exactly what I was thinking. They want to have your cake, they want to have my cake, and they want to eat them both. I bet their lawyers are running around in tight circles right now trying to figure out how to defend their favorable positions in both interpretations of the law in the same court case. I hope their heads EXPLODE.
(tempting though it is to reply to your bulletpoints which show very shallow insights, I would rightfully expect some off-topic moderation to my post)
I think the thing to remember here is that the pirate bay people are almost certainly guilty of breaking said laws. Not saying the laws are just, but the fact that they appeal it repeatedly and keep getting the same decision to a degree shows that at least that facet of the system is working as designed. Piracy will always be around, but when piracy gets to a certain height it indicates there is an underlying problem that needs to be addressed more urgently. It's like running a restaurant that keeps having problems with cockroaches - sure the cockroaches shouldn't be there, but there's probably an underlying problem (lack of proper sanitation) that is encouraging the problem. But almost all the laws on the books right now advocate busting out bigger and bigger cans of RAID, they ignore the underlying cause.
Look at china, piracy there is so completely out of control it's a joke. Carts on streetcorners full to overflowing with pirated media for sale dirt cheap. Imagine seeing that on the streets of London or Washington. Bad laws, lead to bad behavior, leading to worse laws. And then they justify the worse laws because of the bad behavior, ignoring the bad laws that initiated the problem to begin with. Until they get rid of the root cause, they'll never bring the intermediate issues into check. But like consulting, there's a lot less profit to be made solving a problem than there is in mitigating it, and so that's what we're doing. One of the major problems of democracy.:(
the English language to distinguish among all the various forms of our non-biological overlords, underlings, and peers.
Indeed. I guess when I hear "robot", I think of something with at least partly autonomous operation. RC planes aren't robots. Deep sea ROVs aren't robots. The mars landers are the crossover point, designed to operate semi-autonomously, here's what to do, you know how to do it, and here's what to do if you have a problem. (which may involve us taking back more direct control)
I think even the simple roomba could start being classified a robot, we tell it where to work and it does its think on its own. (we tell it what to do, and it works out the details on how to accomplish that, adapting to conditions without external correction) Those cars with computers in them that were on that desert race last year, those were definitely robots.
This thing on the other hand, is very similar to an ROV, it's merely a remotely-controlled tool. It's no more a robot than the claw machine in the arcade.
"... saying the auto-answer feature that left those system vulnerable was an effort to strike the right balance between security and usability."
was just gonna say, that sounds just like MS's excuse to keep AutoRun functional for so long. It was the most flagrant invitation to viruses that has ever existed.
At least at this point most vendors have figured out that automatic code execution from untrusted sources is not a good tradeoff for convenience.
So, uh, with all this talk of warrantless wiretaps, you still think it's going to take a court order for them to back-trace the signal?
The reason warrantless wiretapping works so efficiently in the USA is that every major phone exchange has a small room in the building with more alarms than you can shake a stick at, that's run remotely by DHS, and that's their siphon point for any traffic that runs through the building. (not making this up, I actually know someone that is cleared to work on the computers in one of those rooms) It lets them remotely grab any information they want, in real-time. There's no warrants, no court orders, no phonecalls, no faxes, they just press a button at their office in Cali or wherever and the information comes up on their screen. A lot of this hardware was installed before it was legal to use, as with most DHS stuff they implement it and then worry about making it retroactively legal later or maybe after they get caught using it.
