If Brian Krebs can figure out that The Securities Group LLC, The Limited; Santiam Memorial Hospital, North Shore Medical Center; McCann-Erickson Worldwide; and the Greater Reno-Tahoe Economic Development Authority are part of a botnet, then the ISPs used by those companies can do the same. Which points out the real problem with spam, malware and botnets: ISPs refuse to lift a finger to secure their networks.
Every person or business identified as being part of a botnet should be notified that their Internet access is being terminated immediately and will not be restored until they fix the problem.
If Wikipedia and its current admins had been around in 1890, they would have deleted the entry for Vincent Van Gogh due to "lack of notability". Maybe people who really are expert and knowledgeable don't want to be associated with an "encyclopedia" which routinely deletes genuine information while keeping articles like this
I'm a tech guy. The best manager I've ever had was a guy with very limited technical ability -- but he knew it. He won me over by apologizing about an offhand comment he made, some joke about paying me too much if I remember correctly. The fact that he was sensitive enough to realize that he may have hurt my feelings -- and then took steps to make sure he fixed it.. >
Those are certainly good qualities and there's no denying that "people skills" are very important and, unfortunately, sadly lacking in many (most?) managers. However, technical ability must come first. You can't lead an organization, solve problems and make important decisions if you aren't an expert in the technology involved.
Regardless of your excellent "people skills", if you aren't smarter than me then you have no business being my boss and probably got the job by being a schmoozer and suckass.
Before the Wikipedia brouhaha, Old Man Murray probably didn't meet Wikipedia's notability standards
Wikipedia is full of articles that don't meet "notability" standards. The real issue is "is there someone out there in a position of power who gets a bug up his ass and decides that this particular entry is not notable". It has been well documented that Wikipedia is controlled by a handful of OCD control freaks.
Boy. THAT was a lame article. It was, word for word (except where they doubled up on the same sentence twice) everything stated in the iFixit video. This guy must a spent a LOT of time copying off other people's tests.
There's only so many different ways to say "over-priced toy".
Essentially, Microsoft wrote a whole bunch of benchmarks intended to test out new IE9 features.
On a whim, they compared IE9's performance to Firefox's, and in the process, uncovered some (huge, in some cases) performance bugs in Firefox. The IE9 team then offered some suggestions as to what might be causing the bugs based on their experiences optimizing IE9.
Rather than take this as some helpful advice, Firefox is treating this as FUD.
That was something I immediately noticed. The author goes through a bunch of the benchmarks where IE9 claims to be faster than FF and with each one admits that the problem is bugs in FF.
But that's OK. The problem isn't in FF's "architecture", it's just "bugs". What a maroon.
or better yet Firefox could drop their NIH bad attitude and just support whatever the OS supports by calling whatever native player they have, or even call VLC since it runs on all and plays all.
Well then, I must have some strange alien version of Firefox, even though it claims to be Firefox 4.0 RC, because I have never encountered a problem playing any video including H.264. My copy of Firefox is obviously using the codecs I have installed on my system (Windows 7 and VLC).
after 10-12 hours of usage FF has managed to blow through the entire 1.5Gb of RAM all by itself and start hitting the swap which slams the CPU at 100% and practically shuts down the machine. So just like the old 2.x.x crap it is shutdown and relaunch just to get FF to give back memory,
I have never seen this problem and have never seen FF use anywhere near 1.5GB of RAM on any of my computers. Slow? Sluggish? Sorry, I'm not seeing it. And trust me, if FF was 1/100 as bad as some people are claiming, I would have dumped it a long time ago.
May need to iron out the kinks a little and fine-tune the dollar amount, but conceptually, this is a workable idea (and surprisingly so, coming from the music business!). We've been screaming at the music industry to come up with ideas to allow them to adapt to and survive the new internet reality, and they're delivering on it.
If you really think this is a good idea then you have absolutely no understanding of how the music industry works.
Let's say that the $10 a month fee in enacted. In a couple of years, the record companies will be complaining that too many people are downloading music for free instead of buying it, so the fee needs to be raised to $20. A couple years later, still not enough. Sales are still way down. We need to raise the fee higher. And Higher.
If she grew up in the internet age, she has no excuse not to understand the technology. If Grandma thinks the computer is magic, that's understandable. Someone who was born in 1996 should know better.
Grandmaw was growing up when television was becoming widespread. That doesn't mean she understands how it works. Some people are just stupid.
> While the feature does effectively block ads from Web sites, > I'm not yet convinced
Translation: It's Microsoft, so I have to find fault with it!
You just sound stupid.
No. The proper translation is: This might be a step in the right direction, but, Microsoft has a history of not really giving a fuck about making a good web browser, so we'll have to wait and see.
