Haha you're funny. Let's take a look at, say, Yahoo's instant messenger protocol, or practically any other protocol out there that uses challenge-response: It's cracked in under a few months. I'm not saying the CC companies are going to use a challenge-response method as simplistic as an instant messenger program, but RFIDs will not exactly be able to perform a large amount of calculation, they just don't have the power to provide a truely safe challenge/response mechanism, and let's face it if this system comes in, there will be plenty of opportunity for RFID sniffers to lurk around and pick up a ton of valid challenges and responses in order to reverse engineer the system.
This system demonstrates an incredible amount of faith in the stupidity of fraudsters, which is completely unfounded. Cracking is an incredibly well-known and well documented phenomena, look at DeCSS, C-DILLA and all those games you ripped off in the past 20 years. When the chances of getting at someone's cash are involved, the incentive becomes so much greater.
Yes this will lead to more fraud. In the UK we've recently had a system put in where debit/credit cards are equipped with a chip that, to quote my documentation "is programmed to respond to [my] PIN choice". While that's probably not hard to crack if you steal a card (hey, you only have 9999 possibilities till the chip responds with an appropriate answer), there's also another problem. Instead of signing for purchases now I may be asked to "enter my PIN on a keypad and let the cashier swipe my card". WHAT? No WAY! Swipe a card, and you've just read enough data from it to make a copy. Enter a PIN into a keypad, and suddenly the fraudulent cashier has both a copy of the magnetic strip and a PIN. How quick and simple would it be to knock up a device like a laptop with card reader and PS2 numeric keypad attached and fool customers into getting their card AND PIN ripped off? Not difficult at all. I resolve to never pay with this method except from retailers I trust, and the RFID thing just seems to be yet another step in a dumb direction.
Err. That just looked like a real movie. Where's the satire supposed to come in? I realise that I can't speak Finnish, but I can sure listen to the tone of voice and read the English subtitles, and I just didnt see anything remotely amusing there. It's like another Star Trek film but with some "funny names" stuck in. Perhaps the funniest part was the start of the trailer, and that didnt even raise a smile.
This is going to have to go a long way to meet the raw kind of humour we've seen in spoofs of space movies, most memorable being Spaceballs, which was crap but brilliant. As other people have mentioned, this is done TOO WELL, i don't know if it's going to be shown in theatres in Finland, but it certainly should be, the quality is incredible.
To give it it's due, I need an English translation by some competent English voice artists to really judge this film, because either all the jokes were lost in the translation, or Finland just doesnt have a sense of humour.
I'm currently supporting the student residents network at a university in the UK, we have to audit every machine before it gets online. Out of over 200 users, only 3 have been running windows 9x/ME, 2 have been using windows 2000, 3 have been apple macs, 0 have been Linux, and the rest were WinXP. Personally I use Win2k because eyecandy in an OS isn't terribly important to me (I hate skinned apps and just want the thing to work and not crash, so Win2k is my MS OS of choice - yes I do use Slackware on my servers, because for them I need an OS that works and doesnt need to be usable every day)
So while I accept a lot of people still use Win9x, in the UK i think the majority of people have flipped over to XP, just from my own information.
Oh and i forgot to add what pissed me off about this particular article: he makes assumptions without backing them up. He asks "hey do any of these machines make a paper trail?!" and then says "no! they don't!" without providing any evidence of this point. Of course any voting machine doesnt make a paper trail available to the customer. When you vote by paper you don't get a receipt. When you vote on a voting machine you don't get a receipt. It's called confidentiality. If people got receipts from voting then they'd just be left with a big pile of unclaimed receipts in the voting booth that anyone could look at. So Cringely, give me some damn evidence about your information first instead of just plucking it out of thin air (or worse, just dreaming it up and then moaning about something you just thought of -- as in this article), and then don't waste half the article on one really insignificant point. I can't understand how the man can go on about every other device that Diebold has made leaving a paper trail, and then not ask himself "HEY! maybe theres some kind of REASON a voting machine doesnt leave one?! If I'm right in my assumption that it doesnt leave one anyway!". Christ.
