There are legal limits to what you can (or can't) do to LOTS of things.
Exactly correct.
I think what people are missing is that the court ruled that the chips were illegal. Modifying a PS box isn't illegal, but the parts needed to do so are illegal to sell. A truly determined hardware hacker would find a workaround, I'm sure:-)
This is entirely analogous to aftermarket automotive performance equipment that is labelled "offroad use only." It is illegal to use that equipment on a street-driven vehicle. I just wish my local police could figure out that the guy down the block who's just installed a set of Hooker Headers on his 1999 Trans-Camaro didn't bother to put the catalytic converter or the mufflers back on the danged thing.
I publish 15 security-related RSS feeds (scrapers) at my website. In general, they are really small files, so bandwidth is usually not an issue for me. I do publish the frequency with which the feeds are refreshed (usually once per hour).
I won't argue with those who have posted here that some alternative to the "pull" technology of RSS would be very useful. But...
The biggest problem I see isn't newsreaders but blogs. Somebody throws together a blog, inserts a little gizmo to display one of my feeds & then the page draws down the RSS every time the page is reloaded. Given the back-and-forth nature of a lot of folks' web browsing pattern, that means a single user might draw down one of my feeds 10-15 times in a 5 minute span. Now, why couldn't the blogger's software be set to load & cache a copy of the newsfeed according to a schedule?
The honorable mention for RSS abuse goes to the system administrator who set up a newreader screen saver that pulled one of my feeds. He then installed the screen saver on every PC in every office of his company. Every time the screen saver activated, POW! one feed drawn down...
Yes, it's pretty blatant marketing. But what's the difference between this & the "sweetheart" licensing deals that Microsoft offers to K-12 schools, college & universities?
If anything, I'd say giving iPods to new freshmen is more of a marketing gimmick for Duke & not just Apple...
Also, the amount of damage that could be inflicted would be moderate because most PDAs are synchronized with a host PC. So the information on the PDA is essentially backed up multiple times a day.
For PDAs that are regularly synch'ed to a desktop, couldn't the desktop antivirus be tuned to scan files destined for the handheld (or the handheld itself, for that matter)?
I know this option wouldn't be viable for the increasing number of folks who are fetching content wirelessly... But for folks using their PDAs in "plain vanilla" situations, the desktop is a gateway of sorts & could be the logical place for virus checking.
The biggest key to their popularity, I think, is their status as Netscape Navigator's heir.
This is an astute observation & frankly I'm surprised that this comment hasn't gotten more positive moderator attention.
Some of us (e.g., myself included) began using Netscape for browsing & email back when there really wasn't a MSIE to consider. And the first few MSIE releases were just plain cheesy. By the time the MSIE/OE combination became "competitive" (through whatever means), I had an awful lot of email archived in Netscape. So I stuck through "old Netscape" & made the arduous migration to NS 6 & 7.
The only -- repeat only -- reason that MSIE achieved "market dominance" was that it was bundled with a shipload of new PCs. We all know the shenanigans Microsoft engaged in to ensure that MSIE/OE would be the first (and in many cases only) browser-email package neophyte users ever saw. Installing Netscape was the first step towards being a "real" computer user that many folks ever took.
So there is name recognition for Netscape among a lot of users. Mozilla has been able to play off that name association. "It ain't Microsoft" is actually something that may help promote a product these days.
All that said, the icing on the cake is that Mozilla continues to advance, while MSIE is essentially in a "release security patches" holding pattern awaiting whatever horrors are in store when Longhorn is released.
Why dont we see lower power laptops?...using current tech for low power consumption they could make a laptop that has say a 500-600mhz processor and a trans-reflective TFT display like that on PDA's as well as using a hard drive/ram/flash combo to give me 3-4 days run time.
Really, 3-4 days run time would be a holy grail for present-day high-end PDAs let alone subnotebooks. The Palm Tungsten T3 & C handhelds both sport 400 MHz ARM processors, 64 MB RAM, etc. For my T3, 3-4 hours of run time is about it. I treat my T3 like a cellphone & recharge whenever I can. The upside is that the battery seems to recharge fairly quickly.
I've heard that Sony is deprecating the Clié UX line in favor of its VAIO type U "superportable notebook." Gimme 3-4 days of run time on one of those mothers & I'd probably end up unemployed (for dereliction of duty)!
A lot of folks with smartphones wouldn't mind 3-4 days of run time (not just standby) from a charge...
Diversity fosters adaptation & "evolution." Sure, many distros die off because they aren't promoted or don't fill a niche, or lack distinguishing "value added" features.
But a terrific example is Knoppix. It fits a particular niche. And it in turn is derived from Debian Linux. Sounds like a phylogenetic tree to me.
Skolelinux is really a client program adapted from Linux to meet a specific need. Given it's language localization, too, it has really defined its niche. More power to 'em!
Re:I know a man who had this in the Eighties...
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm... Would this wi-fi blocking stuff work against Van Eck Phreaking?
Or more importantly, does the average/.'er need to worry about Van Eck Phreaking?
(The closest I've ever come to worrying about this was my old college girlfriend who would say (while we were ensconced in the back of my van), "Eck! Freak!"
