"we've recently switched to using Unicode in our products."
...why?
It started out with a weirdness in Windows 2000 we had to work around, and it involved using the Win32 API TCHAR data type, so that it could compile on both Unicode-enabled systems and ANSI character systems.
To make a long story short, we were forced to enable Unicode in one of our products; then, we thought it a good idea to have all our products capable of internationalised data.
Would a false announcement coming from a domain that looks like microsoft.com trick anyone? Could any newspapers, news stations, magazines, etc...(except slashdot...they'll post pretty much anything) actually be fooled. Could that have any impact to stock pricing?
Maybe not from a domain like microsoft.com, but certainly from a smaller company's domain. So many people are influenced by Microsoft and its market droids that it would be difficult to circulate false information.
Since the first spam was sent. Spammers spam because it works. It is slimy and scummy, but it works. Why else would they do it?:)
Precisely. Why would someone want to waste resources for years and years on something that doesn't work? There wouldn't be much of a point to sending spam, if nobody ever responded.
I develop applications for a DSP company, and we've recently switched to using Unicode in our products. Unicode certainly has its quirks, and this is one of the more obvious ones. I fail to see why it has been implemented so widely, without very, very rigorous testing.
Actions like the one described in this article could bring down a company, if a person tried hard enough. Of course, Microsoft could just call Verisign and ask them to remove the Cyrillic domain, with no problems. But, for a small company, it could be hell. An entire user group using the same character set to access a certain website would be sent to a different site. In a worst case scenario, anti-company propaganda might be posted on the spoofing site, and it would deter people from visiting the "real" site in the future.
The only solution I can imagine is to simply prevent the translation of characters among character sets, especially in this sort of environment.
A Russian site, such as The Moscow Times, could have its site spoofed in exactly the same manner, and everyone using the Cyrillic character set (obviously, widely used in Russia, for example) would be sent to some other site, possibly indefinitely, knowing how registrars have been acting lately. This would create havoc for the newspaper and significant hurt revenue.
Comcast may raise rates on users of their @home service who download a significant amount of audio or video files.
Spammers typically don't transmit audio or video; it's usually text. However, if Comcast decides to go forward and raise fees for those who transmit a significant amount of data, rather than just audio and video, it could help reduce the amount of spam sent through their system. However, if spam really works, then a small hike in fees is not going to deter the large-scale spammers, anyway.
If the new MSN Money license is anything like the new Hotmail license, any sane user should contact their lawyer right away. Selling off email addresses and phone numbers is one thing, but what about accounts? Portfolios? Stock information? What about using all this for some sort of convoluted insider trading scheme?
This may seem a bit paranoid, but Microsoft has the best lawyers in the world. If they want, they can get away with anything.
Isn't that just Holst's "Mars", from "The Planets" anyway?
I was actually referring to the Rage Against the Machine song. You're right, though, a techno remix version of "Mars" is one of the songs both on the The Matrix soundtrack and in the trailer we've recently watched.
I've mirrored it at http://helium.denterprises.org/~saveth/MATRIX_SVCD _JH.rar. I will take it down before I go to work in seven hours, so abuse it while you can.:)
A site with streaming geek-type video getting Slashdotted and still being able to hold its own, as far as bandwidth is concerned, is rather impressive. In about ten minutes, I'm sure it won't be doing as well, though.:)
Anyway, trailer is pretty neat. I don't particularly like the fact that it features a song from the previous The Matrix soundtrack, but the rest is good stuff.
Comparing it to the old The Matrix trailers, I'd have to say I'm not so thrilled with The Matrix: Reloaded. I may be jumping the gun when assuming things about it, but it looks like it's less "matrix theory" and more cultish action. I hope the movie doesn't turn out like that.
At any rate, I'll probably get suckered into standing in line for an hour, opening night, and loving the entire movie, so you'd probably be better off just ignoring me.:P
Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it.
I doubt it. They're probably charing it to support further development. Creating an easy-to-use, featureful office suite doesn't happen overnight, and skilled programmers are not exactly cheap.
