$ telnet blog.seanalexander.com 25 Trying 66.226.14.131... Connected to blog.seanalexander.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 dedi312 Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.211 ready at Sat, 8 Jan 2005 08:00:47 -0800
(I didn't feel like checking to see if it was also an open relay, that would just have completely topped it)
I mail out laptops frequently for service, and I have to say the mailers we use put that pizza box to shame. First off, it has ZERO protection around the edges. If you're going to drop something shaped like that, the odds that it lands dead flat on top or bottom is close to nil - it's going to land on edge, and the laptop is just going to slide right to the edge (strap or no strap) and spiderweb your LCD as the only thing between it and concrete is 3mm of cardboard.
Second issue is the thickness of the box. You'll notice they have a tibook in there in the ads... that's about the THINNEST laptop made. A 1.75" thick pizza box with 1" of padding (estimates, sue me if I'm wrong) leaves 0.75" of space for the laptop, unless you want it to bulge. This case just isn't practical for anything but a mac powerbook. Even the ibook would be pushing it to fit into the case with the lid shut.
That, and sooner or later SOMEONE is going to prank you and hide your laptop, and you're going to open that box up and find...
It does seem rather silly of them to attack the problem from this end... "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" fits here well. Stop the spyware from getting installed, rather than trying to pry it out once it's dug in. This merely seems like common sense to me.
It's not likely you would be able to live there that long... there's only so many supplies they could send with you, and resupply runs would be small at best. Look at the size/weight of the rovers we send, and imagine that being your supply size for what... how often could they launch supply missions? every 3 months? You can't pack enough food, water, and air for 3 months in that kind of space, so supply missions would be pointless.
So it would be a mission with a termination date. YOUR termination. The last box in the supply crate would contain a cyanide capsule. Forget 60 years, think more like 6 weeks.
Though that being said, I still think it would be a tempting mission, because as has been pointed out, one man in one day could do more things on mars than a rover can do in a year. Unfortunately, by the same logistics issues previously mentioned, supplying the llife support needs of even one passenger for that length of travel time would be an immense undertaking even by today's standards.
Apple does have a policy on dead pixels, it's just covered under non-disclosure so I can't detail it.;) Apple is usually a bit picky on minor cosmetic issues, though if pressed they will often provide coverage beyond their written policy, for good customer relations' sake. I've seen displays with a single stuck subpixel (stuck on) but nothing worse than that, and only one case where a customer raised it as a repair inquiry. (green subpixel stuck on near middle of screen) They seem to have a very good track record for perfect pixels on their displays.
Well I will say this - I have yet to encounter an Apple flatscreen that is classified as 'defective' due to pixel anomolies - that's a statement for their current quality, not for their standards. Very rarely do I see a flatscreen with even a single subpixel anomaly. On the rare times I have seen an LCD with an issue it's a matrix problem that produces vertical (or hoizontal) bands and is clearly a defect.
Apple's policy is not on the public record, but it can best be summed up by "the more annoying the pixels, the more likely it is to be considered unacceptable". (I've read the policy, it's quite reasonable) You have to take a display into an Apple service center for the tech to reference the policy to determine if the display is considered defective. This is probably to take the burdon off Apple where customers might try to stretch the wording of a quality policy beyond reason. They may say yes or no to a description given to them over the phone, but I haven't tried that. But for certain, Apple does not have a zero-dead-pixel policy.
But if someone's machine has a security hole and they are say, already infected with a virus/worm that is actively attacking and attempting to infect other machines, and the user is blissfully unaware of this, (read: negligent) then isn't this a fair way to react to the problem that they are facillitating?
If someone's car stalls out on a travel lane of a highway and they just leave it to go home and think about what to do, the police will have it towed, to protect public safety. If the driver returns to find his car gone off to impound, waaaaah. It's not the driver's fault that their car broke down, but it is their fault for not noticing the problem they are now involved with, and not doing something about it, inconveniencing the rest of the planet.
I question whether this is a real threat or not. All common laser pointers use laser diodes, which at best can bee columated to a beam a foot or so wide at a half a mile. This virtually eliminates any danger of retinal damage because of how much the beam's power is spread out. The only issue I see is a temporary "flash blindness" like that of getting your picture taken with a flash bulb in use. That's not too far off from getting glare off the hood while driving to work at dawn. If a pilot can't handle that, they have no business flying an airplane.
That being said though, I still agree that giving a pilot a sudden vision obstacle while they are in the critical stages of landing their airplane is dangerous and should be unlawful.
