I'm not sure that comparing a FitBit to other wearables (like a smartwatch) is fair. I think learn more by comparing it to other exercise equipment - you know, like that treadmill you use for a coat rack in the spare room.
The Kickstarter used the phrase 'Digital Version' in some places and 'Digital Download' in others. I see no mention of DRM-free, so all they have to do is hand out Amazon credit to those who complain about the streaming solution. But no, they'd rather pay out a bunch of money than give people something that matches what they paid for. I'm thinking everyone who has a piece of this (the production company, any stars that get a piece of the action) ought to probably demand an accounting to make sure Hollywood didn't charge them for the returned cash...
is itself a major problem these days. I'm using a Droid 4 because it's one of the few with any kind of keyboard available. You may or may not like Android, but you can always put CyanogenMod on it, if you want to move further away from the carrier's grasping tentacles.
Look at how artists get paid today. The baseline assumption in your statement is that DRM prevents piracy, for which there is exactly zero evidence. So any way that an artist gets paid today is a way they get paid in a world without DRM.
Some places (and I've worked at one) had policies that could be read as them owning anything I did while employed, but could also be read as just applying to things in their area of interest (video test equipment, as it happened). I talked to my boss about it when I came on and he assured me that in fact it was only intended to read as applying to things that were related in some way to their business - stuff that was totally unrelated they didn't care about.
Now that was verbal, not written, but I suggest that you start by asking the question, and see what they say.
If it doesn't have the same diag partition, then NewEgg didn't do their usual refurb testing on it. Which means that there's a chance it's not in as good a shape as the others. So send it back and make them give you one that's been properly refurbed. There's no excuse for them not to have wiped the drive in the process of testing it before they resold it.
OK, I wanted to try to find out if there were encrypted data at some offset in a chunk of random data, I'd start with Knuth's tests for randomness. I'd break the thing up into decent sized chunks (1 meg or so) and run a bunch of different randomness tests on each chunk and on the whole data set and see if any patterns emerge.
The thing is, even if the encrypted data looks pretty random, it's likely to look DIFFERENT than the surrounding random data.
The worse problem is that if you have someone who's asking you if there is encrypted data, and they find some bogus pattern in the random noise, then you've got a problem because you can't prove that there ISN'T any data there. If you are being prosecuted in a normal US court, you might get away with this (if they can't prove that you've got anything encrypted, it may be hard to hold you in contempt trying to get you to give up the keys), but if you fall under the sway of some intelligence agency that doesn't like the look of you, it's not likely that they'll just let you go because you claim there isn't any data.
If the franchise agreement really says you get expanded basic in exchange for them getting the franchise, then I'd have a word with the township's lawyers. Depending on how the deal is stated, it's probably Comcast's problem to make this work, not yours. I suspect that if the town's lawyers had a word with Comcast's lawyers, then someone in Comcast's engineering department would sort things out right quick.
Nothing you can do will get the users to read the message. NOTHING. The best you can do is to make sure that the error will live in a log somewhere (with timestamps and perhaps screen shots if possible) so that you can figure out what they are talking about.
There's simply no way to force people to pay attention to error messages on the screen - they are focused on doing something, and the error dialog is in the way, so they dismiss it as fast as possible. Then they complain that it's not working.
There's just no way around it - they won't read, they don't read, and they can't be made to read. Give up trying to make them read, and instead find a way to get information in the absence of user assistance.
No one is going to switch search tools because some particular newspaper is in Bing's index and not Google's. If Bing wants to get the traffic, all they have to do is return better results. Buying exclusive access to index the WSJ isn't going to help, because anyone who actually cares about what the WSJ has to say specifically will just go to the WSJ site, not to Bing.
This would be a waste of MS money, and would hurt the WSJ by having them be found less often (Bing isn't yet as popular as Google, as I understand things), thus getting them less hits and less notice. Unless Murdoch doesn't care about the WSJ's future, this is overall likely a bad move for him.
