Do we all really beleive that there's no backdoor in Windows XP?
Or just that the WMF "problem" isn't it?
Frankly, I'd be shocked if Microsoft didn't insert a backdoor into Windows somehwere. Apparently, the Chinese were woried enough about this very problem that they set up a program to look things over, and they're still looking into Windows alternatives.
The two main games are CounterStrike: Source and Unreal Tournament 2004. I use it exclusively while playing, in-game chatting excluded, of course.
(On second thought, I still manually buy weapons in CS:S with the main keyboard. I know a lot of guys who use macros or the N52's macros for this, but honestly, after a week you get to know the weapon-buy keystrokes so well it comes automatically. Example: O2B42,.O3O3O4 gets me kevlar with a helmet, an AK47, full ammo for the AK and the Gloc, two flashbangs, and one HE grenade. I just did that almost automaticaly and from memory.)
I find it superior to the keyboard mainly because I can position it off to the left side and deep on my desk, allowing me to get a very ergonomic arm position. The D-Pad under the thumb basically works out to having 4 "spacebars" available at all times, which is also great. In CS, for example, I can make one direction a "jump," one a "crouch-jump," one a "jump left" and one a "jump right" (these last two are best for sniping with an AWP).
If you're into flight-sims (and I am) then the older Nostromo unit may be better. It only has 10 buttons, but the mousewheel maps to a throttle axis.
So you want a programmable keyboard for gaming? One that's ergonomically shaped for your left hand? One that works on PCs and Macs via USB? One that also comes with a mouse-wheel-like device that's also programmable? And has a d-pad positioned correctly (under your thumb), which is itself also programmable?
And costs around $30? And lets you keep your existing keyboard for, you know, typing text?
Between it and my Logitech MX510 mouse, a Mouse Bungee, and LogiGamer, I'm in gaming heaven, and I get to keep my 15-year old IBM Model M keyboard and 15-year old Apple Extended I keyboard for thumping out articles.
"...could this bring a future to the Newton platform?"
No.
You know, I can (and do) emulate the Apple IIGS and IIe on my PC (and Mac, for that matter) with production-quality emulation software. So?
Would anyone be stupid enough to suggest that a dead platform like the Apple II, even well emulated, gives it a future beyond that of a "novelty project?" I think not.
Before we all panic at the thought of "poor light and ventillation" killing people (ha ha ha), don't forget that many South Koreans believe in "fan death."
"...The legend states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars."
Various newspapers have described the problems thusly:
"...On Friday in eastern Seoul, a 16-year-old girl died from suffocation after she fell asleep in her room with an electric fan in motion. The death toll from fan-related incidents reached 10 during the past week. Medical experts say that this type of death occurs when one is exposed to electric fan breezes for long hours in a sealed area. "Excessive exposure to such a condition lowers one's temperature and hampers blood circulation. And it eventually leads to the paralysis of heart and lungs," says a medical expert."
I know how you feel. I have an iPod Photo. I have a car stereo and Treo cell phone that use MP3s natively. My "workout music player" is a Cretive Labs Muvo TX that plays MP3s and Windows Media Files.
The key for me is to use "lowest common demoninator" file formats, which means MP3s. iTunes is a fine Ripper, so I have it set to "Import Music" (that is, rip from CDs) in MP3 format (usually 192 kpbs, but sometimes 160). Stuff winds up in iTunes' library automatically.
OK, so that handles ripping my CDs and making them work on the iPod.
When buying music from the iTunes Store, it comes as AAC files with DRM. Big hassle, since it only works in the iPod (and iTunes, of course.) Fortunately, you can use Hymn (or JHymn) over at http://www.hymn-project.org/ to convert these store-bought songs into MP3s with just a few clicks. Problem: it doesn't work with iTunes 6, at least yet. The solution here is to keep using older iTunes. Since I don't need to download and play video, I still use iTunes 4.9, available from http://www.5star-shareware.com/Windows/Music/Multi mediaPlayers/itunes.html, or version 5.x is over at: http://www.oldapps.com/itunes.htm.
