While they're at it, they should get with Consumers' Union and go after the wireless providers, credit card lenders and all those other services where the terms of service are basically "we've got the gold, we make the rules". Onerous contract terms and gullible consumers that think they have to have these services are the root of all evil in our service/consumer based economy (speaking for the US).
It sounds like these rules apply to hourly or to salaried non-exempt (salaried positions that receive OT pay for extra hours actually worked), rather than exempt (positions that get no OT pay regardless). On the other hand, an employee who is constantly required to do unpaid on-call support probably could sue over their "exempt" classification, if they fall into the situations described in the parent.
The big thing the lawer is forgetting is that firefighters and the like get a bit of comp time. They are frequently 2 weeks on an 1 week off, or something like that. It isn't enough to cover 168 hours vs. 40 hours, but it is intended to average out the extra hours that actually occur.
The other factor to consider is the source: This is Fortune, which isn't exactly a bastion of worker's rights....
DOSBox has various integer multiple scalers at 2x and 3x...options are listed in dosbox.conf but unfortunately generate a filter error for junk characters if I try to include them here. On the other hand, I don't think DOSBox is quite up to running Windows 3.1 well enough to run Win32 games. Getting close though.
But I think the general idea of running old low-res games in an emulator/virtual machine is probably a good way to control the resolution scaling. Run the game inside a window that is at an integer multiple of the original resolution, and then your full-screen resolution just has to be big enough to fit the window without being so hi-res that the window is too small. So maybe use WINE for those old windows games?
Considering how many boneheads CNN has put in front of the camera (SEEya, Lou Dobbs), why is Dahl whinging about the Twitteratti?
I can understand his annoyance: I too wish TV came with a plugin like NoScript that would disable the crawl on the news channels. But that's why I use the web. It's far from perfect, but I can do at least some filtering.
Don't think it's a question of just size. Google's got most of Florida, including Miami and Orlando. And US Air's hub in Charlotte. But no DFW, ORD, NYC, or any of the other big hubs. Still, they've got all three airports in my general area, so I'm covered for at least my outbound leg.
Could be. I haven't seen the transcript, so I'm stuck with what the media choose to highlight. I've seen enough rulings go the opposite of what early reports seemed to indicate that I'll hold onto my own skepticism, thank you.
Regardless of whether they're "in the tank", I've noticed that this court tends to ask the most skeptical questions of the side they are considering ruling in favor of, at least when reported in the "anti-patent" media like Slashdot. It's more that they're trying to pin down the scope of their ruling rather than actually skeptical of the proposed arguments. Sometimes I think part of it is a cruel sense of humor toward the lawyers arguing before the court.
True that. We're at the point in the evolution of the personal computer where if an application requires admin rights to run (as opposed to Install), it should not be on your computer. That is no longer an excuse for running user accounts as Admin level.
Especially since Vista and Win 7 allow you to run a specific application (Say Spybot or other anti-malware that requires registry access to clean up infections) as Admin from the icon's context menu.
As I remember The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire came out about 25-30 years after the original short stories, so it's pretty clear Asimov would have written more stories or novels about the robots if he had a story to tell. Asimov was a commercial writer in the age of pulp magazines. That, by definition, is a sell-out.
That he managed to produce such a body of acclaimed work is a function of his work ethic and talent, not his "artistic sensibility" or the "purity" of his body of work.
Maybe create some internal XSS that resides on your corporate proxy server. So when someone runs (say) a Facebook app, your XSS runs some Javascript off of an internal server that does something moderately annoying like continual pop-ups. Then if they click on one of the popups, disable their external web access completely.
Re:MS snatched victory from the jaws of failure...
on
A Tale of Two Windows 7s
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Agree what with Dvorak? Apart from the one-liner about cheap vodka, Dvorak doesn't discuss the operating systems at all. On the other hand, you're spot-on about Win 7 being a success because the rest of the market finally caught up with Vista. Reminds me of Windows NT, which never really succeeded until NT4 when the hardware finally caught up.
The biggest difference is that Vista required a major hardware upgrade to run properly. Then when MS realized that there weren't enough "Vista capable" machines in existence to sell enough copies, they tried to shoehorn it into some platforms where it really couldn't perform. So Vista's failure was mostly the fault of the marketing people overriding the engineered design. Although the performance tuning of things like memory caching and the search service were also big problems.
Windows 7 has a much better chance of success because hardware sold over the past couple of years will have no problem running it. In fact, even some machines that couldn't run Vista should be able to run Win 7. However, if you are already running Vista on a dual-core machine with a couple gigs of memory, there's no real reason to upgrade unless you find the UI changes compelling.