Compatibility Issues
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sun's web site mentions that StarOffice 6.0 will maintain "interoperability with other desktop suites," such as Microsoft Office. Sure, they can offer this, but will Microsoft counter it by obfuscating their document formats even more? Microsoft, may not intend to do this, but because Office has the ability to put so many things (Word Art, equations, movies, strangely placed words, etc.) into documents, the parsing process becomes a nightmare.
Currently, bare Word.doc files, for example, are fairly simple to parse and import. But, when it comes to importing embedded objects like equations and Excel spreadsheets, the parsing process becomes far less trivial. I've used X-based programs, namely Abiword and StarOffice, to read from and write to Microsoft document formats, and it's not a pleasant experience. One of my more recent trials resulted in corrupted documents, in fact. Backups were made before attempting the export, of course, so this isn't meant to be a rant, but the fact remains that the number of features Microsoft Office has is proportional to the number of points at which a program that imports or exports their formats can break.
Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.
Shouldn't configuring zones for.us domains be as simple as cloning the methods for configuring other zones and doing a giant `s/.com/.us/g`? I suspect there are other changes also involved in the process, but I'm sure they are trivial.
I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours. With any luck and with the help of your "geeky computer programmer" skills, you will end up as a programmer or a communications officer, rather than a live-round infantry target or something along these lines. Come back in one piece, would you?:)
I work for a company that has a (very) new product, called the VoIP Development System (VDS), that is a testbed and diagnostic application for VoIP systems. Apparently, the software is so new that it is not even featured on the front page of our web site.
Anyway, VoIP architecture is, of course, integrated into the software. On a daily basis, the VoIP package development team is coming to us, the senior programmers, and asking for assistance and references for developing various parts of the code, ranging from simple GUI items to items regarding the infinitely more complex network architecture implementation.
</plug>
Because of this, I know how difficult and intense the development of VoIP systems is. Kudos go out to the developers for this project. Keep up the good work; you're doing an excellent thing for the open source and free software communities.
Now, whether free software will release a person or company from the cost of buying the hardware to support an extensive network of VoIP systems is another problem, entirely.:)
Yes, the BMW iDrive is really nifty. I remember reading about it in a Popular Science, for the first time, about a year ago. I enjoy cars, and I enjoy gadgets. The new BMWs, equipped with the iDrive, combine both into a powerful beast, worthy of only the best drivers. Then again, don't all new BMWs fit this shoe?
I can't wait to test drive one. A maddening experience it may be, but I'm sure years of gaming will help me get the hang of it quickly.
So you don't have to turn your head away from the monitor every time you want to watch a part of the movie. Most geeks' computer chairs are more comfortable than their couches, anyway.:P
The reason you're finding more hardware tools than software tools for echo cancellation, among other things, is that the telecommunications industry demands these sorts of things with much more fervor than the average consumer. Echo cancellation devices (for example, a codec with echo cancellation built in, running on a DSP) are used extensively in cellular telephones, voice routers, and this sort of thing. Your best bet, in this respect, is to find a company that is willing to release the source code to the software that is running on your hardware.
Alas, I do not know of any software, especially open source or free, that provides a full suite of audio processing utilities. Why is it that you're against using hardware, in the first place? Too expensive? Those are the breaks.
Heh. I'm currently doing two majors and a minor: Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics, respectively. The reason I got into physics is simply that I like the pretty colours.:) I plan to earn graduate degrees in astrophysics and stare at the stars for a living.
Slashdot Mirror
"we've recently switched to using Unicode in our products."
:P
...why?
It started out with a weirdness in Windows 2000 we had to work around, and it involved using the Win32 API TCHAR data type, so that it could compile on both Unicode-enabled systems and ANSI character systems.
To make a long story short, we were forced to enable Unicode in one of our products; then, we thought it a good idea to have all our products capable of internationalised data.
Yeah. That.
Would a false announcement coming from a domain that looks like microsoft.com trick anyone? Could any newspapers, news stations, magazines, etc...(except slashdot...they'll post pretty much anything) actually be fooled. Could that have any impact to stock pricing?
