Yeah... people forget about those backup catalogs. Especially critical for spanned tapes. -- Back in the Olden Daze of QIC80 tapes, most backup software only put the catalog on the LAST tape of a set. If you lost ANY tape of that set, the whole set was good as toasted. Fastback6 was an exception; it put the catalog on EVERY tape, so any single tape of a set was still usable by itself.
At one time I was looking at some sort of RAID for backup duty for my own mess o'data... but heard too many horror stories. I've since decided the only sane method is full mirroring to an independent system. (I don't have a formal setup here, but critical data is duped across 3 systems, a couple of loose HDs, and a stack of CDRs, with some CDR copies elsewhere for remote safekeeping.)
Tape drives of sufficient capacity are still too pricey for me, and through evil experience I'm also soured on any backup that doesn't offer full random access.
Remember CIH? I had the thought even then, that there's no reason in the world that it couldn't have written spyware (perhaps with its own mini SMTP) to the BIOS, rather than just trashing it. Perhaps a simple keystroke logger that only caught, say, numeric strings of a length indicating a credit card number. There'd be no symptoms at all, other than occasional unexplained packets going out to the 'Net. It wouldn't even be OS-specific -- everyone could play!
Jumpers to control writing to the BIOS may be a PITA when you have to flash the BIOS or update its settings, but they're also good preventive security.
Or in current parlance, "low level format" usually means "remove all partition info and FDISK it from scratch". Inaccurate, but close enough for modern purposes.
MFM drives often required the occasional LLF for real... I had to LLF my 286's HD every couple years, and it would only speak to Disk Manager v3.2, special version for Seagate. I got to where I knew the bad sector table by heart!
I'd be loathe to trust 'em again myself... certainly not for mission-critical data!! Sorta like some HDs I've got here that have made funny noises at one time or another... yeah, they still work, and haven't thrown any errors, but they ain't goin' near my Real Work machines.
How'd you get so lucky as for the netbackup unit to be the next one to go?! Goes to show.. make backups of your backup catalogs TOO!
Kids have even more need for mental downtime than adults, and kids that are left to their own devices are fairly adept at finding ways to give themselves this needful downtime -- and "crap" TV is, as noted, one avenue for this. -- One big problem with today's society is that most parents seem to think every moment of a kid's day has to be accounted for and "used productively". It's no wonder we've got a generation of stressed-out kids -- they never get a chance to just "be a kid".
As to your own tastes in such media, you may be finding your downtime somewhere else (see my other post in this thread), so random TV/radio are not required anymore, and in fact those not up to snuff have become annoying. Once I was no longer doing "long days at the office", I couldn't bear to watch such shows anymore either!
Trouble is, this Watterson guy is wrong. Batteries don't fully recharge if they're constantly being discharged at the same time. "Constructive recreation" is not *relaxation*; it's another form of work, even tho it may not SEEM like work at the time.
Younger folks still endowed with youth's surplus energies don't usually recognise this, but after a lifetime of work ("recreational" or otherwise) most people discover a need for a certain amount of mental downtime. This can be TV, video games, reading (fiction, NOT educational stuff), gardening, chopping wood, or just plain vegetating -- but the point is, it's not sleep, but it's also NOT anything that requires the brain's learning processes to be powered on.
Without this daily downtime, burnout is a very real threat. Even more so with today's too-often sleep-deprived schedules, where the brain not only isn't getting enough downtime, it's also not getting enough rest.
Very very bad; not good!! How did the trashed drives being transferred into the other Powervault cause more drives to fail... or was their sending corrupted data thru the controller causing the controller itself to spew garbage? (never heard of such a thing, but the idea came to mind, so...)
Anyway.. yeah, that's enough to make you HUG your backup mechanism...
I've got some SCSI cards so old that a CDR attached to 'em will only do 4x, cuz that's their max thruput. Ouch!
