As the virus seems to be only installed on certain machines with known paths, and those paths can be exposed through Microsoft Office document files, it is possible that whoever targeted this attack had received a MS Office document, that told them who to target. I would not be entirely surprised if the font was used to detect installation on the target PC through either the virus using it in a office document as a file - or possibly even through printed material generated by the target machine.
Here is a simple explanation of why the Judge has ordered this:
1) You are allowed to claim anything you like in a court of law and you can't be sued for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise the legal system would be completely broken.
2) Journalists are allowed to report anything they like and they can't be used for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise freedom of the press would be completely broken.
3) Oracle appears to have paid 'journalists' to repeat the claims made in court as fact. Because those claims are now being made outside of court, they don't have the courts protection against being sued. Because the 'journalist' is acting as a paid agent of Oracle they are no longer protected by freedom of the press.
So this isn't a first amendment issue - this is just a did Oracle pay someone to defame Google issue.
If AU requires ads to not be bought by competitors,.
Competitors are still allowed to bid on other companies trademarked names - it's just that the link can't be deceptive.
e.g. Toyota could bid on keywords like 'ford truck' to have one of Toyota's ads come up.
What they can't do is have the ad say 'Hot deals on Ford F-150 trucks' and then have it link through to a site that only sells Toyota trucks, as that is a deceptive advert.
with a head office in the UK, I think this is awesome.
Currently the packets between Oz and the UK either go through central Asia, where there is massive packet loss, or they go the long way round - across the Pacific, across the USA and then across the Atlantic.
The new route will probably shave 40ms off the ping time from Oz to the UK as well as be pretty reliable - and also not subject to US data monitoring.
Basically in the first areas where the NBN has been deployed the biggest complaint from the customers was about the need to have battery packs inside their homes and the fact they will need to be replaced periodically.
Although some people or businesses may need to have working POTS during a black out I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to have it in all premises, particularly in a country like Australia where everyone has a mobile phone anyway.
However it is currently a requirement for the NBN installation that the phones work during powercuts. Stopping the mass installation of batteries and instead requiring people to keep their copper lines until either a better plan or smarter requirements can be implemented seems quite sensible to me.
TFA may have a point about prices - but no one is forced to choose Telstra. I'll be sticking with iinet and getting twice the data allocation and about six times the speed that I'm currently getting on ADSL.
And yet, according to TFA, the researchers were able to extinguish a foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort) with only a 600 watts of electricity AND they suspect they could do it with much less.
Watts != voltage differential
If there is no electricity being carried then a small power supply can build up an almost arbitrarily high electric field, until it either either arcs or the electric field becomes strong enough to start electrons streaming from it as an ion wind.
foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort)
That sounds like it could have been a bunsen burner - i.e. the flame could still have just been a centimeter or two across, which is a much easier fire to deal with that a wide fire. In fact you could probably put that flame out by just licking your thumb and sticking it over the fuel source.
Flames are ionised (i.e. charged) particles. If you have a strong enough electric field (which is really not the same as 'shooting electricity' as per the article) when the charged particles move through the electric field there will be a force on them perpendicular to their motion and to the field i.e. the flame will curve over into spiral.
If you could get this to happen on a large enough scale, the flame would suppress itself as instead of the flame moving away from the fuel it would hang around - stopping oxygen from reaching the fuel.
If this all sounds really unlikely, that's because it is. Here it a video showing an electric field affecting a small candle:
It looks like you need an electric field on the order of 10keV per 5cm to get this effect. So if you wanted to do it on a fire that was say 5 meters across you'd need an electric field in the order of 1MV which while obtainable is not exactly an easy thing to setup - particularly when there's a fire going on.
For some unknown reason the Irish government decided to guarantee all debts by banks in Ireland including banks that are owned and run by people who are not Irish or based in Ireland. These debts were not sovereign debts until the Irish government decided to unilaterally back them without any good cause. They did this back in 2008 and it's only now that they massive amount that they've basically handed over to private investors is becoming apparent.
It's pretty nuts that private investors had hoped to make money by investing in Irish banks - but now that they're actually facing losses the people of Ireland are going to step up and cover all these debts. So for the private investors it's a case of head I win, tails you lose - where there is no risk of the private investors losing any money - and no chance for the public to get a share of the profits that banks were making in the good times.