If Bing wants the traffic, they have to return better results. Eventually, that will translate into users, but it's not a quick thing.
This would be a stupid move on Microsoft's part, and probably a bad plan on Murdoch's part. That doesn't mean they won't go forward, but it's a dumb idea all around.
I can't conceive of why working in the gambling industry would be a mark against you. It wouldn't make sense. You're either good at writing software or you aren't, it really doesn't matter what industry. The only possible downside is that it's not a large industry, so you probably can't make a lifetime out of working in the same industry. But so what? So far, in the last 17 years, I've worked in the medical equipment field (EEG monitors, blood pressure monitors), industrial non-medical ultrasound (one project in the fish farming industry, one in the lumber industry), the petroleum retail industry (credit card interfaces for gas stations), the cable TV industry (software for video on demand systems), the video test equipment industry (windows device drivers for custom cards) and then back to petroleum retail.
No one who wants to hire good software people is going to care. No one.
If jailbroken iPhones can hurt cell towers, then it's already too late, because there are already jailbroken iPhones. So how does making jailbreaks illegal help this problem? It doesn't.
I'm supposed to believe that Microsoft couldn't replace a couple of drivers with code of their own, and thus ended up open-sourcing a large codebase to comply with the GPL? Sorry, no.
Everything Microsoft does is about making money. They open sourced this code because they believe they can use that in some way to make a buck. End of story.
Use an encrypted query to match against the encrypted text. The problem is, if the text is REALLY encrypted, then there shouldn't be enough information to do this - the encrypting of the original text should make it impossible to even match against it.
If it didn't, then an attacker who got hold of the encrypted text and some of your encrypted queries might well be able to mount an attack based on commonalities between the two.
I can't say I'm that surprised. I actually canceled a free subscription to EGM (they had a promotion a year or two back) because it just wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Being a print publication (and the attendant information lags) was bad enough, but their staff wrote like a bunch of high-schoolers. If I'm going to bother to kill a tree, I at least want some decent writing.
While automatic updates are a good reason to leave machines on, they are also a good reason to leave machines off. At my last company (about 1-1.5 years ago) we got hit with a bad update to the AV software over a weekend. Any machine that was on did the update, re-scanned and trashed a bunch of files belonging to things like MS Office. Those machines (like mine) that weren't on over the weekend did not because the update got fixed before Monday morning.
Those of us who were shutdown over the weekend had to wait a few minutes (like always) for updates, but the machines that were on were hosed for half the day.
But, (how can I say this delicately...Oh, I can't) DUHHHH! A $79 device is NOT, in all likelyhood, going to have particularly wonderous encryption built in. For 99% of the population, this is NOT an issue, I mean, who's going to bother with sniffing your keyboard when they can probably more easily get what they are after? For those it does matter for, I suspect they are already the paranoid types anyway, and wouldn't have touched these things with a 10 foot pole to begin with.
Basically, my point is: This is not news worthy or even slightly surprising.
That all web designers should be forced to work through 56K modem links (so they understand what they put the rest of us through with their flash animations, etc, etc). This device, properly placed in a phone closet, with the latencies turned up ever so slowly between the relevant designers and the in-house servers should do the trick nicely...
I DON'T know about cheap, but my phone closet is cooled by a Sanyo A/C unit. After we got it properly installed, I've found it to be very reliable.
One thing to note about two-piece units (like my Sanyo): If you want to use it in the winter, make sure your installer works the proper magic at install time. If not, then when the exterior temperature drops below about 40 degrees F, and the unit turns on, the cold changes the pressure differentials in the compressor and the limit switches trip, shutting it down.
Unfortunately, I suspect that $1000 is about what you are going to have to pay - small non-window unit A/C units just aren't in that high of a demand.
Here's a thought: Build a box with ductwork & fans that you can mount a small window unit into. The box would have two ducts and at least one fan. The fan would circulate air in the one duct and out the other, both ducts (big dryer ductwork?) would go out the window.