Who even has the money to pay for a Mars boondoggle, one-way or not?
Where's the payback for the billions of dollars this will require? A new flavor of Tang? Another cool pen that writes upside down? Seriously, where is the cost-benefit analysis, who can possibly show that the price is justifiable to the taxpayer?
We, along with Russia, simply do not have the money for such a frivolous project, even if the technical hurdles were surmountable. This is just another NASA pipe dream, stoked by science fiction and movie lore. Every dollar spent pursuing this project is a dollar flushed straight down the toilet (or, as some would say, graft for the contractors like Lockheed and Grumman who get the $ and don't have to produce anything tangible)
Too many people have forgotten that landing a man on the moon was not driven by science, it was driven by politics -- specifically the fear of the Soviet Union. The Russians put the first man in space and the US was afraid that if the Soviet Union got to the moon it would somehow give them some sort of military advantage. With that (stupid) fear out of the way, we can now see that sending people to the moon or Mars is a pointless waste of money.
Before they start working on how to get OFF of Mars they need to figure out how to get ON Mars. A couple of years ago I found this article (sorry, lost the original link).
Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of Mars by Nancy Atkinson July 17th, 2007
Some proponents of human missions to Mars say we have the technology today to send people to the Red Planet. But do we? Rob Manning of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discusses the intricacies of entry, descent and landing and what needs to be done to make humans on Mars a reality.
There’s no comfort in the statistics for missions to Mars. To date over 60% of the missions have failed. Even among those who have devoted their careers to the task, mention sending a human mission to land on the Red Planet, with payloads several factors larger than an unmanned spacecraft, and the trepidation grows even larger.
Why? Nobody knows how to do it.
Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars. "It turns out that most people aren’t aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars," said Manning.
He believes many people immediately come to the conclusion that landing humans on Mars should be easy. After all, humans have landed successfully on the Moon and we can land our human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size and atmosphere, it should be easy. "There’s the mindset that we should just be able to connect the dots in between," said Manning.
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone", said Manning, "There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."
In 2004 NASA organized a Road Mapping session to discuss the current capabilities and future problems of landing humans on Mars. Manning co-chaired this event and the major conclusion that came from the session was that no one has yet figured out how to safely get large masses from speeds of entry and orbit down to the surface of Mars.
"We call it the Supersonic Transition Problem," said Manning. With our current capabilities, a large, heavy vehicle, streaking through Mars’ thin atmosphere only has about ninety seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and finally, gently touch down.
When this problem is first presented to people, the most offered solution, Manning says, is to use airbags, since they have been so successful for the missions that he has been involved with; the Pathfinder rover, Sojourner and the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity.
But engineers feel they have reached the capacity of airbags with MER. "It's not just the mass or the volume of the airbags, or the size of the airbags themselves, but it's the mass of the beast inside the airbags," Manning said. "This is about as big as we can take that particular design."
In addition, an airbag landing subjects the payload to forces between 10-20 G’s. While robots can withstand such force, humans can’t. This doesn’t mean airbags will never be
They keep removing stuff I want in my browser, that and I can't read half the sizes because the Google Zealots refuse to allow you to make the fonts bigger. That makes it a crap browser.
Actually you can. At least in the current beta of Chrome 11. Options -> Under the hood -> Web Content -> Customize Fonts
This was one of the big things keeping me from using Chrome.
Mozilla and Google both seem to be on a crusade to completely fuck up their browsers and make them as shitty and useless as possible. I just don't get their mindset of constantly changing things, removing things, adding things, not to make them better, but to simply make them different. It makes sense for commercial products, whether it's Windows, automobiles or toothpaste, where you have to constantly get people to buy the latest version of your product in order to maintain your revenue stream. But for a product that is given away for free, it makes no sense.
If you're going to take nothing more than the fact that I use a particular communication tool as a reason to write me off as irresponsible,
If you're too close-minded to use the latest in communication tools
If you aren't smart enough to give the correct answer, which is "I don't have a Facebook account" because you actually think that Facebook is a "communication tool" then you probably deserve to be fired.
The problem isn't money. The problem is that Firefox's developers suffer from a combination of arrogance and gross incompetence. Incompetence? How about constantly adding new features to beta software. Even the greenest rookie developer knows you don't add new features to Beta 11. How about (by their own admission) spending more time fixing non-blocking bugs than blocking bugs?
Arrogance? How about constantly ignoring requests for things people want while constantly filling FF with crap nobody cares about. How about removing features that result in FF being less useful that it used to be and forcing people to write extensions so they can get back stuff that used to be in FF.
