If the player can play it, it can be broken. The only thing you can do is make it difficult. It's like preventing software piracy. For every month of development time for copy protection, you delay a determined and knowledgeable attacker for maybe an hour. This is just another fine example of that truth. If they'd have spent 10 years and 2 billion dollars instead it would have just taken an additional two weeks to break. Don't they get it? This will never change.
As long as the DRM has been properly broken before I buy the unit, I'm happy. Kudos to you, keep up the good work.
Funny how the RIAA goons are making mistakes, and want the ISPs to give them more information so that somehow this will prevent them from making so many mistakes.
We keep arresting innocent people. If the criminals' parents would just turn in all the criminals we wouldn't have to arrest so many innocent people.
Isn't this how nazi germany took care of crime? Convinced people to turn each other over at the slightest hint of disobedience, in the name of reducing crime?
It's so stupid it's funny. It's so true it's ironic.
that windows vista might actually give us a good reason to consider using windows,
Russinovich acknowledges the risk factor but says it was a 'design choice' to balance security with ease of use."
Isn't that the fundamental design problem with windows in general? Sacrificing security in the name of ease of use? From all the hype I've read recently that "vista is the most secure ever", I thought that maybe, just maybe, windows would focus on security this time.
...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut.
This is just an example of abuse of the democratic system, using it to push someone's agenda rather than to work the way it was intended. Federal laws are meant to be laws that are "common sense" that is accepted as a definition of unacceptable behavior by a greater majority of the people. Here again we see a minority of people attempting to push their version of common sense to the masses on a federal level.
This is also another attempt to trade a little fredom in the name of safety. There is so much of that going on nowadays it makes me sick. Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety (Benjamin Franklin)
isn't telnet still used a lot by hardware for configuration? It hasn't been that long ago since I used telnet to configure several baytecs. Telnet is a lot like the serial ports you see on routers and switches - archaic, but simple and useful.
Instead of blindly contributing my cycles to whatever project some group of people in california (or wherever) decide is the project of the day, I would like it if I was given the option as a node to pick which project(s) my cycles were used for. People feel better about helping others and contributing/donating when they have a better knowledge of what exactly they are helping. I would be more likely to donate my cycles if I was able to pick which project I was most interested in loaning my hardware to.
It would also be to their benefit to introduce some competition. Contests like RC64 encouraged teamwork, and there were daily ranking boards where you could go see whose teams were knocking out the most units that day. There is no better motivator to encourage donation of resources than competition and bragging rights. Many of those teams were group oriented, there were things like TeamUnix, TeamMacinotosh, TeamUCLA, etc, and again that gives the nodes in each team a feeling of belonging to a group of people they can relate to, even if they have little in common.
that the recording industries believe that all they have to to do make money is to make more laws?
Why don't they try something novel like oh.... selling a product to us?
I say we pass a law that everyone that buys a crowbar has to pay me a nickel, to make up for the losses I incur every time someone breaks into my house. ya.
Idiots. No, I take that back. By saying that I'm just insulting the idots and that's not fair for even them.
I realize it's supposed to work with VPN and all, but for a new product release this is a fairly minor issue. It'll certainly be fixed in the next firmware update which we are likely to see later this month. I saw two people post that they returned their airports until apple fixes it. That's sort of like returning your new car because the remote trunk release isn't working properly. Too many people expect perfection even on new products.
I do sympathize with the users that need their VPN to work, but when an issue affects only 2% of the customer base it's unreasonable to expect the manufacturer to scramble their entire tech staff to fix it instantly. Be reasonable and they will fix it in a reasonable amount of time.
I've dealt with several computer defect issues in the past, and have been on the "front lines" of getting a recall announced. Computer manufacturers will do everything they can to avoid a recall because it costs them a tremendous amount of money and causes a lot of consumers that are not actually experiencing a problem to file for the recall and get an unnecessary replacement. Case in point, I was working on one model of computer and I recognized the now well-known "bulging capacitor" issue, but this was on a machine that was not on the recall list. I contacted the manufacturer and was assured this was a fluke and there was no known issue with these boards. Two weeks later, a recall for that model was announced. They would not have done this only two weeks after finding out about the problem, I'm sure they knew about it months ago and were just now making the decision and getting their parts supply pumped up before making the anouncement.
Consider the cost of paying this guy off or replacing the house, and compare that with the cost of announcing a recall on a $50 part that's in 50,000 units? The house is cheap by comparison. Although if someone dies in the fire, you're likely to lose your shirt.