Now how to pull out iTunes files for other players? idleTunes to the rescue! It can take any playlist in iTunes and copy the MP3 files out to another folder, with the files named and numbered how you like them. It does other good things too. And for free. Get it from: http://www.idletunes.com/.
And that's how I keep my music flowing between all my devices. Works great. Hope this helps.
A PDA has been my constant companion since my Psion 3a in 1993, and I've since moved through Palms and Treos to my current Treo 650. The Treo has abilities my poor little Psion would never have dreamed of, and despite a much better user interface, is just as complex to use overall because of it. It is about as complex as a modern PC or Macintosh, just as my Psion was about as complex as PCs or Macs were back in 1993. I happen to be comfortable with this, and it seems the original poster of the question is too.
The iPod I carry around in my bag is about as simple to use as the cassete tape-playing Walkman I had in High school, in spite of the fact that it has far more abilties than that Walkman ever had. That lowers the barriers to ownership right there.
Then toss in the "cool factor" that comes with each iPod, and contrast that to the "nerd factor" that comes with every PDA, and it is soon clear why there are a few billion more iPods than PDAs out there.
There's a great email program for Palm-powered smartphones (like the Treo 650) called ChatterMail (http://www.chatteremail.com/) that works as you'd expect with POP3 mail servers, but given an IMAP server, you can have email pushed to your treo as it arrives, normally within a few seconds.
The whole experience is pretty much just like Blackberry mail, except it is on a versitle hardware platform (heh heh heh).
I think he will find that the expense for creating free wifi is cheaper than his monthly expenses for sugar and creamer. Does he charge for these condiments?
No, of course not. Wifi should be thought of as a condiment - free to use with purchase. Setting a purchase policy is up to the owner of course, but it be good to go.
Therefore you can easily deny that there is any additional hidden data, and there is no basis for anyone to say otherwise.
Sure, unless the person trying to get your data see's a program called "TrueCrypt" in your Start menu, runs it, chooses Help -> About, goes to the website (or just Googles the name TrueCrypt) and reads all about the second hidden partitions that requires a second password.
Other than that, it seems like a very good program (sorry if that sounds sarcastic - it really does look good otherwise.)
Among other things, I repair computers and Windows problems for a living. With the cost of new Dell Desktop PCs now at $299 (sometimes after rebate,) and with my rate being $75 an hour, the math starts to get interesting:
If it takes 4 hours to totally clean off an severely infested PC, then they might as well get a new PC. If it only takes me two hours, then they're halfway to a new PC. Hmmmm...
Suppose the hard drive fails, and (like a client) they haven't done a backup in a year. Suppose the PC is a 3 year old PIII PC. New hard drive: $60. Time to install Windows ME (or whatever) with all the drivers: at least an hour, but probably two. Cost: around $150 or a little more for a 3 year old PC. (Add more for software installation and network setup, and I do.) Again, that's halfway to a modern PC that is much faster, has a warranty, and has XP preloaded.
Not that I wind up going hungry when the client gets a new PC: there's still networking, data transfer, and software installation and setup that needs to get done. But the cost of new PCs has really changed the cost-benefit of fixing versus replacing.
Of coruse, the best part is when the client says, "Oh, and just take away that old, 'broken' PC. It is of no use to me now." Away it goes with me, because my time is free to me...
And don't forget, my rates are CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP compared to visits from The Geek Squad. If a consumer has to go through them, then the math in favor of a new PC gets even stronger...
I can't say I'm wild about this situation, but at least you can see why we're here at it.
Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE. This means Firefox would cross the 10% market share by October.
Of course, this means that (assuming 1% growth per month for easy math):
14% by Jan 2006
26% by Jan 2007
38% by Jan 2008
50% by Jan 2009
62% by Jan 2010
74% by Jan 2011
86% by Jan 2012
98% by Jan 2013
100% by Mar 2013
Sounds about right: no more IE in only 8 short years. The math couldn't possibly be wrong...
Sometimes it takes evil thinking to get around evil guarantees."Fight Evil with Evil" goes the tagline to at least one movie...
Were *I* in this position, I'd buy a second lock, break it, leave pieces of it lying around the area where the notebook was stolen, take a photo, and then proceed to make my claim.
