The weekly magazine Science News has a web site with each week's articles.
While this is a single magazine and not a portal, the nature of Science News is that each article is a summary of some interesting piece of research. The articles on the web site have links and references to the source material, in case you want to read the orginal papers that the article was based on.
While you have to be a magazine subscriber to see the full text of all the articles (non-subscribers get the full text to some articles), anybody can read the references to get the original sources.
For $3-5, you get to spend all evening downloading a file. When you get it, you have 30 days to play it before it self-destructs. And it self-destructs 24 hours after you start playing it. And you have to watch it on your computer, and the computer must be a PC running Windows.
On the other hand, video rental stores charge you the same $3-5, and you usually have at least three days to watch it.
Or pay-per-view cable which costs the same $3-5 for 24 hours, but doesn't involve any download time.
Or NetFlix where a $20/mo fee lets you watch your rentals for as long as you want.
Can someone tell me again what advantage there is to using Movielink?
Yeah, Windows Update requires you set Microsoft to medium or lower security.
But how can it possible be otherwise? The whole purpose of Windows Update is to install core system software - precisely the kind of activity that you generally want to prevent any other web site from attempting.
Of course, I don't think Windows Update should be done through a web browser in the first place. The Software Update facility in MacOS is a standalone program that can't be used for anything other than fetching and installing Apple's software updates. I think such a system is inherently more secure, because it can't be used to access third-party servers that may contain malicious software. (Yes, I'm aware that a malicious proxy server between yourself an Apple can redirect the request, but that's not something I expect to happen very often.)
This so-called "protection" doesn't have anything to do with the SCO lawsuits. The article is talking about covering costs due to software audits. In other words, your corporation purchases a site-license for an MS product (like Office). Then some anonymous tipster tells the BSA that you're using illegal copies and the BSA summarily gets your entire network confiscated before you even realize what's happening. MS is saying that they'll cover your legal costs while you produce your site-license paperwork and sue to get your property back.
But we all know that the real threat of lawsuits involving MS products are suits against MS, and suits by MS. I'm sure they won't be paying for your costs in either of the above situations.
Surely the band could deal with Apple themselves ?
I'm sure they could. But what about other online music stores? According to CDBaby's site, they also distribute to listen.com, emusic.com Rhapsody, and others.
CDBaby also sells physical CDs,. For a one-time $35 charge (and 5 copies of your album), they'll warehouse and sell your album. They charge customers whatever you want to charge for your album, keeping $4 per sale. (One thing the/. article didn't mention is that the $40 charge for distribution to download sites is in addition to the $35 charge for them to sell your physical CD.)
Also CDBaby's 9% is 9% of what they get from the web sites. So if Apple charges 99 cents and keeps 40 cents, the remaining 59 cents goes to CDBaby. They take 9% of that (5.31 cents) and pay you the remaining 53.69 cents. Which is still a far cry better than going through a major label, where the artist will get 12 cents and the label owns the copyright on the song.
Overall, their service looks like a great deal. Combined with the fact that studio equipment isn't nearly as expensive as it once was, any band can now record their own material, burn their own CDs, and sell them on-line without any oppressive contracts and for very little money up-front.
He knows he could do a clearn install from a boxed copy. The point is that he shouldn't have to go out and buy a boxed copy in order to do this.
Back in the days before XP, this wouldn't be a big deal - ignore the CD with the bundle and install from a boxed CD you have lying around. But thanks to XP's draconian copy protection schemes, you can't do that. You need a separate distribution for each computer. If the bundled distribution is useless, then you have to buy yet another one.
According to Fossil's spec page, it uses Jot instead of Graffiti for input. You can download a demo of Jot if you want to try it out on a traditional Palm device.
Does the add-on software the author mentioned require Windows or can I use the current version of pilot-link?
I'm sure they only officially support Windows. But the interface is USB. Assuming they conform to Palm's specs, you may be able to use any other application that can talk with a USB-based Palm device. At least I hope so. If I can't sync it up with the Palm Desktop on my Mac, then it loses nearly all of its usefulness.