Cringely should really stop writing. Just about everything I've ever read by him put me in a fit of rage over his failure to raise important points or his ineptitude on realising the fundamental problems in his own proposals. The guy can argue a point like a fish can ride a bicycle. In the past his ramblings have prompted me to e-mail him up to 5 times requesting him to stop filling the internet with this sort of mindless opinionated filth, or at least make simple corrections to his articles which he inevitably fails to do (and no, I don't adopt a conceited "I AM RIGHT" attitude in my mails, I just argue a point in a polite and formal manner, backed up with numerous reputable references). I can't believe he's held his job since everything he says is usually so much flamebait and pontification. I'll be modded troll for this, but I hope at least one or two people agree with me.
Article snippet:
They tested the preconfigured open-source software according to various criteria
Sadly it's not the GUI thats the most difficult part of linux to get to grips with. It's the configuration of the GUI and software that phases most users. I like the fact that so many people said they thought they could migrate to the new OS (Linux) easilly, unfortunately most of them will probably find that when the thing breaks it's impossible for them to fix.
Linux doesn't yet have the niceties that Windows users expect (especially in installation, the process would be very confusing to someone not au fait with the system, for example which packages do you install? I don't need all this developer stuff I'm not a developer! Oh no Random Application #317 needed that M4 thing! What's hard disk partitioning? etc etc). Though the guides are there, it's my feeling that currently it's not as "click and go brush the dog" as WinXP is.
Before I get modded troll or offtopic, I'd like to also mention that personally I would not like to see one-click installations of Linux, I can't stand distros that use graphical boots or boot up into X, Linux has always catered for my server needs very well, but never really cut it in the desktop area. It's getting more and more difficult to obtain Linux distros that *dont* cater for the computer illiterate. I think one of the nicer things about Linux was that it wasn't windows, so what the hell are they doing trying to turn it into windows? There's no revenue in this, it's just a scrap over popularity to the tunes of Rage Against The Machine.
They should probably rename the "Troll" mod to "Pessimist"
Actually that's not true. There aren't 100 possible stations. The FM band is almost full as it is, since you have to put your station on a slightly different frequency in different parts of the country if your station is nationwide. This is to prevent cross-modulation or (interference as the carriers from two different transmission stations on the same frequency overlap when you're situated between them). This is why some stations say that they're on a frequency RANGE and not an absolute frequency (radio 4 is on 92-95MHz).
Also since the FM band is divided up into individual possible stations every 0.5MHz, there's actually only 41 possible stations (the band is 87.5 - 108 MHz).
I'm not sure of the laws in practice here (perhaps I should have RTFA) but I do know that some short-range FM transmitters are allowed in the UK, depending on power and frequency. It is of course illegal to transmit anywhere in the FM broadcast band (87.5-108MHZ) and this seems to be where this iTrip is broadcasting. However it's power is such that it can only transmit 30ft, which I thought was legal in the UK, I mean the signal from this thing is not going to leave your house, and we've been able to buy FM hi-fi senders in the UK for years now (though mostly through mail order and thus probably not legally).
This law is not heavilly enforced, and I believe that it's outdated. The law should be changed to allow domestic transmissions of a certain power, though this will be difficult to do since what happens if you drive up the highway with your iTrip or take it to work, you're bound to interfere with what someone's listening to. Perhaps a domestic FM frequency at the top or bottom of the commercial broadcast band could be reserved for such devices, provided they do not exceed a certain power level. This would be a great solution to the problem and would allow a flood of currently pointlessly illegal devices to enter the market.
As usual out come the Linux crowd to say "M$ si teh ghey use lunix!". My answer to this is that you use the OS that:
Your staff are familiar with, to avoid re-training
Is easilly patched against such flaws as this (the OS does it for you without you even knowing if you want, couldn't be more straightforward than that)
Runs the legacy applications you have developed to run your organisation
Runs commercial applications such as Sage and Office that have been developed to be the best and not shallow copies of such products that have been developed because the OS needs to compete
The bottom line here is that jumping on the "hah! crappy RPC!" bandwaggon is probably a mistake. RPC is extremely handy, despite the fact that it may have a few security flaws, and it is not something that was really meant to be open across the Internet, it's more of a LAN thing. The fact that it can, if desired, be conveniently accessible over your external interface is really something sysadmins should decide about whether this should be allowed or not.
