If they want to tax on the miles you drive when you fill up, then it's likely that they can also keep track of how much gas you're using. If your GPS unit says you travelled 100 miles this month but you've filled up with enough gas to go 10 times that distance, it'd probably raise some flags...
There's this neat thing called a "battery charger" that comes with most phones. The battery life of most mobile phones is more than sufficient for most people (meaning the length of time they do not have access to their charger). Why not not make something you carry most of the time more useful?
I use my mobile phone to play music when I go to the gym. This way I only have one thing to deal with instead of having to deal with a seperate music player.
Windows NT 4.0 had a PPC version as well. They killed off most of the non-x86 ones with 2000 though due to slow sales. The NT kernel was designed with portability in mind so creating a new PPC version shouldn't be too huge a task.
The unofficial Google toolbar for Firefox is #12 in the download rankings at update.mozilla.org. So there is definately a market for stuff like these, even among the geeks.
Google Maps can't find my street address for some reason. I put it and Google shows my complete address and zip code but just shows a blank map. If I use a nearby intersection though, that map shows up and I can pan over to where I am. Map24 doesn't have this problem. Google Maps is definately faster for me though.
Map24 has a neat distance measuring thingy where you can measure the distance between two points by clicking between arbitrary waypoints. Google Maps doesn't seem to have this. Hopefully they'll implement something like this soon though.
My point is that all of Firefox's attempts to block XPI installations by default isn't going to help as much as people want to think it will. A big chunk of spyware people get is crap thats piggybacked with other software. Firefox, as it stands now, can do absolutely nothing about this.
The people that get infected by crap this way when they use IE are not going to be any safer when they switch to Firefox because it is just as vulnerable to this type of "exploit". User education is the key to reducing the problem. Install Firefox and telling the user to "use this instead of that blue E" does nothing in the long run.
That's still thinking small. The biggest obstacle to cooling CPUs is that air is a very poor conductor of heat. Since almost all cooling systems used for PCs at some point have to radiate heat into air to cool down, air is the obvious weakness in the system.
Solution: We all need to grow gills and move under the sea.
Firefox extension don't have to be installed via the browser. I could download something off of a P2P that, when I ran it, would find my Firefox profile folder, install the malware files, and modify my configuration files directly to turn it on. The uesr would never know, especially if it gave itself an innocent looking name in the Extensions list.
I'm leaning towards lame myself. The Simpsons has a very rich background with tons of locations and characters that the Hit and Run game could draw on to make a neat 3rd person game.
Family Guy doesn't really have all that much to draw on. I'm thinking it's gonna be more "a 3rd person game with Family Guy characters" rather than a "Family Guy game".
Never know though. Hit and Run was a good game but the ones before it weren't exactly stellar.
I doubt its digital camera can take pictures fast enough that the seek time has any effect on it. And unless you're switching tracks on the MP3 player every few milliseconds, it's not going to matter there either.
What type of Flash memory is significantly faster than a hard drive?
The highest end Flash memory I see at Sandisk's site writes at 20MB/s. This is on the lower end of what 2.5" notebook hard drives are capable of and well below what a 3.5" drive could do.
And you really think spyware writers would make it easy for you to uninstall their junk by putting all their files in one convenient, clearly named folder?
Anyway, the point isn't whether spyware can be removed easily or not, it's whether or not Macs are the cure for spyware which they clearly aren't. If you have the ability to install software on a computer, you have the ability to install spyware.
I don't understand why Mac and Linux users think they're so immune to spyware. It'd wouldn't be difficult at all to have an installation program for something add something in your.profile, etc. file that'd run something in the background to FTP a list of websites you've visited somewhere. Or install a spyware extension in your Mozilla profile. Or change your Mozilla home page, etc.
Sure, a Linux literate person would immediately know where the begin looking to get rid of these things, but those aren't the kind of users we need to worry about. It's your 70 year old grandmother who has a Windows installation choke full of spyware so you decide to do her a favor and install Linux instead. The only thing keeping her safe for now is that spyware writers just don't care about Linux.