So until DHS manages to secure space inside every major ISP, (and the day MAY come) we're ok for now. Warrantless wiretapping is already on the books, so they can do it to the telcos. There's nothing on the books yet that forces ISPs to let DHS have ongoing physical access. That I know of anyway. Anyone with information to the contrary please speak up. So for now at least it requires warrants or some personal social engineering at each proxy hop. Each of these hops takes time to get information on (from hours to days) to see where the next hop is. All they can do is hope the ISP they faxed has good turnaround time and hope that the next hop is actually the origin point. (and the really scary thing here is that most of them will just blindly reply back to any faxed request sent on authentic looking letterhead, since misuse of govt seal is a crime they can say it was safe to assume you were LEA, they have no further responsibility to verify the identity of the requestor - I have personal experience with handling such faxed requests)
On the surface I'm surprised that the ISPs aren't under the same controls as the telcos, but then again the telcos have a long history of working closely with law enforcement agents, (mostly to the benefit of the telcos) so maybe it was more a case of "you owe us one" that got a "foot in the door" (literally) for DHS. The ISPs have nothing to gain by being overly cooperative, and a lot to lose in the way of negative press if they do. Just imagine all the people that cancelled their subscriptions to HideMyAss after they handed over all their proxy records during the Anonymous witchhunt.
How do you figure that's "anonymous"? You are paying for the Internet connection so SOMEBODY knows who you are.
I think that falls under the "I'm behind seven proxies, good luck!" meme. Granted, you get more and more latency each hop, but if you can give someone enough busywork trying to follow the breadcrumbs, you're likely to either (A) make them decide it's not worth the effort to get a 5th, 6th, and 7th court order, or by the time they get to the last proxy they have wiped your session data and simply have nothing to give anyone with a badge on their letterhead.
Good proxy providers make a point to not retain session data for any longer than is absolutely necessary. Or if they don't, you've made a bad selection of providers. I know if I were working in Anonymous, I sure as hell would be using a proxy chain paid for using prepaid visa cards.
But don't the colleges already have you locked in? "Buy this and this and this for the courses you've signed up for this semester". OK, what are your options? You buy this and this and this. There is no choice other than trying to get your hands on something used. There is no shopping around. At least iBooks is cheaper. It's also a heck of a lot easier to carry to class. And how can you possibly argue with [i]searchable[/i]? There are so many advantages over dead trees it's almost magical.
(and I was just reading a thread earlier where some twit was arguing that you couldn't sell the book back... ok then, so you can rent an iBook for $30 for the semester, or you can BUY the book for $230, and the book store will give you $55 for it at the end of the semester. Oh that's so much better! hope he's not trying for a math major. Back in the 90's I never made it out of the book store any lighter than $400 a semester, even after reselling (essentially giving away) my books)
forces you to sell only via the Apple Store. So, Apple will make 30% on every text book sold which is written in their new tool, and likey 30% on every new, yearly addition which changes a picture here or there and yet charges full price (what, you don't think this odious practice from physical books will make it into electronic textbooks?)
Talk about vendor lock-in.
And good luck trying to sell your book at the end of the year back to the Apple Store...
Very little of that is relevant if it reduces the student's final book costs by 70%. I'll happily give Apple their book lock-in all day long if it saves me a few grand on textbooks. Wouldn't you?
(I yanked that 70% out of thin air, someone with better digging skills please dig up some hard numbers for us, but I can't imagine the savings being any LESS than that really, anyone that's had to pay their own college bills knows books are a complete racket)
HDMI, however, tops out at 1920 x 1200, same as single-link DVI. For higher than that you need dual-link DVI or DisplayPort.
Sadly I have trouble explaining this to people from time to time. "This 30 display looks nice but I have a bigger TV at home." "The TV will have a lower resolution than this display." "No, my TV is a 42" high def set." Aaaand so we have to try to explain resolution vs size. Some get it, some don't.
We have an elgato hooked to the mac pro here, on a 30" cinema display, and we tune to one of IPTV's high def (1080) channels and show the window at "100%" size and show them... here, THIS is how much content will fit on your tv. With this display, you get all that additional space to the right and below the window.
Some still don't get it no matter how we try to explain it. "Bigger is better" is all they can understand. The other nice thing we can try is to attach the HD tv here to the computer's other graphics port and show the arrangement panel, which will show the two displays side by side, by pixel size. And drag windows between the two displays. "why did the window get so BIG when you dragged it to the TV?" and then some have an "ahh ha!" moment.
I suspect you would have a difficult time finding a 2560x1440 panel that doesn't support HDMI.