When I saw this article, I looked at Contentville and found their disclamers about UMI. I then asked my boss (a Ph.d. in acoustics) what the real deal was. Here's his answer:
The way it works, your Ph.D. must be "published", and open to anyone who wants to see it. That usually means that you pay to have it bound, with a copy for yourself, one for your advisor, one for your university's library, and one copy sent
to the University of Michigan's "University Microfilms", where it is dutifully imaged and saved. The thing started because, let's say you saw a
reference to my thesis, maybe in a journal article I published, and you want a copy. It would be a pain in my backside to make a copy for you, and
everyone else that asked, even if you did offer to pay for my copying costs. So... University Microfilms (UM) was established a number of years
ago, so that when you called me, I could just send you to them, giving you the reference number to my thesis. In exchange for reducing my hassle, I
assigned UM the right to copy the thesis and sell it to you, at a small carrying fee. I get no royalty on what is my copyright work, but I also get
no hassle. Now just because someone buys a copy, they don't have license to plagiarize, only to use, etc. It also allows people to always get a copy of your thesis, even if you're dead or unreachable. The guy who complained doesn't realize what the deal is, unless he specifically refused to have
his work submitted, but most universities require it as part of the process, because they also, don't want the hassle. This just looks like the e-commerce version of something that has been in place for years (at least 35-40).
Unfortunately: No. The summary of the patent just talks about tracking users preferences via a mechanism like cookies. The fact that doing so is often combined with Banner ads is irrelevant - banner ads per say are NOT covered under this patent.
I expect that this means that either DoubleClick,etc. are going to be in court for a while, or they are going to pay CNET to license. Either way, nothing will change.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking the respondents were all fresh out of school, and haven't had their absurd expectations ground down by the real world yet...
I'm not sure that comparing a FitBit to other wearables (like a smartwatch) is fair. I think learn more by comparing it to other exercise equipment - you know, like that treadmill you use for a coat rack in the spare room.
The Kickstarter used the phrase 'Digital Version' in some places and 'Digital Download' in others. I see no mention of DRM-free, so all they have to do is hand out Amazon credit to those who complain about the streaming solution. But no, they'd rather pay out a bunch of money than give people something that matches what they paid for. I'm thinking everyone who has a piece of this (the production company, any stars that get a piece of the action) ought to probably demand an accounting to make sure Hollywood didn't charge them for the returned cash...
But if it really is called the 'Smartphone Prevention Act', that would pretty much say everything needed about this government, wouldn't it?
is itself a major problem these days. I'm using a Droid 4 because it's one of the few with any kind of keyboard available. You may or may not like Android, but you can always put CyanogenMod on it, if you want to move further away from the carrier's grasping tentacles.
Look at how artists get paid today. The baseline assumption in your statement is that DRM prevents piracy, for which there is exactly zero evidence. So any way that an artist gets paid today is a way they get paid in a world without DRM.
Some places (and I've worked at one) had policies that could be read as them owning anything I did while employed, but could also be read as just applying to things in their area of interest (video test equipment, as it happened). I talked to my boss about it when I came on and he assured me that in fact it was only intended to read as applying to things that were related in some way to their business - stuff that was totally unrelated they didn't care about.
Now that was verbal, not written, but I suggest that you start by asking the question, and see what they say.
If it doesn't have the same diag partition, then NewEgg didn't do their usual refurb testing on it. Which means that there's a chance it's not in as good a shape as the others. So send it back and make them give you one that's been properly refurbed. There's no excuse for them not to have wiped the drive in the process of testing it before they resold it.
OK, I wanted to try to find out if there were encrypted data at some offset in a chunk of random data, I'd start with Knuth's tests for randomness. I'd break the thing up into decent sized chunks (1 meg or so) and run a bunch of different randomness tests on each chunk and on the whole data set and see if any patterns emerge.