Of course, there there is no way I would *really* do that officer...
I get around 250 emails a day. I've had the same email address for years at my own domain, and the address gets published in print multiple times a month, so that's why the number is so large.
200 of them are spam. 30 are mailing lists, either digests or individual messages. 10 are press-releases (I'm a journalist.)
That leaves 10 "normal" mails a day.
Yes, I have SpamBayes for Outlook, which works great. Opera's M2 has a spam filter that works great too. Other desktop clients has various spam filters that work with varying degrees of success (glares at Thunderbird).
That's all fine and dandy until I'm on the road and want to get my email, and then BAM, I've got 250 messages to download to my wireless-enabled palm pilot over a CDMA connection for every 24 hour period. Needless to say, that's totally useless.
Ultimately, I ran (run?) my own mailserver. Blacklists filter out 80% of the spam, for better or worse (but almost always for the better). Bayesien routines get the other 20%. Keyword-based filters send list-messages and press releases to a different mailbox. What remains is just 15 messages a day, which is just fine for slow wireless Palm Pilot access.
I don't expect people to have to run their own mail servers in order to have useful wireless email access, but as wireless access becomes more common, killing spam at the ROOT of the problem becomes more important.
Who knows how effective this will be, but I suspect that politicians are starting to get hip to this subject because THEIR wireless devices are becomming useless due to spam...
It isn't as if only the geeks have gotten sloppy with grammar and spelling. EVERYBODY is bad at it these days.
Additionally, spell-checkers have made things worse, because now no one knows how to spell things correctly by themselves. When you see somethng choc-full-o-spelling-errors, it is probably because there's no built-in spelling checker. And I am just as guilty of this as the rest of the world.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm a professional writer, and the worse the general population can write, the more employable I become...
ALL this guy's stuff is from the Whatever-Whatever division of Wayne Enterprises. You'd think this "Batman" fellow owned the freaking company or something...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Undervolting" is a perfectly cromulent word.
So, just so that we're all on the same page...
Do we all really beleive that there's no backdoor in Windows XP?
Or just that the WMF "problem" isn't it?
Frankly, I'd be shocked if Microsoft didn't insert a backdoor into Windows somehwere. Apparently, the Chinese were woried enough about this very problem that they set up a program to look things over, and they're still looking into Windows alternatives.
The two main games are CounterStrike: Source and Unreal Tournament 2004. I use it exclusively while playing, in-game chatting excluded, of course.
(On second thought, I still manually buy weapons in CS:S with the main keyboard. I know a lot of guys who use macros or the N52's macros for this, but honestly, after a week you get to know the weapon-buy keystrokes so well it comes automatically. Example: O2B42,.O3O3O4 gets me kevlar with a helmet, an AK47, full ammo for the AK and the Gloc, two flashbangs, and one HE grenade. I just did that almost automaticaly and from memory.)
I find it superior to the keyboard mainly because I can position it off to the left side and deep on my desk, allowing me to get a very ergonomic arm position. The D-Pad under the thumb basically works out to having 4 "spacebars" available at all times, which is also great. In CS, for example, I can make one direction a "jump," one a "crouch-jump," one a "jump left" and one a "jump right" (these last two are best for sniping with an AWP).
If you're into flight-sims (and I am) then the older Nostromo unit may be better. It only has 10 buttons, but the mousewheel maps to a throttle axis.
So you want a programmable keyboard for gaming? One that's ergonomically shaped for your left hand? One that works on PCs and Macs via USB? One that also comes with a mouse-wheel-like device that's also programmable? And has a d-pad positioned correctly (under your thumb), which is itself also programmable?
And costs around $30? And lets you keep your existing keyboard for, you know, typing text?
Then you want a Nostromo N52 from Belkin. Pure gaming heaven.
Between it and my Logitech MX510 mouse, a Mouse Bungee, and LogiGamer, I'm in gaming heaven, and I get to keep my 15-year old IBM Model M keyboard and 15-year old Apple Extended I keyboard for thumping out articles.
"...could this bring a future to the Newton platform?"