I'm not too technical with how VGA works, but doesn't higher monitor resolution require more (serial?) bandwidth? And hit some sort of wall of bandwidth when the resolution gets high?
I'm no rocket scientist so maybe I'm missing something here, but if a planet loses mass in this way it should not affect its orbit. Take as an example, lets say some supergiant transformer takes out his sword and slices the moon in half. Each half has 50% of the mass of the moon. That doesn't cause both pieces of the moon to plummet toward the sun.
(circular) orbit is the equilibrium reached when the gravitational pull toward an attractor is balanced by the inertial energy of the mass which is trying to move the object away from the attractor. Both have a linear relation to change of mass of the object in orbit, and the two contribute an opposite force, so if you change the mass, the object should remain in the same orbit. (if you lower the mass, you lower the gravitational attraction and lower the inertial energy)
This is the same reason astronauts don't get hurled off into space when they step out of their spacecraft. And the spacecraft also remains in the same orbit when the astronaut leaves it.
If you want to make something fall toward its attractor, you need to slow it down. That lowers its inertial energy without affecting the gravitational attraction. Or let it collide with a mass that does not have the same inertial vector. (increasing the mass attraction, without an equal increase in overall inertial energy)
I suppose another basic way to view an object in orbit is to view all the particles of the object as independently in the same orbit. Group them any way you want, they are still in the same orbit. Even if some of it turns from rock to gas. The gas remains in the same orbit along with the rock.
Really though, as a customer, you don't look favorably at your security vendor waiting until after a serious breach to refine their processes. You pay them the big dollars because they're supposed to already know what they're doing and have good practice already in place the day you shake hands.
This is just their P.R. people clawing for some way to put a little positive spin on their blunder.
you might as well advise us all then how vulnerable flash drives are too. capable of storing and acting as a vector for viruses, even more so than a mac. Telling a user that their mac presents a virus danger makes as much sense as shooting the messenger.
I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, but this time I have to call BS. You're either a troll or uneducated and trying to spread FUD on a platform you have a grudge against. So I hope I'm throwing a wet blanket on your FUD rather than feeding a troll.
Thing is, a virus for a present version of the Mac operating system hasn't been spotted in the wild in the past decade. (a program that installs itself to a remote computer without user interaction, either by media exchange or network connection) 300? Name one. Just one. (lots of noobs don't know the difference between scareware, malware, trojans, viruses, and worms, and call them all "viruses")
There certainly is malware in the wild for the Mac though, MacDefender and the many aliases it goes by, is the most widespread. As with most malware, it requires user interaction and permission to install itself before it can cause problems with the one computer the user installed it on. MacDefender is a member of the "scareware" subclass of malware. I've also ran into a limited number of computers with a DNS redirector cronjob installed on them that masqueraded as a codec installer for watching the porn videos on the page it was hosted at, and that is a more classic example of "malware". Your claim of "About 300 or so viruses or malware files" isn't going to fly very far unless you're talking 300 copies of one or two unique malware apps, none of which would be even the slightest risk to other computers on the user's home network as you stated.
May as well throw this in for full disclosure. I've ran into TWO cases of spear-phishing malware on a Mac. These were custom jobs tweaked for the specific victim, and required direct interaction between the malware author and the victim. One of them was able to get an inexperienced new network admin to install remote access to his laptop, and the criminals then set it up to be a spam zombie, using tools normally installed onto compromised unix servers. It was discovered when he attended a conference, and found himself surrounded by astounded IT staff and network admins that had traced the spambot traffic at the facility to his laptop. It was the first time they had ever seen or heard of a compromised mac. Goes to show just how extraordinarily rare that sort of thing is on the platform. This is the only example I have ever seen of malware on a mac that is going on the offensive on the network. And I work on somewhere around a hundred macs a week. (which turn out to be mostly hardware repairs, in and out of warranty)
and had scare adds on it saying that soAndSo.dll was infected on my machine
My personal favorites are the sites that do a surprise "scan" on my machine and report my registry is infected... click here to download RegistryRepair! Oh I'm so on that.