One thing I have yet to see anyone clarify is who is ending up paying for the majority of the costs associated with this recall? They're sony batteries in dell battery packs. One would assume that dell has a contact with sony that specifies sony will pay at least some of the cost of any necessary recall involving their product.
The idea here I believe is to take advantage of a large amount of energy that is available during uncertain and varying intervals. You cannot power a city on an unreliable power source without being able to store the excess for use when production is low, and the technology of storing large amounts of energy is usually limited to phyiscal storage. (energy of water in a dam for exampe)
This use of heat (or lack of heat, if you prefer to look at it that way) is just a way to buffer the supply and the demand. At night when power demand in the city is low, they divert some of the wind energy to the freezers, which drop the temperature in the cold store by a small amount. When daytime comes around, the refridgeration system has a head start on the day and less energy is taken from the grid to keep the cold storage cold. It's more efficient to turn down electricity production at a plant on a slow and large scale if you know you will need 5% less energy today than you did yesterday. If there was little wind last night then you don't get that 5% savings today, but you know that in advance. This makes an unreliable but large energy source practical to use. A savings of only a few percent makes a tremendous difference when you are talking about the power required to run an entire city. Think of how poorly engines would work without flywheels, it'd be like moving something with a jackhammer.
I was trying to think of a good analogy to bitlocker and I came up with this.
Imagine you had a locksmith out to your house to instal what seems to ben described as the "perfect lock", that no thief can pick or break through. A week after the new locks are in, you read an article in the paper of what your local locksmith has been doing. He has made two copies of the keys. He gave one to your local police department and kept the other for himself.
Who would stand for this? I don't care WHAT his motivations were. I paid for privacy and I did not get it.
I feel a lot safer from abuse of privacy laws when there is a lock on my door. At least that way if someone decides to snoop without a warrant I have a chance of finding out about it.
Another good thing to look up is "crumple zones", the areas of a vehicle designed to collapse while absorbing energy. In most cars, a head-on collision is supposed to force the engine and transmission down and out the bottom (since they are too solid to crumple) and the rest of the engine compartment collapses in on itself and hopefully slows down the vehicle or the intruding object to a safer speed before the crumple zone has been totally crushed and the remaining force starts in on the passenger area.
The trunk has less to worry about, there is no massive steel (engine or transmission) to get rid of so it is just designed to crumple and absorb energy of impact.
What amazes me is how well cars survive getting T-boned. In many cases the front end of the offending car is usually totally demolished and yet the struck driver's door is only pushed in a few inches.
The tradeoff of all this is the vehicle's odds of surviving. If you are in a 52 packard you can run into a wall at 20mph and not do a whole lot besides ruin the bumper. They'll be pulling your head out of the windshield however. Try that with a Taurus and all you'll notice is the airbag, until you go looking for the front of your car and find it in the trunk. Cars used to be designed to survive accidents. Now they are designed to protect their passengers instead. People cry about how expensive it will be to fix a modern car after running into a tree, but they shut up real fast when you point out they would be in a body cast right now if it weren't for all that damage to their car.
'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.'
I look at the antivirus and spybot udpates rolling in all the time. I think they're already doing that, Bill. Once a month? That would be an improvement for Windows now wouldn't it?
If their primary interest is cost, and for many looking at linux cost is the prime motivator, pick the easiest traditional linux you can find. As you've noticed, some distros are not entirely user friendly, and many have a very steep initial setup learning curve. (offering to get them installed and patched up to current can clear them of 90% of their concerns)
If they are willing to spend a little money, red hat or Mac OS X are good recommendations. Red Hat offers good support and still has the "feel" of unix. OS X's gui interface design and ease of use generally beats the stuffing out of anything else unix but comes with a cost. (drivers are also easier to come by) These two prevent the user from feeling like they are on their own, and I believe this is the main fear of people considering linux. Most people don't like having to maintain their computer, they want it to "just work", with the least possible startup hassel. If you can address either of these two concerns you will have a very good case in a short amount of time.
I was reading someone's termination story and found it rather humorous, your summary reminded me of it. He was one of the higher ups in the IT department and designed the security system the company used, including the keycard system. One day he came into work and the door refused his card. So he messes with it for awhile, gets out his pocket screwdriver, takes the reader apart and swaps the network connection to the backup server.