Admittedly, most home users aren't system administrators, and I think Microsoft is probably failing (through obscurity and simplicity-of-install) to inform people using, for example, Windows XP, that they probably don't NEED to allow RPC over their dial-up adapter. I'm not sure if there's an option to disable it, but I think simply disabling "Client for Microsoft Networks" on your external/dial-up interface would do the trick. Since I use a gateway to access the net, I'm not even sure if CfMN is enabled on new dialup connections by default, but I seem to remember it isn't.
With the amount of people running windows update (which is a gift from God now that it doesnt download updates for crap you don't even have) I'm not sure how much of a threat this will really be. It'll slam people who were arrogant enough to say "hah! windows update is a pile of filth and is insecure and if i use it MS will come knocking on my door asking about my pirated copy of their softwarez!!" but then they probably deserve to be slammed anyway.
Use Windows for your office desktops, and Linux or some other UNIX variant for your servers. May I also point out that some Linux distros are so insecure on the default install that it beats all hell out of anything that Microsoft have done, for example some don't even set a root pass until the user does it manually.
"I'm going to sue you because I bought a computer that had Windows installed on it."
I've never heard anything so ludicrous in my life. And it's clearly nonsense too, the retail copy of XP is worth $199, the OEM copy is probably not worth a fraction of that. If you get a machine with a copy of winxp on it, you probably got XP a good deal cheaper than if you'd bought it in the store, so you can't win a claim of more than the value of the OEM version of Windows XP, which ain't $199.
A remarkably dull article about a remarkably dull man who's prepared to do this sort of thing and tell the world about it in a million pages of text. On the other hand I felt the need to comment, so it can't have been that dull.
If they haven't heard of it, then they may find it a refreshingly realist approach to a genre so overpopulated by flat and uninteresting characters. Just because somebody hasn't seen the original doesn't mean that they will immediately dispense with the remake.
Remaking Blakes Seven has the potential to "play on the sentimentality of the few" and at the same time introduce a new generation to the show. So long as they play their cards right and don't get too nostalgic themselves (I.e. a quick introduction explaining what happened in between the last original episode and the new series, then get on with it without too many references to stuff people might not have heard of) this has the potential to gain a new cult following again, and I fully support a good remake of it. I don't support a bad one:/
They did bring back Dr. Who as a feature length TV movie. It was shamefully overdone and nothing like the original. Anyway, Dr. Who has few merits, those being the theme music, the laughable crapness of the dialogue and effects, and the happy-go-lucky cheapness of the whole affair.
Blakes Seven had intelligent scripts and a dynamic variety of characters, which sets it apart from the rather staid, co-operative attitude we see in Star Trek. Argumentative, angry, mutinous characters coupled with sensible, direct and forthright ones add a depth to the show that is not often seen in higher budget equivalents. Like radio, Blakes Seven calls on your imagination to some extent (this space ship was NOT made by Tony Hart out of kitchen utensils and gardening paraphernalia in his spare time, it IS A REAL SPACE SHIP. BELIEVE. etc..) and I only hope that any attempt at re-creating it will preserve the merits of the original. Of course, it probably won't.
Since the atmospheric pressure on mars is about 1% of that on earth, making a decent cup of tea is difficult. The water just wouldnt boil at the right temperature without using a pressure cooker. And anyone who makes tea in a pressure cooker needs serious help.
I am sure that the next British endeavor will be to create a kettle and teapot that is compatible with the Mars atmosphere, just as we developed a rotary cooker for use on the ISS. Britain provide for family.
If you have no idea what the difference between Longitudinal Recording and Perpendicular Recording might be, and the phrase "stands the bits on end" meant absolutely nothing to you because its an utterly ridiculous way to explain it, here's the lodown.
Longitudinal recording is what we use today in everything from cassette tape to hard disks. It works by magnetising tiny sections of the recording medium. You can imagine the magnetised sections as tiny bar magnets laid end-to-end. The read head detects transitions in the direction of the magnetic field.
<- -> <-- -> <- -->
In the above diagram we're looking down at one track on the surface of a platter.
Perpendicular recording works differently. The "magnets" or bits are arranged so that the field they emit is perpendicular to the medium, like this:
x . x . x . x.