The blurb on Apple's page about their built in firewall says nothing about blocking OUTGOING connections, which is a bigger worry than inbound connections as far as spyware is concerned:
The Mac OS X personal firewall protects your computer from unauthorized access by monitoring all incoming network traffic. When you enable the personal firewall in Mac OS X, all inbound connections are denied except for those that you explicitly permit. The personal firewall is based on ipfw, a technology that has stood up to years of real-world use in protecting the most mission-critical UNIX computers on the Internet. The personal firewall is integrated in the Sharing preference pane, with simple on/off checkboxes to enable protection. In addition, it can be customized for additional communication services, IRC, Gnutella, or other user-definable services.
Now, I'm sure it's possible to tweak things manually to add that in, but at this point we're really getting away from Macs being a spyware proof system out of the box.
If you're installing a program that includes spyware, how would the OS know it's actually two seperate programs and prompt you twice (once for the real program and once for the spyware)?
Besides, if everyone followed your advice and got a Mac, Apple's desktop market share would go up. If Macs had a significant market share on the desktop, you can be damn sure spyware makers will start writing little presents for you guys too;)
One of the problems with BitTorrent is that the trackers themselves can get overloaded with too many clients. If this system can eliminate something like that happening then that'd definately be a good thing.
That being said, the busiest torrents I've seen are for copyright-infringing material, so I guess it's still a boon for piracy.;)
I played way too much NFS:Underground 2 during the winter break. I'm still fighting the urge to try and spin out any car that I see coming up next to me.
Kazaa Lite used to come with something called 'sig2dat' that allowed this as well. You'd use sig2dat to generate a special link for your file (which just contained stuff like the filename, a hash, etc.) which you could put on a web site. If someone clicked the link and had Kazaa Lite installed, it'd automatically search Kazaa for a file matching that hash.
I don't think it really caught on though before Kazaa turned into a wasteland.
"Moving the pollution around" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you move the source of pollution from millions of loosely regulated and privately owned vehicles and transfer it to relatively small number of well regulated hydrogen processing plants, the net effect will still be positive.
Reducing emissions as new technology comes about will entail upgrading those processing plants rather than trying to get millions of drivers to upgrade their vehicle.
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If they want to tax on the miles you drive when you fill up, then it's likely that they can also keep track of how much gas you're using. If your GPS unit says you travelled 100 miles this month but you've filled up with enough gas to go 10 times that distance, it'd probably raise some flags...
Isn't this the "fix" that everyone found stopped working after you restarted the browser?
There's this neat thing called a "battery charger" that comes with most phones. The battery life of most mobile phones is more than sufficient for most people (meaning the length of time they do not have access to their charger). Why not not make something you carry most of the time more useful?
I use my mobile phone to play music when I go to the gym. This way I only have one thing to deal with instead of having to deal with a seperate music player.
Windows NT 4.0 had a PPC version as well. They killed off most of the non-x86 ones with 2000 though due to slow sales. The NT kernel was designed with portability in mind so creating a new PPC version shouldn't be too huge a task.
The unofficial Google toolbar for Firefox is #12 in the download rankings at update.mozilla.org. So there is definately a market for stuff like these, even among the geeks.
Google Maps can't find my street address for some reason. I put it and Google shows my complete address and zip code but just shows a blank map. If I use a nearby intersection though, that map shows up and I can pan over to where I am. Map24 doesn't have this problem. Google Maps is definately faster for me though.
Map24 has a neat distance measuring thingy where you can measure the distance between two points by clicking between arbitrary waypoints. Google Maps doesn't seem to have this. Hopefully they'll implement something like this soon though.
My point is that all of Firefox's attempts to block XPI installations by default isn't going to help as much as people want to think it will. A big chunk of spyware people get is crap thats piggybacked with other software. Firefox, as it stands now, can do absolutely nothing about this.
The people that get infected by crap this way when they use IE are not going to be any safer when they switch to Firefox because it is just as vulnerable to this type of "exploit". User education is the key to reducing the problem. Install Firefox and telling the user to "use this instead of that blue E" does nothing in the long run.
That's still thinking small. The biggest obstacle to cooling CPUs is that air is a very poor conductor of heat. Since almost all cooling systems used for PCs at some point have to radiate heat into air to cool down, air is the obvious weakness in the system.