You say, ======= Channels serve a useful purpose to me. When I want to be "entertained" and I don't want to stress my already-indecisive brain, I just turn on the TV and "see what's on". =======
Exactly why so many "crap" shows make it big. When average Workin' Joes comes home from their 9 to 5, they don't want intellectual giganticism. They want something that they can just flow with and not have to think about.
And I can speak to this from firsthand experience: When I was working 12 hour shifts (as it happened, on TV and film sets!) I'd come home on Friday night, turn on the TV, and there were Baywatch and the Dukes of Hazzard and suchlike.... Predictable, tolerably pleasant, just enough plot to pretend something actually happens -- and exactly right to relax and unwind by, put my feet up and have a beer and let my brain drift off to sleep.
[Side thought: one has to wonder if part of why some people find their jobs so stressful is because they've never learned how to really relax after work.]
Now, I wouldn't pay money for any of those shows on DVD, but they serve their purpose. They're massage therapy for the brain -- you relax and let them do their thing.
Conversely, I'm quite willing to buy DVDs of shows that have captivated my interest. And yes, those take a proactive desire to concentrate on what I'm watching -- so while they're a lot more intellectually *entertaining*, they're not necessarily great for relaxing after a long day at work.
BTW this is why my everyday-use MP3 list is "every bloody thing I own" all randomly mixed together -- no need to decide what I want to hear; it'll all come by sooner or later, just like radio.
I've talked to a couple people who had a RAID controller do the same thing -- flake out and corrupt hell out of stuff. In one case it wasn't obvious what was doing it til they'd replaced practically the whole rest of the server.
One has to wonder how common this might be, since we hear so many more horror stories about "failed HDs" on RAID setups. How often was it not the HDs at fault, but rather the RAID controller? (Does anyone take those "failed HDs" home and test them in an ordinary standalone PC?)
[laughing] Actually, so long as you don't use crap like flash/javascript menus, and use proper CSS, I'll see your site well enough for all practical purposes, and won't have to haul out a disliked browser just to read or navigate it (a quick way to get rid of me, so I never appear in your logs again:) Even imagemaps work okay without loading the image, if they refer to normal links.
Cringely's Pulpit pages are a good example of CSS that degrades well to effectively plaintext. The complex CSS menu layout becomes a list of ordinary links in reasonably logical order, and the content appears after that, all perfectly readable.
On my own sites I get folks using stuff like [shudder] WebTV, but their money is just as green, so why should I lock them out?
I use Mosaic 0.9 as a worst-case tester and lynx-alike; if a page can be deciphered with that, then *any* browser can see it well enough to read the content.
Exactly so. The GOOD designers make sites that work to at least a readable degree in any browser, including the one I *prefer*. The bad ones, as you say never gave a flying fuck anyhow. (And who are they to tell me which browser I should wish to use??)
My own sites are designed to at least scrape by in any browser, and personally I'm willing to let standards take a hike if using a deprecated structure means =everyone= can still make sense of the *content*.
You won't believe this... but *by preference* I still use Netscape 3.04 (with images and js disabled). If I have to, I'll drag out Mozilla (or KMeleon or OffByOne or whatever, I have about a dozen browsers installed), but I'm always mortally glad to get back to the speed and behaves-how-*I*-want of old NS3. No site keeps me as a user for long if it forces me to switch browsers just to read stuff.
Since I don't use the CSS/fullblown version here, I'm not even sure what slashboxes ARE:) But I'm all for anything that lets the user eliminate visual clutter, as it's helpfully done for you.
(And as the low-bandwidth/no-CSS approach does for me!)
Well, no... what I meant was otherwise it's too hard on the aging eyes, and if I had to deal with comments pages in my mailbox (if that's what you meant), I'd quickly give it up. And dialup that maxes out at 28k (but is more realistically 12k -- thanks, Verizon!) isn't suitable for anything beyond stripped down versions of anything.
Whereas with my current setup, here I see essentially plaintext, it's fast, and I can cherry-pick.
Thanks for the links, tho -- bookmarked for future reference!
