Anyone know if there will be future security patches for the now older 2.0.x version? I.e. should I figure on upgrading sooner rather than later to minimize the disruption the next critical bug fix comes out?
Google is first and foremost a search engine - one or two page views per visit. Google was late to the webmail game so the traffic from GMail is probably 10% of that of Yahoo! Mail. Other than that, there is not a whole lot that would warrant multiple page views in the Google world -- maybe GoogleGroups, but I doubt that it's very popular outside of the geek world. In contrast, I've been using Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail for years. Both of these by their nature take several page views per day. I think that both Flickr and the old eGroups both suck down page views too, but I don't use those.
I suspect that the dollar value and the volume make the difference. A couple ideas:
It's possible with coupons for the retailer to pretend that they've collected coupons from every purchase. With food, the # of transactions is much larger than with electronics. So manufacturers can do basic ratio analysis to catch any stores that try to cheat the system - i.e. if one particular store redeems a coupon 3x more often than the norm, then it's time to send in a mystery shopper. Since the dollar value is higher and the volume is lower with more expensive goods, it's harder to get reasonable auditing of redeemptions. Secondly, perhaps food manufacturers would prefer a rebate program; however, with food, we're usually talking about a dollar or two. For the same amount of work in handling a rebate it just isn't worth it for all parties.
Why have rebates at all? Why not just put the product on sale?
Well one big reason is that rebates are typically handled by the manufacturer - HP, DLink, SMC, etc.
If the manufacturer simply lowers the price that it sells to wholesalers/retailers there are several problems:
1. All of their customers get the same (lowered) price. This is not necessarily bad; however, it is nice to have some flexibility to work with certain retailers at certain times on specific co-marketing programs.
2. It is very hard for manufacturers to later bring the price back up. The expectation from retailers (and end-consumers) is that the sale price is the "proper" price. Whereas a rebate is not as strongly associated with permanent price changes.
3. Rebates are more likely to affect the price for the end-consumer. In other words, simply dropping the wholesale price might end up fattening the margins of the retailer w/o increasing sales. This is more important for some products than others. E.g. router sales are highly competitive, so any price break by rebate or price decrease would probably end up at the retail level; whereas, for mid-high end TVs or stereo equipment, there is a greater chance of retailers just pocketing any price reductions.
4. Retailers don't want to drop prices. Markups are how they make money. Period. In a way, offering a rebate can effectively go behind the retailer's back to affect prices offered to the end-consumer.
There are other rationales and tricks w/rebates that others on/. will mention. I'm sure that many of those are valid. But, IMHO, the manufacturer to retailer relationship angle doesn't get enough consideration when it comes to the rebate debate.
NAV for home users is terrible. How Symantec can release two completely dissimilar antivirus products boggles my mind. SAV (i.e. corporate) is pretty good as far as maintenance goes - it seems to catch the viruses w/reasonable resource usage. NAV (i.e. home) is terrible. It constantly looses its license key -- I've seen this sevearal times on at least two different model "years" of NAV on completely different computers. Somehow they've done some sort of DRM that just doesn't work. Plus the GUI is much heavier in NAV.
But that's the point. Almost anything can be encapsulated within proper HTTP packets over port 80 (for example). In fact, there are standards to do just that, such as SOAP. These will pass a statefull inspection because they are proper packets. You need something beyond statefull inspection, you need to be able to magically tell what is a "good" or "safe" http connection from a "bad" http connection.
I've recommended this type of setup for many people over the last few years. If your mail host also supports webmail, you get the added bonus of access via web.
It all becomes a lot simpler if you decide what you actually use your computer for.
If it's games, then you will need PCI-Express, preferably 2 slots. If it's office / web stuff, then buy whatever is cheap but quality - speed really isn't a factor so save a few bucks by avoiding top end CPUs/GPUs/RAM (don't skimp on the HD, keyboard, mouse, or monitor though). If you want a PC for a home theatre setting, then noise level is crucial and size is very important - nowadays, that's generally AMD territory, since Intel's chips typically use 2x as much power. Etc.
Regarding likeliness, I was thinking more in terms of recovering from a bad scratch or a bit of bit rot. When I wrote the post, I had no idea how I would easily recombine two identical but damaged files. Although, one of the other responses to my GP post recommends an intresting program to do just that.