No.You know, I can (and do) emulate the Apple IIGS and IIe on my PC (and Mac, for that matter) with production-quality emulation software. So?
Would anyone be stupid enough to suggest that a dead platform like the Apple II, even well emulated, gives it a future beyond that of a "novelty project?" I think not.
Emulated NewtonOS is no different.
Before we all panic at the thought of "poor light and ventillation" killing people (ha ha ha), don't forget that many South Koreans believe in "fan death."
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death):
"...The legend states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars."
Various newspapers have described the problems thusly:
"...On Friday in eastern Seoul, a 16-year-old girl died from suffocation after she fell asleep in her room with an electric fan in motion. The death toll from fan-related incidents reached 10 during the past week. Medical experts say that this type of death occurs when one is exposed to electric fan breezes for long hours in a sealed area. "Excessive exposure to such a condition lowers one's temperature and hampers blood circulation. And it eventually leads to the paralysis of heart and lungs," says a medical expert."
I think I'll sleep easy on this "news."
Install Microsoft Windows.
I know how you feel. I have an iPod Photo. I have a car stereo and Treo cell phone that use MP3s natively. My "workout music player" is a Cretive Labs Muvo TX that plays MP3s and Windows Media Files.
i mediaPlayers/itunes.html, or version 5.x is over at: http://www.oldapps.com/itunes.htm.
The key for me is to use "lowest common demoninator" file formats, which means MP3s. iTunes is a fine Ripper, so I have it set to "Import Music" (that is, rip from CDs) in MP3 format (usually 192 kpbs, but sometimes 160). Stuff winds up in iTunes' library automatically.
OK, so that handles ripping my CDs and making them work on the iPod.
When buying music from the iTunes Store, it comes as AAC files with DRM. Big hassle, since it only works in the iPod (and iTunes, of course.) Fortunately, you can use Hymn (or JHymn) over at http://www.hymn-project.org/ to convert these store-bought songs into MP3s with just a few clicks. Problem: it doesn't work with iTunes 6, at least yet. The solution here is to keep using older iTunes. Since I don't need to download and play video, I still use iTunes 4.9, available from http://www.5star-shareware.com/Windows/Music/Mult
Now how to pull out iTunes files for other players? idleTunes to the rescue! It can take any playlist in iTunes and copy the MP3 files out to another folder, with the files named and numbered how you like them. It does other good things too. And for free. Get it from: http://www.idletunes.com/.
And that's how I keep my music flowing between all my devices. Works great. Hope this helps.
The situation, that is.
Not the jokes.
Well, maybe the jokes too...
A PDA has been my constant companion since my Psion 3a in 1993, and I've since moved through Palms and Treos to my current Treo 650. The Treo has abilities my poor little Psion would never have dreamed of, and despite a much better user interface, is just as complex to use overall because of it. It is about as complex as a modern PC or Macintosh, just as my Psion was about as complex as PCs or Macs were back in 1993. I happen to be comfortable with this, and it seems the original poster of the question is too.
The iPod I carry around in my bag is about as simple to use as the cassete tape-playing Walkman I had in High school, in spite of the fact that it has far more abilties than that Walkman ever had. That lowers the barriers to ownership right there.
Then toss in the "cool factor" that comes with each iPod, and contrast that to the "nerd factor" that comes with every PDA, and it is soon clear why there are a few billion more iPods than PDAs out there.
There's a great email program for Palm-powered smartphones (like the Treo 650) called ChatterMail (http://www.chatteremail.com/) that works as you'd expect with POP3 mail servers, but given an IMAP server, you can have email pushed to your treo as it arrives, normally within a few seconds.
The whole experience is pretty much just like Blackberry mail, except it is on a versitle hardware platform (heh heh heh).
Yes, yes, that's very interesting and all, but what I want to know is who won the Nobel Prize this year for "Attempted Chemistry?"
Even a manservant reading all of my mail and hand-carying printouts of nothing but personal messages to my Jamacian bungalow doesn't "end" spam.
It would seem that These Guys are actually making an attempt to "end" spam.
All this guy is just talking about is hiding it from view. Big deal...
