1.8MB? You could download that from practically any open access point without anybody noticing. I'm frankly surprised that the code is that small, I know the bulk of a game is the art and whatnot, but man, I've personally coded some things that were a good fraction of that myself in just a few days.
With the way the science has been going, I wouldn't be surprised to see room temperature (300k) superconductors in my lifetime. Practical use may take longer, but thus far the field has been quite exciting.
My wife's laptop got the same thing. I'd clear out all of the spyware and stuff that was found, but after a couple of days it would be reinstalled. Clearly the machine was rooted and whoever it was used the rootkit to install that crap. The only way to get rid of it was to reinstall Windows (and not a lame "repair", but a full on reinstall).
Anyway, I think this is fairly new because it's only recently that nVidia released the three way SLI capable 9800s. Frankly, I would be surprised if this card performs much better than the GX2 with the current state of the drivers and games.
You've been reading too many nutty conspiracy types about those RFID chips. They're basically just a slightly better barcode, not a movie style locater where someone with a box can pinpoint where you are from halfway across the city.
The box listed above is pretty much the minimum you need for a global tracking system for your stuff. A GPS receiver, battery, and one way pager (the one-way in this case is out! Probably is actually a stripped down cell phone sending SMS messages). It also won't work if the thief brings your stuff inside, and is iffy in cities or around lots of trees. Still, even a few hits could go a long way towards figuring out where your stuff is.
$10 a month seems a bit high for something that's almost never going to send data. I'd prefer something like $0.10 per message (which is pretty outrageous for the amount of data sent) with no fixed cost. Although if you can use the same account for a whole bunch of the receivers (probably not) it might not be so bad.
Why would they still be running Vista? That doesn't make any sense. It's like people of 25 years ago saying "oh man, they'll be running Dos 3.9987SP22X5LM21 in 2008!"
Tires, as it turns out, are terrible reef material. They're so light that they shift around in the currents, destroying anything that tries to grow on them. I know at least one project attempted to remedy that situation by tying all of the tires together...with steel cables. Obviously the steel cables rusted away within months and it was the same problem all over again.
Subway cars, however, are heavy enough to not move around in the currents and should provide ample anchorage for sea life.
I just wish USB soundcards weren't such a hack. It always seemed to me that firewire would be perfect for external sound cards, but nobody seems to do that, at least not at the consumer level.
If you want to go far enough, dang near any computer made today (even the one that runs the keypad on your microwave) is powerful enough to play Pong or a variety of 2600 games. It depends how many kids want to run games from 1998. Heck, the vast majority of Linux games will run on any computer you could buy today.
It didn't look like there was a good place to turn around to me. I was willing to give the driver the benefit of the doubt that he was looking for a way to turn around instead of having to back all the way down the driveway. It doesn't excuse the lack of a "delete the last x seconds" button though, since you have to expect this sort of thing to happen fairly frequently in more rural areas where street signs are rare and side roads are difficult to distinguish from driveways (google maps gets this wrong a lot too!).
It looked to me like the Google van turned down a side street and realized too late that it was a private driveway. By the time they had turned around and gone out to the main road, their van had already captured the pictures. What the operators should have done is to erase the last N seconds worth of pictures from street view, but for some reason they didn't (do they even have the capability?).
I think a bigger deterrent against game playing will be the 1.6Ghz VIA processor and the sure to be crappy integrated graphics, not to mention the fact that it's running Linux (how many Linux games come on CD anyway?).
$500 seems like a bit much for this laptop. Is it ruggedized or something (would make sense for a machine designed for kids)?
Frankly, I'm not rushing to get a Blu-Ray drive for my computer. The blanks are too expensive right now and it might never support playing movies thanks to the industry paranoia and DRM, especially since I primarily use FreeBSD. Thus far I do not have a pressing need to burn disks that no other computer I have access to can read either.
The blanks aren't quite as bad as you said though, simply because they do have higher capacity. Blu-Ray blanks at $11/each for $0.44/GB. This is still more expensive than DVD ($0.04/GB), but its only about an order of magnitude. Blu Ray blanks have to get down to about a buck a piece to match that, which given the history of blanks I'd expect to happen in a year or two.
I'd argue that if most average users see a file called "hotstuff.jpg" they'll think it's a picture, but if they see hotstuff.jpg.exe they'll stop for a moment and at least go "what is wrong with that file?" It just looks wrong at first glance, which is really what you need to get people started down the road of good security. Arguably, hotstuff.exe would be harder to spot because it follows the basic pattern people are self trained to recognize on Windows machines.
Also, clueless luser jokes aside, I think most users would practice better security if their OS didn't work against them quite so much. Only.exe files should execute with a double click like that..scr files should require a right click to execute (a double click could bring up a box explaining that it's a screensaver and needs to be installed to be used and not to trust it if you found it on the internet)..pif files shouldn't be executable at all unless they're actually a.pif. I'm sure there's something else I'm forgetting, but you get the idea. Keep the OS simple and logical and people won't be fooled by surprising stuff like that.
If my grandmother rolls her eyes at the idea of internet petitions, what reason is there to think that Uwe would stop making movies from one? Just because someone name Soukin McCocksoff said he's a bad man and should go away on the internet means he'll do it.