Regarding ECC, it's true that disks have a lot of error correction already, about 30% of a CD IIRC. However, I've still seen more than my fair share of partially unreadable CDs. I don't know the details of the ECC on a CD, but I strongly suspect that it doesn't stretch very far ahead or behind of the data. In other words, I think that.pars add a good extra layer of defence because the parity information is stored much further away from the data. Further, I have an uneducated theory that the ECC standards were defined for pressed CDs. Writeable media uses the same encoding, but the media is far, far, less durable.
For photos, backups and other archival stuff to CD or DVD I've been adding PAR parity files. They're sort-of like RAID at a file level. Even though the initial use of.pars was for Usenet binary downloads (I think) the tools work great for any situation where partial loss of data is likely. In theory, as long as the unreadable bits of the disc are a small % of the disk, I should be able to rebuild the data. There's an article where this is tested by scratching / drawing on a CDR -- unfortunately, I don't have a bookmark. The chances are good that a disk will not go bad uniformly across the entire disk. So, the parity files should be able to recover from most scratches and a lot of bit rot.
Plus, I feel that.par files are better than making 2 copies of the same data. For example, if you're only backing up a few large files, the odds of having both copies of the file get a few bad sectors is relatively high. I suppose you could patch over unreadable bits with a hex editor or something, but I'll take a nice GUI and relatively common software anyday.
Although, to be perfectly honest, I just don't rely on CDR or DVDR. I keep a copy of all stuff on a hard drive too. DVD's go offsite, HD stays at home.
IE can render transparencies in the old.GIF style. Which, to me, is sort of like having a special "colour" that is transparent for rendering.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer can not render the much cooler alpha channel that PNG supports. This would make things like the blending of images over a background image / colour much easier. At least we get more than 256 colours w/PNG's and IE.
Computers suck. Web design really sucks. And being a geek, I really wish that I was kidding...
The first time I tried to setup a really locked down network (i.e. better than a NAT by allowing specific outgoing traffic only) I screwed up royally. Actually, I still would have significant difficulties without a good GUI.
For a crash course in the difference between UDP and TCP and how IP ports work and what NATs do, IMHO, there's nothing better than actually trying to create a "secure" firewall that still lets you do the stuff you normally expect. E.g. email, web, P2P (take your pick), streaming media, DNS resolution (which is way more complex than I would have imagined).
AOL sends a lot of traffic to Google since Google provides the search results for AOL. I thought that I had read that this is noticeable chunk of revenue for Google, but looking at AOL's site, I'm not entirely sure how that works - I don't see Google Ads.
Anyway, if Yahoo or MS/MSN bought AOL, that traffic instantly goes away. That's the reason that I've heard for Google even being interested in AOL. It's worth mentioning that Google is by no means a monopoly in search traffic. It's probably pretty close to a monopoly with the Slashdot crowd, but overall, it's not. MSN, AOL, and Yahoo are quite popular with different crowds for various reasons.
The name to google for the free limited SQL 2000 engine is MSDE - which stands for MS Data Engine, I think. Note that the limitations have changed between MSDE and the new Express db - overall it's generally similar, i.e it's the same great engine but with limits on size and speed (i.e. processors/clusters). The biggest new "freebie" for me is that the max database size is now 4GB instead of 2GB.
Beyond being able to hear the different sounds, I really doubt that it's that much easier to learn a language as a kid. Even if it is, I don't think it's a one sided bet. Of the kids whom I've met who for natural reasons were raised bilingual from the start (e.g. immigrants who try to speak English, but end up speaking something else at home), about as many end up having significant problems in one or both languages as those who excel in both languages. But that's purely anecdotal.
I didn't truely appreciate the magic that was FidoNet back then... actually, I'm still not exactly sure how it managed to route messages from BBS to BBS until it reached the other side of the planet.
In some ways, BBS's were better than the 'net today, it was a real community since people tended to call BBS's that were in their own city. Nowadays, I don't have any idea where Slashdotter's live... plus there are sooo many more users per site...
Try this, see that stack of routers at Best Buy? If a Linksys WRT54GS has 100+ MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, some flash memory, a wireless chipset, and can RETAIL for USD60, then it's bill of materials is probably half that. Say, 30. Swap the WiFi chips for VGA chips, then add a USB controller and keyboard and a I/O ports and you might have 50 for a TFT. It's still tight, but within reason.
I get the impression that this will be offered at little to no profit for developing nations so we don't need to factor in retail markups.