"Personally I don't run any antivirus......and I haven't had a single malware in like 10 years"
How can you know that for sure?
It probably has something to do with the fruit-shaped logo on his computer.;) (I can say the same thing, for the same reason)
Tho getting more OT, I'm surprised that Symantec would stoop to doing fake scans in the most blatant expression of scareware. They already have a very long list of suckers, they don't need to break the law to be well into the black. They had to know doing something like this was going to be a net-loss?
Sounds like the boss may like to code, or may find it easier to express design in implementation than words.
Hook him up with a rapid prototyping language like VB. (specifically even if you don't use VB) The point is that it takes a handful of minutes to flesh out a gui in the VB IDE. And that's probably the point he's trying to get across to you. It doesn't have to be functional, there doesn't have to be even a line of actual code behind any of the events or button clicks. Just the physical layout and control behavior may be what he's trying to get across to you.
You may also want to consider him to have the viewpoint of closer to a "real user". As a coder I can state from experience that it's easy to get tunnel vision as to "how it's supposed to work" and lose some sight of "how the user wants it to work". At the end of the day your job isn't to solve any stated problem, but to give the user what they need. Not what they want. Not what they asked for. Not what you think they need. The most valuable tool for that is watching a user interact with your code. Treat the boss's request like user feedback. You almost certainly will learn something from the experience that can be applied to improving the performance of the product.
Some of the most important changes I make to my code involve changing behavior based on watching a user deal with a problem they simply have no idea that is changeable or that any alternative exists. I've lost count of the number of conversations along the lines of "this looks like it's getting the job done but wouldn't it be easier if it xxx?" "Well ya, I suppose so.... actually that'd be great if it worked that way. You can DO that?" The boss presenting you with some ideas in gui form may work like that but in reverse, showing you some insight you never even considered. Those are gold.
(once you've become used to a complex process it no longer stands out as something that could use improvement, this applies to both coders and users, and is most quickly identified by someone with fresh insight)
And they care why? They got what they wanted, the material was taken down. They had nothing at risk because the DMCA laws don't have any teeth in them to prevent abuse. And they'll just keep doing it until someone makes them stop, because it's "good for business".
I took a slightly more removed view from this and am observing that it was forked while the license was less restrictive, and then they didn't like that and tightened up their license, and appear to believe that their license changes are retroactive?
The box has no accurate way to tell your spontaneous speed unless blondestar is recording your gps positions constantly (it may be) But it CAN use accelerometers to measure g-forces while it's recording time. g-forces over time between start of event and full stop can pretty accurately measure how fast you were going when you started to slow down, whether the slowdown was applying the brakes or hitting a tree. (this works as long as you end up stopped, which serves as the reference point)
they have dropped such complexity for a simpler system that screws merchants over pretty badly.
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution. (a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it) That's why sellers can't leave buyers negative feedback anymore - too much abuse. I personally got burnt by a seller on two occasions there before they started adjusting things. (one cost me $156 - wound up with no product and no cash, PLUS a negative feedback, with a comment that made me look like the bad guy)
In a local sale, the seller is usually at a disadvantage - in most cases returning items is very easy, so much so that for common issues sellers have to specifically exclude returns due to abuse - like water pumps and generators in times of flooding and ice storms. Lots of abuse of buy-use-return abuse on tools too. A properly working buyer/seller system doesn't appear "balanced and fair" from a casual glance, it appears to be tilted toward the buyer. But in reality, that's where fairness lives.
OK, you convinced me, I'll try it immediately. Does it come as.deb or.rpm? Or maybe I should compile it from source?
No, IE9 implements the most advanced security model, not found in Chrome or Firefox, it's called "Security by Obscurity". That way, even in the highly unlikely chance there's a security-related bug, nobody will ever find it. So they won't be releasing the source code, for your protection.
IR is used to provide lighting when there is inadequate contrast. A bright screen in a dark theatre does not require any enhancing of contrast.
That's why the autofocus light doesn't come on when you're taking a picture outdoors in good light. It's main purpose is for indoor low overall lighting conditions.
