I'll gladly pay for downloadable music if it's in OGG or (preferably) MP3 format. I'm not paying $20 for an album, though. Those days are gone as far as I'm concerned. Lately all I've bought from the store are $10 or less items, just for something different to listen to. Let me listen to music at 96kbps and if I like it, I want to pick song by song what I want for say $1 a piece. Or a whole album (with good songs but includes filler) for say $10. I couldn't see people pirating too much at reasonable prices with unlimited usage terms. Let me reiterate that try before you buy (read: listening to the whole song at a lower sample rate) is a key feature IMO.
By the way, why didn't they just come out and say what format it would be in instead of being vague? The omission only makes their statement sound like a half truth.
The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site.
What browser allows BBC to send them spyware without the user's permission? If that really happens, it's a browser security bug. I'm surprised the spammers haven't leveraged this bug with their html mail efforts (if it's really that easy to install spyware on a user's system). I find it hard to believe this claim. Anyone have an explanation?
I don't know... At least 10 years ago someone could point a dish at your office window from 100 feet away and steal data. I would not be surprised today if that same technology has advanced 100 fold and could pick up even the tiny signals spoken of in this article.
I remember my sister and I working to get a game going on the C64. She read the hex numbers, I typed (over 10 pp). Now that I think about it, that was pretty cool of her.:)
I don't know about the rest of you, but if someone thinks they can take out a multi-multi BILLION dollar company and not have a hitman after them, they're either very clever or very stupid.
Then everybody decided to make their search engine a "portal."
To me, there are some things that a portal is good for. One of those things is _not_ to have categorized links for every topic imaginable right on the front page. I don't have time to read that. Instead of clicking the "Sports" item, it's faster for me to simply type "Sports".
I think that possibly site owners are getting back to the basics and getting rid of the big, bloated pages that used to seem so impressive and professional (yeah sure).
So I'd say they are doing ok by the community. Think it would exist if they hadnt 'sold out' and started taking money for tiny little non intrusive ads?
I actually _like_ their text ads, and I really, really hate graphical ads. To me, it's an unobtrusive and polite way to tell me something, and I often find myself reading them.
Hell, IE still to this day includes Mozilla in its user agent header to work around all the sites that would deny access to anything other than Netscape, back in the 2.0 era.
At this I am very surprised. It's Microsoft's style to turn around and bite people in the ass when they have the upper hand. I wonder why MS hasn't "forced" Netscape only sites to change by updating their agent header?
If a browser can't render it, file a bug. If it doesn't work in IE, too bad!
Many sites can get away with this, but many cannot. If I'm selling a product on the web, I'll make darn sure that 99% of my customer's browsers work with my site. It's a good ideal to say "fix your IE bugs", but often not realistic.
Just remember that every file they download immediately becomes a candidate for upload by one, ten, or a thousand people.
That's an excellent point. Surely there's another, less offensive, way to curb excessive P2P usage without banning it outright? Let's say, limit the amount of upstream bandwidth that can be used in a certain period of time. Over that, and the connection gets throttled to 2KB/second or something.
Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read them -- and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Problem with Open source alternatives is simply that it's more expensive to administer them, it's fairly easy to find someone qualified to keep a Windows or Mac lab running fairly well, but *nix systems require a tad more expertise to run properly.
These days it's not hard to find someone who knows Linux or UNIX. With the current economy, you wouldn't have to pay them (much) more either.
Is it really more expensive to administer? I think that really depends on the skills of the administrator and the software you're talking about. As for an office suite running on Linux, it's no harder to use than MS Office. Try a recent distro! It's very easy to install and use.
One benefit you've overlooked is that once a Linux system is setup, you can let it run for years problem free: that's where you can save some money. Windows installations need reformatting every 6 months to a year in most cases.
1. A DRAM "drive" suffers the fundemental problem that if the "external" power source is lost, you lose everything on the drive.
This may not be such a bad thing. You could store 2 GB of sensitive data on it and if your computer is accessed in a non-standard way, you'd automatically shut down. (you get the idea)
A lot of things suck up bandwidth. Why pick on P2P? Linux ISO's take a lot of bandwidth.. let's outlaw downloading of those?
And since when is upstream bandwidth more expensive than downstream bandwidth? They make it sound like you can download all you want -- just don't upload anything. Costs the same thing.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Cut off your nose to spite your face?
By that logic, we should simply shut down the Internet because of all the bad things that can be accomplished by it. The way this is going, all the 'net will be good for in 10 years is advertising and spying on us in our homes.
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I'll gladly pay for downloadable music if it's in OGG or (preferably) MP3 format. I'm not paying $20 for an album, though. Those days are gone as far as I'm concerned. Lately all I've bought from the store are $10 or less items, just for something different to listen to. Let me listen to music at 96kbps and if I like it, I want to pick song by song what I want for say $1 a piece. Or a whole album (with good songs but includes filler) for say $10. I couldn't see people pirating too much at reasonable prices with unlimited usage terms. Let me reiterate that try before you buy (read: listening to the whole song at a lower sample rate) is a key feature IMO.
By the way, why didn't they just come out and say what format it would be in instead of being vague? The omission only makes their statement sound like a half truth.