What, so now that I do encrypted backups onto removable USB drives using Windows EFS, I'm at risk having to explain myself every time I cross the US border (I'm Canadian)?
What's next? VPN software? SSH? SSL'd bookmarks in my browser?
Some other tidbits from my poor memory...
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
The current deal was for a set number of movies, and it expires with "Cars" in 2006. There was also disagreement with respect to Toy Story 2, it was originally a "cheap sequel". Later, it got upgraded to a full fledged movie. Pixar wanted it to count against the original # of movies in the distribution agreement, Disney didn't - I don't recall what became of that.
PS. Why do I keep getting deja vu when I see the Chicken Little advertisements? Is that character (design) ripped off of some cartoon or have I just seen the trailer too many times or are there just too many bird movies this year?
I agree. For an entire office suite 80MB is quite reasonable to me. We're not talking about a one-task webbrowser. You get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing tool and more in that 80MB. I haven't looked recently, but I'm pretty sure that MS Office is at least 2 or 3 times that size on the CD.
80MB may be awkward for those on a dial up modem, but put into context, it isn't that bad. I suppose that it would be nice to modularize it so that bits are downloaded as needed. A 20MB base download in one language with other bits downloaded in the background or as needed would bring the base download time for a modem user down to about an hour.
Memory size consumption and start up time are bigger concerns to me. Oh, and a small web-plugin to read OOo files off websites would be excellent.
But the OEM MS (Basic) Office Suite is cheaper.
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 1
True. But you can't by Excel "OEM" (at least I've never seen it). An OEM copy of the basic MS Office Suite (Excel, Word, Outlook) from Dell is ~ $150. From your link, Excel itself is $229. I think I'll take the suite.
I stumbled on my first Flash stream a few weeks ago - it was in the thumbnail previews of Google's Video service! My uneducated guess is that a larger % of web users have Flash these days than either WM or QT, plus the integration with the browser is flawless (it is Flash Player afterall).
Re: QT, I find the app. tremendously annoying in Windows. Also, a lot of people do not have it installed. Personally, I'd like to see QT die and go away for web streams.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know if there will be future security patches for the now older 2.0.x version? I.e. should I figure on upgrading sooner rather than later to minimize the disruption the next critical bug fix comes out?
G4U (easy to Google) has a link to a really simple utility that does just that - create a big file of 0's (in Windows).
Google is first and foremost a search engine - one or two page views per visit. Google was late to the webmail game so the traffic from GMail is probably 10% of that of Yahoo! Mail. Other than that, there is not a whole lot that would warrant multiple page views in the Google world -- maybe GoogleGroups, but I doubt that it's very popular outside of the geek world. In contrast, I've been using Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail for years. Both of these by their nature take several page views per day. I think that both Flickr and the old eGroups both suck down page views too, but I don't use those.
I'm pretty sure that the 1GB refers to non-volatile storage (i.e. flash). I doubt that there will be 1GB of RAM.
I suspect that the dollar value and the volume make the difference. A couple ideas:
It's possible with coupons for the retailer to pretend that they've collected coupons from every purchase. With food, the # of transactions is much larger than with electronics. So manufacturers can do basic ratio analysis to catch any stores that try to cheat the system - i.e. if one particular store redeems a coupon 3x more often than the norm, then it's time to send in a mystery shopper. Since the dollar value is higher and the volume is lower with more expensive goods, it's harder to get reasonable auditing of redeemptions. Secondly, perhaps food manufacturers would prefer a rebate program; however, with food, we're usually talking about a dollar or two. For the same amount of work in handling a rebate it just isn't worth it for all parties.
Well one big reason is that rebates are typically handled by the manufacturer - HP, DLink, SMC, etc.
If the manufacturer simply lowers the price that it sells to wholesalers/retailers there are several problems:
1. All of their customers get the same (lowered) price. This is not necessarily bad; however, it is nice to have some flexibility to work with certain retailers at certain times on specific co-marketing programs.
2. It is very hard for manufacturers to later bring the price back up. The expectation from retailers (and end-consumers) is that the sale price is the "proper" price. Whereas a rebate is not as strongly associated with permanent price changes.
3. Rebates are more likely to affect the price for the end-consumer. In other words, simply dropping the wholesale price might end up fattening the margins of the retailer w/o increasing sales. This is more important for some products than others. E.g. router sales are highly competitive, so any price break by rebate or price decrease would probably end up at the retail level; whereas, for mid-high end TVs or stereo equipment, there is a greater chance of retailers just pocketing any price reductions.