Well, yeah, of course they're all mutually ass-kissing at this point.. but from M$'s POV there's a whole lot more immediate money to be had from the PC OEMs and their enterprise customers... that market is here and now and money is already positively coming down the pipe. The *AA content market is still going "well, when your DRM is strong enough, *then* we'll all get in bed together."
Very similar to what I see in low-bandwidth mode with a non-CSS browser. Quite legible, and reasonable for my crappy half-speed dialup. I couldn't read slashdot otherwise myself.
I really like having these off-main articles linked on the front page; previously I had some vague idea they existed, but couldn't see them. Thanks for implementing this!!!!!
I use low-bandwidth option and a non-CSS browser (in fact can't read/. without 'em), so all this visual minutia is lost on me:) but in the essentially plaintext version that I see, there is no confusion; the off-main links appear distinct enough to immediately tell what they are.
However, as someone else mentioned, it would be more efficient if they were grouped together, as it's too easy to scroll past a single link and miss it entirely. OTOH, I'm not sure what that would do to the process of aging then off the page; it might become more of a nuisance to keep track of which articles I've already seen the links to.
I like it too. Previously I had some vague idea there were more articles here than appear on the front page, but I need the low-bandwidth option, and don't use a CSS-enabled browser, so these articles simply weren't available to me. Now I can see them inline with the other stories, which is handy as hell.
Your other ideas make a lot of sense too, notably being able to "moderate articles" for yourself, by setting a comment threshold after which they'd automagically appear on your personal front page. It might even be further refined to "comments at your reading threshold" (as opposed to "all comments").
To add one more notion, I'd like to be able to turn on *just* "links from the article" (so they appear along with the naked article link), so I can quickly read what, if anything, the article links to without having to load the whole comment page. I'm weird that way, I like to RTFA before deciding whether I want to read the comments.:)
I'm thinking thst much what's behind this are the big PC OEMs, specifically Dell. Make it harder to run Vista on clone hardware, and OEM hardware sales go up. Dell is a whole lot bigger customer for M$ (primarily through enterprise contracts for hardware and OS) than the media content companies.
I think this was first tried with XP -- back in the XP beta days, it became clear to me that XP was designed to be wholly compatible with Dell hardware, but with other hardware you just *hoped* it worked right.
Re:MOD PARENT +INF INSIGHTFUL!
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Great, now look what you've done... you've just proven that Walt IS preserved in some Disney vault... and will live forever!!
I have a few dozen infected diskettes here somewhere, used in their day to test new releases of AV programs. I still keep a small zoo on my HD, for the same purpose, tho I never bothered to extract and archive any of the BSVs of the floppy era.
Collecting viruses was kindof a fun hobby, in a way... sortof like collecting stinging insects.:)
"To believe this is a backdoor, you have to believe that people thought Windows computers were going to be hooked into a giant, international, network back in 1985-1990 (and that WMF and the 8086/x86 architecture would still be relevent by the time that network came into being.)"
Exactly why I've been arguing against it being an "intentional backdoor":
The internet as a popular medium didn't yet exist, and networking meant Novell, Lantastic, or mainframes, with DOS-only workstations.
Not only that, but WMF was never a widely-used graphics format even in Win16's heyday. Even allowing for "file sharing" via BBSs, AOL, CI$, etc (themselves mainly using DOS-based, textmode interfaces), PCX was much more common, as it was far more compatible with the image-viewing apps of the day. WMFs were only routinely used by a few Win16 page-layout apps... itself a lousy vector back then, as most serious page-layout work was still done on Macs.
As to maliciously hooking into WMF's other functions, such as printing aborts... well, you've still got the problem of getting past that air-gap firewall.
In short, back when WMF was designed, first you couldn't get to the backdoor'd PC, then even if you do get there, hardly anything used WMF anyway. So how was this *useful* as a backdoor, even if it were designed that way?