Austin's becoming a hot hot spot because it's still a comparatively small city with the likes of New York and such.
Austin may be small by comparison with NYC but it's a major metro area compared with most places.
Still, your comment made me wonder if wi-fi could be the basis for an economic development model for smaller cities & towns. I wonder if any of the profs at UT are looking at that aspect of the Austin "model"...
I do wonder if the original poster meant to suggest a Bluetooth enabled hearing aid that could interface with a cellphone, creating the ultimate "hearing aid compatible phone" & eliminating the need for hands-free headsets.
I could also see a Bluetooth hearing aid being able to interface directly with a "deaf aid" P.A. system such as churches sometimes install.
... if cellphone service & cellphone companies suck so badly, why don't people quit buying cellphones?
My grandparents did perfectly well without a landline phone. They got their newspaper the next day by USPS (out on the RFD). I never perceived that they felt their lives were somehow incomplete.
How many people that answer their cells so urgently all the time really have life-or-death situations they have to deal with? Very few.
The killer app for BlueTooth will be a BlueTooth enabled key fob that you hang on your keychain. Lost your keys again? Just dial a magic key sequence on your cell phone, which then sends out a BlueTooth transmission. This wakes the key fob, which begins beeping loudly. Now you just walk to the sound and pick up your keys.
I'm sure that an auto manufacturer could build that sort of thing into existing keyless entry systems. The one on my pickup truck has a much better range than Bluetooth.
I would finally ask what you mean by "interfacing" between hearing aids and PCs?
IANAA (I am not an audiologist), but...
I've been wearing a set of digital hearing aids for about five years. They do in fact interface with a PC though a small adapter that fits in the battery door. This allows my audiologist to adjust the frequency equalization curves & even draw down my last audiogram, which is stored in each hearing aid. Moreover, the hearing aids have my name & patient number recorded in them. I don't think Bluetooth would be necessary for this sort of interfacing. I don't think such an interface would even be of much use to an audiologist.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
I guess PalmOne needs to countersue RIM for the form factor itself. IIRC, the original PalmPilot was pitched based entirely on a wooden mock-up of the form factor...
Maybe it's time for them to revisit the MSRP for CDs altogether. When CDs first appeared about 20 years ago, a vinyl LP could be had for six bucks or so. CDs were more than double that price. We were told that the high price was to recoup the R&D costs associated with the new medium.
Surely 20 years has been long enough! Why aren't new albums being released for under $10 as a rule & not the exception?
Price of product & quality of product are the real reasons for declining record company revenues (if their revenues are really declining).
Of course, an undergrad major in biomedical engineering would be a pretty cool "declared major" for someone ultimately planning to go to med school.
The best thing to do with any major is to go to grad school, really.
Now what exactly do they think students are going to download with this kind of connection other than movies and music? The engineering and science students who might have lots of data prob need their lab computers since it has all the needed software on it. My argument is, the bandwitdh will not help much in doing their assignments.
I agree that at present movies & music are probably going to be the top downloads. At present.
But couldn't the availability of that much bandwidth make it actually possible for students to use distributed or client-server applications (or whatever the buzz word du jour happens to be), ultimately reducing the need for those specialized labs?
Without the bandwidth, distributed applications are slugs & nobody wants to use them. But this much available bandwidth may make those applications truly feasible.
Find a competent family counselor and make some appointments with them so you can start to see the bigger picture, where you might be harboring some misconceptions, ways of thinking that might be doing harm both to your sister and to yourself.
This is good advice, but I do want to offer a couple of caveats.
Be aware that a "competent" family counselor is going to charge by the hour at a rate that will make you believe you've been consulting with a neurosurgeon. And there's no way to tell a "competent" counselor from an "incompetent" counselor until after you've consulted with (and paid) them for a while.
Be also aware that if any member of your family doesn't want to participate or follow the suggestions of the counselor (assuming that you did luck out & find a competent one), then the whole process is ruined. Of course, the counselor is not going to give you a refund.
If your sister hasn't done so already, get a second opinion. Maybe a third. If the original diagnosis was by a psychiatrist, get an opinion from a neurologist (and vice versa).
Schizophrenia is an organic disorder. "Talk therapy" (e.g., family counseling) does not treat organic disorders. It may help with whatever "dysfunction" the therapist identifies within your family, but it isn't going to do anything about your sister's disease.
It nothing else, American spammers will just move their operations abroad.
How many American spammers are going to move themselves to China? It's one thing to move the criminal operations overseas, but unless the criminal relocates his own worthless carcass, the fibbies can still go after him. The FBI loves to make cases by "following the money."
It's not just a matter of "outsourcing" the spamming operation overseas. The spammer will have to move to Lower Slobovia, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly correct.
I think what people are missing is that the court ruled that the chips were illegal. Modifying a PS box isn't illegal, but the parts needed to do so are illegal to sell. A truly determined hardware hacker would find a workaround, I'm sure :-)
This is entirely analogous to aftermarket automotive performance equipment that is labelled "offroad use only." It is illegal to use that equipment on a street-driven vehicle. I just wish my local police could figure out that the guy down the block who's just installed a set of Hooker Headers on his 1999 Trans-Camaro didn't bother to put the catalytic converter or the mufflers back on the danged thing.