4. Retailers don't want to drop prices. Markups are how they make money. Period. In a way, offering a rebate can effectively go behind the retailer's back to affect prices offered to the end-consumer.
/. will mention. I'm sure that many of those are valid. But, IMHO, the manufacturer to retailer relationship angle doesn't get enough consideration when it comes to the rebate debate.
There are other rationales and tricks w/rebates that others on
NAV for home users is terrible. How Symantec can release two completely dissimilar antivirus products boggles my mind. SAV (i.e. corporate) is pretty good as far as maintenance goes - it seems to catch the viruses w/reasonable resource usage. NAV (i.e. home) is terrible. It constantly looses its license key -- I've seen this sevearal times on at least two different model "years" of NAV on completely different computers. Somehow they've done some sort of DRM that just doesn't work. Plus the GUI is much heavier in NAV.
But that's the point. Almost anything can be encapsulated within proper HTTP packets over port 80 (for example). In fact, there are standards to do just that, such as SOAP. These will pass a statefull inspection because they are proper packets. You need something beyond statefull inspection, you need to be able to magically tell what is a "good" or "safe" http connection from a "bad" http connection.
How much power are we talking about here? Sheesh...
Are there any other consumer electronics that have had external PSUs even close to this in capacity??
I've recommended this type of setup for many people over the last few years. If your mail host also supports webmail, you get the added bonus of access via web.
It all becomes a lot simpler if you decide what you actually use your computer for.
If it's games, then you will need PCI-Express, preferably 2 slots. If it's office / web stuff, then buy whatever is cheap but quality - speed really isn't a factor so save a few bucks by avoiding top end CPUs/GPUs/RAM (don't skimp on the HD, keyboard, mouse, or monitor though). If you want a PC for a home theatre setting, then noise level is crucial and size is very important - nowadays, that's generally AMD territory, since Intel's chips typically use 2x as much power. Etc.
Regarding likeliness, I was thinking more in terms of recovering from a bad scratch or a bit of bit rot. When I wrote the post, I had no idea how I would easily recombine two identical but damaged files. Although, one of the other responses to my GP post recommends an intresting program to do just that.
.pars add a good extra layer of defence because the parity information is stored much further away from the data. Further, I have an uneducated theory that the ECC standards were defined for pressed CDs. Writeable media uses the same encoding, but the media is far, far, less durable.
Regarding ECC, it's true that disks have a lot of error correction already, about 30% of a CD IIRC. However, I've still seen more than my fair share of partially unreadable CDs. I don't know the details of the ECC on a CD, but I strongly suspect that it doesn't stretch very far ahead or behind of the data. In other words, I think that
For photos, backups and other archival stuff to CD or DVD I've been adding PAR parity files. They're sort-of like RAID at a file level. Even though the initial use of .pars was for Usenet binary downloads (I think) the tools work great for any situation where partial loss of data is likely. In theory, as long as the unreadable bits of the disc are a small % of the disk, I should be able to rebuild the data. There's an article where this is tested by scratching / drawing on a CDR -- unfortunately, I don't have a bookmark. The chances are good that a disk will not go bad uniformly across the entire disk. So, the parity files should be able to recover from most scratches and a lot of bit rot.
.par files are better than making 2 copies of the same data. For example, if you're only backing up a few large files, the odds of having both copies of the file get a few bad sectors is relatively high. I suppose you could patch over unreadable bits with a hex editor or something, but I'll take a nice GUI and relatively common software anyday.
Plus, I feel that
Although, to be perfectly honest, I just don't rely on CDR or DVDR. I keep a copy of all stuff on a hard drive too. DVD's go offsite, HD stays at home.
IE can render transparencies in the old .GIF style. Which, to me, is sort of like having a special "colour" that is transparent for rendering.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer can not render the much cooler alpha channel that PNG supports. This would make things like the blending of images over a background image / colour much easier. At least we get more than 256 colours w/PNG's and IE.
Computers suck. Web design really sucks. And being a geek, I really wish that I was kidding...
OK, maybe this is flamebait... maybe not.
The first time I tried to setup a really locked down network (i.e. better than a NAT by allowing specific outgoing traffic only) I screwed up royally. Actually, I still would have significant difficulties without a good GUI.