You do realize of course that MD5s only provide limited security. Afterall, if I can replace the .tar.gz, why can't I also replace the .md5?
Presumably, the md5sum file was also md5sum'd.
the device from StepUp Computing can be navigated by touching the display with any object
;)
This is going to revolutionalize porn..
(sorry, had to be said
The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site.
What browser allows BBC to send them spyware without the user's permission? If that really happens, it's a browser security bug. I'm surprised the spammers haven't leveraged this bug with their html mail efforts (if it's really that easy to install spyware on a user's system). I find it hard to believe this claim. Anyone have an explanation?
On the other hand, it works great for baked goods companies.
I thought standing behind someone in the supermarket paying with cheques was bad... imagine being behind this guy in airport security!
I don't know... At least 10 years ago someone could point a dish at your office window from 100 feet away and steal data. I would not be surprised today if that same technology has advanced 100 fold and could pick up even the tiny signals spoken of in this article.
If that doesn't make you think a little, then maybe you didn't read these recent stories:
Sensors gone wild
The Pentagon Wants Your Secrets
I remember my sister and I working to get a game going on the C64. She read the hex numbers, I typed (over 10 pp). Now that I think about it, that was pretty cool of her. :)
Didn't someone at least make a photocopy of it?!
I've had just this very idea. It goes like this:
The FCC actually allows low-powered FM broadcasts for amateur radio stations.
I'm not sure if you were trying to say what I'm going to say, but here goes:
Distributed low-powered FM broadcasts supplied by broadband Internet.
Slow connections are irrelevent. Those with broadband can broadcast the FM station, and everyone else just turns on their radio!
One site you could check out is:
http://sta.c64.org/
You must use Internet Explorer to view the movies.
DRM here we come!
Now, will it be the red pill, or the blue pill?
This appears as an exit link:
"anarax.net - easier to use than a virgin on prom night"
Not very tasteful for a professional site.
I don't know about the rest of you, but if someone thinks they can take out a multi-multi BILLION dollar company and not have a hitman after them, they're either very clever or very stupid.
Then everybody decided to make their search engine a "portal."
To me, there are some things that a portal is good for. One of those things is _not_ to have categorized links for every topic imaginable right on the front page. I don't have time to read that. Instead of clicking the "Sports" item, it's faster for me to simply type "Sports".
I think that possibly site owners are getting back to the basics and getting rid of the big, bloated pages that used to seem so impressive and professional (yeah sure).
So I'd say they are doing ok by the community. Think it would exist if they hadnt 'sold out' and started taking money for tiny little non intrusive ads?
I actually _like_ their text ads, and I really, really hate graphical ads. To me, it's an unobtrusive and polite way to tell me something, and I often find myself reading them.
Hell, IE still to this day includes Mozilla in its user agent header to work around all the sites that would deny access to anything other than Netscape, back in the 2.0 era.
At this I am very surprised. It's Microsoft's style to turn around and bite people in the ass when they have the upper hand. I wonder why MS hasn't "forced" Netscape only sites to change by updating their agent header?
If a browser can't render it, file a bug. If it doesn't work in IE, too bad!
Many sites can get away with this, but many cannot. If I'm selling a product on the web, I'll make darn sure that 99% of my customer's browsers work with my site. It's a good ideal to say "fix your IE bugs", but often not realistic.
Just remember that every file they download immediately becomes a candidate for upload by one, ten, or a thousand people.
That's an excellent point. Surely there's another, less offensive, way to curb excessive P2P usage without banning it outright? Let's say, limit the amount of upstream bandwidth that can be used in a certain period of time. Over that, and the connection gets throttled to 2KB/second or something.
Problem with Open source alternatives is simply that it's more expensive to administer them, it's fairly easy to find someone qualified to keep a Windows or Mac lab running fairly well, but *nix systems require a tad more expertise to run properly.
These days it's not hard to find someone who knows Linux or UNIX. With the current economy, you wouldn't have to pay them (much) more either.
Is it really more expensive to administer? I think that really depends on the skills of the administrator and the software you're talking about. As for an office suite running on Linux, it's no harder to use than MS Office. Try a recent distro! It's very easy to install and use.
One benefit you've overlooked is that once a Linux system is setup, you can let it run for years problem free: that's where you can save some money. Windows installations need reformatting every 6 months to a year in most cases.
The Pentagon wants to be able to sit on their ass and control the world. That's the ultimate goal.
Toss your wireless devices...
1. A DRAM "drive" suffers the fundemental problem that if the "external" power source is lost, you lose everything on the drive.
This may not be such a bad thing. You could store 2 GB of sensitive data on it and if your computer is accessed in a non-standard way, you'd automatically shut down. (you get the idea)
A lot of things suck up bandwidth. Why pick on P2P? Linux ISO's take a lot of bandwidth.. let's outlaw downloading of those?
And since when is upstream bandwidth more expensive than downstream bandwidth? They make it sound like you can download all you want -- just don't upload anything. Costs the same thing.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Cut off your nose to spite your face?
By that logic, we should simply shut down the Internet because of all the bad things that can be accomplished by it.
The way this is going, all the 'net will be good for in 10 years is advertising and spying on us in our homes.