But long-tail metals and, say, shale oil are effectively the same -- once you get it extracted, it's either metal and oil, or it's not. But in either case it's a lot more work to extract and purify than wieth discrete deposits. So I don't think they're different at all, in that respect.
[finds 2nd post, lazily answers it here too] And yes, I think you're also right that the profit point for reopening old mines and wells does indeed help cap prices, but meanwhile scarcity has driven up the cost of related infrastructure, so I expect the profit point/price cap values both rise over time, and perhaps not an an entirely one for one relationship.
I generally grok the concept, but your pseudocode would be welcome, as who knows what enlightenment it might provide... maybe in some area not even related to this topic.:)
Gibson's main selling point on why this is a backdoor apparently rests on the "single value that works" being too specific to be an accident.
My own reservation is -- no one has yet explained exactly HOW a backdoor was widely USEFUL on Win3.0, when networking was unheard-of outside of businesses (and there generally meant Novell, Lantastic, or mainframe, with pure DOS/textmode workstations), and internet connectivity meant the DOS versions of CI$ and AOL, themselves still quite small. 99% of PCs were protected from all backdoor activities by that strongest of firewalls, the Air Gap. How do you use a backdoor on systems that can't execute it, let alone on systems that you can't get to??
Furthermore, I'm still waiting to hear how this managed to survive so long in an open standard, not to be noticed until 12 years after.WMF fell out of what little use it had as an image format. (Go count the.WMFs on your systems. Among all my images, archived all the way back to my original DOS-only system, I have exactly 10.WMFs, 3 of which I made myself for use with some Win3.1 app. One belongs to the Windows Fax unit and 6 belong to Acrobat 4, apparently for generating fax cover sheets.)
It has also occurred to me to wonder whether the by-design behaviour of.WMF might have inherited from its older DOS cousin, the.CGM image format. The two were largely interchangeable in apps that could use one or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... people forget about those backup catalogs. Especially critical for spanned tapes. -- Back in the Olden Daze of QIC80 tapes, most backup software only put the catalog on the LAST tape of a set. If you lost ANY tape of that set, the whole set was good as toasted. Fastback6 was an exception; it put the catalog on EVERY tape, so any single tape of a set was still usable by itself.
At one time I was looking at some sort of RAID for backup duty for my own mess o'data... but heard too many horror stories. I've since decided the only sane method is full mirroring to an independent system. (I don't have a formal setup here, but critical data is duped across 3 systems, a couple of loose HDs, and a stack of CDRs, with some CDR copies elsewhere for remote safekeeping.)
Tape drives of sufficient capacity are still too pricey for me, and through evil experience I'm also soured on any backup that doesn't offer full random access.
Remember CIH? I had the thought even then, that there's no reason in the world that it couldn't have written spyware (perhaps with its own mini SMTP) to the BIOS, rather than just trashing it. Perhaps a simple keystroke logger that only caught, say, numeric strings of a length indicating a credit card number. There'd be no symptoms at all, other than occasional unexplained packets going out to the 'Net. It wouldn't even be OS-specific -- everyone could play!
Jumpers to control writing to the BIOS may be a PITA when you have to flash the BIOS or update its settings, but they're also good preventive security.
Or in current parlance, "low level format" usually means "remove all partition info and FDISK it from scratch". Inaccurate, but close enough for modern purposes.
MFM drives often required the occasional LLF for real... I had to LLF my 286's HD every couple years, and it would only speak to Disk Manager v3.2, special version for Seagate. I got to where I knew the bad sector table by heart!
I'd be loathe to trust 'em again myself... certainly not for mission-critical data!! Sorta like some HDs I've got here that have made funny noises at one time or another... yeah, they still work, and haven't thrown any errors, but they ain't goin' near my Real Work machines.
How'd you get so lucky as for the netbackup unit to be the next one to go?! Goes to show.. make backups of your backup catalogs TOO!