Also I agree with an earlier post here that there is zero risk of a sustained illumination of a cockpit window from someone holding a handheld pointer two miles away aiming at a target moving at upwards of 800mph.
It seems like anytime MicroSoft says it's "innovating", they release a product with features that look suspiciously like those employed by three competing products that have been on the market for the last year and a half.
You must remember it, that white box with the 40 watt bulb in it, with the front panel full of holes - you'd put a piece of paper in between the two front plates and plug in plastic colored pegs that would then glow by the light behind the paper.
I can't believe that diidn't make the list - everyone had one. And oh how those pegs hurt when stepped on with bare feet in deep shag carpet early in the morning!
I bought the T2 "metal" box set about a year ago. I already owned the DVD but wanted the extra footage and soforth. I get it home, open it up, and inside the box with the disc is a little slip of paper that says something like "this disc uses some of the most advanced technology for your viewing pleasure. Some features may not be available on your player, but this will not inhibit the enjoyment of the movie."
Ya right. Tried it in three players... well actually two players and a computer. It wouldn't even start in the computer, (impossible to select the Play option from the root menu) and on both DVD players it played normally except every time it came up to a scene that had "multiple angles", it played EVERY ANGLE SEQUENTIALLY. So I got to see the same scenes 4-9 times from every viewpoint. The DVD menu was hopeless... graphics were overlapped and not where they belonged, some options could not be selected, and in most cases the select pointer was not where it belonged.
It went back to Sam Goody the next day. I explained it wasn't defective, it was just poorly designed and that I couldn't use it - they took it back and gave me a refund.
So this is not the first time that studio has pulled this sort of stunt with "new technology". If you're going to pay for the "special edition" you should at least get some quality.
Infringement Detail: Infringing Work: Grudge, The Filepath: The.Grudge.SCREENER-VideoCD.torrent|CD1 Filename: vcd-tg1.r00 First Found: 18 Dec 2004 04:21:14 EST (GMT -0500) Last Found: 18 Dec 2004 04:21:14 EST (GMT -0500) Filesize: 14,648k IP Address: IP Port: 58546 Network: BTPeers Protocol: BitTorrent
Apparently the RIAA has been sampling the swarms or getting their data from somewhere like that. This torrent was gotten from Suprnova... was that "paper" we saw the other day here on slashdot linked to any data they collected that the RIAA might have dipped into?
Are CRTs really more energy-efficient than LCDs? My two ViewSonics use 65 watts of power when on with a moderately bright picture. My powerbook uses at most 35 watts when going full tilt gaming with the CPU and GPU maxed out. (18w when sitting idle, with LCD on full intensity)
By this comparison at least, the LCD looks very much more efficient. The only efficiency issue I see is that the CRT draws less power (relative to itself) when displaying a dark image, whereas the LCD draws about the same power at all times, unless you adjust the backlight intensity,
Although the site was anonymous, meaning anyone can LOG IN, the SCO may still have ground to stand on if they displayed a terms of use when you login, and say something like "if you don't agree to these terms, you are not permitted to download and must log out immediately." If IBM then did not agree to the terms (was in violation of the terms) and proceeded to stay logged in and download files, SCO just might have a case?
I know, I hate EULAs and soforth the same as most other ppl, but right now they have at least some degree of legal force, and have to be considered seriously.
Exploder on the mac also does nothing when clicked. It seems to be using a javascript that is being ignored when clicked. You can copy it to clipboard though, and all you get is something like "javascriptstart()" for a link.
Just an update for any who are listening... I just got the opportunity to test play UT on my powerbook, booted off a FW HD running 10.3.7, and the frame rates are good! It looks like whatever they broke in 10.3.5 they fixed in 10.3.7, at least for the 15" FW800 powerbook's video chipset. Anyone care to sample the 12" and 17" powerbooks performance for us?
On my 800mhz tibook, I was getting around 18fps with 10.3.3 playing UT 2004. When I updated to 10.3.4, frame rates dropped to about 1fps. Even the main page's animation was this slow. So I had to archive and install and carefully update back to 10.3.3. I accidentally updated to 10.3.4 two weeks later and had to do it over again.
When I upgraded to a 15" albook, it came with 10.3.4, but frames were great, at 34fps. I accidentally installed the 10.3.5 update, (arg! again!) and frames crashed to 4fps. Archive and install back to 10.3.4 (my third reinstall) and frames were back to 35'ish. I have Software Update set to manual now, to avoid needing yet another reinstall.
Now I wish I had partitioned my HD when I transferred from the tibook, so that I would have another partition to install and "test drive" the new updates on. I'll probably borrow an external HD and install on that for a test later.
