had slipped itself in there and was screwing things up.
Oh, I neglected to mention that in my dealings with spyware infected systems, although I've seen (and exorcised) spyware on everything from Windows 95 to Windows XP (SP1 for sure, not sure if I've cleaned it off an SP2 box just yet), for some strange reason none of the Mac users I support seem to have gotten any yet.
I travel with a frequently-updated set of tools for exorcising various demons from PC's, and am accustomed to mucking about in the registry, winsock stacks and other oh-so-fun places to finish up the job.
I got mine, too, here in Hawaii.
Well, for SOME values of "got."
Experian worked.
Equifax consistently gave me some stupid internal error.
TransUnion gave me an error saying something was down or offline and therefore it couldn't cooperate.
One out of three... hopefully by the time you eastern folks get this, they'll all at least be functional.
You''ve got to have that word in there.
It's a vaccine because it "teaches" the immune system how to deal with HIV - at least to the extent of keeping it from getting worse, and in some percentage of cases, enough to drastically lower the viral load and rate of transmission.
But it's not a PREVENTIVE vaccine like most widespread vaccines, and it can't be mass-produced since it uses material from each patient and is custom-made for them.
It's still potentially a great leap in terms of treatment of HIV/AIDS, though.
Get thee to The Register, and read the BOFH stuff. ALL of it.
That'll give you a few ideas to get started.
As has been pointed out over on Groklaw, under the terms of the USL-BSDI agreement, USL basically couldn't go suing anyone for doing stuff with UNIX unkless the party being sued had licensed UNIX from them.
:)
Sooooo... by buying a SCO license, and thus establishing a contractual relationship with SCO, you basically put your name on the list of parties SCO could potentially file a lawsuit against.
Splendid, isn't it?
I suppose so, with a little heads-up display or something. Though I've got 20/20 vision or close to it, and I'm quite accustomed to using aural cues to determine the location of things I can't readily get a visual on.
But then, I'm a birdwatcher... YMMV.
Presumably at some point this will be miniaturized to the point that it can be built into something the size of a couple hearing aids, or at worst a pair of headphones? It could be useful not just for the blind and vision-impaired, but also for people who have to work in dark or opaque environments (off the top of my head, fire rescue in thick smoke, etc).
Anyway, yes, there are certain advantages to terrestrial facilities - being far cheaper is one of them. That derives largely from the absence of the cost of getting them into orbit, of course. You can also make things so big they won't fit on a rocket, etc.
Of course, there are limitations, as well. Want to observe ultraviolet-wavelength energy? Head for space - the atmosphere absorbs most of it. Things past UV on the spectrum might also be easier to observe there.
Oh, and Hubble doesn't care about terrestrial weather. I can assure you the LBT is going to get a lot more grief from high thin cirrus clouds than Hubble does.
A lot of observing and imaging of comets and their dust comas, and analysis of the resulting images, is being carried out by Jana Pittichova, a postdoctoral fellow (and triathlete!) on Karen's research team, primarily using the University's 88-inch telescope atop Mauna Kea.
Being one of the operators on that telescope, I've worked with Jana on several nights - probably one-third to one-half of the Meech team's total observing this semester.
Although I understand how the observations are carried out from a purely operational and practical standpoint, I haven't seen what the actual analysis looks like... and even if I did, the odds are good that I'd need a lot of explaining, since I'm not a Ph.D. myself!
No yacht, but unless their definition of "the southwestern United States" includes Hawaii (which would make it far more technically correct than most), the top of Mauna Kea might suffice as a place to watch it.