Maybe not from a domain like microsoft.com, but certainly from a smaller company's domain. So many people are influenced by Microsoft and its market droids that it would be difficult to circulate false information.
Since the first spam was sent. Spammers spam because it works. It is slimy and scummy, but it works. Why else would they do it? :)
Precisely. Why would someone want to waste resources for years and years on something that doesn't work? There wouldn't be much of a point to sending spam, if nobody ever responded.
I develop applications for a DSP company, and we've recently switched to using Unicode in our products. Unicode certainly has its quirks, and this is one of the more obvious ones. I fail to see why it has been implemented so widely, without very, very rigorous testing.
Actions like the one described in this article could bring down a company, if a person tried hard enough. Of course, Microsoft could just call Verisign and ask them to remove the Cyrillic domain, with no problems. But, for a small company, it could be hell. An entire user group using the same character set to access a certain website would be sent to a different site. In a worst case scenario, anti-company propaganda might be posted on the spoofing site, and it would deter people from visiting the "real" site in the future.
The only solution I can imagine is to simply prevent the translation of characters among character sets, especially in this sort of environment.
A Russian site, such as The Moscow Times, could have its site spoofed in exactly the same manner, and everyone using the Cyrillic character set (obviously, widely used in Russia, for example) would be sent to some other site, possibly indefinitely, knowing how registrars have been acting lately. This would create havoc for the newspaper and significant hurt revenue.
If you'll recall, the majority of the world's automobiles run on gasoline.
The abstract says the following.
Comcast may raise rates on users of their @home service who download a significant amount of audio or video files.
Spammers typically don't transmit audio or video; it's usually text. However, if Comcast decides to go forward and raise fees for those who transmit a significant amount of data, rather than just audio and video, it could help reduce the amount of spam sent through their system. However, if spam really works, then a small hike in fees is not going to deter the large-scale spammers, anyway.
That's like trying to fit CowboyNeal inside a soup can. It just isn't going to work.
Even if it did, the mass-to-volume ratio would be too large, and the can would collapse into a singularity.
MSN Money
If the new MSN Money license is anything like the new Hotmail license, any sane user should contact their lawyer right away. Selling off email addresses and phone numbers is one thing, but what about accounts? Portfolios? Stock information? What about using all this for some sort of convoluted insider trading scheme?
This may seem a bit paranoid, but Microsoft has the best lawyers in the world. If they want, they can get away with anything.
Isn't that just Holst's "Mars", from "The Planets" anyway?
I was actually referring to the Rage Against the Machine song. You're right, though, a techno remix version of "Mars" is one of the songs both on the The Matrix soundtrack and in the trailer we've recently watched.
Ah, so that's what's going on. Thanks. I was just following the dogma of the original poster of this thread, by not linking the link. :)
Somehow, a space ended up in that URL. It's as follows.
V CD _JH.rar
/%7Esaveth/MATRIX_SVCD HTTP/1.0" 404 321 "-" "Wget/1.7"
:)
http://helium.denterprises.org/~saveth/MATRIX_S
The space works, too, actually, but I'm seeing things like the following in my logs.
xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [16/May/2002:05:36:01 +0000] "GET
So, yeah. To everyone eating my bandwidth, you're welcome!
It's got to be downloaded somehow, right? Er, moron?
I've mirrored it at http://helium.denterprises.org/~saveth/MATRIX_SVCD _JH.rar. I will take it down before I go to work in seven hours, so abuse it while you can. :)
A site with streaming geek-type video getting Slashdotted and still being able to hold its own, as far as bandwidth is concerned, is rather impressive. In about ten minutes, I'm sure it won't be doing as well, though. :)
:P
Anyway, trailer is pretty neat. I don't particularly like the fact that it features a song from the previous The Matrix soundtrack, but the rest is good stuff.
Comparing it to the old The Matrix trailers, I'd have to say I'm not so thrilled with The Matrix: Reloaded. I may be jumping the gun when assuming things about it, but it looks like it's less "matrix theory" and more cultish action. I hope the movie doesn't turn out like that.