For a crash course in the difference between UDP and TCP and how IP ports work and what NATs do, IMHO, there's nothing better than actually trying to create a "secure" firewall that still lets you do the stuff you normally expect. E.g. email, web, P2P (take your pick), streaming media, DNS resolution (which is way more complex than I would have imagined).
AOL sends a lot of traffic to Google since Google provides the search results for AOL. I thought that I had read that this is noticeable chunk of revenue for Google, but looking at AOL's site, I'm not entirely sure how that works - I don't see Google Ads.
Anyway, if Yahoo or MS/MSN bought AOL, that traffic instantly goes away. That's the reason that I've heard for Google even being interested in AOL. It's worth mentioning that Google is by no means a monopoly in search traffic. It's probably pretty close to a monopoly with the Slashdot crowd, but overall, it's not. MSN, AOL, and Yahoo are quite popular with different crowds for various reasons.
The name to google for the free limited SQL 2000 engine is MSDE - which stands for MS Data Engine, I think. Note that the limitations have changed between MSDE and the new Express db - overall it's generally similar, i.e it's the same great engine but with limits on size and speed (i.e. processors/clusters). The biggest new "freebie" for me is that the max database size is now 4GB instead of 2GB.
Beyond being able to hear the different sounds, I really doubt that it's that much easier to learn a language as a kid. Even if it is, I don't think it's a one sided bet. Of the kids whom I've met who for natural reasons were raised bilingual from the start (e.g. immigrants who try to speak English, but end up speaking something else at home), about as many end up having significant problems in one or both languages as those who excel in both languages. But that's purely anecdotal.
I didn't truely appreciate the magic that was FidoNet back then... actually, I'm still not exactly sure how it managed to route messages from BBS to BBS until it reached the other side of the planet.
In some ways, BBS's were better than the 'net today, it was a real community since people tended to call BBS's that were in their own city. Nowadays, I don't have any idea where Slashdotter's live... plus there are sooo many more users per site...
Try this, see that stack of routers at Best Buy? If a Linksys WRT54GS has 100+ MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, some flash memory, a wireless chipset, and can RETAIL for USD60, then it's bill of materials is probably half that. Say, 30. Swap the WiFi chips for VGA chips, then add a USB controller and keyboard and a I/O ports and you might have 50 for a TFT. It's still tight, but within reason.
I get the impression that this will be offered at little to no profit for developing nations so we don't need to factor in retail markups.
What, so now that I do encrypted backups onto removable USB drives using Windows EFS, I'm at risk having to explain myself every time I cross the US border (I'm Canadian)? What's next? VPN software? SSH? SSL'd bookmarks in my browser?
The current deal was for a set number of movies, and it expires with "Cars" in 2006. There was also disagreement with respect to Toy Story 2, it was originally a "cheap sequel". Later, it got upgraded to a full fledged movie. Pixar wanted it to count against the original # of movies in the distribution agreement, Disney didn't - I don't recall what became of that.
PS. Why do I keep getting deja vu when I see the Chicken Little advertisements? Is that character (design) ripped off of some cartoon or have I just seen the trailer too many times or are there just too many bird movies this year?
I agree. For an entire office suite 80MB is quite reasonable to me. We're not talking about a one-task webbrowser. You get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing tool and more in that 80MB. I haven't looked recently, but I'm pretty sure that MS Office is at least 2 or 3 times that size on the CD.
80MB may be awkward for those on a dial up modem, but put into context, it isn't that bad. I suppose that it would be nice to modularize it so that bits are downloaded as needed. A 20MB base download in one language with other bits downloaded in the background or as needed would bring the base download time for a modem user down to about an hour.
Memory size consumption and start up time are bigger concerns to me. Oh, and a small web-plugin to read OOo files off websites would be excellent.
True. But you can't by Excel "OEM" (at least I've never seen it). An OEM copy of the basic MS Office Suite (Excel, Word, Outlook) from Dell is ~ $150. From your link, Excel itself is $229. I think I'll take the suite.
I stumbled on my first Flash stream a few weeks ago - it was in the thumbnail previews of Google's Video service! My uneducated guess is that a larger % of web users have Flash these days than either WM or QT, plus the integration with the browser is flawless (it is Flash Player afterall).
Re: QT, I find the app. tremendously annoying in Windows. Also, a lot of people do not have it installed. Personally, I'd like to see QT die and go away for web streams.