I don't know what WoW's expected frame rate is, but 12fps seems a bit low for a 17", but then again 75fps is stellar so maybe the outside rendering is just massive. (no fog? long line f sight?)
Apple has been systematically destroying OpenGL performance on their powerbooks lately. 10.3.4 wiped out the TiBooks. 10.3.5 took down the 15" albooks, and 10.3.6 took out the 17" albooks. In each case it took opengl frame rates and cut them to 25% (or worse) of normal. Each update listed "updated opengl drivers" and "improved performance for ATI and Radeon video chipsets". Ya, right. Is it April 1st again already?
I'm still cowering at the updates, sitting at 10.3.4 for my 15" abook, "on the edge of disaster" for my Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming enjoyment. Is 10.3.7 "safe" yet for us gamers??
My battle strategy is about the same... my email address IS on my web site, but it's a jpg, and isn't clickable. That, and I now run my own mailserver, which uses authenticated relaying and is subscribed to the three major RBL's, so they tank the incoming connnections before they even get a chance to send the body of the msg. I see hits in the log files all the time - I hear you knockin but you can't come in!
I've been giving out free email addresses to my friends and family, and they're all quite pleased with the zero-spam system.
That's not exactly how it works. The workings of the courtroom are spelled out in great detail for jurors. Their job is to determine innocence or guilt based on what the law is. For that, they are to rely on the judge to interpret and explain the law to them. A juror that votes "not guilty" by reason of "the law isn't fair" is actually NOT performing their duty as a juror, and should have been struck during the selection process. 12 people don't make the rules up, they judge people by them. Millions of people casting their votes are what makes the rules.
The regional roll-out is probably due to capacity, getting the records into an online database was possibly done in waves, state by state, and that's just the order they picked to enter them into the system in.
As for the referrer, look at how many scams are already going for people charging you absurd amounts to get a copy of your credit report. They are probably trying to prevent scammers from charging people for an online copy of their credit report when all they do after they charge your credit card $9.55 is to forward you to this site.
Slashdot Mirror
$ telnet blog.seanalexander.com 25
Trying 66.226.14.131...
Connected to blog.seanalexander.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 dedi312 Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.211 ready at Sat, 8 Jan 2005 08:00:47 -0800
(I didn't feel like checking to see if it was also an open relay, that would just have completely topped it)
I mail out laptops frequently for service, and I have to say the mailers we use put that pizza box to shame. First off, it has ZERO protection around the edges. If you're going to drop something shaped like that, the odds that it lands dead flat on top or bottom is close to nil - it's going to land on edge, and the laptop is just going to slide right to the edge (strap or no strap) and spiderweb your LCD as the only thing between it and concrete is 3mm of cardboard.
Second issue is the thickness of the box. You'll notice they have a tibook in there in the ads... that's about the THINNEST laptop made. A 1.75" thick pizza box with 1" of padding (estimates, sue me if I'm wrong) leaves 0.75" of space for the laptop, unless you want it to bulge. This case just isn't practical for anything but a mac powerbook. Even the ibook would be pushing it to fit into the case with the lid shut.
That, and sooner or later SOMEONE is going to prank you and hide your laptop, and you're going to open that box up and find...
It does seem rather silly of them to attack the problem from this end... "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" fits here well. Stop the spyware from getting installed, rather than trying to pry it out once it's dug in. This merely seems like common sense to me.
It's not likely you would be able to live there that long... there's only so many supplies they could send with you, and resupply runs would be small at best. Look at the size/weight of the rovers we send, and imagine that being your supply size for what... how often could they launch supply missions? every 3 months? You can't pack enough food, water, and air for 3 months in that kind of space, so supply missions would be pointless.
So it would be a mission with a termination date. YOUR termination. The last box in the supply crate would contain a cyanide capsule. Forget 60 years, think more like 6 weeks.
Though that being said, I still think it would be a tempting mission, because as has been pointed out, one man in one day could do more things on mars than a rover can do in a year. Unfortunately, by the same logistics issues previously mentioned, supplying the llife support needs of even one passenger for that length of travel time would be an immense undertaking even by today's standards.
Apple does have a policy on dead pixels, it's just covered under non-disclosure so I can't detail it. ;) Apple is usually a bit picky on minor cosmetic issues, though if pressed they will often provide coverage beyond their written policy, for good customer relations' sake. I've seen displays with a single stuck subpixel (stuck on) but nothing worse than that, and only one case where a customer raised it as a repair inquiry. (green subpixel stuck on near middle of screen) They seem to have a very good track record for perfect pixels on their displays.