At any rate, I'll probably get suckered into standing in line for an hour, opening night, and loving the entire movie, so you'd probably be better off just ignoring me.
Sounds difficult. I guess it's a bit like Photoshopping video, rather than a still image. Kudos!
Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it.
I doubt it. They're probably charing it to support further development. Creating an easy-to-use, featureful office suite doesn't happen overnight, and skilled programmers are not exactly cheap.
Sun's web site mentions that StarOffice 6.0 will maintain "interoperability with other desktop suites," such as Microsoft Office. Sure, they can offer this, but will Microsoft counter it by obfuscating their document formats even more? Microsoft, may not intend to do this, but because Office has the ability to put so many things (Word Art, equations, movies, strangely placed words, etc.) into documents, the parsing process becomes a nightmare.
.doc files, for example, are fairly simple to parse and import. But, when it comes to importing embedded objects like equations and Excel spreadsheets, the parsing process becomes far less trivial. I've used X-based programs, namely Abiword and StarOffice, to read from and write to Microsoft document formats, and it's not a pleasant experience. One of my more recent trials resulted in corrupted documents, in fact. Backups were made before attempting the export, of course, so this isn't meant to be a rant, but the fact remains that the number of features Microsoft Office has is proportional to the number of points at which a program that imports or exports their formats can break.
Currently, bare Word
Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.
I just like to pet my cat. She is warm, purrs, and listens to me when I need to rant. I think I noticed her perk up when I mentioned a LART, once. :P
Shouldn't configuring zones for .us domains be as simple as cloning the methods for configuring other zones and doing a giant `s/.com/.us/g`? I suspect there are other changes also involved in the process, but I'm sure they are trivial.
What is Neustar's problem?
I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours. With any luck and with the help of your "geeky computer programmer" skills, you will end up as a programmer or a communications officer, rather than a live-round infantry target or something along these lines. Come back in one piece, would you? :)
I work for a company that has a (very) new product, called the VoIP Development System (VDS), that is a testbed and diagnostic application for VoIP systems. Apparently, the software is so new that it is not even featured on the front page of our web site.
Anyway, VoIP architecture is, of course, integrated into the software. On a daily basis, the VoIP package development team is coming to us, the senior programmers, and asking for assistance and references for developing various parts of the code, ranging from simple GUI items to items regarding the infinitely more complex network architecture implementation.
</plug>
Because of this, I know how difficult and intense the development of VoIP systems is. Kudos go out to the developers for this project. Keep up the good work; you're doing an excellent thing for the open source and free software communities.
Now, whether free software will release a person or company from the cost of buying the hardware to support an extensive network of VoIP systems is another problem, entirely.
Yes, the BMW iDrive is really nifty. I remember reading about it in a Popular Science, for the first time, about a year ago. I enjoy cars, and I enjoy gadgets. The new BMWs, equipped with the iDrive, combine both into a powerful beast, worthy of only the best drivers. Then again, don't all new BMWs fit this shoe?
I can't wait to test drive one. A maddening experience it may be, but I'm sure years of gaming will help me get the hang of it quickly.
So you don't have to turn your head away from the monitor every time you want to watch a part of the movie. Most geeks' computer chairs are more comfortable than their couches, anyway. :P
The reason you're finding more hardware tools than software tools for echo cancellation, among other things, is that the telecommunications industry demands these sorts of things with much more fervor than the average consumer. Echo cancellation devices (for example, a codec with echo cancellation built in, running on a DSP) are used extensively in cellular telephones, voice routers, and this sort of thing. Your best bet, in this respect, is to find a company that is willing to release the source code to the software that is running on your hardware.
Alas, I do not know of any software, especially open source or free, that provides a full suite of audio processing utilities. Why is it that you're against using hardware, in the first place? Too expensive? Those are the breaks.
Heh. I'm currently doing two majors and a minor: Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics, respectively. The reason I got into physics is simply that I like the pretty colours. :) I plan to earn graduate degrees in astrophysics and stare at the stars for a living.