...this one has a battery life of 2 hours @ 33 MHZ
Where did you see that? Fossil's spec sheet says 4-5 days. Which should be fine if you stick it in its charger every night before going to bed. If you put a charger on your nightstand, it won't even be inconvenient.
A warning that something wrong with your car wouldn't be believed if it was seen on a road sign.
But what if it popped up on your in-dash navigation system? (Don't laugh, I predict auto makers will start selling advertising space on them in the near future. Recent history has proven that there doesn't exist a thing that a corporation won't try to sell advertising space on.)
but then its on a disk, and if its truly sensitive, the only way of really erasing a hd is to take a blowtorch to the platters.
Who said it has to be on a hard drive?
Old-style floppy disks (like the 360K PC floppies or the even older 140K Apple floppies) have a very low coercivity. Low enough that a common demagnetizing tool (like those sold for erasing VHS) will work.
Unfortunately, higher capacity media (like 1.44M floppies, Zip disks and hard drives) have a much higher coercivity, so they can't be completely erased (beyond the ability of a magnetic force microscope to recover), meaning that kind of media requires physical destruction.
Still, I suspect none of these document recovery companies could recover a bin full of confetti-shredded floppy disks that have been bulk-erased. Now you've got to reassemble thousands of visually-identical pieces and then examine them with a magnetic force microscope. Good f'ing luck.
Here's the latest info. All the legal nonsense has gone through. They're tallying the forms now. They say cheques will be shipped out late-summer or early-fall this year.
I seem to remember that phone companies have been doing this for decades in order to catch people illegally copying the phone book.
Phone listings are not proprietary - anyone can publish a phone book. But you can't copy someone else's publication (like the telco's official phone book.)
In order to tell if a third-party phone book is legal or not, the telcos put a bunch of bogus listings in ever one. When third-party books are published, the telco can check to see if the bogus listings are in it. If they are, then they know that the book is an illegal copy of the telco's phone book. A book that doesn't pirate the telco's book (e.g. using listings purchased from the telco or by asking people to contribute contact information) will not have those listings in it.
This sounds like the same concept applied to a new purpose.
They don't have to since they have gotten subsidies in the form of taxes paid by consumers given to them for the purchases of blank media and drives.
Those subsidies only apply to consumer audio recorders. Which is why you must buy an audio-CD-R for those devices instead of a generic CD-R. The generic ones are not tariffed, and therefore don't have the data written to them that identifies them as an audio-CD-R.
The CD-RW drive in your computer, and the generic CD-R media you use in it are not tariffed.
The tariff also doesn't apply to pro-audio CD recorders like this one
Who's willing to bet that no one is going to pay the $3500?
Too late. The Register article already cited one person who paid up.
Is it illegal to possess it?
The DMCA states that posession of any device whose primary purpose is piracy is illegal. The real question here is if DirecTV can prove that the smart card programmers purchased are piracy devices and not just general-purpose programmers that are sometimes used for piracy.
Given that the devices in question were advertised and sold as piracy devices, the result is not that clear. The device is general-purpose, but its stated purpose is piracy. If the court concludes that it's a piracy device, then posession is illegal. If not, then DirecTV will have to prove that it was actually used for piracy, which is much more difficult.
This strikes a very similar parallel to DVD decryption software. It is general-purpose software (used for making player software as well as piracy). The MPAA's claim is that its primary purpose is piracy.
I've been using Mozilla's junk filtering since it was first introduced in the post-1.3 nightly builds. After a few weeks of training, it has developed an incredible track record.
Between my two mailboxes, I receive about 100-150 spams a day. Over 90% of them are detected and are shunted into the Junk folder. Maybe 2-3 messages a month are false-positives. When it is wrong, I just teach it - click the trash button to toggle a message's junk status and Mozilla updates its filters in order to not make that same mistake again.
On some days, it hits 99% accuracy. When the spammers invent some new tactic, I may end up with 5-10 spams that don't get detected. So I select them all, click the trash button, and then delete the messages. After a few days, that tactic is detected and caught with all the rest.