Ironically, apart from the one-liner about the "cheap Microsoft vodka", Dvorak has absolutely nothing to say about the operating system itself. He spends the whole column railing about the incompetence of the MS marketing department and whinging that he is no longer treated like a press god. Looks like he's finally catching on that the industry has passed him by.
Actually, the reason wages are down is because we let China and India bootstrap themselves into information economies by educating their students. Then they undercut our salaries by using the internet to compete in markets they couldn't otherwise reach. So due to competition, yes the work IS worth less. Sometimes the free market is a bitch, isn't it? Just like for the dairy farmers who have to slaughter their cows because milk prices are so low.
Judge should be able to force a re-trial in cases like these, but not reverse the verdict. In my (non-lawyer) opinion, once a jury has been empaneled, the verdict must come from a jury. And at some point, if enough juries are in agreement about disagreeing with the judge, the judge should even lose the power to force a retrial.
I can see a judge vacating a verdict for a retrial. If he thinks the jury got it wrong as a matter of law and/or fact he should be able to vacate the verdict/declare a mistrial for a new trial. But to completely reverse the ruling and turn it upside down fails the smell test.
Also: does jury nullification apply in civil cases like this? Assuming you "believe" in jury nullification in the first place.
Oracle is terminating one of their relationships with HP: to build this particular line of servers. The article says nothing about their other relationships such as the "Agility Alliance" partnership with EDS. The article clearly only refers to the hardware alliance, but the summary says " Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP..."
On the other hand, EDS is/was Sun's biggest customer and HP overall is a pretty huge Oracle software customer, too. If HP ever decided to retaliate, Oracle would already be in bad shape on the hardware side and there are alternatives on the DBMS side that don't involve IBM or Oracle either. However, I don't expect this to happen. The Exadata business isn't that big a loss compared with the other partnerships. And HP could just reverse the relationship and bundle Oracle software on hardware they sell, with support coming via EDS' relationship with Oracle.
-Disclosure: I have a business relationship with HP, but in no way am I a spokesperson for the company. The opinions and speculations expressed here are my own.
Wouldn't a superposition of all the possible quantum states of the virus also include all possible mutations of the virus' DNA? i.e., instant mutant lethal super-swine-flu!
Or are we just generating a subset of the possible quantum states without any real comprehension of how that would affect the DNA...
Actually, it's the protocol set (TCP/IP) that's designed to route around damage, not the internet. If every route between two nodes has to go over a particular physical link, it doesn't matter how robust your re-routing algorithm is. Don't need a "kill-switch" at all. A stray back-hoe is usually sufficient.
Of course that doesn't make the CSR's response any less strange. Plenty of civilian networks have redundancy. There are plenty of different routes you can take from Dallas to Fort Worth. But the grain of truth is that civilian networks are rarely 100% redundant. Chop off all the bridges and tunnels leaving Manhattan and you can still get to Long Island from the mainland. But that doesn't do anything for the people actually IN Manhattan.
I suspect that the "kill switch" in this case is that your ISP isn't paying their due to their backbone provider, so they get cut off from time to time until they pay up.
The point isn't critical infrastructure that is _only_ accessible by the internet, the point is to prevent internet access to critical infrastructure from causing damage to that infrastructure, regardless of whether there are other means of access.
For example, if a foreign government has unleashed a cyber-attack, that would probably be a reasonable justification for taking.mil and.gov off of the public internet. That doesn't mean they don't stay networked within their own C&C, just that Joe Public (and presumably the foreign attacker) can't get to them.
Parent==Flamebait??? Puhleez. Just because someone professes a non liberal-libertarian viewpoint doesn't mean they don't have a point worth hearing.
#1) How is this a "privacy" issue. I can see it as an information access and possibly a censorship issue (although I doubt it's intended for that purpose), but privacy isn't really on the table here. In fact, disconnecting computers from the internet will probably IMPROVE the security of your private information.
#2) How is this different from the government closing off roads into disaster areas like wildfires and hurricanes, not to mention the police line at crime scenes? There's a legitimate safety and security issue involved in letting the general public into systems infected with malware or that need to be analyzed as part of a criminal investigation.
As far as I can tell this is just an extension of existing real-world government authority into the cyber arena. Any government authority is vulnerable to abuse, but there's also a legitimate need for this type of authority when there actually IS an emergency.
Get a grip, people. Feed the watchdogs at EFF and ACLU with money to prevent the potential abuse, but don't deny the government a legitimate role in cyber-security.
In other words, Apple made the decision to block Google voice because they had a contractual obligation to block any (AT&T-competitive) VoIP service from using AT&T's network without AT&T's permission. So it still goes back to AT&T: either they didn't give permission under the contract, plus they imposed this contractual condition on Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
While they're at it, they should get with Consumers' Union and go after the wireless providers, credit card lenders and all those other services where the terms of service are basically "we've got the gold, we make the rules". Onerous contract terms and gullible consumers that think they have to have these services are the root of all evil in our service/consumer based economy (speaking for the US).