Card works now. Walks inside. Manager is there waiting for him. He tries to explain how the card reader is broken and finds out it's not broken, they just didn't know there was a backup server copy of the credentials. They handed him a shoebox of his stuff from his desk, took his keycard, and showed him back to the door.
OTOH, I know of several people that have given two weeks notice and for them it has been the worst two weeks of their life, spent working very long hours to train their replacement. One of them, it took almost six months to get his last paycheck.
One person I know who quit a key position at her company did not give notice. She locked in two weeks vacation and then gave her 2 wks notice. I asked why she did this and she insisted that if she had given notice, they would have realized the problem this would create, and have found cause to fire her a few days before she left and that would have eliminated her pension. She figures the company's determination to not allow her to train anyone else to know how to do her job (which she tried to get them to do for over a year) cost them an insane amount of money. (4 floors of a square city block size building were going home with pay at noon for 3 months because they ran out of work to do)
I dont give notice when I quit because if I was fired my employer wouldnt give me two weeks notice that I was out of a job in two weeks.
I had that discussion with one of my managers about people giving notice, and I asked him how much notice I would get from him if I were to be fired or laid off. He went into a long explanation of how telling an employee he's getting canned causes all sorts of security problems and low productivity etc etc, to which I pointed out I would give him as much notice as I thought he would give me.
I don't think he liked that, but he understood where I was coming from. Companies expect generosity and loyalty from their employees, but have absolutely no intention of being generous or loyal to their employees. Generous and loyal employees increase company proffit. Generous and loyal companies lower company proffit. That can only lead to this sort of behavior.
I hope this fellow gets a nice settlement from a countersuit, he deserves it.
What about the final value fees? If you shill your item for $200 and it does not "sell" (you win your own item) you have to pay eBay your auction listing and final value fees. I suppose you could relist it once and not shill that one, or shill it lower and hope for a sell, but this practice seems to work in ebay's favor, as long as people don't stop bidding as much as a result.
Most people if asked would say they vote based on a variety of issues and positions that a politician takes, but I believe in reality most voters cast their ballot based on a handful, possibly just one or two issues that they very strongly want to see changed.
I see Clinton's position on privacy to be very attractive as the main deciding factor in an election. I'm sure that one position alone will garner a great many votes. Right now I would consider this to be one of the most important issues in the upcoming election.
For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"
Well, it's a good thing the only real reasons for a reinstall nowadays is a massive virus or spyware infection.
if you really want to push the reliable button, amateur radio is about the only form of communication you can rely on when the chips are down. (hurricanes are a great example) Cell reception is spotty in many places and the loss of a single tower could easily disable several square miles of service.
this is my first post, when trying to download the map of western europe v6.6 direct from TomTom Home site to my PC the following message appears '' an error occurred while dowloading this file: read error., followed by the options ''continue'' or ''cancel.
Can anyone help me with this problem?
His first reply:
Disable your firewall and anti virus and see if that helps.
The first link, the letter from tomtom, does refer users to a couple free antivirus removal tools that will remove the virus, but other than that, I wonder how much responsibility tomtom will take for getting their customers' PCs infected? If you are a businessman and have taken your tomtom into work and connected to the local network to update your maps for your scheduled sales calls and have now infected the entire company network with viruses, I wonder how much of a problem this will cause and what tomtom would do about it? "Sorry sucker, thanks for purchasing our product, please come again."
I am also a little interested in seeing how tomtom follows this up. There was a report a few months ago about a few ipods shipping with something nasty, and Apple tracked them down all the way to the imaging workstation that started the outbreak. Judging by how tomtom is trying to sweep this one under the rug, I rather doubt they are exercising due diligence. At the very least someone should get fired - either the yutz that violated company policy and brought in his flash drive etc, or the director that didn't have any policies in place to start with. More than likely both are at fault but the guy with the flash drive will wind up taking the fall.
pennies will become useless. It's getting hard to find a product that is priced to not end in a "9". $1.59 $39.99 etc. It's just a marketing dance. If they drop pennines we'll see all the prices start ending in a "5" I'm sure.
Gas prices are worse still. I defy you to find a gas station selling gas for a price that does not end in 9/10th of a cent. What's up with that? Are they just trying to be collectively stupid or is it really helping their sales? Someone should make it illegal to price a product down to less than 1 cent (or the lowest unit of legal tender) for any product where the average product's sale is over $5. Will it happen? of course not, it makes way too much sense.