In comparison, I used to use manual filters. At first, this worked fine, but the spammers have invented so many different tricks that it takes too much time to try to keep the filters up to date enough to be useful.
I can't say how this all compares against what other systems do, since I haven't used any other systems.
Lexmark was spun off from IBM. They're the group that made the peripherals (keyboards, mice, printers, etc.) Today, I think they only make printers.
Several people from the keyboard group left Lexmark and bought the patent for buckling-spring keys and started their own company. PCKeyboard.com is that company. They can sell you a classic type-M keyboard. They can also sell you a new keyboard (with Windows keys if you like) using buckling-spring technology.
Unfortunately, they don't make any with a USB interface. I'd really love to get one of these for my Mac.
With all this, the Alt keys send the left-ALT and right-ALT sequences into X (instead of Meta, which is usually the default for those keys). The left Windows key is Meta, the right Windows key is Super, and the Menu key is Hyper.
For those who don't use X11, Meta, Super and Hyper are three additional shift keys that the X11 standard specifies. A lot of software uses Meta (especially Emacs - which uses it eveywhere), but most programs do not use Super or Hyper, because most keybaords don't have those keys.
With my.Xmodmap, I get three extra shift keys that I can use when assigning keybaord shortcuts to stuff. I get Alt (which is normally not used, because the physical Alt keys are typically mapped to Meta), Super and Hyper.
I'm sure Microsoft is busy working out a way to make sure that future keyboards can't be mapped like this, but that's not my problem (yet).
FWIW, when I started coding for a living (beginning 1994), it was common to use "spam" as a meaningless word when you need to output something or name a variable or a temporary file. Similar to common usages for "foo" and "bar" (and yes, I am aware that both of these come from the military slang "FUBAR".) Also common at the time was "fred" (the joke being that you have to name your file something - "Fred" is as good a name as any.)
At that time, it was also (less commonly) used as a verb, referring to a lot of output from a program. But that was not common, at least not where I worked.
When Canter & Segal (possible spelling error here) broke the ice and started massively crosposting their junk mail to thousands of newsgroups, people quickly started calling it "spam". I'm not sure who used the term first. I seem to remember using it before I remember seeing it used by others, but that doesn't necessarily mean very much.
With regard to the Monty Python reference, that's what everybody claims. All I can say is that I was well aware of that sketch long before C&S's spamming, but I never considered the two usages in any way related until after others mentioned the connection.
Of course, all of this rambling really doesn't amount to a hill of beans (or can of Spam) in the final analysis.
Agreed. They should return all the unused IP space for re-allocation.
It's not that simple.
The way I understand it, you can't just give back some of your addresses. You have to give back the entire block and then go through the whole lengthy application process to get a new block. Which means there will be a significant amount of time during which you have no addresses. And when you finally do get them, you'll have to renumber your network, because you won't get back addresses from the block you gave up. And if ARIN decides that you don't actually "need" as many addresses as you want to keep, you're SOL.
And if your network grows, you have to go through all the red tape of justifying your request for another/larger block.
The fact that you did the internet a service by surrendering a lot of unused addresses in the first place doesn't figure into thesedecisions.
For anybody who has a legacy class-B (or even class-A) block, it just doesn't pay to go through all the work, only to find yourself screwed in six months when you find that your new allocation wasn't big enough.
I was wondering why the electronics inside aircraft would be such insanely sensitive devices seeing how almost nothing else on earth even notices the RF from a pager/cellphone. But after considering the RF cage all that equipment lives in and the age of the entire system design... I'm really not surprised it's so easy to screw it up.
I don't think it's the electronics, but the interconnects between the components.
There are really long runs of cables running the length of planes, in order to carry signals between the sensors, antennae, computers, and flight control systems. These cables are either copper wire or wave-guides (effectively radio transmitted through a conduit). It's quite likely that these are sensitive to microwave radiation (such as the 2.4GHz signals used by cell phones these days.)