In the above diagram we're looking down at one track on the surface of a platter 'x' represents a field pointing away from us, '.' is one pointing towards us. This is what it looks like in cross-section (looking in from the edge of the platter): ^ | ^ | ^ | ^ | ^
| v | v | v | v |
In perpendicular recording the read head detects the actual direction of the fields emitted by these bits/magnets, rather than transitions in the field. Perpendicular recording is advantageous because it allows one to use a much smaller surface area on the medium for one bit. Imagine if you laid a line of bricks end-to-end on the ground, you could make the line shorter but taller if you stood each brick on end (so they're laid flat-to-flat), but you've not had to make the bricks any smaller in order to acheive this change in the length of your line.
Most of the above is hopefully right. Anyway it's a better explanation than that site gave.
That's great. A 32k picture of your face on a chip. Fab. Err. Isnt there already a real picture in your passport though? and an EEPROM? Pardom me for being a complete idiot here but wouldnt it be rather simple to just erase the eeprom and replace the picture with whatever you liked?
As for us Europeans using retina scans and so on, that's wettening but one gets the feeling that with Europe as it is it will not happen, or will happen in a rather crap way (as usual). Will we be able to get mod chips for these things? Will there be writers available like there are for credit cards? Will we be able to go to r3tin4z.com and download illegally copied retinas?
What confuses me is, why is this information stored on a chip that the holder has total access to? Wouldn't it be more sensible to store the information in a big database and then allow airport security to look up a person's name or identity number on said database to retrieve a picture or retina info which can then be used to verify that this person is who they say they are? Perhaps this is not done because of connectivity or legal reasons, but it seems to me that storing this sort of information on an EEPROM only serves to make it considerably easier and cheaper to forge convincingly by just rewriting the chip. I know this thing will be small, but if airports can read it, SOMEone will start selling devices to write it.
I'd like to see Mozilla getting leaner with each release.
I agree. I run Moz on both windows and linux and its startup times are appaling (5 to 10 seconds in windows, 15 in linux on a clean boot). It seems to need to read half of my drive before it'll show a window. I suspect it's to do with Chrome, but what do I know.
People aren't going to switch from IE to Moz if one comes up in under 2 seconds and the other rapes their disk and CPU for an unprescedented amount of time before coming up with any window (and it isn't exactly a pretty window after that, pardon me but I like my browser to look like other desktop applications I run. I thought this was partly the point of Firebird but even that seems to now be using some sort of nonstandard menus and other widgets).
Yes, I know that I can load portions of Moz into RAM at bootup so it comes up faster, but what if I resent useless tray applications that use memory that gets swapped out by my OS anyway and therefore doesnt really cut load times but just restart times.
Put it this way, a browser should not need a splash-screen to inform you that it's loading. I know that browsers are extremely complicated applications that one would expect would take some time to load, but in mozilla's case it's just frustrating. I can't wait for the bugfix that says "we now do less useless crap at startup so things are only loaded when needed. This increases loading speed significantly", but I guess this could be a long wait.
To bitch some more, Firebird is disappointingly slow on resizing windows which is probably Gecko's fault. I hate to give IE any credit but it IS blindingly quick and doesnt jack my CPU usage up to max while resizing (I have show-window-contents while dragging on btw).
Of course firebird is still my browser of choice, despite the fact that it feels awfully sluggish, and the only thing I really desperately want from it now is the ability to REMOVE extensions without messing about with tons of chrome files.
Why not just run Windows? Is this some sort of way to dodge costs or is it a plan to move Linux in over an extended period of time?
I suspect that since people in general are more au fait with Windows applications (ask a man in the street what Star Office is and he'd go "whu??", ask him what Microsoft Office is and he'd complain bitterly about its shortcomings) that it simply makes sense to run them over less well known Linux apps. That way you dont need to re-train people and people get less irritated by change.
The only fact here is that no matter what anyone tries to say, Linux simply does not yet have the fully-fledged desktop application base that Windows has. Therefore it makes plain sense to run established software until Linux ports come along. The story doesnt suggest that VMWare will be used to run everything, just that It Will Be Installed, presumably to run stuff that Linux does not yet have an acceptable clone of.
Nice reaction to this story by the way, the Linux trolls are really showing impressive arrogance and pomposity as usual. Good on you guys, without people like you, Windows users might actually want to be associated with your OS of choice, instead of thinking you're all a bunch of degenerate bitter underdogs using a 'complicated' OS to look clever. An operating system is a tool not a religion or political standpoint, so get over it.
Note that yes I run Linux and yes what a handy piece of software it is too. I dont run Wine or VMWare. I have a Win2k box for that.