It will be interesting how Bing presents Wolfram Alpha and whether it removes the inherent design flaws in it. There is an insightful but long article about the problems here - wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces. Two good quotes from which are:
Hype also generates funding because it generates exaggerated sales projections. For instance:
"What Wolfram Alpha will do," Wolfram says, "is let people make use of the achievements of science and engineering on an everyday basis, much as the Web and search engines have let billions of people become reference librarians, so to speak."
[...]
It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as things only geeks would care about (such as generating truth tables for Boolean algebraic equations).
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
Dr. Wolfram, may I mention a word to you? That word is MySpace. If there is any such person as this average person, she has a MySpace account. Does she generate customized nutrition labels? On a regular basis, or just occasionally? In what other similar activities does she engage - monitoring the population of Burma? Graphing the lifecycle of stars? Charting Korean copper consumption since the 1960s? Perhaps you should feed MySpace into your giant electronic brain, and see what comes out.
and
Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe.....
The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't.
On May 19, 2006, the National Post of Canada published two pieces, one by Taheri, claiming that the Iranian parliament passed a law that "envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public." Iranian sources say Taheri had taken an Iranian Parliament discussion on a dress code law to have Muslims wear garments that showed you were a Muslim, and reported the event as a law being passed requiring Jews to wear badges as under the Nazis. Current Iranian law does require Jews to identify themselves as such if they sell food, but Iran claims badges for Jews was not actually under discussion nor in the law. Taheri states that his report is correct and that the dress code law has been passed by the Islamic Majlis and will now be submitted to the Council of Guardians. He does not claim badges for Jews are in the law, but does say that special markers for followers of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism are under discussion as a means to implement the law.
The National Post retracted the story several hours after it was posted online. The newspaper blamed Taheri for the falsehood in the article, [4] [5] and published a full apology on May 24.
Joining in with everyones else's generalisations - I.T women tend to have more skills then I.T. men ie they haven't dedicated their every waking moment to tech and so can find it easier than men to find jobs in other industries, leaving the men to compete for the few, low paying jobs available in the I.T. industry.
Plus they've finally gotten fedup with the I.T. men not washing enough.
Apparently, you also forget the pain of pre-.NET development. I haven't forgotten the insane amount of work it was to build a Web site with tables that let you sort and page data. I haven't forgotten how much work it was to write client-side and server side code to validate form fields.
Wtf? Apparently he has forgoten to use PHP for web development.
Your memory card is fuxored - corrupt blue screen - >the memory chips are failing. Been overclocking it have we or bought it second hand from Ebay?
If it's working until it get to a certain temperature you could try slapping some memory heat sinks on the chips or increasing ventilation in your pc, but usually corrupt memory means it's time to get another card...
No unfortunately - most of it came from talking to people in the know and reading between the lines of the legal struggles between nvidia and microsoft. There's no document signed by Microsoft saying how they planned to shaft nvidia.
The dispute over price was won by nvidia, presumably because it was very clear in the contract what the formula was for the profit per chip.
Why bother emulating it when you could simply license from Intel a mobileP3
Because that would add cost to each Xbox2 sold.
Since ideally the GPU of the xbox was made to MS specs they can give the info to ATI
The graphics chip was designed by nvidia who licenses Microsoft to manufacture the chips, but not any derivatives. To make another chip that was backwars compatible Microsoft would need to pay nvdia more license fees to cover the patents which again would add to the cost of the xbox 2.
Tada Xbox 2 is backwards compatible with a few minor code tweaks and hardware adjustments. Except that the Xbox2 probably won't have a hard drive.
Why does everyone think this is going to be so hard?
You are wrong because:
Anything You Don't Understand is Easy to Do. Example: If you have the right tools, how hard could it be to generate nuclear fission at home?
What makes nVidia so certain that Sony being easier to deal with then Microsoft?
Microsoft basically demanded that they be able to renegotiate the deal once they realised how much money they were losing per xbox and asked nvidia to just give up their money.