The thing is, even if the encrypted data looks pretty random, it's likely to look DIFFERENT than the surrounding random data.
The worse problem is that if you have someone who's asking you if there is encrypted data, and they find some bogus pattern in the random noise, then you've got a problem because you can't prove that there ISN'T any data there. If you are being prosecuted in a normal US court, you might get away with this (if they can't prove that you've got anything encrypted, it may be hard to hold you in contempt trying to get you to give up the keys), but if you fall under the sway of some intelligence agency that doesn't like the look of you, it's not likely that they'll just let you go because you claim there isn't any data.
If you don't want them to access the router, change the bloody password. Like you should have done 3 years ago!
If the franchise agreement really says you get expanded basic in exchange for them getting the franchise, then I'd have a word with the township's lawyers. Depending on how the deal is stated, it's probably Comcast's problem to make this work, not yours. I suspect that if the town's lawyers had a word with Comcast's lawyers, then someone in Comcast's engineering department would sort things out right quick.
Nothing you can do will get the users to read the message. NOTHING. The best you can do is to make sure that the error will live in a log somewhere (with timestamps and perhaps screen shots if possible) so that you can figure out what they are talking about.
There's simply no way to force people to pay attention to error messages on the screen - they are focused on doing something, and the error dialog is in the way, so they dismiss it as fast as possible. Then they complain that it's not working.
There's just no way around it - they won't read, they don't read, and they can't be made to read. Give up trying to make them read, and instead find a way to get information in the absence of user assistance.
No one is going to switch search tools because some particular newspaper is in Bing's index and not Google's. If Bing wants to get the traffic, all they have to do is return better results. Buying exclusive access to index the WSJ isn't going to help, because anyone who actually cares about what the WSJ has to say specifically will just go to the WSJ site, not to Bing.
This would be a waste of MS money, and would hurt the WSJ by having them be found less often (Bing isn't yet as popular as Google, as I understand things), thus getting them less hits and less notice. Unless Murdoch doesn't care about the WSJ's future, this is overall likely a bad move for him.
If Bing wants the traffic, they have to return better results. Eventually, that will translate into users, but it's not a quick thing.
This would be a stupid move on Microsoft's part, and probably a bad plan on Murdoch's part. That doesn't mean they won't go forward, but it's a dumb idea all around.
I can't conceive of why working in the gambling industry would be a mark against you. It wouldn't make sense. You're either good at writing software or you aren't, it really doesn't matter what industry. The only possible downside is that it's not a large industry, so you probably can't make a lifetime out of working in the same industry. But so what? So far, in the last 17 years, I've worked in the medical equipment field (EEG monitors, blood pressure monitors), industrial non-medical ultrasound (one project in the fish farming industry, one in the lumber industry), the petroleum retail industry (credit card interfaces for gas stations), the cable TV industry (software for video on demand systems), the video test equipment industry (windows device drivers for custom cards) and then back to petroleum retail.
No one who wants to hire good software people is going to care. No one.
All we have to do is get the CAs to pay attention to the certs they issue, correct?
Uh-oh. We're screwed.
If jailbroken iPhones can hurt cell towers, then it's already too late, because there are already jailbroken iPhones. So how does making jailbreaks illegal help this problem? It doesn't.
I'm supposed to believe that Microsoft couldn't replace a couple of drivers with code of their own, and thus ended up open-sourcing a large codebase to comply with the GPL? Sorry, no.
Everything Microsoft does is about making money. They open sourced this code because they believe they can use that in some way to make a buck. End of story.
Use an encrypted query to match against the encrypted text. The problem is, if the text is REALLY encrypted, then there shouldn't be enough information to do this - the encrypting of the original text should make it impossible to even match against it.
If it didn't, then an attacker who got hold of the encrypted text and some of your encrypted queries might well be able to mount an attack based on commonalities between the two.