On Christmas Day I was visiting relatives. My brother spent the entire time on his phone, texting and surfing the Internet. I really wanted to punch him in the head. You don't need to be online ever waking minute.
Microsoft had to create autorun because too many people are too stupid to figure out how to navigate somewhere and find the file they need. Seriously.
A couple of years ago I copied a bunch of files onto a CD for my wife's boss. The next day she calls me from work -- he can't figure out how to access the files (this is a guy with some pretty substantial education). So I say "just tell him to copy the files from the CD to his hard drive". He literally had no idea how to do that. I refused to play along and spell out every exact step required and I just kept saying "I don't know any other way to explain it -- just copy the files from the CD to the hard drive." I don't know if he ever did it.
As far as I can tell, the DMCA does not protect Hotfile with the safe harbor clause. The safe harbor clause gets voided when you directly profit off of the infringement.
Hotfile doesn't directly profit from the infringement -- i.e., they aren't selling you copies of movies. They charge you for access to their system. What you do with that access is none of their concern. If people are uploading improper content then send Hotfile a DMCA takedown notice.
Hotfile is no more "directly profiting" than Youtube, which makes many millions of dollars every year. When Viacom tried to sue Youtube they lost because Youtube demonstrated that they have a policy in place to properly deal with DMCA takedown notices. As long as Hotfile takes stuff down when notified of infringement then I see no difference between them and Youtube.
What is currently being called FF 4.0 actually started out as FF 3.7, but after a short time they changed the version number. Since FF 4 is still in beta they should do the same thing they did to the FF 3.7 beta -- just change the version number again. Call it FF 12 and be done with it.
Like accelerating the version number major releases suddenly makes the release cycle better. More bugs?
I don't think so, and I don't think they'll rush the features.
Really? Why not? They're already rushing new features. They're currently at Beta 10 and working on Beta 11. And they just added a new feature -- the Do Not Track thingee. Who the fuck adds a new feature in Beta 10? And by their own admission they didn't properly integrate it into the configuration UI because they wanted to hurry up and get this new feature out -- despite the fact that its benefit is highly questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't want a sex change, even if they are experts!
Maybe you would like Camp Anal
If Brian Krebs can figure out that The Securities Group LLC, The Limited; Santiam Memorial Hospital, North Shore Medical Center; McCann-Erickson Worldwide; and the Greater Reno-Tahoe Economic Development Authority are part of a botnet, then the ISPs used by those companies can do the same. Which points out the real problem with spam, malware and botnets: ISPs refuse to lift a finger to secure their networks.
Every person or business identified as being part of a botnet should be notified that their Internet access is being terminated immediately and will not be restored until they fix the problem.
If Wikipedia and its current admins had been around in 1890, they would have deleted the entry for Vincent Van Gogh due to "lack of notability". Maybe people who really are expert and knowledgeable don't want to be associated with an "encyclopedia" which routinely deletes genuine information while keeping articles like this
I'm a tech guy. The best manager I've ever had was a guy with very limited technical ability -- but he knew it. He won me over by apologizing about an offhand comment he made, some joke about paying me too much if I remember correctly. The fact that he was sensitive enough to realize that he may have hurt my feelings -- and then took steps to make sure he fixed it.. >
Those are certainly good qualities and there's no denying that "people skills" are very important and, unfortunately, sadly lacking in many (most?) managers. However, technical ability must come first. You can't lead an organization, solve problems and make important decisions if you aren't an expert in the technology involved.
Regardless of your excellent "people skills", if you aren't smarter than me then you have no business being my boss and probably got the job by being a schmoozer and suckass.
as a connoisseur of fine irony.
Before the Wikipedia brouhaha, Old Man Murray probably didn't meet Wikipedia's notability standards
Wikipedia is full of articles that don't meet "notability" standards. The real issue is "is there someone out there in a position of power who gets a bug up his ass and decides that this particular entry is not notable". It has been well documented that Wikipedia is controlled by a handful of OCD control freaks.
Boy. THAT was a lame article. It was, word for word (except where they doubled up on the same sentence twice) everything stated in the iFixit video. This guy must a spent a LOT of time copying off other people's tests.
There's only so many different ways to say "over-priced toy".
Essentially, Microsoft wrote a whole bunch of benchmarks intended to test out new IE9 features.
On a whim, they compared IE9's performance to Firefox's, and in the process, uncovered some (huge, in some cases) performance bugs in Firefox. The IE9 team then offered some suggestions as to what might be causing the bugs based on their experiences optimizing IE9.
Rather than take this as some helpful advice, Firefox is treating this as FUD.