Solution: We all need to grow gills and move under the sea.
Firefox extension don't have to be installed via the browser. I could download something off of a P2P that, when I ran it, would find my Firefox profile folder, install the malware files, and modify my configuration files directly to turn it on. The uesr would never know, especially if it gave itself an innocent looking name in the Extensions list.
I'm leaning towards lame myself. The Simpsons has a very rich background with tons of locations and characters that the Hit and Run game could draw on to make a neat 3rd person game.
Family Guy doesn't really have all that much to draw on. I'm thinking it's gonna be more "a 3rd person game with Family Guy characters" rather than a "Family Guy game".
Never know though. Hit and Run was a good game but the ones before it weren't exactly stellar.
I doubt its digital camera can take pictures fast enough that the seek time has any effect on it. And unless you're switching tracks on the MP3 player every few milliseconds, it's not going to matter there either.
If we're browsing Slashdot, we can't be working, so NSFW is inaccurate and confusing.
NSFTNWAW is better... Not Safe For Those Not Working At Work.
What type of Flash memory is significantly faster than a hard drive?
The highest end Flash memory I see at Sandisk's site writes at 20MB/s. This is on the lower end of what 2.5" notebook hard drives are capable of and well below what a 3.5" drive could do.
I think you're thinking about Yamaha's "T@2" (or something like that...) system that printed stuff on the unused portion of a CD-R.
It's no BS. As soon as I start the installer, my copy of Kerio Personal Firewall tells me it's trying to connect to 63.236.5.132.
And you really think spyware writers would make it easy for you to uninstall their junk by putting all their files in one convenient, clearly named folder?
.profile, etc. file that'd run something in the background to FTP a list of websites you've visited somewhere. Or install a spyware extension in your Mozilla profile. Or change your Mozilla home page, etc.
Anyway, the point isn't whether spyware can be removed easily or not, it's whether or not Macs are the cure for spyware which they clearly aren't. If you have the ability to install software on a computer, you have the ability to install spyware.
I don't understand why Mac and Linux users think they're so immune to spyware. It'd wouldn't be difficult at all to have an installation program for something add something in your
Sure, a Linux literate person would immediately know where the begin looking to get rid of these things, but those aren't the kind of users we need to worry about. It's your 70 year old grandmother who has a Windows installation choke full of spyware so you decide to do her a favor and install Linux instead. The only thing keeping her safe for now is that spyware writers just don't care about Linux.
Now, I'm sure it's possible to tweak things manually to add that in, but at this point we're really getting away from Macs being a spyware proof system out of the box.
If you're installing a program that includes spyware, how would the OS know it's actually two seperate programs and prompt you twice (once for the real program and once for the spyware)?
How exactly will a Mac keep spam away from you?
;)
Besides, if everyone followed your advice and got a Mac, Apple's desktop market share would go up. If Macs had a significant market share on the desktop, you can be damn sure spyware makers will start writing little presents for you guys too
Just buy a Yugo. I think those things were made out of tin to begin with. :)
One of the problems with BitTorrent is that the trackers themselves can get overloaded with too many clients. If this system can eliminate something like that happening then that'd definately be a good thing.
;)
That being said, the busiest torrents I've seen are for copyright-infringing material, so I guess it's still a boon for piracy.
I played way too much NFS:Underground 2 during the winter break. I'm still fighting the urge to try and spin out any car that I see coming up next to me.
Kazaa Lite used to come with something called 'sig2dat' that allowed this as well. You'd use sig2dat to generate a special link for your file (which just contained stuff like the filename, a hash, etc.) which you could put on a web site. If someone clicked the link and had Kazaa Lite installed, it'd automatically search Kazaa for a file matching that hash.
I don't think it really caught on though before Kazaa turned into a wasteland.
You can buy a diesel Civic in other parts of the world. We're screwed in the US though...
"Moving the pollution around" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you move the source of pollution from millions of loosely regulated and privately owned vehicles and transfer it to relatively small number of well regulated hydrogen processing plants, the net effect will still be positive.
Reducing emissions as new technology comes about will entail upgrading those processing plants rather than trying to get millions of drivers to upgrade their vehicle.