They also demanded that Nvidia hand over all their patents so that Microsoft could give them away to whoevers going to make the Xbox2 chips, so that they could be backwardly compatible.
However bad sony is they can't be as bad as microsoft to deal with.
Oh and Nvidia will presumably benefit from Sonys chip making expertise and will be able to use their fabs to produce high end graphics chips for PCs at cheap prices - rather than having to pay TSMC through the nose...
"US dollars, PC 9800 Pro cards of various configurations are running $180-280."
Thanks for the link, I can see one card that is $200, but that appears to have a 128bit memory controller instead of the 256bit one, ie isn't actually a pro, but yes the next ones are >$270 not over $350. Funny how other sites are still selling at $350 (like insight.com) I guess it might be limited supply.
Now if only Newegg shipped internationally that would be great.
What the frick is happening to the prices of video cards?
In the old days (ie three years ago) the price of each card would fall over time, and then fall dramatically once a couple of video card 'generations' had passed.
Nowadays it seems that the price of existing video cards is stable and that newer cards are coming out at ever increasing prices.
For example the 9800 pro came out over a year ago but is still $350-400 dollars. The new ATI cards coming out are over $500...
This can't really represent the mass market for video cards can it ?
Slashdot Mirror
The assumption is that it allows detection of the installation of the virus via a web-browser.
http://blog.crysys.hu/2012/08/on-the-palida-narrow-mystery-of-gauss-malware-and-possible-remote-detection/
As the virus seems to be only installed on certain machines with known paths, and those paths can be exposed through Microsoft Office document files, it is possible that whoever targeted this attack had received a MS Office document, that told them who to target. I would not be entirely surprised if the font was used to detect installation on the target PC through either the virus using it in a office document as a file - or possibly even through printed material generated by the target machine.
Here is a simple explanation of why the Judge has ordered this:
1) You are allowed to claim anything you like in a court of law and you can't be sued for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise the legal system would be completely broken.
2) Journalists are allowed to report anything they like and they can't be used for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise freedom of the press would be completely broken.
3) Oracle appears to have paid 'journalists' to repeat the claims made in court as fact. Because those claims are now being made outside of court, they don't have the courts protection against being sued. Because the 'journalist' is acting as a paid agent of Oracle they are no longer protected by freedom of the press.
So this isn't a first amendment issue - this is just a did Oracle pay someone to defame Google issue.
If AU requires ads to not be bought by competitors, .
Competitors are still allowed to bid on other companies trademarked names - it's just that the link can't be deceptive.
e.g. Toyota could bid on keywords like 'ford truck' to have one of Toyota's ads come up.
What they can't do is have the ad say 'Hot deals on Ford F-150 trucks' and then have it link through to a site that only sells Toyota trucks, as that is a deceptive advert.
with a head office in the UK, I think this is awesome.
Currently the packets between Oz and the UK either go through central Asia, where there is massive packet loss, or they go the long way round - across the Pacific, across the USA and then across the Atlantic.
The new route will probably shave 40ms off the ping time from Oz to the UK as well as be pretty reliable - and also not subject to US data monitoring.
Basically in the first areas where the NBN has been deployed the biggest complaint from the customers was about the need to have battery packs inside their homes and the fact they will need to be replaced periodically.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/276366,nbn-users-complain-about-battery-backup.aspx
Although some people or businesses may need to have working POTS during a black out I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to have it in all premises, particularly in a country like Australia where everyone has a mobile phone anyway.
However it is currently a requirement for the NBN installation that the phones work during powercuts. Stopping the mass installation of batteries and instead requiring people to keep their copper lines until either a better plan or smarter requirements can be implemented seems quite sensible to me.
TFA may have a point about prices - but no one is forced to choose Telstra. I'll be sticking with iinet and getting twice the data allocation and about six times the speed that I'm currently getting on ADSL.
And yet, according to TFA, the researchers were able to extinguish a foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort) with only a 600 watts of electricity AND they suspect they could do it with much less.