The "X sucks" bandwagon is justified and something I've been riding on for a very long time. Actually X doesnt suck per se, it just needs a serious re-think. DirectFB has done that re-think for a linux windowsing system, and DirectFB does not suck.
Slashdot Mirror
I love people pushing the boundaries of hardware, but also I note that Archos have already made a sexy new device to accommodate your movie needs:
s id=j22oyjykb2y3ckjbyjj24j#cinema_to_go
:)
http://www.archos.com/products/av300_series.html?
80 hours? Yeah right. Does it do DivX? No doubt a firmware hack will allow that
Haha you're funny. Let's take a look at, say, Yahoo's instant messenger protocol, or practically any other protocol out there that uses challenge-response: It's cracked in under a few months. I'm not saying the CC companies are going to use a challenge-response method as simplistic as an instant messenger program, but RFIDs will not exactly be able to perform a large amount of calculation, they just don't have the power to provide a truely safe challenge/response mechanism, and let's face it if this system comes in, there will be plenty of opportunity for RFID sniffers to lurk around and pick up a ton of valid challenges and responses in order to reverse engineer the system.
This system demonstrates an incredible amount of faith in the stupidity of fraudsters, which is completely unfounded. Cracking is an incredibly well-known and well documented phenomena, look at DeCSS, C-DILLA and all those games you ripped off in the past 20 years. When the chances of getting at someone's cash are involved, the incentive becomes so much greater.
Yes this will lead to more fraud. In the UK we've recently had a system put in where debit/credit cards are equipped with a chip that, to quote my documentation "is programmed to respond to [my] PIN choice". While that's probably not hard to crack if you steal a card (hey, you only have 9999 possibilities till the chip responds with an appropriate answer), there's also another problem. Instead of signing for purchases now I may be asked to "enter my PIN on a keypad and let the cashier swipe my card". WHAT? No WAY! Swipe a card, and you've just read enough data from it to make a copy. Enter a PIN into a keypad, and suddenly the fraudulent cashier has both a copy of the magnetic strip and a PIN. How quick and simple would it be to knock up a device like a laptop with card reader and PS2 numeric keypad attached and fool customers into getting their card AND PIN ripped off? Not difficult at all. I resolve to never pay with this method except from retailers I trust, and the RFID thing just seems to be yet another step in a dumb direction.
Err. That just looked like a real movie. Where's the satire supposed to come in? I realise that I can't speak Finnish, but I can sure listen to the tone of voice and read the English subtitles, and I just didnt see anything remotely amusing there. It's like another Star Trek film but with some "funny names" stuck in. Perhaps the funniest part was the start of the trailer, and that didnt even raise a smile.
This is going to have to go a long way to meet the raw kind of humour we've seen in spoofs of space movies, most memorable being Spaceballs, which was crap but brilliant. As other people have mentioned, this is done TOO WELL, i don't know if it's going to be shown in theatres in Finland, but it certainly should be, the quality is incredible.
To give it it's due, I need an English translation by some competent English voice artists to really judge this film, because either all the jokes were lost in the translation, or Finland just doesnt have a sense of humour.
I'm currently supporting the student residents network at a university in the UK, we have to audit every machine before it gets online. Out of over 200 users, only 3 have been running windows 9x/ME, 2 have been using windows 2000, 3 have been apple macs, 0 have been Linux, and the rest were WinXP. Personally I use Win2k because eyecandy in an OS isn't terribly important to me (I hate skinned apps and just want the thing to work and not crash, so Win2k is my MS OS of choice - yes I do use Slackware on my servers, because for them I need an OS that works and doesnt need to be usable every day)
So while I accept a lot of people still use Win9x, in the UK i think the majority of people have flipped over to XP, just from my own information.
Oh and i forgot to add what pissed me off about this particular article: he makes assumptions without backing them up. He asks "hey do any of these machines make a paper trail?!" and then says "no! they don't!" without providing any evidence of this point. Of course any voting machine doesnt make a paper trail available to the customer. When you vote by paper you don't get a receipt. When you vote on a voting machine you don't get a receipt. It's called confidentiality. If people got receipts from voting then they'd just be left with a big pile of unclaimed receipts in the voting booth that anyone could look at. So Cringely, give me some damn evidence about your information first instead of just plucking it out of thin air (or worse, just dreaming it up and then moaning about something you just thought of -- as in this article), and then don't waste half the article on one really insignificant point. I can't understand how the man can go on about every other device that Diebold has made leaving a paper trail, and then not ask himself "HEY! maybe theres some kind of REASON a voting machine doesnt leave one?! If I'm right in my assumption that it doesnt leave one anyway!". Christ.