Well I will say this - I have yet to encounter an Apple flatscreen that is classified as 'defective' due to pixel anomolies - that's a statement for their current quality, not for their standards. Very rarely do I see a flatscreen with even a single subpixel anomaly. On the rare times I have seen an LCD with an issue it's a matrix problem that produces vertical (or hoizontal) bands and is clearly a defect.
Apple's policy is not on the public record, but it can best be summed up by "the more annoying the pixels, the more likely it is to be considered unacceptable". (I've read the policy, it's quite reasonable) You have to take a display into an Apple service center for the tech to reference the policy to determine if the display is considered defective. This is probably to take the burdon off Apple where customers might try to stretch the wording of a quality policy beyond reason. They may say yes or no to a description given to them over the phone, but I haven't tried that. But for certain, Apple does not have a zero-dead-pixel policy.
But if someone's machine has a security hole and they are say, already infected with a virus/worm that is actively attacking and attempting to infect other machines, and the user is blissfully unaware of this, (read: negligent) then isn't this a fair way to react to the problem that they are facillitating?
If someone's car stalls out on a travel lane of a highway and they just leave it to go home and think about what to do, the police will have it towed, to protect public safety. If the driver returns to find his car gone off to impound, waaaaah. It's not the driver's fault that their car broke down, but it is their fault for not noticing the problem they are now involved with, and not doing something about it, inconveniencing the rest of the planet.
I question whether this is a real threat or not. All common laser pointers use laser diodes, which at best can bee columated to a beam a foot or so wide at a half a mile. This virtually eliminates any danger of retinal damage because of how much the beam's power is spread out. The only issue I see is a temporary "flash blindness" like that of getting your picture taken with a flash bulb in use. That's not too far off from getting glare off the hood while driving to work at dawn. If a pilot can't handle that, they have no business flying an airplane.
That being said though, I still agree that giving a pilot a sudden vision obstacle while they are in the critical stages of landing their airplane is dangerous and should be unlawful.
Also I agree with an earlier post here that there is zero risk of a sustained illumination of a cockpit window from someone holding a handheld pointer two miles away aiming at a target moving at upwards of 800mph.
It seems like anytime MicroSoft says it's "innovating", they release a product with features that look suspiciously like those employed by three competing products that have been on the market for the last year and a half.
You must remember it, that white box with the 40 watt bulb in it, with the front panel full of holes - you'd put a piece of paper in between the two front plates and plug in plastic colored pegs that would then glow by the light behind the paper.
I can't believe that diidn't make the list - everyone had one. And oh how those pegs hurt when stepped on with bare feet in deep shag carpet early in the morning!
I bought the T2 "metal" box set about a year ago. I already owned the DVD but wanted the extra footage and soforth. I get it home, open it up, and inside the box with the disc is a little slip of paper that says something like "this disc uses some of the most advanced technology for your viewing pleasure. Some features may not be available on your player, but this will not inhibit the enjoyment of the movie."
Ya right. Tried it in three players... well actually two players and a computer. It wouldn't even start in the computer, (impossible to select the Play option from the root menu) and on both DVD players it played normally except every time it came up to a scene that had "multiple angles", it played EVERY ANGLE SEQUENTIALLY. So I got to see the same scenes 4-9 times from every viewpoint. The DVD menu was hopeless... graphics were overlapped and not where they belonged, some options could not be selected, and in most cases the select pointer was not where it belonged.
It went back to Sam Goody the next day. I explained it wasn't defective, it was just poorly designed and that I couldn't use it - they took it back and gave me a refund.
So this is not the first time that studio has pulled this sort of stunt with "new technology". If you're going to pay for the "special edition" you should at least get some quality.
A friend of mine just received one of these gems:
: vcd-tg1.r00
Infringement Detail:
Infringing Work: Grudge, The
Filepath: The.Grudge.SCREENER-VideoCD.torrent|CD1
Filename
First Found: 18 Dec 2004 04:21:14 EST (GMT -0500)
Last Found: 18 Dec 2004 04:21:14 EST (GMT -0500)
Filesize: 14,648k
IP Address:
IP Port: 58546
Network: BTPeers
Protocol: BitTorrent
Apparently the RIAA has been sampling the swarms or getting their data from somewhere like that. This torrent was gotten from Suprnova... was that "paper" we saw the other day here on slashdot linked to any data they collected that the RIAA might have dipped into?