Watts != voltage differential
If there is no electricity being carried then a small power supply can build up an almost arbitrarily high electric field, until it either either arcs or the electric field becomes strong enough to start electrons streaming from it as an ion wind.
foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort)
That sounds like it could have been a bunsen burner - i.e. the flame could still have just been a centimeter or two across, which is a much easier fire to deal with that a wide fire. In fact you could probably put that flame out by just licking your thumb and sticking it over the fuel source.
Flames are ionised (i.e. charged) particles. If you have a strong enough electric field (which is really not the same as 'shooting electricity' as per the article) when the charged particles move through the electric field there will be a force on them perpendicular to their motion and to the field i.e. the flame will curve over into spiral.
If you could get this to happen on a large enough scale, the flame would suppress itself as instead of the flame moving away from the fuel it would hang around - stopping oxygen from reaching the fuel.
If this all sounds really unlikely, that's because it is. Here it a video showing an electric field affecting a small candle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fKGeV4NrrA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
It looks like you need an electric field on the order of 10keV per 5cm to get this effect. So if you wanted to do it on a fire that was say 5 meters across you'd need an electric field in the order of 1MV which while obtainable is not exactly an easy thing to setup - particularly when there's a fire going on.
It's the private bank's debts.
For some unknown reason the Irish government decided to guarantee all debts by banks in Ireland including banks that are owned and run by people who are not Irish or based in Ireland. These debts were not sovereign debts until the Irish government decided to unilaterally back them without any good cause. They did this back in 2008 and it's only now that they massive amount that they've basically handed over to private investors is becoming apparent.
It's pretty nuts that private investors had hoped to make money by investing in Irish banks - but now that they're actually facing losses the people of Ireland are going to step up and cover all these debts. So for the private investors it's a case of head I win, tails you lose - where there is no risk of the private investors losing any money - and no chance for the public to get a share of the profits that banks were making in the good times.
It will be interesting how Bing presents Wolfram Alpha and whether it removes the inherent design flaws in it. There is an insightful but long article about the problems here - wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces. Two good quotes from which are:
Hype also generates funding because it generates exaggerated sales projections. For instance:
"What Wolfram Alpha will do," Wolfram says, "is let people make use of the achievements of science and engineering on an everyday basis, much as the Web and search engines have let billions of people become reference librarians, so to speak."
[...]
It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as things only geeks would care about (such as generating truth tables for Boolean algebraic equations).
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
Dr. Wolfram, may I mention a word to you? That word is MySpace. If there is any such person as this average person, she has a MySpace account. Does she generate customized nutrition labels? On a regular basis, or just occasionally? In what other similar activities does she engage - monitoring the population of Burma? Graphing the lifecycle of stars? Charting Korean copper consumption since the 1960s? Perhaps you should feed MySpace into your giant electronic brain, and see what comes out.
and
Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe. ....
The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't.
Amir Taheri, the author of that piece is a known fabricator of lies about Iran
From Wikipedia
On May 19, 2006, the National Post of Canada published two pieces, one by Taheri, claiming that the Iranian parliament passed a law that "envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public." Iranian sources say Taheri had taken an Iranian Parliament discussion on a dress code law to have Muslims wear garments that showed you were a Muslim, and reported the event as a law being passed requiring Jews to wear badges as under the Nazis. Current Iranian law does require Jews to identify themselves as such if they sell food, but Iran claims badges for Jews was not actually under discussion nor in the law. Taheri states that his report is correct and that the dress code law has been passed by the Islamic Majlis and will now be submitted to the Council of Guardians. He does not claim badges for Jews are in the law, but does say that special markers for followers of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism are under discussion as a means to implement the law.
The National Post retracted the story several hours after it was posted online. The newspaper blamed Taheri for the falsehood in the article, [4] [5] and published a full apology on May 24.
Please to not be accepting propaganda as truth.
Becaus they can.
Joining in with everyones else's generalisations - I.T women tend to have more skills then I.T. men ie they haven't dedicated their every waking moment to tech and so can find it easier than men to find jobs in other industries, leaving the men to compete for the few, low paying jobs available in the I.T. industry.
Plus they've finally gotten fedup with the I.T. men not washing enough.
Apparently, you also forget the pain of pre-.NET development. I haven't forgotten the insane amount of work it was to build a Web site with tables that let you sort and page data. I haven't forgotten how much work it was to write client-side and server side code to validate form fields.