That was something I immediately noticed. The author goes through a bunch of the benchmarks where IE9 claims to be faster than FF and with each one admits that the problem is bugs in FF.
But that's OK. The problem isn't in FF's "architecture", it's just "bugs". What a maroon.
or better yet Firefox could drop their NIH bad attitude and just support whatever the OS supports by calling whatever native player they have, or even call VLC since it runs on all and plays all.
Well then, I must have some strange alien version of Firefox, even though it claims to be Firefox 4.0 RC, because I have never encountered a problem playing any video including H.264. My copy of Firefox is obviously using the codecs I have installed on my system (Windows 7 and VLC).
after 10-12 hours of usage FF has managed to blow through the entire 1.5Gb of RAM all by itself and start hitting the swap which slams the CPU at 100% and practically shuts down the machine. So just like the old 2.x.x crap it is shutdown and relaunch just to get FF to give back memory,
I have never seen this problem and have never seen FF use anywhere near 1.5GB of RAM on any of my computers. Slow? Sluggish? Sorry, I'm not seeing it. And trust me, if FF was 1/100 as bad as some people are claiming, I would have dumped it a long time ago.
May need to iron out the kinks a little and fine-tune the dollar amount, but conceptually, this is a workable idea (and surprisingly so, coming from the music business!). We've been screaming at the music industry to come up with ideas to allow them to adapt to and survive the new internet reality, and they're delivering on it.
If you really think this is a good idea then you have absolutely no understanding of how the music industry works.
Let's say that the $10 a month fee in enacted. In a couple of years, the record companies will be complaining that too many people are downloading music for free instead of buying it, so the fee needs to be raised to $20. A couple years later, still not enough. Sales are still way down. We need to raise the fee higher. And Higher.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
If she grew up in the internet age, she has no excuse not to understand the technology. If Grandma thinks the computer is magic, that's understandable. Someone who was born in 1996 should know better.
Grandmaw was growing up when television was becoming widespread. That doesn't mean she understands how it works. Some people are just stupid.
> While the feature does effectively block ads from Web sites,
> I'm not yet convinced
Translation: It's Microsoft, so I have to find fault with it!
You just sound stupid.
No. The proper translation is: This might be a step in the right direction, but, Microsoft has a history of not really giving a fuck about making a good web browser, so we'll have to wait and see.
Who even has the money to pay for a Mars boondoggle, one-way or not?
Where's the payback for the billions of dollars this will require? A new flavor of Tang? Another cool pen that writes upside down? Seriously, where is the cost-benefit analysis, who can possibly show that the price is justifiable to the taxpayer?
We, along with Russia, simply do not have the money for such a frivolous project, even if the technical hurdles were surmountable. This is just another NASA pipe dream, stoked by science fiction and movie lore. Every dollar spent pursuing this project is a dollar flushed straight down the toilet (or, as some would say, graft for the contractors like Lockheed and Grumman who get the $ and don't have to produce anything tangible)
Too many people have forgotten that landing a man on the moon was not driven by science, it was driven by politics -- specifically the fear of the Soviet Union. The Russians put the first man in space and the US was afraid that if the Soviet Union got to the moon it would somehow give them some sort of military advantage. With that (stupid) fear out of the way, we can now see that sending people to the moon or Mars is a pointless waste of money.
Before they start working on how to get OFF of Mars they need to figure out how to get ON Mars. A couple of years ago I found this article (sorry, lost the original link).
Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of Mars
by Nancy Atkinson
July 17th, 2007
Some proponents of human missions to Mars say we have the technology today to send people to the Red Planet. But do we? Rob Manning of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discusses the intricacies of entry, descent and landing and what needs to be done to make humans on Mars a reality.
There’s no comfort in the statistics for missions to Mars. To date over 60% of the missions have failed. Even among those who have devoted their careers to the task, mention sending a human mission to land on the Red Planet, with payloads several factors larger than an unmanned spacecraft, and the trepidation grows even larger.
Why? Nobody knows how to do it.
Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars. "It turns out that most people aren’t aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars," said Manning.
He believes many people immediately come to the conclusion that landing humans on Mars should be easy. After all, humans have landed successfully on the Moon and we can land our human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size and atmosphere, it should be easy. "There’s the mindset that we should just be able to connect the dots in between," said Manning.
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone", said Manning, "There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."
In 2004 NASA organized a Road Mapping session to discuss the current capabilities and future problems of landing humans on Mars. Manning co-chaired this event and the major conclusion that came from the session was that no one has yet figured out how to safely get large masses from speeds of entry and orbit down to the surface of Mars.