Kids have even more need for mental downtime than adults, and kids that are left to their own devices are fairly adept at finding ways to give themselves this needful downtime -- and "crap" TV is, as noted, one avenue for this. -- One big problem with today's society is that most parents seem to think every moment of a kid's day has to be accounted for and "used productively". It's no wonder we've got a generation of stressed-out kids -- they never get a chance to just "be a kid".
As to your own tastes in such media, you may be finding your downtime somewhere else (see my other post in this thread), so random TV/radio are not required anymore, and in fact those not up to snuff have become annoying. Once I was no longer doing "long days at the office", I couldn't bear to watch such shows anymore either!
Trouble is, this Watterson guy is wrong.
Batteries don't fully recharge if they're constantly being discharged at the same time. "Constructive recreation" is not *relaxation*; it's another form of work, even tho it may not SEEM like work at the time.
Younger folks still endowed with youth's surplus energies don't usually recognise this, but after a lifetime of work ("recreational" or otherwise) most people discover a need for a certain amount of mental downtime. This can be TV, video games, reading (fiction, NOT educational stuff), gardening, chopping wood, or just plain vegetating -- but the point is, it's not sleep, but it's also NOT anything that requires the brain's learning processes to be powered on.
Without this daily downtime, burnout is a very real threat. Even more so with today's too-often sleep-deprived schedules, where the brain not only isn't getting enough downtime, it's also not getting enough rest.
Very very bad; not good!! How did the trashed drives being transferred into the other Powervault cause more drives to fail... or was their sending corrupted data thru the controller causing the controller itself to spew garbage? (never heard of such a thing, but the idea came to mind, so...)
Anyway.. yeah, that's enough to make you HUG your backup mechanism...
I've got some SCSI cards so old that a CDR attached to 'em will only do 4x, cuz that's their max thruput. Ouch!
You say,
=======
Channels serve a useful purpose to me. When I want to be "entertained" and I don't want to stress my already-indecisive brain, I just turn on the TV and "see what's on".
=======
Exactly why so many "crap" shows make it big. When average Workin' Joes comes home from their 9 to 5, they don't want intellectual giganticism. They want something that they can just flow with and not have to think about.
And I can speak to this from firsthand experience: When I was working 12 hour shifts (as it happened, on TV and film sets!) I'd come home on Friday night, turn on the TV, and there were Baywatch and the Dukes of Hazzard and suchlike.... Predictable, tolerably pleasant, just enough plot to pretend something actually happens -- and exactly right to relax and unwind by, put my feet up and have a beer and let my brain drift off to sleep.
[Side thought: one has to wonder if part of why some people find their jobs so stressful is because they've never learned how to really relax after work.]
Now, I wouldn't pay money for any of those shows on DVD, but they serve their purpose. They're massage therapy for the brain -- you relax and let them do their thing.
Conversely, I'm quite willing to buy DVDs of shows that have captivated my interest. And yes, those take a proactive desire to concentrate on what I'm watching -- so while they're a lot more intellectually *entertaining*, they're not necessarily great for relaxing after a long day at work.
BTW this is why my everyday-use MP3 list is "every bloody thing I own" all randomly mixed together -- no need to decide what I want to hear; it'll all come by sooner or later, just like radio.
I've talked to a couple people who had a RAID controller do the same thing -- flake out and corrupt hell out of stuff. In one case it wasn't obvious what was doing it til they'd replaced practically the whole rest of the server.
One has to wonder how common this might be, since we hear so many more horror stories about "failed HDs" on RAID setups. How often was it not the HDs at fault, but rather the RAID controller? (Does anyone take those "failed HDs" home and test them in an ordinary standalone PC?)
Ah, well, that's a different matter! Getting just the stories as RSS might be useful for those times when I don't get here at all for a few days.
Thanks for the info!
[laughing] Actually, so long as you don't use crap like flash/javascript menus, and use proper CSS, I'll see your site well enough for all practical purposes, and won't have to haul out a disliked browser just to read or navigate it (a quick way to get rid of me, so I never appear in your logs again :) Even imagemaps work okay without loading the image, if they refer to normal links.