Note that the galleys use convection ovens and not microwave ovens. Probably for the same reason.
IMO, the best solution here is to replace these conduits with fiber optics. But that would probably require a complete refit of the plane's avionics systems. Boeing could design this into their next-generation of aircraft (and for all I know, they're already doing this.) But it would be very expensive to retrofit such a system into an existing plane, and I doubt any airline has the money to pay for such a refit.
Tell me about it.
The Tron Collector's edition DVD mentions a sequel movie in some of the interview tracks.
It also mentions a "Tron 2.0: Killer App", but the website appears to be dedicated to the game, not any future movie.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is a single magazine and not a portal, the nature of Science News is that each article is a summary of some interesting piece of research. The articles on the web site have links and references to the source material, in case you want to read the orginal papers that the article was based on.
While you have to be a magazine subscriber to see the full text of all the articles (non-subscribers get the full text to some articles), anybody can read the references to get the original sources.
For $3-5, you get to spend all evening downloading a file. When you get it, you have 30 days to play it before it self-destructs. And it self-destructs 24 hours after you start playing it. And you have to watch it on your computer, and the computer must be a PC running Windows.
On the other hand, video rental stores charge you the same $3-5, and you usually have at least three days to watch it.
Or pay-per-view cable which costs the same $3-5 for 24 hours, but doesn't involve any download time.
Or NetFlix where a $20/mo fee lets you watch your rentals for as long as you want.
Can someone tell me again what advantage there is to using Movielink?
And let me tell you, when you've got DRM coming out your wazoo, it doesn't do a thing for your complexion.
But how can it possible be otherwise? The whole purpose of Windows Update is to install core system software - precisely the kind of activity that you generally want to prevent any other web site from attempting.
Of course, I don't think Windows Update should be done through a web browser in the first place. The Software Update facility in MacOS is a standalone program that can't be used for anything other than fetching and installing Apple's software updates. I think such a system is inherently more secure, because it can't be used to access third-party servers that may contain malicious software. (Yes, I'm aware that a malicious proxy server between yourself an Apple can redirect the request, but that's not something I expect to happen very often.)
But we all know that the real threat of lawsuits involving MS products are suits against MS, and suits by MS. I'm sure they won't be paying for your costs in either of the above situations.
FWIW, RedHat still has their 1.0 distribution on-line. It's based on kernel 1.2.10.
I'm sure they could. But what about other online music stores? According to CDBaby's site, they also distribute to listen.com, emusic.com Rhapsody, and others.
CDBaby also sells physical CDs,. For a one-time $35 charge (and 5 copies of your album), they'll warehouse and sell your album. They charge customers whatever you want to charge for your album, keeping $4 per sale. (One thing the /. article didn't mention is that the $40 charge for distribution to download sites is in addition to the $35 charge for them to sell your physical CD.)
Also CDBaby's 9% is 9% of what they get from the web sites. So if Apple charges 99 cents and keeps 40 cents, the remaining 59 cents goes to CDBaby. They take 9% of that (5.31 cents) and pay you the remaining 53.69 cents. Which is still a far cry better than going through a major label, where the artist will get 12 cents and the label owns the copyright on the song.
Overall, their service looks like a great deal. Combined with the fact that studio equipment isn't nearly as expensive as it once was, any band can now record their own material, burn their own CDs, and sell them on-line without any oppressive contracts and for very little money up-front.
How do you expect them to install spyware applets without your consent if you're allowed to use other browsers?
He knows he could do a clearn install from a boxed copy. The point is that he shouldn't have to go out and buy a boxed copy in order to do this.
Back in the days before XP, this wouldn't be a big deal - ignore the CD with the bundle and install from a boxed CD you have lying around. But thanks to XP's draconian copy protection schemes, you can't do that. You need a separate distribution for each computer. If the bundled distribution is useless, then you have to buy yet another one.
According to Fossil's spec page, it uses Jot instead of Graffiti for input. You can download a demo of Jot if you want to try it out on a traditional Palm device.