The other advantage of Scheme is that there is absolutely no chance it will be useful outside of the classroom, so you can be sure the entire exercise is academic. Scheme is a lot like basic Pascal in that it's missing enough features that nobody will ever try to use it for a real project and you don't have to worry about your students discovering those features and writing programs in a completely different way than you intended.
Maybe I just hate scheme because my professor would deduct one letter grade if he was able to cause improper operation of the program with invalid input, and automatically fail you if he could crash it ungracefully (you didn't catch the error). Have you ever tried to type check input in Scheme, or verify the structure of a file? It's not fun.
Microsoft's "hide extensions by default" has to be the worst security decision of all time. I know it's the first thing I turn off when I use a new machine, but still, most people leave it on and it's just asking for trouble.
Wow, I don't envy the guy who's job it is to look through the millions of TCP connections per day to find the ones that look "wrong". Sure you can do some statistical aggregation to find someone who is actively sending out thousands of emails (which your firewall is likely blocking anyway), but finding the one guy who clicked on a bad link in the absolute torrent of connections? Laughable.
Re:Designate Windows OS as Terrorist Tool
on
New Botnet Dwarfs Storm
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I find it easier to believe that that antivirus tools just suck.
So it's talking about a piece of hardware we can't even build (last time I shopped for holographic projectors that can be embedded in a ceramic cup they were hard to find) that has a user interface nobody would want (how do you choose what data is transfered?) on a product that will never be built. Sounds like a real winner of a story. I guess it employed some graphic artist for like half a day, so that's something.
In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together; shifting more towards modular designs rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of Windows. This increased amount of componentization, while satisfying the DoJ and EU, also led to performance issues due to the increased number of libraries which comprise the operating system. On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit.
This is the point I stopped reading the article. This is several orders of a magnitude away from being a factor as to why Vista is slow. Since it appears to be the foundation of his argument, I know the rest of the article doesn't have a leg to stand on.
How hard would it be for them to do that? Does it require a tech to come out or is it something I can just call and have done in 15 minutes? I really wouldn't mind dumping PPPoE. I guess this is what I get for being an early adopter. On the other hand, I get to use my own (BSD based) firewall instead of the appliance because I have the separate box for the FiOS TV stuff, so I guess I gotta take the good with the bad.
I seem to recall that the problem with Eye of Judgment was that it was trivially easy to copy cards (or just download them from the internet and print them out), making the whole "card collecting" part of the game pointless.
Frankly, I hate "collectible" games anyway, since it means either buying a ton of crap you don't want (and throw away) to get the good stuff, or paying someone else to do it for you.
1.8MB? You could download that from practically any open access point without anybody noticing. I'm frankly surprised that the code is that small, I know the bulk of a game is the art and whatnot, but man, I've personally coded some things that were a good fraction of that myself in just a few days.
Of course if you get hit by a truck while in your Mustang you have a much higher chance of survival than you would have had in your old tin can Honda.
Isn't there an X-Prize that is pretty much exactly what you're asking for?
With the way the science has been going, I wouldn't be surprised to see room temperature (300k) superconductors in my lifetime. Practical use may take longer, but thus far the field has been quite exciting.
My wife's laptop got the same thing. I'd clear out all of the spyware and stuff that was found, but after a couple of days it would be reinstalled. Clearly the machine was rooted and whoever it was used the rootkit to install that crap. The only way to get rid of it was to reinstall Windows (and not a lame "repair", but a full on reinstall).
Slashvertisments are hardly new.
Anyway, I think this is fairly new because it's only recently that nVidia released the three way SLI capable 9800s. Frankly, I would be surprised if this card performs much better than the GX2 with the current state of the drivers and games.
You've been reading too many nutty conspiracy types about those RFID chips. They're basically just a slightly better barcode, not a movie style locater where someone with a box can pinpoint where you are from halfway across the city.
The box listed above is pretty much the minimum you need for a global tracking system for your stuff. A GPS receiver, battery, and one way pager (the one-way in this case is out! Probably is actually a stripped down cell phone sending SMS messages). It also won't work if the thief brings your stuff inside, and is iffy in cities or around lots of trees. Still, even a few hits could go a long way towards figuring out where your stuff is.
$10 a month seems a bit high for something that's almost never going to send data. I'd prefer something like $0.10 per message (which is pretty outrageous for the amount of data sent) with no fixed cost. Although if you can use the same account for a whole bunch of the receivers (probably not) it might not be so bad.
Why would they still be running Vista? That doesn't make any sense. It's like people of 25 years ago saying "oh man, they'll be running Dos 3.9987SP22X5LM21 in 2008!"
Tires, as it turns out, are terrible reef material. They're so light that they shift around in the currents, destroying anything that tries to grow on them. I know at least one project attempted to remedy that situation by tying all of the tires together...with steel cables. Obviously the steel cables rusted away within months and it was the same problem all over again.
Subway cars, however, are heavy enough to not move around in the currents and should provide ample anchorage for sea life.