Cringely should really stop writing. Just about everything I've ever read by him put me in a fit of rage over his failure to raise important points or his ineptitude on realising the fundamental problems in his own proposals. The guy can argue a point like a fish can ride a bicycle. In the past his ramblings have prompted me to e-mail him up to 5 times requesting him to stop filling the internet with this sort of mindless opinionated filth, or at least make simple corrections to his articles which he inevitably fails to do (and no, I don't adopt a conceited "I AM RIGHT" attitude in my mails, I just argue a point in a polite and formal manner, backed up with numerous reputable references). I can't believe he's held his job since everything he says is usually so much flamebait and pontification. I'll be modded troll for this, but I hope at least one or two people agree with me.
Brings a whole new meaning to the term "Fatal Exception".
If you class linux as a product then they've released more OS updates than Microsoft could ever compete with :)
Actually that's not true. There aren't 100 possible stations. The FM band is almost full as it is, since you have to put your station on a slightly different frequency in different parts of the country if your station is nationwide. This is to prevent cross-modulation or (interference as the carriers from two different transmission stations on the same frequency overlap when you're situated between them). This is why some stations say that they're on a frequency RANGE and not an absolute frequency (radio 4 is on 92-95MHz).
Also since the FM band is divided up into individual possible stations every 0.5MHz, there's actually only 41 possible stations (the band is 87.5 - 108 MHz).
This is unusual.
I'm not sure of the laws in practice here (perhaps I should have RTFA) but I do know that some short-range FM transmitters are allowed in the UK, depending on power and frequency. It is of course illegal to transmit anywhere in the FM broadcast band (87.5-108MHZ) and this seems to be where this iTrip is broadcasting. However it's power is such that it can only transmit 30ft, which I thought was legal in the UK, I mean the signal from this thing is not going to leave your house, and we've been able to buy FM hi-fi senders in the UK for years now (though mostly through mail order and thus probably not legally).
This law is not heavilly enforced, and I believe that it's outdated. The law should be changed to allow domestic transmissions of a certain power, though this will be difficult to do since what happens if you drive up the highway with your iTrip or take it to work, you're bound to interfere with what someone's listening to. Perhaps a domestic FM frequency at the top or bottom of the commercial broadcast band could be reserved for such devices, provided they do not exceed a certain power level. This would be a great solution to the problem and would allow a flood of currently pointlessly illegal devices to enter the market.
As usual out come the Linux crowd to say "M$ si teh ghey use lunix!". My answer to this is that you use the OS that:
Your staff are familiar with, to avoid re-training
Is easilly patched against such flaws as this (the OS does it for you without you even knowing if you want, couldn't be more straightforward than that)
Runs the legacy applications you have developed to run your organisation
Runs commercial applications such as Sage and Office that have been developed to be the best and not shallow copies of such products that have been developed because the OS needs to compete
The bottom line here is that jumping on the "hah! crappy RPC!" bandwaggon is probably a mistake. RPC is extremely handy, despite the fact that it may have a few security flaws, and it is not something that was really meant to be open across the Internet, it's more of a LAN thing. The fact that it can, if desired, be conveniently accessible over your external interface is really something sysadmins should decide about whether this should be allowed or not.
Admittedly, most home users aren't system administrators, and I think Microsoft is probably failing (through obscurity and simplicity-of-install) to inform people using, for example, Windows XP, that they probably don't NEED to allow RPC over their dial-up adapter. I'm not sure if there's an option to disable it, but I think simply disabling "Client for Microsoft Networks" on your external/dial-up interface would do the trick. Since I use a gateway to access the net, I'm not even sure if CfMN is enabled on new dialup connections by default, but I seem to remember it isn't.
With the amount of people running windows update (which is a gift from God now that it doesnt download updates for crap you don't even have) I'm not sure how much of a threat this will really be. It'll slam people who were arrogant enough to say "hah! windows update is a pile of filth and is insecure and if i use it MS will come knocking on my door asking about my pirated copy of their softwarez!!" but then they probably deserve to be slammed anyway.