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If the player can play it, it can be broken. The only thing you can do is make it difficult. It's like preventing software piracy. For every month of development time for copy protection, you delay a determined and knowledgeable attacker for maybe an hour. This is just another fine example of that truth. If they'd have spent 10 years and 2 billion dollars instead it would have just taken an additional two weeks to break. Don't they get it? This will never change.
As long as the DRM has been properly broken before I buy the unit, I'm happy. Kudos to you, keep up the good work.
Funny how the RIAA goons are making mistakes, and want the ISPs to give them more information so that somehow this will prevent them from making so many mistakes.
We keep arresting innocent people. If the criminals' parents would just turn in all the criminals we wouldn't have to arrest so many innocent people.
Isn't this how nazi germany took care of crime? Convinced people to turn each other over at the slightest hint of disobedience, in the name of reducing crime?
It's so stupid it's funny. It's so true it's ironic.
that windows vista might actually give us a good reason to consider using windows,
Russinovich acknowledges the risk factor but says it was a 'design choice' to balance security with ease of use."
Isn't that the fundamental design problem with windows in general? Sacrificing security in the name of ease of use? From all the hype I've read recently that "vista is the most secure ever", I thought that maybe, just maybe, windows would focus on security this time.
Apparently not.
...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut.
do we really need one of those?
This is just an example of abuse of the democratic system, using it to push someone's agenda rather than to work the way it was intended. Federal laws are meant to be laws that are "common sense" that is accepted as a definition of unacceptable behavior by a greater majority of the people. Here again we see a minority of people attempting to push their version of common sense to the masses on a federal level.
This is also another attempt to trade a little fredom in the name of safety. There is so much of that going on nowadays it makes me sick. Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety (Benjamin Franklin)
isn't telnet still used a lot by hardware for configuration? It hasn't been that long ago since I used telnet to configure several baytecs. Telnet is a lot like the serial ports you see on routers and switches - archaic, but simple and useful.
Instead of blindly contributing my cycles to whatever project some group of people in california (or wherever) decide is the project of the day, I would like it if I was given the option as a node to pick which project(s) my cycles were used for. People feel better about helping others and contributing/donating when they have a better knowledge of what exactly they are helping. I would be more likely to donate my cycles if I was able to pick which project I was most interested in loaning my hardware to.
It would also be to their benefit to introduce some competition. Contests like RC64 encouraged teamwork, and there were daily ranking boards where you could go see whose teams were knocking out the most units that day. There is no better motivator to encourage donation of resources than competition and bragging rights. Many of those teams were group oriented, there were things like TeamUnix, TeamMacinotosh, TeamUCLA, etc, and again that gives the nodes in each team a feeling of belonging to a group of people they can relate to, even if they have little in common.
that the recording industries believe that all they have to to do make money is to make more laws?
Why don't they try something novel like oh.... selling a product to us?
I say we pass a law that everyone that buys a crowbar has to pay me a nickel, to make up for the losses I incur every time someone breaks into my house. ya.
Idiots. No, I take that back. By saying that I'm just insulting the idots and that's not fair for even them.
I realize it's supposed to work with VPN and all, but for a new product release this is a fairly minor issue. It'll certainly be fixed in the next firmware update which we are likely to see later this month. I saw two people post that they returned their airports until apple fixes it. That's sort of like returning your new car because the remote trunk release isn't working properly. Too many people expect perfection even on new products.
I do sympathize with the users that need their VPN to work, but when an issue affects only 2% of the customer base it's unreasonable to expect the manufacturer to scramble their entire tech staff to fix it instantly. Be reasonable and they will fix it in a reasonable amount of time.
I've dealt with several computer defect issues in the past, and have been on the "front lines" of getting a recall announced. Computer manufacturers will do everything they can to avoid a recall because it costs them a tremendous amount of money and causes a lot of consumers that are not actually experiencing a problem to file for the recall and get an unnecessary replacement. Case in point, I was working on one model of computer and I recognized the now well-known "bulging capacitor" issue, but this was on a machine that was not on the recall list. I contacted the manufacturer and was assured this was a fluke and there was no known issue with these boards. Two weeks later, a recall for that model was announced. They would not have done this only two weeks after finding out about the problem, I'm sure they knew about it months ago and were just now making the decision and getting their parts supply pumped up before making the anouncement.
Consider the cost of paying this guy off or replacing the house, and compare that with the cost of announcing a recall on a $50 part that's in 50,000 units? The house is cheap by comparison. Although if someone dies in the fire, you're likely to lose your shirt.