It sounds like these rules apply to hourly or to salaried non-exempt (salaried positions that receive OT pay for extra hours actually worked), rather than exempt (positions that get no OT pay regardless). On the other hand, an employee who is constantly required to do unpaid on-call support probably could sue over their "exempt" classification, if they fall into the situations described in the parent.
The big thing the lawer is forgetting is that firefighters and the like get a bit of comp time. They are frequently 2 weeks on an 1 week off, or something like that. It isn't enough to cover 168 hours vs. 40 hours, but it is intended to average out the extra hours that actually occur.
The other factor to consider is the source: This is Fortune, which isn't exactly a bastion of worker's rights....
DOSBox has various integer multiple scalers at 2x and 3x...options are listed in dosbox.conf but unfortunately generate a filter error for junk characters if I try to include them here. On the other hand, I don't think DOSBox is quite up to running Windows 3.1 well enough to run Win32 games. Getting close though.
But I think the general idea of running old low-res games in an emulator/virtual machine is probably a good way to control the resolution scaling. Run the game inside a window that is at an integer multiple of the original resolution, and then your full-screen resolution just has to be big enough to fit the window without being so hi-res that the window is too small. So maybe use WINE for those old windows games?
Since no-one seems to have provided a link to DOSBox, here you go:
http://www.dosbox.com/ OR
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/
Considering how many boneheads CNN has put in front of the camera (SEEya, Lou Dobbs), why is Dahl whinging about the Twitteratti?
I can understand his annoyance: I too wish TV came with a plugin like NoScript that would disable the crawl on the news channels. But that's why I use the web. It's far from perfect, but I can do at least some filtering.
No, it's the spoonerism of HuffPo that would give you the X rating...PuffHo?
Don't think it's a question of just size. Google's got most of Florida, including Miami and Orlando. And US Air's hub in Charlotte. But no DFW, ORD, NYC, or any of the other big hubs. Still, they've got all three airports in my general area, so I'm covered for at least my outbound leg.
Could be. I haven't seen the transcript, so I'm stuck with what the media choose to highlight. I've seen enough rulings go the opposite of what early reports seemed to indicate that I'll hold onto my own skepticism, thank you.
Regardless of whether they're "in the tank", I've noticed that this court tends to ask the most skeptical questions of the side they are considering ruling in favor of, at least when reported in the "anti-patent" media like Slashdot. It's more that they're trying to pin down the scope of their ruling rather than actually skeptical of the proposed arguments. Sometimes I think part of it is a cruel sense of humor toward the lawyers arguing before the court.
True that. We're at the point in the evolution of the personal computer where if an application requires admin rights to run (as opposed to Install), it should not be on your computer. That is no longer an excuse for running user accounts as Admin level.
Especially since Vista and Win 7 allow you to run a specific application (Say Spybot or other anti-malware that requires registry access to clean up infections) as Admin from the icon's context menu.
As I remember The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire came out about 25-30 years after the original short stories, so it's pretty clear Asimov would have written more stories or novels about the robots if he had a story to tell. Asimov was a commercial writer in the age of pulp magazines. That, by definition, is a sell-out.
That he managed to produce such a body of acclaimed work is a function of his work ethic and talent, not his "artistic sensibility" or the "purity" of his body of work.
Maybe create some internal XSS that resides on your corporate proxy server. So when someone runs (say) a Facebook app, your XSS runs some Javascript off of an internal server that does something moderately annoying like continual pop-ups. Then if they click on one of the popups, disable their external web access completely.
Agree what with Dvorak? Apart from the one-liner about cheap vodka, Dvorak doesn't discuss the operating systems at all. On the other hand, you're spot-on about Win 7 being a success because the rest of the market finally caught up with Vista. Reminds me of Windows NT, which never really succeeded until NT4 when the hardware finally caught up.
The biggest difference is that Vista required a major hardware upgrade to run properly. Then when MS realized that there weren't enough "Vista capable" machines in existence to sell enough copies, they tried to shoehorn it into some platforms where it really couldn't perform. So Vista's failure was mostly the fault of the marketing people overriding the engineered design. Although the performance tuning of things like memory caching and the search service were also big problems.
Windows 7 has a much better chance of success because hardware sold over the past couple of years will have no problem running it. In fact, even some machines that couldn't run Vista should be able to run Win 7. However, if you are already running Vista on a dual-core machine with a couple gigs of memory, there's no real reason to upgrade unless you find the UI changes compelling.