So attempting to jam IR-assisted autofocus in a theatre is a complete waste of time.
Also FWIW, those little autofocus assist lamps on the cameras have a range of around 15 feet tops - no one with a handycam is going to be that close to the screen, focus becomes much less critical at the typical 35-60 foot theatre seating distance, most cameras are at or close to "infinite" for focal distance by that point. Cameras at least will let you disable auto focus and just manually crank it to the max, but it's not commonly available on handicams.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly what I was thinking. They want to have your cake, they want to have my cake, and they want to eat them both. I bet their lawyers are running around in tight circles right now trying to figure out how to defend their favorable positions in both interpretations of the law in the same court case. I hope their heads EXPLODE.
(tempting though it is to reply to your bulletpoints which show very shallow insights, I would rightfully expect some off-topic moderation to my post)
I think the thing to remember here is that the pirate bay people are almost certainly guilty of breaking said laws. Not saying the laws are just, but the fact that they appeal it repeatedly and keep getting the same decision to a degree shows that at least that facet of the system is working as designed. Piracy will always be around, but when piracy gets to a certain height it indicates there is an underlying problem that needs to be addressed more urgently. It's like running a restaurant that keeps having problems with cockroaches - sure the cockroaches shouldn't be there, but there's probably an underlying problem (lack of proper sanitation) that is encouraging the problem. But almost all the laws on the books right now advocate busting out bigger and bigger cans of RAID, they ignore the underlying cause.
Look at china, piracy there is so completely out of control it's a joke. Carts on streetcorners full to overflowing with pirated media for sale dirt cheap. Imagine seeing that on the streets of London or Washington. Bad laws, lead to bad behavior, leading to worse laws. And then they justify the worse laws because of the bad behavior, ignoring the bad laws that initiated the problem to begin with. Until they get rid of the root cause, they'll never bring the intermediate issues into check. But like consulting, there's a lot less profit to be made solving a problem than there is in mitigating it, and so that's what we're doing. One of the major problems of democracy. :(
Indeed. I guess when I hear "robot", I think of something with at least partly autonomous operation. RC planes aren't robots. Deep sea ROVs aren't robots. The mars landers are the crossover point, designed to operate semi-autonomously, here's what to do, you know how to do it, and here's what to do if you have a problem. (which may involve us taking back more direct control)
I think even the simple roomba could start being classified a robot, we tell it where to work and it does its think on its own. (we tell it what to do, and it works out the details on how to accomplish that, adapting to conditions without external correction) Those cars with computers in them that were on that desert race last year, those were definitely robots.
This thing on the other hand, is very similar to an ROV, it's merely a remotely-controlled tool. It's no more a robot than the claw machine in the arcade.
"... saying the auto-answer feature that left those system vulnerable was an effort to strike the right balance between security and usability."
was just gonna say, that sounds just like MS's excuse to keep AutoRun functional for so long. It was the most flagrant invitation to viruses that has ever existed.
At least at this point most vendors have figured out that automatic code execution from untrusted sources is not a good tradeoff for convenience.
The reason warrantless wiretapping works so efficiently in the USA is that every major phone exchange has a small room in the building with more alarms than you can shake a stick at, that's run remotely by DHS, and that's their siphon point for any traffic that runs through the building. (not making this up, I actually know someone that is cleared to work on the computers in one of those rooms) It lets them remotely grab any information they want, in real-time. There's no warrants, no court orders, no phonecalls, no faxes, they just press a button at their office in Cali or wherever and the information comes up on their screen. A lot of this hardware was installed before it was legal to use, as with most DHS stuff they implement it and then worry about making it retroactively legal later or maybe after they get caught using it.