Use Windows for your office desktops, and Linux or some other UNIX variant for your servers. May I also point out that some Linux distros are so insecure on the default install that it beats all hell out of anything that Microsoft have done, for example some don't even set a root pass until the user does it manually.
Does this mean I can fix my ghastly vision by staring at the sun instead of going in for all that expensive laser surgery?
"I'm going to sue you because I bought a computer that had Windows installed on it."
I've never heard anything so ludicrous in my life. And it's clearly nonsense too, the retail copy of XP is worth $199, the OEM copy is probably not worth a fraction of that. If you get a machine with a copy of winxp on it, you probably got XP a good deal cheaper than if you'd bought it in the store, so you can't win a claim of more than the value of the OEM version of Windows XP, which ain't $199.
A remarkably dull article about a remarkably dull man who's prepared to do this sort of thing and tell the world about it in a million pages of text. On the other hand I felt the need to comment, so it can't have been that dull.
Pfft. If your fingers are cold just point a 60 watt angle-poise lamp at the keyboard. Mmm. Toasty.
Does that really matter?
:/
If they haven't heard of it, then they may find it a refreshingly realist approach to a genre so overpopulated by flat and uninteresting characters. Just because somebody hasn't seen the original doesn't mean that they will immediately dispense with the remake.
Remaking Blakes Seven has the potential to "play on the sentimentality of the few" and at the same time introduce a new generation to the show. So long as they play their cards right and don't get too nostalgic themselves (I.e. a quick introduction explaining what happened in between the last original episode and the new series, then get on with it without too many references to stuff people might not have heard of) this has the potential to gain a new cult following again, and I fully support a good remake of it. I don't support a bad one
No!
They did bring back Dr. Who as a feature length TV movie. It was shamefully overdone and nothing like the original. Anyway, Dr. Who has few merits, those being the theme music, the laughable crapness of the dialogue and effects, and the happy-go-lucky cheapness of the whole affair.
Blakes Seven had intelligent scripts and a dynamic variety of characters, which sets it apart from the rather staid, co-operative attitude we see in Star Trek. Argumentative, angry, mutinous characters coupled with sensible, direct and forthright ones add a depth to the show that is not often seen in higher budget equivalents. Like radio, Blakes Seven calls on your imagination to some extent (this space ship was NOT made by Tony Hart out of kitchen utensils and gardening paraphernalia in his spare time, it IS A REAL SPACE SHIP. BELIEVE. etc..) and I only hope that any attempt at re-creating it will preserve the merits of the original. Of course, it probably won't.
Since the atmospheric pressure on mars is about 1% of that on earth, making a decent cup of tea is difficult. The water just wouldnt boil at the right temperature without using a pressure cooker. And anyone who makes tea in a pressure cooker needs serious help.
I am sure that the next British endeavor will be to create a kettle and teapot that is compatible with the Mars atmosphere, just as we developed a rotary cooker for use on the ISS. Britain provide for family.
The first law of SPAM is that if you don't want to receive even more of it, don't open or respond to it.
If you have no idea what the difference between Longitudinal Recording and Perpendicular Recording might be, and the phrase "stands the bits on end" meant absolutely nothing to you because its an utterly ridiculous way to explain it, here's the lodown. Longitudinal recording is what we use today in everything from cassette tape to hard disks. It works by magnetising tiny sections of the recording medium. You can imagine the magnetised sections as tiny bar magnets laid end-to-end. The read head detects transitions in the direction of the magnetic field.
.
<- -> <-- -> <- -->
In the above diagram we're looking down at one track on the surface of a platter. Perpendicular recording works differently. The "magnets" or bits are arranged so that the field they emit is perpendicular to the medium, like this:
x . x . x . x
In the above diagram we're looking down at one track on the surface of a platter 'x' represents a field pointing away from us, '.' is one pointing towards us. This is what it looks like in cross-section (looking in from the edge of the platter):
^ | ^ | ^ | ^ | ^
| v | v | v | v |
In perpendicular recording the read head detects the actual direction of the fields emitted by these bits/magnets, rather than transitions in the field. Perpendicular recording is advantageous because it allows one to use a much smaller surface area on the medium for one bit. Imagine if you laid a line of bricks end-to-end on the ground, you could make the line shorter but taller if you stood each brick on end (so they're laid flat-to-flat), but you've not had to make the bricks any smaller in order to acheive this change in the length of your line.