Wtf? Apparently he has forgoten to use PHP for web development.
but where is the market crying out for a disposable phone? Who's life does it improve?
Terrorists, criminals, adulterers.
Hmm, I'd like to see the advertising for this one.
The conventional wisdom is that it will now be a launch title on the xbox 2 possibly along with the next conkers game.
Microsoft has officially confirmed details of its acquisition of Rare Ltd this evening at X02 in Seville. The deal, worth $375 million, will see five Xbox exclusives titles including a sequel to Perfect Dark appearing in the next 12-24 months.
Oh you obviously meant they didn't spend more than 2% of their cash reserve.
My bad - change it to a peacekeeper missile (cep of 90m) and fill the house with sweaty gelignite. Should do the trick.
Gather up the bosses of all the companies that are receiving contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars for building it.
Put them in a house.
Target the house with an ICBM - it doesn't matter if it doesn't have a warhead, having it impact at supersonic speeds will do the trick.
Setup the missile defence.
Ask the bosses if they want to go through with the test or whether they want to admit it's not going to work and for them to stop taking free money.
Test if it works or not.
--- --- ---
After a few tests you'll probably find the new people in charge of the companies admit they're selling snake oil.
Your memory card is fuxored - corrupt blue screen - >the memory chips are failing. Been overclocking it have we or bought it second hand from Ebay?
If it's working until it get to a certain temperature you could try slapping some memory heat sinks on the chips or increasing ventilation in your pc, but usually corrupt memory means it's time to get another card...
No unfortunately - most of it came from talking to people in the know and reading between the lines of the legal struggles between nvidia and microsoft. There's no document signed by Microsoft saying how they planned to shaft nvidia.
The dispute over price was won by nvidia, presumably because it was very clear in the contract what the formula was for the profit per chip.
Why bother emulating it when you could simply license from Intel a mobileP3
Because that would add cost to each Xbox2 sold.
Since ideally the GPU of the xbox was made to MS specs they can give the info to ATI
The graphics chip was designed by nvidia who licenses Microsoft to manufacture the chips, but not any derivatives. To make another chip that was backwars compatible Microsoft would need to pay nvdia more license fees to cover the patents which again would add to the cost of the xbox 2.
Tada Xbox 2 is backwards compatible with a few minor code tweaks and hardware adjustments.
Except that the Xbox2 probably won't have a hard drive.
Why does everyone think this is going to be so hard?
You are wrong because:
Anything You Don't Understand is Easy to Do.
Example: If you have the right tools, how hard could it be to generate nuclear fission at home?
no unfortunately. For speed reasons developers have bypassed the DirectX api to write native nvidia opcodes.
D'oh!
What makes nVidia so certain that Sony being easier to deal with then Microsoft?
Microsoft basically demanded that they be able to renegotiate the deal once they realised how much money they were losing per xbox and asked nvidia to just give up their money.
They also demanded that Nvidia hand over all their patents so that Microsoft could give them away to whoevers going to make the Xbox2 chips, so that they could be backwardly compatible.
However bad sony is they can't be as bad as microsoft to deal with.
Oh and Nvidia will presumably benefit from Sonys chip making expertise and will be able to use their fabs to produce high end graphics chips for PCs at cheap prices - rather than having to pay TSMC through the nose...
"US dollars, PC 9800 Pro cards of various configurations are running $180-280."
Thanks for the link, I can see one card that is $200, but that appears to have a 128bit memory controller instead of the 256bit one, ie isn't actually a pro, but yes the next ones are >$270 not over $350. Funny how other sites are still selling at $350 (like insight.com) I guess it might be limited supply.
Now if only Newegg shipped internationally that would be great.
What the frick is happening to the prices of video cards?
In the old days (ie three years ago) the price of each card would fall over time, and then fall dramatically once a couple of video card 'generations' had passed.
Nowadays it seems that the price of existing video cards is stable and that newer cards are coming out at ever increasing prices.
For example the 9800 pro came out over a year ago but is still $350-400 dollars. The new ATI cards coming out are over $500...
This can't really represent the mass market for video cards can it ?
= The ohno second - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.