So until DHS manages to secure space inside every major ISP, (and the day MAY come) we're ok for now. Warrantless wiretapping is already on the books, so they can do it to the telcos. There's nothing on the books yet that forces ISPs to let DHS have ongoing physical access. That I know of anyway. Anyone with information to the contrary please speak up. So for now at least it requires warrants or some personal social engineering at each proxy hop. Each of these hops takes time to get information on (from hours to days) to see where the next hop is. All they can do is hope the ISP they faxed has good turnaround time and hope that the next hop is actually the origin point. (and the really scary thing here is that most of them will just blindly reply back to any faxed request sent on authentic looking letterhead, since misuse of govt seal is a crime they can say it was safe to assume you were LEA, they have no further responsibility to verify the identity of the requestor - I have personal experience with handling such faxed requests)
On the surface I'm surprised that the ISPs aren't under the same controls as the telcos, but then again the telcos have a long history of working closely with law enforcement agents, (mostly to the benefit of the telcos) so maybe it was more a case of "you owe us one" that got a "foot in the door" (literally) for DHS. The ISPs have nothing to gain by being overly cooperative, and a lot to lose in the way of negative press if they do. Just imagine all the people that cancelled their subscriptions to HideMyAss after they handed over all their proxy records during the Anonymous witchhunt.
i suppose we'll get something that looks like a freedom of information request reply that is 18 pages of black "redacted" bars.
Or someone will fly in with a cape and shout "this investigation has been halted for reasons of national security!" and fly away.
I think that falls under the "I'm behind seven proxies, good luck!" meme. Granted, you get more and more latency each hop, but if you can give someone enough busywork trying to follow the breadcrumbs, you're likely to either (A) make them decide it's not worth the effort to get a 5th, 6th, and 7th court order, or by the time they get to the last proxy they have wiped your session data and simply have nothing to give anyone with a badge on their letterhead.
Good proxy providers make a point to not retain session data for any longer than is absolutely necessary. Or if they don't, you've made a bad selection of providers. I know if I were working in Anonymous, I sure as hell would be using a proxy chain paid for using prepaid visa cards.
But don't the colleges already have you locked in? "Buy this and this and this for the courses you've signed up for this semester". OK, what are your options? You buy this and this and this. There is no choice other than trying to get your hands on something used. There is no shopping around. At least iBooks is cheaper. It's also a heck of a lot easier to carry to class. And how can you possibly argue with [i]searchable[/i]? There are so many advantages over dead trees it's almost magical.
(and I was just reading a thread earlier where some twit was arguing that you couldn't sell the book back... ok then, so you can rent an iBook for $30 for the semester, or you can BUY the book for $230, and the book store will give you $55 for it at the end of the semester. Oh that's so much better! hope he's not trying for a math major. Back in the 90's I never made it out of the book store any lighter than $400 a semester, even after reselling (essentially giving away) my books)
Very little of that is relevant if it reduces the student's final book costs by 70%. I'll happily give Apple their book lock-in all day long if it saves me a few grand on textbooks. Wouldn't you?
(I yanked that 70% out of thin air, someone with better digging skills please dig up some hard numbers for us, but I can't imagine the savings being any LESS than that really, anyone that's had to pay their own college bills knows books are a complete racket)
but are there any devices (specifically, LCD tv sets) that support better than 1080? that we can buy reasonably?
Sadly I have trouble explaining this to people from time to time. "This 30 display looks nice but I have a bigger TV at home." "The TV will have a lower resolution than this display." "No, my TV is a 42" high def set." Aaaand so we have to try to explain resolution vs size. Some get it, some don't.
We have an elgato hooked to the mac pro here, on a 30" cinema display, and we tune to one of IPTV's high def (1080) channels and show the window at "100%" size and show them... here, THIS is how much content will fit on your tv. With this display, you get all that additional space to the right and below the window.
Some still don't get it no matter how we try to explain it. "Bigger is better" is all they can understand. The other nice thing we can try is to attach the HD tv here to the computer's other graphics port and show the arrangement panel, which will show the two displays side by side, by pixel size. And drag windows between the two displays. "why did the window get so BIG when you dragged it to the TV?" and then some have an "ahh ha!" moment.
I'm not too technical with how VGA works, but doesn't higher monitor resolution require more (serial?) bandwidth? And hit some sort of wall of bandwidth when the resolution gets high?