"We call it the Supersonic Transition Problem," said Manning. With our current capabilities, a large, heavy vehicle, streaking through Mars’ thin atmosphere only has about ninety seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and finally, gently touch down.
When this problem is first presented to people, the most offered solution, Manning says, is to use airbags, since they have been so successful for the missions that he has been involved with; the Pathfinder rover, Sojourner and the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity.
But engineers feel they have reached the capacity of airbags with MER. "It's not just the mass or the volume of the airbags, or the size of the airbags themselves, but it's the mass of the beast inside the airbags," Manning said. "This is about as big as we can take that particular design."
In addition, an airbag landing subjects the payload to forces between 10-20 G’s. While robots can withstand such force, humans can’t. This doesn’t mean airbags will never be
I'm curious to see what 650 bug fixes solve!
Bug 355071 - Flash stops keyboard input in other FF windows (TSM doc problem)
originally submitted: 2006-10-01
Considering that Firefox 4 was supposed to be released in November 2010, no, wait, scratch that, February 2011, no wait, who knows when -
Don't worry. Firefox 5, 6 and 7 will be released this year!!
As much as I like Firefly, how many times can you watch the same 14 episodes? If Firefly had a longer history it would make a lot more sense.
They keep removing stuff I want in my browser, that and I can't read half the sizes because the Google Zealots refuse to allow you to make the fonts bigger. That makes it a crap browser.
Actually you can. At least in the current beta of Chrome 11. Options -> Under the hood -> Web Content -> Customize Fonts
This was one of the big things keeping me from using Chrome.
Mozilla and Google both seem to be on a crusade to completely fuck up their browsers and make them as shitty and useless as possible. I just don't get their mindset of constantly changing things, removing things, adding things, not to make them better, but to simply make them different. It makes sense for commercial products, whether it's Windows, automobiles or toothpaste, where you have to constantly get people to buy the latest version of your product in order to maintain your revenue stream. But for a product that is given away for free, it makes no sense.
If you aren't smart enough to give the correct answer, which is "I don't have a Facebook account" because you actually think that Facebook is a "communication tool" then you probably deserve to be fired.
The problem isn't money. The problem is that Firefox's developers suffer from a combination of arrogance and gross incompetence.
Incompetence? How about constantly adding new features to beta software. Even the greenest rookie developer knows you don't add new features to Beta 11. How about (by their own admission) spending more time fixing non-blocking bugs than blocking bugs?
Arrogance? How about constantly ignoring requests for things people want while constantly filling FF with crap nobody cares about. How about removing features that result in FF being less useful that it used to be and forcing people to write extensions so they can get back stuff that used to be in FF.
On Christmas Day I was visiting relatives. My brother spent the entire time on his phone, texting and surfing the Internet. I really wanted to punch him in the head. You don't need to be online ever waking minute.
Microsoft had to create autorun because too many people are too stupid to figure out how to navigate somewhere and find the file they need. Seriously.
A couple of years ago I copied a bunch of files onto a CD for my wife's boss. The next day she calls me from work -- he can't figure out how to access the files (this is a guy with some pretty substantial education). So I say "just tell him to copy the files from the CD to his hard drive". He literally had no idea how to do that. I refused to play along and spell out every exact step required and I just kept saying "I don't know any other way to explain it -- just copy the files from the CD to the hard drive." I don't know if he ever did it.
As far as I can tell, the DMCA does not protect Hotfile with the safe harbor clause. The safe harbor clause gets voided when you directly profit off of the infringement.
Hotfile doesn't directly profit from the infringement -- i.e., they aren't selling you copies of movies. They charge you for access to their system. What you do with that access is none of their concern. If people are uploading improper content then send Hotfile a DMCA takedown notice.
Hotfile is no more "directly profiting" than Youtube, which makes many millions of dollars every year. When Viacom tried to sue Youtube they lost because Youtube demonstrated that they have a policy in place to properly deal with DMCA takedown notices. As long as Hotfile takes stuff down when notified of infringement then I see no difference between them and Youtube.
What is currently being called FF 4.0 actually started out as FF 3.7, but after a short time they changed the version number. Since FF 4 is still in beta they should do the same thing they did to the FF 3.7 beta -- just change the version number again. Call it FF 12 and be done with it.
Like accelerating the version number major releases suddenly makes the release cycle better. More bugs?
I don't think so, and I don't think they'll rush the features.
Really? Why not? They're already rushing new features. They're currently at Beta 10 and working on Beta 11. And they just added a new feature -- the Do Not Track thingee. Who the fuck adds a new feature in Beta 10? And by their own admission they didn't properly integrate it into the configuration UI because they wanted to hurry up and get this new feature out -- despite the fact that its benefit is highly questionable.