I just wish USB soundcards weren't such a hack. It always seemed to me that firewire would be perfect for external sound cards, but nobody seems to do that, at least not at the consumer level.
If you want to go far enough, dang near any computer made today (even the one that runs the keypad on your microwave) is powerful enough to play Pong or a variety of 2600 games. It depends how many kids want to run games from 1998. Heck, the vast majority of Linux games will run on any computer you could buy today.
The real question is: will it run WoW?
It didn't look like there was a good place to turn around to me. I was willing to give the driver the benefit of the doubt that he was looking for a way to turn around instead of having to back all the way down the driveway. It doesn't excuse the lack of a "delete the last x seconds" button though, since you have to expect this sort of thing to happen fairly frequently in more rural areas where street signs are rare and side roads are difficult to distinguish from driveways (google maps gets this wrong a lot too!).
It looked to me like the Google van turned down a side street and realized too late that it was a private driveway. By the time they had turned around and gone out to the main road, their van had already captured the pictures. What the operators should have done is to erase the last N seconds worth of pictures from street view, but for some reason they didn't (do they even have the capability?).
I think a bigger deterrent against game playing will be the 1.6Ghz VIA processor and the sure to be crappy integrated graphics, not to mention the fact that it's running Linux (how many Linux games come on CD anyway?).
$500 seems like a bit much for this laptop. Is it ruggedized or something (would make sense for a machine designed for kids)?
Frankly, I'm not rushing to get a Blu-Ray drive for my computer. The blanks are too expensive right now and it might never support playing movies thanks to the industry paranoia and DRM, especially since I primarily use FreeBSD. Thus far I do not have a pressing need to burn disks that no other computer I have access to can read either.
The blanks aren't quite as bad as you said though, simply because they do have higher capacity. Blu-Ray blanks at $11/each for $0.44/GB. This is still more expensive than DVD ($0.04/GB), but its only about an order of magnitude. Blu Ray blanks have to get down to about a buck a piece to match that, which given the history of blanks I'd expect to happen in a year or two.
I'd argue that if most average users see a file called "hotstuff.jpg" they'll think it's a picture, but if they see hotstuff.jpg.exe they'll stop for a moment and at least go "what is wrong with that file?" It just looks wrong at first glance, which is really what you need to get people started down the road of good security. Arguably, hotstuff.exe would be harder to spot because it follows the basic pattern people are self trained to recognize on Windows machines.
.exe files should execute with a double click like that. .scr files should require a right click to execute (a double click could bring up a box explaining that it's a screensaver and needs to be installed to be used and not to trust it if you found it on the internet). .pif files shouldn't be executable at all unless they're actually a .pif. I'm sure there's something else I'm forgetting, but you get the idea. Keep the OS simple and logical and people won't be fooled by surprising stuff like that.
Also, clueless luser jokes aside, I think most users would practice better security if their OS didn't work against them quite so much. Only
If my grandmother rolls her eyes at the idea of internet petitions, what reason is there to think that Uwe would stop making movies from one? Just because someone name Soukin McCocksoff said he's a bad man and should go away on the internet means he'll do it.
The other advantage of Scheme is that there is absolutely no chance it will be useful outside of the classroom, so you can be sure the entire exercise is academic. Scheme is a lot like basic Pascal in that it's missing enough features that nobody will ever try to use it for a real project and you don't have to worry about your students discovering those features and writing programs in a completely different way than you intended.
Maybe I just hate scheme because my professor would deduct one letter grade if he was able to cause improper operation of the program with invalid input, and automatically fail you if he could crash it ungracefully (you didn't catch the error). Have you ever tried to type check input in Scheme, or verify the structure of a file? It's not fun.
Microsoft's "hide extensions by default" has to be the worst security decision of all time. I know it's the first thing I turn off when I use a new machine, but still, most people leave it on and it's just asking for trouble.
Wow, I don't envy the guy who's job it is to look through the millions of TCP connections per day to find the ones that look "wrong". Sure you can do some statistical aggregation to find someone who is actively sending out thousands of emails (which your firewall is likely blocking anyway), but finding the one guy who clicked on a bad link in the absolute torrent of connections? Laughable.
I find it easier to believe that that antivirus tools just suck.
So it's talking about a piece of hardware we can't even build (last time I shopped for holographic projectors that can be embedded in a ceramic cup they were hard to find) that has a user interface nobody would want (how do you choose what data is transfered?) on a product that will never be built. Sounds like a real winner of a story. I guess it employed some graphic artist for like half a day, so that's something.
How hard would it be for them to do that? Does it require a tech to come out or is it something I can just call and have done in 15 minutes? I really wouldn't mind dumping PPPoE. I guess this is what I get for being an early adopter. On the other hand, I get to use my own (BSD based) firewall instead of the appliance because I have the separate box for the FiOS TV stuff, so I guess I gotta take the good with the bad.
I seem to recall that the problem with Eye of Judgment was that it was trivially easy to copy cards (or just download them from the internet and print them out), making the whole "card collecting" part of the game pointless.
Frankly, I hate "collectible" games anyway, since it means either buying a ton of crap you don't want (and throw away) to get the good stuff, or paying someone else to do it for you.