Does the add-on software the author mentioned require Windows or can I use the current version of pilot-link?
I'm sure they only officially support Windows. But the interface is USB. Assuming they conform to Palm's specs, you may be able to use any other application that can talk with a USB-based Palm device. At least I hope so. If I can't sync it up with the Palm Desktop on my Mac, then it loses nearly all of its usefulness.
Where did you see that? Fossil's spec sheet says 4-5 days. Which should be fine if you stick it in its charger every night before going to bed. If you put a charger on your nightstand, it won't even be inconvenient.
But what if it popped up on your in-dash navigation system? (Don't laugh, I predict auto makers will start selling advertising space on them in the near future. Recent history has proven that there doesn't exist a thing that a corporation won't try to sell advertising space on.)
Who said it has to be on a hard drive?
Old-style floppy disks (like the 360K PC floppies or the even older 140K Apple floppies) have a very low coercivity. Low enough that a common demagnetizing tool (like those sold for erasing VHS) will work.
Unfortunately, higher capacity media (like 1.44M floppies, Zip disks and hard drives) have a much higher coercivity, so they can't be completely erased (beyond the ability of a magnetic force microscope to recover), meaning that kind of media requires physical destruction.
Still, I suspect none of these document recovery companies could recover a bin full of confetti-shredded floppy disks that have been bulk-erased. Now you've got to reassemble thousands of visually-identical pieces and then examine them with a magnetic force microscope. Good f'ing luck.
Here's the latest info. All the legal nonsense has gone through. They're tallying the forms now. They say cheques will be shipped out late-summer or early-fall this year.
If you were going for the Simpsons reference, the correct phrase is "YVAN EHT NIOJ". Bart was unknowingly recruiting for the Navy, not the Army.
Phone listings are not proprietary - anyone can publish a phone book. But you can't copy someone else's publication (like the telco's official phone book.)
In order to tell if a third-party phone book is legal or not, the telcos put a bunch of bogus listings in ever one. When third-party books are published, the telco can check to see if the bogus listings are in it. If they are, then they know that the book is an illegal copy of the telco's phone book. A book that doesn't pirate the telco's book (e.g. using listings purchased from the telco or by asking people to contribute contact information) will not have those listings in it.
This sounds like the same concept applied to a new purpose.
Those subsidies only apply to consumer audio recorders. Which is why you must buy an audio-CD-R for those devices instead of a generic CD-R. The generic ones are not tariffed, and therefore don't have the data written to them that identifies them as an audio-CD-R.
The CD-RW drive in your computer, and the generic CD-R media you use in it are not tariffed.
The tariff also doesn't apply to pro-audio CD recorders like this one
Too late. The Register article already cited one person who paid up.
Is it illegal to possess it?
The DMCA states that posession of any device whose primary purpose is piracy is illegal. The real question here is if DirecTV can prove that the smart card programmers purchased are piracy devices and not just general-purpose programmers that are sometimes used for piracy.
Given that the devices in question were advertised and sold as piracy devices, the result is not that clear. The device is general-purpose, but its stated purpose is piracy. If the court concludes that it's a piracy device, then posession is illegal. If not, then DirecTV will have to prove that it was actually used for piracy, which is much more difficult.
This strikes a very similar parallel to DVD decryption software. It is general-purpose software (used for making player software as well as piracy). The MPAA's claim is that its primary purpose is piracy.
Between my two mailboxes, I receive about 100-150 spams a day. Over 90% of them are detected and are shunted into the Junk folder. Maybe 2-3 messages a month are false-positives. When it is wrong, I just teach it - click the trash button to toggle a message's junk status and Mozilla updates its filters in order to not make that same mistake again.
On some days, it hits 99% accuracy. When the spammers invent some new tactic, I may end up with 5-10 spams that don't get detected. So I select them all, click the trash button, and then delete the messages. After a few days, that tactic is detected and caught with all the rest.
In comparison, I used to use manual filters. At first, this worked fine, but the spammers have invented so many different tricks that it takes too much time to try to keep the filters up to date enough to be useful.