Cringely's Pulpit pages are a good example of CSS that degrades well to effectively plaintext. The complex CSS menu layout becomes a list of ordinary links in reasonably logical order, and the content appears after that, all perfectly readable.
On my own sites I get folks using stuff like [shudder] WebTV, but their money is just as green, so why should I lock them out?
I use Mosaic 0.9 as a worst-case tester and lynx-alike; if a page can be deciphered with that, then *any* browser can see it well enough to read the content.
Exactly so. The GOOD designers make sites that work to at least a readable degree in any browser, including the one I *prefer*. The bad ones, as you say never gave a flying fuck anyhow. (And who are they to tell me which browser I should wish to use??)
My own sites are designed to at least scrape by in any browser, and personally I'm willing to let standards take a hike if using a deprecated structure means =everyone= can still make sense of the *content*.
You won't believe this... but *by preference* I still use Netscape 3.04 (with images and js disabled). If I have to, I'll drag out Mozilla (or KMeleon or OffByOne or whatever, I have about a dozen browsers installed), but I'm always mortally glad to get back to the speed and behaves-how-*I*-want of old NS3. No site keeps me as a user for long if it forces me to switch browsers just to read stuff.
Since I don't use the CSS/fullblown version here, I'm not even sure what slashboxes ARE :) But I'm all for anything that lets the user eliminate visual clutter, as it's helpfully done for you.
(And as the low-bandwidth/no-CSS approach does for me!)
Well, no... what I meant was otherwise it's too hard on the aging eyes, and if I had to deal with comments pages in my mailbox (if that's what you meant), I'd quickly give it up. And dialup that maxes out at 28k (but is more realistically 12k -- thanks, Verizon!) isn't suitable for anything beyond stripped down versions of anything.
Whereas with my current setup, here I see essentially plaintext, it's fast, and I can cherry-pick.
Thanks for the links, tho -- bookmarked for future reference!
Well, yeah, of course they're all mutually ass-kissing at this point.. but from M$'s POV there's a whole lot more immediate money to be had from the PC OEMs and their enterprise customers... that market is here and now and money is already positively coming down the pipe. The *AA content market is still going "well, when your DRM is strong enough, *then* we'll all get in bed together."
Very similar to what I see in low-bandwidth mode with a non-CSS browser. Quite legible, and reasonable for my crappy half-speed dialup. I couldn't read slashdot otherwise myself.
I really like having these off-main articles linked on the front page; previously I had some vague idea they existed, but couldn't see them. Thanks for implementing this!!!!!
/. without 'em), so all this visual minutia is lost on me :) but in the essentially plaintext version that I see, there is no confusion; the off-main links appear distinct enough to immediately tell what they are.
o ld=2&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=14540758, and to add to that, it might be nice to be able to turn on just links to TFAs (if any) for these off-main story links.
I use low-bandwidth option and a non-CSS browser (in fact can't read
However, as someone else mentioned, it would be more efficient if they were grouped together, as it's too easy to scroll past a single link and miss it entirely. OTOH, I'm not sure what that would do to the process of aging then off the page; it might become more of a nuisance to keep track of which articles I've already seen the links to.
I also like the ideas put forth in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174429&thresh
Anyway, cheers for a good new feature!!
I like it too. Previously I had some vague idea there were more articles here than appear on the front page, but I need the low-bandwidth option, and don't use a CSS-enabled browser, so these articles simply weren't available to me. Now I can see them inline with the other stories, which is handy as hell.
:)
Your other ideas make a lot of sense too, notably being able to "moderate articles" for yourself, by setting a comment threshold after which they'd automagically appear on your personal front page. It might even be further refined to "comments at your reading threshold" (as opposed to "all comments").
To add one more notion, I'd like to be able to turn on *just* "links from the article" (so they appear along with the naked article link), so I can quickly read what, if anything, the article links to without having to load the whole comment page. I'm weird that way, I like to RTFA before deciding whether I want to read the comments.