You mean one employee lost a whole project due to his inability to make regular backups, I think.
This reeks of a FUD post...
No, of course not. Wifi should be thought of as a condiment - free to use with purchase. Setting a purchase policy is up to the owner of course, but it be good to go.
Sure, unless the person trying to get your data see's a program called "TrueCrypt" in your Start menu, runs it, chooses Help -> About, goes to the website (or just Googles the name TrueCrypt) and reads all about the second hidden partitions that requires a second password.
Other than that, it seems like a very good program (sorry if that sounds sarcastic - it really does look good otherwise.)
Yup, its never been easier to develop fast GUI apps for all 10 regular BeOS users...
Client gets what client pays for. I do not support piracy, especially when posting about it in public.
(Spits right back at you...)
If it takes 4 hours to totally clean off an severely infested PC, then they might as well get a new PC. If it only takes me two hours, then they're halfway to a new PC. Hmmmm...
Suppose the hard drive fails, and (like a client) they haven't done a backup in a year. Suppose the PC is a 3 year old PIII PC. New hard drive: $60. Time to install Windows ME (or whatever) with all the drivers: at least an hour, but probably two. Cost: around $150 or a little more for a 3 year old PC. (Add more for software installation and network setup, and I do.) Again, that's halfway to a modern PC that is much faster, has a warranty, and has XP preloaded.
Not that I wind up going hungry when the client gets a new PC: there's still networking, data transfer, and software installation and setup that needs to get done. But the cost of new PCs has really changed the cost-benefit of fixing versus replacing.
Of coruse, the best part is when the client says, "Oh, and just take away that old, 'broken' PC. It is of no use to me now." Away it goes with me, because my time is free to me...
And don't forget, my rates are CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP compared to visits from The Geek Squad. If a consumer has to go through them, then the math in favor of a new PC gets even stronger...
I can't say I'm wild about this situation, but at least you can see why we're here at it.
Of course, this means that (assuming 1% growth per month for easy math):
14% by Jan 2006
26% by Jan 2007
38% by Jan 2008
50% by Jan 2009
62% by Jan 2010
74% by Jan 2011
86% by Jan 2012
98% by Jan 2013
100% by Mar 2013
Sounds about right: no more IE in only 8 short years. The math couldn't possibly be wrong...
Were *I* in this position, I'd buy a second lock, break it, leave pieces of it lying around the area where the notebook was stolen, take a photo, and then proceed to make my claim.
Of course, there there is no way I would *really* do that officer...
200 of them are spam. 30 are mailing lists, either digests or individual messages. 10 are press-releases (I'm a journalist.)
That leaves 10 "normal" mails a day.
Yes, I have SpamBayes for Outlook, which works great. Opera's M2 has a spam filter that works great too. Other desktop clients has various spam filters that work with varying degrees of success (glares at Thunderbird).
That's all fine and dandy until I'm on the road and want to get my email, and then BAM, I've got 250 messages to download to my wireless-enabled palm pilot over a CDMA connection for every 24 hour period. Needless to say, that's totally useless.
Ultimately, I ran (run?) my own mailserver. Blacklists filter out 80% of the spam, for better or worse (but almost always for the better). Bayesien routines get the other 20%. Keyword-based filters send list-messages and press releases to a different mailbox. What remains is just 15 messages a day, which is just fine for slow wireless Palm Pilot access.
I don't expect people to have to run their own mail servers in order to have useful wireless email access, but as wireless access becomes more common, killing spam at the ROOT of the problem becomes more important.
Who knows how effective this will be, but I suspect that politicians are starting to get hip to this subject because THEIR wireless devices are becomming useless due to spam...
Ralph: Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Additionally, spell-checkers have made things worse, because now no one knows how to spell things correctly by themselves. When you see somethng choc-full-o-spelling-errors, it is probably because there's no built-in spelling checker. And I am just as guilty of this as the rest of the world.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm a professional writer, and the worse the general population can write, the more employable I become...
ALL this guy's stuff is from the Whatever-Whatever division of Wayne Enterprises. You'd think this "Batman" fellow owned the freaking company or something... ;-)