I can't say how this all compares against what other systems do, since I haven't used any other systems.
Lexmark was spun off from IBM. They're the group that made the peripherals (keyboards, mice, printers, etc.) Today, I think they only make printers.
Several people from the keyboard group left Lexmark and bought the patent for buckling-spring keys and started their own company. PCKeyboard.com is that company. They can sell you a classic type-M keyboard. They can also sell you a new keyboard (with Windows keys if you like) using buckling-spring technology.
Unfortunately, they don't make any with a USB interface. I'd really love to get one of these for my Mac.
Absolutely, but not for the purpose Microsoft intended.
In my .Xmodmap file (for XFree86 on Linux), I have the following:
With all this, the Alt keys send the left-ALT and right-ALT sequences into X (instead of Meta, which is usually the default for those keys). The left Windows key is Meta, the right Windows key is Super, and the Menu key is Hyper.
For those who don't use X11, Meta, Super and Hyper are three additional shift keys that the X11 standard specifies. A lot of software uses Meta (especially Emacs - which uses it eveywhere), but most programs do not use Super or Hyper, because most keybaords don't have those keys.
With my .Xmodmap, I get three extra shift keys that I can use when assigning keybaord shortcuts to stuff. I get Alt (which is normally not used, because the physical Alt keys are typically mapped to Meta), Super and Hyper.
I'm sure Microsoft is busy working out a way to make sure that future keyboards can't be mapped like this, but that's not my problem (yet).
At that time, it was also (less commonly) used as a verb, referring to a lot of output from a program. But that was not common, at least not where I worked.
When Canter & Segal (possible spelling error here) broke the ice and started massively crosposting their junk mail to thousands of newsgroups, people quickly started calling it "spam". I'm not sure who used the term first. I seem to remember using it before I remember seeing it used by others, but that doesn't necessarily mean very much.
With regard to the Monty Python reference, that's what everybody claims. All I can say is that I was well aware of that sketch long before C&S's spamming, but I never considered the two usages in any way related until after others mentioned the connection.
Of course, all of this rambling really doesn't amount to a hill of beans (or can of Spam) in the final analysis.
That's probably what they believe as well, but it's a flat out lie.
Apple's eMac sells for $800 (plus a $50 RAM upgrade to make it usable). This is full list-price retail. The educational price is lower.
It's not that simple.
The way I understand it, you can't just give back some of your addresses. You have to give back the entire block and then go through the whole lengthy application process to get a new block. Which means there will be a significant amount of time during which you have no addresses. And when you finally do get them, you'll have to renumber your network, because you won't get back addresses from the block you gave up. And if ARIN decides that you don't actually "need" as many addresses as you want to keep, you're SOL.
And if your network grows, you have to go through all the red tape of justifying your request for another/larger block.
The fact that you did the internet a service by surrendering a lot of unused addresses in the first place doesn't figure into thesedecisions.
For anybody who has a legacy class-B (or even class-A) block, it just doesn't pay to go through all the work, only to find yourself screwed in six months when you find that your new allocation wasn't big enough.
I don't think it's the electronics, but the interconnects between the components.
There are really long runs of cables running the length of planes, in order to carry signals between the sensors, antennae, computers, and flight control systems. These cables are either copper wire or wave-guides (effectively radio transmitted through a conduit). It's quite likely that these are sensitive to microwave radiation (such as the 2.4GHz signals used by cell phones these days.)
Note that the galleys use convection ovens and not microwave ovens. Probably for the same reason.
IMO, the best solution here is to replace these conduits with fiber optics. But that would probably require a complete refit of the plane's avionics systems. Boeing could design this into their next-generation of aircraft (and for all I know, they're already doing this.) But it would be very expensive to retrofit such a system into an existing plane, and I doubt any airline has the money to pay for such a refit.
Tell me about it. The Tron Collector's edition DVD mentions a sequel movie in some of the interview tracks. It also mentions a "Tron 2.0: Killer App", but the website appears to be dedicated to the game, not any future movie.