I'm no rocket scientist so maybe I'm missing something here, but if a planet loses mass in this way it should not affect its orbit. Take as an example, lets say some supergiant transformer takes out his sword and slices the moon in half. Each half has 50% of the mass of the moon. That doesn't cause both pieces of the moon to plummet toward the sun.
(circular) orbit is the equilibrium reached when the gravitational pull toward an attractor is balanced by the inertial energy of the mass which is trying to move the object away from the attractor. Both have a linear relation to change of mass of the object in orbit, and the two contribute an opposite force, so if you change the mass, the object should remain in the same orbit. (if you lower the mass, you lower the gravitational attraction and lower the inertial energy)
This is the same reason astronauts don't get hurled off into space when they step out of their spacecraft. And the spacecraft also remains in the same orbit when the astronaut leaves it.
If you want to make something fall toward its attractor, you need to slow it down. That lowers its inertial energy without affecting the gravitational attraction. Or let it collide with a mass that does not have the same inertial vector. (increasing the mass attraction, without an equal increase in overall inertial energy)
I suppose another basic way to view an object in orbit is to view all the particles of the object as independently in the same orbit. Group them any way you want, they are still in the same orbit. Even if some of it turns from rock to gas. The gas remains in the same orbit along with the rock.
you can get out of a bit of damage control
Really though, as a customer, you don't look favorably at your security vendor waiting until after a serious breach to refine their processes. You pay them the big dollars because they're supposed to already know what they're doing and have good practice already in place the day you shake hands.
This is just their P.R. people clawing for some way to put a little positive spin on their blunder.
you might as well advise us all then how vulnerable flash drives are too. capable of storing and acting as a vector for viruses, even more so than a mac. Telling a user that their mac presents a virus danger makes as much sense as shooting the messenger.
I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, but this time I have to call BS. You're either a troll or uneducated and trying to spread FUD on a platform you have a grudge against. So I hope I'm throwing a wet blanket on your FUD rather than feeding a troll.
Thing is, a virus for a present version of the Mac operating system hasn't been spotted in the wild in the past decade. (a program that installs itself to a remote computer without user interaction, either by media exchange or network connection) 300? Name one. Just one. (lots of noobs don't know the difference between scareware, malware, trojans, viruses, and worms, and call them all "viruses")
There certainly is malware in the wild for the Mac though, MacDefender and the many aliases it goes by, is the most widespread. As with most malware, it requires user interaction and permission to install itself before it can cause problems with the one computer the user installed it on. MacDefender is a member of the "scareware" subclass of malware. I've also ran into a limited number of computers with a DNS redirector cronjob installed on them that masqueraded as a codec installer for watching the porn videos on the page it was hosted at, and that is a more classic example of "malware". Your claim of "About 300 or so viruses or malware files" isn't going to fly very far unless you're talking 300 copies of one or two unique malware apps, none of which would be even the slightest risk to other computers on the user's home network as you stated.
May as well throw this in for full disclosure. I've ran into TWO cases of spear-phishing malware on a Mac. These were custom jobs tweaked for the specific victim, and required direct interaction between the malware author and the victim. One of them was able to get an inexperienced new network admin to install remote access to his laptop, and the criminals then set it up to be a spam zombie, using tools normally installed onto compromised unix servers. It was discovered when he attended a conference, and found himself surrounded by astounded IT staff and network admins that had traced the spambot traffic at the facility to his laptop. It was the first time they had ever seen or heard of a compromised mac. Goes to show just how extraordinarily rare that sort of thing is on the platform. This is the only example I have ever seen of malware on a mac that is going on the offensive on the network. And I work on somewhere around a hundred macs a week. (which turn out to be mostly hardware repairs, in and out of warranty)
My personal favorites are the sites that do a surprise "scan" on my machine and report my registry is infected... click here to download RegistryRepair! Oh I'm so on that.
It probably has something to do with the fruit-shaped logo on his computer. ;) (I can say the same thing, for the same reason)
Tho getting more OT, I'm surprised that Symantec would stoop to doing fake scans in the most blatant expression of scareware. They already have a very long list of suckers, they don't need to break the law to be well into the black. They had to know doing something like this was going to be a net-loss?