I'm thinking thst much what's behind this are the big PC OEMs, specifically Dell. Make it harder to run Vista on clone hardware, and OEM hardware sales go up. Dell is a whole lot bigger customer for M$ (primarily through enterprise contracts for hardware and OS) than the media content companies.
I think this was first tried with XP -- back in the XP beta days, it became clear to me that XP was designed to be wholly compatible with Dell hardware, but with other hardware you just *hoped* it worked right.
Great, now look what you've done... you've just proven that Walt IS preserved in some Disney vault... and will live forever!!
I have a few dozen infected diskettes here somewhere, used in their day to test new releases of AV programs. I still keep a small zoo on my HD, for the same purpose, tho I never bothered to extract and archive any of the BSVs of the floppy era.
:)
Collecting viruses was kindof a fun hobby, in a way... sortof like collecting stinging insects.
"To believe this is a backdoor, you have to believe that people thought Windows computers were going to be hooked into a giant, international, network back in 1985-1990 (and that WMF and the 8086/x86 architecture would still be relevent by the time that network came into being.)"
Exactly why I've been arguing against it being an "intentional backdoor":
The internet as a popular medium didn't yet exist, and networking meant Novell, Lantastic, or mainframes, with DOS-only workstations.
Not only that, but WMF was never a widely-used graphics format even in Win16's heyday. Even allowing for "file sharing" via BBSs, AOL, CI$, etc (themselves mainly using DOS-based, textmode interfaces), PCX was much more common, as it was far more compatible with the image-viewing apps of the day. WMFs were only routinely used by a few Win16 page-layout apps... itself a lousy vector back then, as most serious page-layout work was still done on Macs.
As to maliciously hooking into WMF's other functions, such as printing aborts... well, you've still got the problem of getting past that air-gap firewall.
In short, back when WMF was designed, first you couldn't get to the backdoor'd PC, then even if you do get there, hardly anything used WMF anyway. So how was this *useful* as a backdoor, even if it were designed that way?
But long-tail metals and, say, shale oil are effectively the same -- once you get it extracted, it's either metal and oil, or it's not. But in either case it's a lot more work to extract and purify than wieth discrete deposits. So I don't think they're different at all, in that respect.
[finds 2nd post, lazily answers it here too] And yes, I think you're also right that the profit point for reopening old mines and wells does indeed help cap prices, but meanwhile scarcity has driven up the cost of related infrastructure, so I expect the profit point/price cap values both rise over time, and perhaps not an an entirely one for one relationship.
I generally grok the concept, but your pseudocode would be welcome, as who knows what enlightenment it might provide... maybe in some area not even related to this topic. :)
= 14466008
.WMF fell out of what little use it had as an image format. (Go count the .WMFs on your systems. Among all my images, archived all the way back to my original DOS-only system, I have exactly 10 .WMFs, 3 of which I made myself for use with some Win3.1 app. One belongs to the Windows Fax unit and 6 belong to Acrobat 4, apparently for generating fax cover sheets.)
.WMF might have inherited from its older DOS cousin, the .CGM image format. The two were largely interchangeable in apps that could use one or the other.
Gibson's main selling point on why this is a backdoor apparently rests on the "single value that works" being too specific to be an accident.
However, someone posted this contrary evidence: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173878&cid
My own reservation is -- no one has yet explained exactly HOW a backdoor was widely USEFUL on Win3.0, when networking was unheard-of outside of businesses (and there generally meant Novell, Lantastic, or mainframe, with pure DOS/textmode workstations), and internet connectivity meant the DOS versions of CI$ and AOL, themselves still quite small. 99% of PCs were protected from all backdoor activities by that strongest of firewalls, the Air Gap. How do you use a backdoor on systems that can't execute it, let alone on systems that you can't get to??
Furthermore, I'm still waiting to hear how this managed to survive so long in an open standard, not to be noticed until 12 years after
It has also occurred to me to wonder whether the by-design behaviour of