I can't say I'm that surprised. I actually canceled a free subscription to EGM (they had a promotion a year or two back) because it just wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Being a print publication (and the attendant information lags) was bad enough, but their staff wrote like a bunch of high-schoolers. If I'm going to bother to kill a tree, I at least want some decent writing.
While automatic updates are a good reason to leave machines on, they are also a good reason to leave machines off. At my last company (about 1-1.5 years ago) we got hit with a bad update to the AV software over a weekend. Any machine that was on did the update, re-scanned and trashed a bunch of files belonging to things like MS Office. Those machines (like mine) that weren't on over the weekend did not because the update got fixed before Monday morning.
Those of us who were shutdown over the weekend had to wait a few minutes (like always) for updates, but the machines that were on were hosed for half the day.
But, (how can I say this delicately...Oh, I can't) DUHHHH! A $79 device is NOT, in all likelyhood, going to have particularly wonderous encryption built in. For 99% of the population, this is NOT an issue, I mean, who's going to bother with sniffing your keyboard when they can probably more easily get what they are after? For those it does matter for, I suspect they are already the paranoid types anyway, and wouldn't have touched these things with a 10 foot pole to begin with.
Basically, my point is: This is not news worthy or even slightly surprising.
That all web designers should be forced to work through 56K modem links (so they understand what they put the rest of us through with their flash animations, etc, etc). This device, properly placed in a phone closet, with the latencies turned up ever so slowly between the relevant designers and the in-house servers should do the trick nicely...
I DON'T know about cheap, but my phone closet is cooled by a Sanyo A/C unit. After we got it properly installed, I've found it to be very reliable.
One thing to note about two-piece units (like my Sanyo): If you want to use it in the winter, make sure your installer works the proper magic at install time. If not, then when the exterior temperature drops below about 40 degrees F, and the unit turns on, the cold changes the pressure differentials in the compressor and the limit switches trip, shutting it down.
Unfortunately, I suspect that $1000 is about what you are going to have to pay - small non-window unit A/C units just aren't in that high of a demand.
Here's a thought: Build a box with ductwork & fans that you can mount a small window unit into. The box would have two ducts and at least one fan. The fan would circulate air in the one duct and out the other, both ducts (big dryer ductwork?) would go out the window.
Good luck!
When I saw this article, I looked at Contentville and found their disclamers about UMI. I then asked my boss (a Ph.d. in acoustics) what the real deal was. Here's his answer:
The way it works, your Ph.D. must be "published", and open to anyone who wants to see it. That usually means that you pay to have it bound, with a copy for yourself, one for your advisor, one for your university's library, and one copy sent
to the University of Michigan's "University Microfilms", where it is dutifully imaged and saved. The thing started because, let's say you saw a
reference to my thesis, maybe in a journal article I published, and you want a copy. It would be a pain in my backside to make a copy for you, and
everyone else that asked, even if you did offer to pay for my copying costs. So... University Microfilms (UM) was established a number of years
ago, so that when you called me, I could just send you to them, giving you the reference number to my thesis. In exchange for reducing my hassle, I
assigned UM the right to copy the thesis and sell it to you, at a small carrying fee. I get no royalty on what is my copyright work, but I also get
no hassle. Now just because someone buys a copy, they don't have license to plagiarize, only to use, etc. It also allows people to always get a copy of your thesis, even if you're dead or unreachable. The guy who complained doesn't realize what the deal is, unless he specifically refused to have
his work submitted, but most universities require it as part of the process, because they also, don't want the hassle. This just looks like the e-commerce version of something that has been in place for years (at least 35-40).
That settled it for me, at least...
Unfortunately: No. The summary of the patent just talks about tracking users preferences via a mechanism like cookies. The fact that doing so is often combined with Banner ads is irrelevant - banner ads per say are NOT covered under this patent.
I expect that this means that either DoubleClick,etc. are going to be in court for a while, or they are going to pay CNET to license. Either way, nothing will change.