Most of the above is hopefully right. Anyway it's a better explanation than that site gave.
That's great. A 32k picture of your face on a chip. Fab. Err. Isnt there already a real picture in your passport though? and an EEPROM? Pardom me for being a complete idiot here but wouldnt it be rather simple to just erase the eeprom and replace the picture with whatever you liked?
As for us Europeans using retina scans and so on, that's wettening but one gets the feeling that with Europe as it is it will not happen, or will happen in a rather crap way (as usual). Will we be able to get mod chips for these things? Will there be writers available like there are for credit cards? Will we be able to go to r3tin4z.com and download illegally copied retinas?
What confuses me is, why is this information stored on a chip that the holder has total access to? Wouldn't it be more sensible to store the information in a big database and then allow airport security to look up a person's name or identity number on said database to retrieve a picture or retina info which can then be used to verify that this person is who they say they are? Perhaps this is not done because of connectivity or legal reasons, but it seems to me that storing this sort of information on an EEPROM only serves to make it considerably easier and cheaper to forge convincingly by just rewriting the chip. I know this thing will be small, but if airports can read it, SOMEone will start selling devices to write it.
I'd like to see Mozilla getting leaner with each release.
I agree. I run Moz on both windows and linux and its startup times are appaling (5 to 10 seconds in windows, 15 in linux on a clean boot). It seems to need to read half of my drive before it'll show a window. I suspect it's to do with Chrome, but what do I know.
People aren't going to switch from IE to Moz if one comes up in under 2 seconds and the other rapes their disk and CPU for an unprescedented amount of time before coming up with any window (and it isn't exactly a pretty window after that, pardon me but I like my browser to look like other desktop applications I run. I thought this was partly the point of Firebird but even that seems to now be using some sort of nonstandard menus and other widgets).
Yes, I know that I can load portions of Moz into RAM at bootup so it comes up faster, but what if I resent useless tray applications that use memory that gets swapped out by my OS anyway and therefore doesnt really cut load times but just restart times.
Put it this way, a browser should not need a splash-screen to inform you that it's loading. I know that browsers are extremely complicated applications that one would expect would take some time to load, but in mozilla's case it's just frustrating. I can't wait for the bugfix that says "we now do less useless crap at startup so things are only loaded when needed. This increases loading speed significantly", but I guess this could be a long wait.
To bitch some more, Firebird is disappointingly slow on resizing windows which is probably Gecko's fault. I hate to give IE any credit but it IS blindingly quick and doesnt jack my CPU usage up to max while resizing (I have show-window-contents while dragging on btw).
Of course firebird is still my browser of choice, despite the fact that it feels awfully sluggish, and the only thing I really desperately want from it now is the ability to REMOVE extensions without messing about with tons of chrome files.
Why not just run Windows? Is this some sort of way to dodge costs or is it a plan to move Linux in over an extended period of time?
I suspect that since people in general are more au fait with Windows applications (ask a man in the street what Star Office is and he'd go "whu??", ask him what Microsoft Office is and he'd complain bitterly about its shortcomings) that it simply makes sense to run them over less well known Linux apps. That way you dont need to re-train people and people get less irritated by change.
The only fact here is that no matter what anyone tries to say, Linux simply does not yet have the fully-fledged desktop application base that Windows has. Therefore it makes plain sense to run established software until Linux ports come along. The story doesnt suggest that VMWare will be used to run everything, just that It Will Be Installed, presumably to run stuff that Linux does not yet have an acceptable clone of.
Nice reaction to this story by the way, the Linux trolls are really showing impressive arrogance and pomposity as usual. Good on you guys, without people like you, Windows users might actually want to be associated with your OS of choice, instead of thinking you're all a bunch of degenerate bitter underdogs using a 'complicated' OS to look clever. An operating system is a tool not a religion or political standpoint, so get over it.
Note that yes I run Linux and yes what a handy piece of software it is too. I dont run Wine or VMWare. I have a Win2k box for that.
The "X sucks" bandwagon is justified and something I've been riding on for a very long time. Actually X doesnt suck per se, it just needs a serious re-think. DirectFB has done that re-think for a linux windowsing system, and DirectFB does not suck.