Sounds like the boss may like to code, or may find it easier to express design in implementation than words.
Hook him up with a rapid prototyping language like VB. (specifically even if you don't use VB) The point is that it takes a handful of minutes to flesh out a gui in the VB IDE. And that's probably the point he's trying to get across to you. It doesn't have to be functional, there doesn't have to be even a line of actual code behind any of the events or button clicks. Just the physical layout and control behavior may be what he's trying to get across to you.
You may also want to consider him to have the viewpoint of closer to a "real user". As a coder I can state from experience that it's easy to get tunnel vision as to "how it's supposed to work" and lose some sight of "how the user wants it to work". At the end of the day your job isn't to solve any stated problem, but to give the user what they need. Not what they want. Not what they asked for. Not what you think they need. The most valuable tool for that is watching a user interact with your code. Treat the boss's request like user feedback. You almost certainly will learn something from the experience that can be applied to improving the performance of the product.
Some of the most important changes I make to my code involve changing behavior based on watching a user deal with a problem they simply have no idea that is changeable or that any alternative exists. I've lost count of the number of conversations along the lines of "this looks like it's getting the job done but wouldn't it be easier if it xxx?" "Well ya, I suppose so.... actually that'd be great if it worked that way. You can DO that?" The boss presenting you with some ideas in gui form may work like that but in reverse, showing you some insight you never even considered. Those are gold.
(once you've become used to a complex process it no longer stands out as something that could use improvement, this applies to both coders and users, and is most quickly identified by someone with fresh insight)
And they care why? They got what they wanted, the material was taken down. They had nothing at risk because the DMCA laws don't have any teeth in them to prevent abuse. And they'll just keep doing it until someone makes them stop, because it's "good for business".
I took a slightly more removed view from this and am observing that it was forked while the license was less restrictive, and then they didn't like that and tightened up their license, and appear to believe that their license changes are retroactive?
The box has no accurate way to tell your spontaneous speed unless blondestar is recording your gps positions constantly (it may be) But it CAN use accelerometers to measure g-forces while it's recording time. g-forces over time between start of event and full stop can pretty accurately measure how fast you were going when you started to slow down, whether the slowdown was applying the brakes or hitting a tree. (this works as long as you end up stopped, which serves as the reference point)
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution. (a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it) That's why sellers can't leave buyers negative feedback anymore - too much abuse. I personally got burnt by a seller on two occasions there before they started adjusting things. (one cost me $156 - wound up with no product and no cash, PLUS a negative feedback, with a comment that made me look like the bad guy)
In a local sale, the seller is usually at a disadvantage - in most cases returning items is very easy, so much so that for common issues sellers have to specifically exclude returns due to abuse - like water pumps and generators in times of flooding and ice storms. Lots of abuse of buy-use-return abuse on tools too. A properly working buyer/seller system doesn't appear "balanced and fair" from a casual glance, it appears to be tilted toward the buyer. But in reality, that's where fairness lives.
No, IE9 implements the most advanced security model, not found in Chrome or Firefox, it's called "Security by Obscurity". That way, even in the highly unlikely chance there's a security-related bug, nobody will ever find it. So they won't be releasing the source code, for your protection.
IR is used to provide lighting when there is inadequate contrast. A bright screen in a dark theatre does not require any enhancing of contrast.
That's why the autofocus light doesn't come on when you're taking a picture outdoors in good light. It's main purpose is for indoor low overall lighting conditions.
So attempting to jam IR-assisted autofocus in a theatre is a complete waste of time.
Also FWIW, those little autofocus assist lamps on the cameras have a range of around 15 feet tops - no one with a handycam is going to be that close to the screen, focus becomes much less critical at the typical 35-60 foot theatre seating distance, most cameras are at or close to "infinite" for focal distance by that point. Cameras at least will let you disable auto focus and just manually crank it to the max, but it's not commonly available on handicams.