Ironically, apart from the one-liner about the "cheap Microsoft vodka", Dvorak has absolutely nothing to say about the operating system itself. He spends the whole column railing about the incompetence of the MS marketing department and whinging that he is no longer treated like a press god. Looks like he's finally catching on that the industry has passed him by.
Actually, the reason wages are down is because we let China and India bootstrap themselves into information economies by educating their students. Then they undercut our salaries by using the internet to compete in markets they couldn't otherwise reach. So due to competition, yes the work IS worth less. Sometimes the free market is a bitch, isn't it? Just like for the dairy farmers who have to slaughter their cows because milk prices are so low.
Judge should be able to force a re-trial in cases like these, but not reverse the verdict. In my (non-lawyer) opinion, once a jury has been empaneled, the verdict must come from a jury. And at some point, if enough juries are in agreement about disagreeing with the judge, the judge should even lose the power to force a retrial.
I can see a judge vacating a verdict for a retrial. If he thinks the jury got it wrong as a matter of law and/or fact he should be able to vacate the verdict/declare a mistrial for a new trial. But to completely reverse the ruling and turn it upside down fails the smell test.
Also: does jury nullification apply in civil cases like this? Assuming you "believe" in jury nullification in the first place.
Revenge of the Nerds was right - "all jocks think about is sports, all nerds think about is sex..."
Oracle is terminating one of their relationships with HP: to build this particular line of servers. The article says nothing about their other relationships such as the "Agility Alliance" partnership with EDS. The article clearly only refers to the hardware alliance, but the summary says " Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP ..."
On the other hand, EDS is/was Sun's biggest customer and HP overall is a pretty huge Oracle software customer, too. If HP ever decided to retaliate, Oracle would already be in bad shape on the hardware side and there are alternatives on the DBMS side that don't involve IBM or Oracle either. However, I don't expect this to happen. The Exadata business isn't that big a loss compared with the other partnerships. And HP could just reverse the relationship and bundle Oracle software on hardware they sell, with support coming via EDS' relationship with Oracle.
-Disclosure: I have a business relationship with HP, but in no way am I a spokesperson for the company. The opinions and speculations expressed here are my own.
But how many viruses can dance on the head of a pin?
Wouldn't a superposition of all the possible quantum states of the virus also include all possible mutations of the virus' DNA? i.e., instant mutant lethal super-swine-flu!
Or are we just generating a subset of the possible quantum states without any real comprehension of how that would affect the DNA...
Actually, it's the protocol set (TCP/IP) that's designed to route around damage, not the internet. If every route between two nodes has to go over a particular physical link, it doesn't matter how robust your re-routing algorithm is. Don't need a "kill-switch" at all. A stray back-hoe is usually sufficient.
Of course that doesn't make the CSR's response any less strange. Plenty of civilian networks have redundancy. There are plenty of different routes you can take from Dallas to Fort Worth. But the grain of truth is that civilian networks are rarely 100% redundant. Chop off all the bridges and tunnels leaving Manhattan and you can still get to Long Island from the mainland. But that doesn't do anything for the people actually IN Manhattan.
I suspect that the "kill switch" in this case is that your ISP isn't paying their due to their backbone provider, so they get cut off from time to time until they pay up.
The point isn't critical infrastructure that is _only_ accessible by the internet, the point is to prevent internet access to critical infrastructure from causing damage to that infrastructure, regardless of whether there are other means of access.
For example, if a foreign government has unleashed a cyber-attack, that would probably be a reasonable justification for taking .mil and .gov off of the public internet. That doesn't mean they don't stay networked within their own C&C, just that Joe Public (and presumably the foreign attacker) can't get to them.
Parent==Flamebait??? Puhleez. Just because someone professes a non liberal-libertarian viewpoint doesn't mean they don't have a point worth hearing.
#1) How is this a "privacy" issue. I can see it as an information access and possibly a censorship issue (although I doubt it's intended for that purpose), but privacy isn't really on the table here. In fact, disconnecting computers from the internet will probably IMPROVE the security of your private information.
#2) How is this different from the government closing off roads into disaster areas like wildfires and hurricanes, not to mention the police line at crime scenes? There's a legitimate safety and security issue involved in letting the general public into systems infected with malware or that need to be analyzed as part of a criminal investigation.
As far as I can tell this is just an extension of existing real-world government authority into the cyber arena. Any government authority is vulnerable to abuse, but there's also a legitimate need for this type of authority when there actually IS an emergency.
Get a grip, people. Feed the watchdogs at EFF and ACLU with money to prevent the potential abuse, but don't deny the government a legitimate role in cyber-security.
In other words, Apple made the decision to block Google voice because they had a contractual obligation to block any (AT&T-competitive) VoIP service from using AT&T's network without AT&T's permission. So it still goes back to AT&T: either they didn't give permission under the contract, plus they imposed this contractual condition on Apple.