Are CRTs really more energy-efficient than LCDs? My two ViewSonics use 65 watts of power when on with a moderately bright picture. My powerbook uses at most 35 watts when going full tilt gaming with the CPU and GPU maxed out. (18w when sitting idle, with LCD on full intensity)
By this comparison at least, the LCD looks very much more efficient. The only efficiency issue I see is that the CRT draws less power (relative to itself) when displaying a dark image, whereas the LCD draws about the same power at all times, unless you adjust the backlight intensity,
Although the site was anonymous, meaning anyone can LOG IN, the SCO may still have ground to stand on if they displayed a terms of use when you login, and say something like "if you don't agree to these terms, you are not permitted to download and must log out immediately." If IBM then did not agree to the terms (was in violation of the terms) and proceeded to stay logged in and download files, SCO just might have a case?
I know, I hate EULAs and soforth the same as most other ppl, but right now they have at least some degree of legal force, and have to be considered seriously.
Exploder on the mac also does nothing when clicked. It seems to be using a javascript that is being ignored when clicked. You can copy it to clipboard though, and all you get is something like "javascriptstart()" for a link.
Just an update for any who are listening... I just got the opportunity to test play UT on my powerbook, booted off a FW HD running 10.3.7, and the frame rates are good! It looks like whatever they broke in 10.3.5 they fixed in 10.3.7, at least for the 15" FW800 powerbook's video chipset. Anyone care to sample the 12" and 17" powerbooks performance for us?
On my 800mhz tibook, I was getting around 18fps with 10.3.3 playing UT 2004. When I updated to 10.3.4, frame rates dropped to about 1fps. Even the main page's animation was this slow. So I had to archive and install and carefully update back to 10.3.3. I accidentally updated to 10.3.4 two weeks later and had to do it over again.
When I upgraded to a 15" albook, it came with 10.3.4, but frames were great, at 34fps. I accidentally installed the 10.3.5 update, (arg! again!) and frames crashed to 4fps. Archive and install back to 10.3.4 (my third reinstall) and frames were back to 35'ish. I have Software Update set to manual now, to avoid needing yet another reinstall.
Now I wish I had partitioned my HD when I transferred from the tibook, so that I would have another partition to install and "test drive" the new updates on. I'll probably borrow an external HD and install on that for a test later.
I don't know what WoW's expected frame rate is, but 12fps seems a bit low for a 17", but then again 75fps is stellar so maybe the outside rendering is just massive. (no fog? long line f sight?)
Apple has been systematically destroying OpenGL performance on their powerbooks lately. 10.3.4 wiped out the TiBooks. 10.3.5 took down the 15" albooks, and 10.3.6 took out the 17" albooks. In each case it took opengl frame rates and cut them to 25% (or worse) of normal. Each update listed "updated opengl drivers" and "improved performance for ATI and Radeon video chipsets". Ya, right. Is it April 1st again already?
I'm still cowering at the updates, sitting at 10.3.4 for my 15" abook, "on the edge of disaster" for my Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming enjoyment. Is 10.3.7 "safe" yet for us gamers??
My battle strategy is about the same... my email address IS on my web site, but it's a jpg, and isn't clickable. That, and I now run my own mailserver, which uses authenticated relaying and is subscribed to the three major RBL's, so they tank the incoming connnections before they even get a chance to send the body of the msg. I see hits in the log files all the time - I hear you knockin but you can't come in!
I've been giving out free email addresses to my friends and family, and they're all quite pleased with the zero-spam system.
That's not exactly how it works. The workings of the courtroom are spelled out in great detail for jurors. Their job is to determine innocence or guilt based on what the law is. For that, they are to rely on the judge to interpret and explain the law to them. A juror that votes "not guilty" by reason of "the law isn't fair" is actually NOT performing their duty as a juror, and should have been struck during the selection process. 12 people don't make the rules up, they judge people by them. Millions of people casting their votes are what makes the rules.
It's not even possible to view the "terms" for giving away your info at that site, the link on "terms" (http://www.quickquid.com/terms) is 404.
Handy, isn't that?
users in the US to download music from Canada's music store, to get the price break?
The regional roll-out is probably due to capacity, getting the records into an online database was possibly done in waves, state by state, and that's just the order they picked to enter them into the system in.
As for the referrer, look at how many scams are already going for people charging you absurd amounts to get a copy of your credit report. They are probably trying to prevent scammers from charging people for an online copy of their credit report when all they do after they charge your credit card $9.55 is to forward you to this site.
Re-arranging the FS on a drive whilst being booted off it is um... rather challenging to do.