One thing I have yet to see anyone clarify is who is ending up paying for the majority of the costs associated with this recall? They're sony batteries in dell battery packs. One would assume that dell has a contact with sony that specifies sony will pay at least some of the cost of any necessary recall involving their product.
The idea here I believe is to take advantage of a large amount of energy that is available during uncertain and varying intervals. You cannot power a city on an unreliable power source without being able to store the excess for use when production is low, and the technology of storing large amounts of energy is usually limited to phyiscal storage. (energy of water in a dam for exampe)
This use of heat (or lack of heat, if you prefer to look at it that way) is just a way to buffer the supply and the demand. At night when power demand in the city is low, they divert some of the wind energy to the freezers, which drop the temperature in the cold store by a small amount. When daytime comes around, the refridgeration system has a head start on the day and less energy is taken from the grid to keep the cold storage cold. It's more efficient to turn down electricity production at a plant on a slow and large scale if you know you will need 5% less energy today than you did yesterday. If there was little wind last night then you don't get that 5% savings today, but you know that in advance. This makes an unreliable but large energy source practical to use. A savings of only a few percent makes a tremendous difference when you are talking about the power required to run an entire city. Think of how poorly engines would work without flywheels, it'd be like moving something with a jackhammer.
I was trying to think of a good analogy to bitlocker and I came up with this.
Imagine you had a locksmith out to your house to instal what seems to ben described as the "perfect lock", that no thief can pick or break through. A week after the new locks are in, you read an article in the paper of what your local locksmith has been doing. He has made two copies of the keys. He gave one to your local police department and kept the other for himself.
Who would stand for this? I don't care WHAT his motivations were. I paid for privacy and I did not get it.
I feel a lot safer from abuse of privacy laws when there is a lock on my door. At least that way if someone decides to snoop without a warrant I have a chance of finding out about it.
Another good thing to look up is "crumple zones", the areas of a vehicle designed to collapse while absorbing energy. In most cars, a head-on collision is supposed to force the engine and transmission down and out the bottom (since they are too solid to crumple) and the rest of the engine compartment collapses in on itself and hopefully slows down the vehicle or the intruding object to a safer speed before the crumple zone has been totally crushed and the remaining force starts in on the passenger area.
The trunk has less to worry about, there is no massive steel (engine or transmission) to get rid of so it is just designed to crumple and absorb energy of impact.
What amazes me is how well cars survive getting T-boned. In many cases the front end of the offending car is usually totally demolished and yet the struck driver's door is only pushed in a few inches.
The tradeoff of all this is the vehicle's odds of surviving. If you are in a 52 packard you can run into a wall at 20mph and not do a whole lot besides ruin the bumper. They'll be pulling your head out of the windshield however. Try that with a Taurus and all you'll notice is the airbag, until you go looking for the front of your car and find it in the trunk. Cars used to be designed to survive accidents. Now they are designed to protect their passengers instead. People cry about how expensive it will be to fix a modern car after running into a tree, but they shut up real fast when you point out they would be in a body cast right now if it weren't for all that damage to their car.
'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.'
I look at the antivirus and spybot udpates rolling in all the time. I think they're already doing that, Bill. Once a month? That would be an improvement for Windows now wouldn't it?
If their primary interest is cost, and for many looking at linux cost is the prime motivator, pick the easiest traditional linux you can find. As you've noticed, some distros are not entirely user friendly, and many have a very steep initial setup learning curve. (offering to get them installed and patched up to current can clear them of 90% of their concerns)
If they are willing to spend a little money, red hat or Mac OS X are good recommendations. Red Hat offers good support and still has the "feel" of unix. OS X's gui interface design and ease of use generally beats the stuffing out of anything else unix but comes with a cost. (drivers are also easier to come by) These two prevent the user from feeling like they are on their own, and I believe this is the main fear of people considering linux. Most people don't like having to maintain their computer, they want it to "just work", with the least possible startup hassel. If you can address either of these two concerns you will have a very good case in a short amount of time.
I was reading someone's termination story and found it rather humorous, your summary reminded me of it. He was one of the higher ups in the IT department and designed the security system the company used, including the keycard system. One day he came into work and the door refused his card. So he messes with it for awhile, gets out his pocket screwdriver, takes the reader apart and swaps the network connection to the backup server.
Card works now. Walks inside. Manager is there waiting for him. He tries to explain how the card reader is broken and finds out it's not broken, they just didn't know there was a backup server copy of the credentials. They handed him a shoebox of his stuff from his desk, took his keycard, and showed him back to the door.
OTOH, I know of several people that have given two weeks notice and for them it has been the worst two weeks of their life, spent working very long hours to train their replacement. One of them, it took almost six months to get his last paycheck.
One person I know who quit a key position at her company did not give notice. She locked in two weeks vacation and then gave her 2 wks notice. I asked why she did this and she insisted that if she had given notice, they would have realized the problem this would create, and have found cause to fire her a few days before she left and that would have eliminated her pension. She figures the company's determination to not allow her to train anyone else to know how to do her job (which she tried to get them to do for over a year) cost them an insane amount of money. (4 floors of a square city block size building were going home with pay at noon for 3 months because they ran out of work to do)
So I guess it works both ways.
I dont give notice when I quit because if I was fired my employer wouldnt give me two weeks notice that I was out of a job in two weeks.
I had that discussion with one of my managers about people giving notice, and I asked him how much notice I would get from him if I were to be fired or laid off. He went into a long explanation of how telling an employee he's getting canned causes all sorts of security problems and low productivity etc etc, to which I pointed out I would give him as much notice as I thought he would give me.
I don't think he liked that, but he understood where I was coming from. Companies expect generosity and loyalty from their employees, but have absolutely no intention of being generous or loyal to their employees. Generous and loyal employees increase company proffit. Generous and loyal companies lower company proffit. That can only lead to this sort of behavior.
I hope this fellow gets a nice settlement from a countersuit, he deserves it.
What about the final value fees? If you shill your item for $200 and it does not "sell" (you win your own item) you have to pay eBay your auction listing and final value fees. I suppose you could relist it once and not shill that one, or shill it lower and hope for a sell, but this practice seems to work in ebay's favor, as long as people don't stop bidding as much as a result.
http://vftp.net/catandmouse/
enjoy
Most people if asked would say they vote based on a variety of issues and positions that a politician takes, but I believe in reality most voters cast their ballot based on a handful, possibly just one or two issues that they very strongly want to see changed.
I see Clinton's position on privacy to be very attractive as the main deciding factor in an election. I'm sure that one position alone will garner a great many votes. Right now I would consider this to be one of the most important issues in the upcoming election.
For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"
Well, it's a good thing the only real reasons for a reinstall nowadays is a massive virus or spyware infection.
Oh, wait... vista is windows right?
if you really want to push the reliable button, amateur radio is about the only form of communication you can rely on when the chips are down. (hurricanes are a great example) Cell reception is spotty in many places and the loss of a single tower could easily disable several square miles of service.
At a forum for tomtom help at http://www.expansys.com/ft.aspx?i=112333&thread=27 96, a user asks,
this is my first post, when trying to download the map of western europe v6.6 direct from TomTom Home site to my PC the following message appears '' an error occurred while dowloading this file: read error., followed by the options ''continue'' or ''cancel.
Can anyone help me with this problem?
His first reply:
Disable your firewall and anti virus and see if that helps.
Silly windows users.
The first link, the letter from tomtom, does refer users to a couple free antivirus removal tools that will remove the virus, but other than that, I wonder how much responsibility tomtom will take for getting their customers' PCs infected? If you are a businessman and have taken your tomtom into work and connected to the local network to update your maps for your scheduled sales calls and have now infected the entire company network with viruses, I wonder how much of a problem this will cause and what tomtom would do about it? "Sorry sucker, thanks for purchasing our product, please come again."
I am also a little interested in seeing how tomtom follows this up. There was a report a few months ago about a few ipods shipping with something nasty, and Apple tracked them down all the way to the imaging workstation that started the outbreak. Judging by how tomtom is trying to sweep this one under the rug, I rather doubt they are exercising due diligence. At the very least someone should get fired - either the yutz that violated company policy and brought in his flash drive etc, or the director that didn't have any policies in place to start with. More than likely both are at fault but the guy with the flash drive will wind up taking the fall.
pennies will become useless. It's getting hard to find a product that is priced to not end in a "9". $1.59 $39.99 etc. It's just a marketing dance. If they drop pennines we'll see all the prices start ending in a "5" I'm sure.
Gas prices are worse still. I defy you to find a gas station selling gas for a price that does not end in 9/10th of a cent. What's up with that? Are they just trying to be collectively stupid or is it really helping their sales? Someone should make it illegal to price a product down to less than 1 cent (or the lowest unit of legal tender) for any product where the average product's sale is over $5. Will it happen? of course not, it makes way too much sense.