Excellent! I haven't been able to get $25 for mine!
I won't argue with those who have posted here that some alternative to the "pull" technology of RSS would be very useful. But...
The biggest problem I see isn't newsreaders but blogs. Somebody throws together a blog, inserts a little gizmo to display one of my feeds & then the page draws down the RSS every time the page is reloaded. Given the back-and-forth nature of a lot of folks' web browsing pattern, that means a single user might draw down one of my feeds 10-15 times in a 5 minute span. Now, why couldn't the blogger's software be set to load & cache a copy of the newsfeed according to a schedule?
The honorable mention for RSS abuse goes to the system administrator who set up a newreader screen saver that pulled one of my feeds. He then installed the screen saver on every PC in every office of his company. Every time the screen saver activated, POW! one feed drawn down...
If anything, I'd say giving iPods to new freshmen is more of a marketing gimmick for Duke & not just Apple...
I know this option wouldn't be viable for the increasing number of folks who are fetching content wirelessly... But for folks using their PDAs in "plain vanilla" situations, the desktop is a gateway of sorts & could be the logical place for virus checking.
Read this article again, carefully. (I know the link is redundant in this thread, but scroll down the paragraphs 13 & 14...)
Maybe if those Oxford "journalists" had used naked chicks to hack the system it woulda been more like the regulation British press...
Some of us (e.g., myself included) began using Netscape for browsing & email back when there really wasn't a MSIE to consider. And the first few MSIE releases were just plain cheesy. By the time the MSIE/OE combination became "competitive" (through whatever means), I had an awful lot of email archived in Netscape. So I stuck through "old Netscape" & made the arduous migration to NS 6 & 7.
The only -- repeat only -- reason that MSIE achieved "market dominance" was that it was bundled with a shipload of new PCs. We all know the shenanigans Microsoft engaged in to ensure that MSIE/OE would be the first (and in many cases only) browser-email package neophyte users ever saw. Installing Netscape was the first step towards being a "real" computer user that many folks ever took.
So there is name recognition for Netscape among a lot of users. Mozilla has been able to play off that name association. "It ain't Microsoft" is actually something that may help promote a product these days.
All that said, the icing on the cake is that Mozilla continues to advance, while MSIE is essentially in a "release security patches" holding pattern awaiting whatever horrors are in store when Longhorn is released.
I would assume there would be no limit & an open season...
How many /.ers would like to have a few spammer's heads mounted on the wall in their dens?
Of course, the taxidermists might not like it. Stuffing a spammer is probably worse that stuffing a dead skunk.
I've heard that Sony is deprecating the Clié UX line in favor of its VAIO type U "superportable notebook." Gimme 3-4 days of run time on one of those mothers & I'd probably end up unemployed (for dereliction of duty)!
A lot of folks with smartphones wouldn't mind 3-4 days of run time (not just standby) from a charge...
But a terrific example is Knoppix. It fits a particular niche. And it in turn is derived from Debian Linux. Sounds like a phylogenetic tree to me.
Skolelinux is really a client program adapted from Linux to meet a specific need. Given it's language localization, too, it has really defined its niche. More power to 'em!
Or more importantly, does the average /.'er need to worry about Van Eck Phreaking?
(The closest I've ever come to worrying about this was my old college girlfriend who would say (while we were ensconced in the back of my van), "Eck! Freak!"
Austin may be small by comparison with NYC but it's a major metro area compared with most places.
Still, your comment made me wonder if wi-fi could be the basis for an economic development model for smaller cities & towns. I wonder if any of the profs at UT are looking at that aspect of the Austin "model"...
I could also see a Bluetooth hearing aid being able to interface directly with a "deaf aid" P.A. system such as churches sometimes install.
My grandparents did perfectly well without a landline phone. They got their newspaper the next day by USPS (out on the RFD). I never perceived that they felt their lives were somehow incomplete.
How many people that answer their cells so urgently all the time really have life-or-death situations they have to deal with? Very few.
The killer app for BlueTooth will be a BlueTooth enabled key fob that you hang on your keychain. Lost your keys again? Just dial a magic key sequence on your cell phone, which then sends out a BlueTooth transmission. This wakes the key fob, which begins beeping loudly. Now you just walk to the sound and pick up your keys. I'm sure that an auto manufacturer could build that sort of thing into existing keyless entry systems. The one on my pickup truck has a much better range than Bluetooth.
IANAA (I am not an audiologist), but... I've been wearing a set of digital hearing aids for about five years. They do in fact interface with a PC though a small adapter that fits in the battery door. This allows my audiologist to adjust the frequency equalization curves & even draw down my last audiogram, which is stored in each hearing aid. Moreover, the hearing aids have my name & patient number recorded in them. I don't think Bluetooth would be necessary for this sort of interfacing. I don't think such an interface would even be of much use to an audiologist.
So did I. So a friend & I wrote a scraper. And we enjoyed our headlines until he got the old "cease & desist" notice.
I hope they don't figure out I'm scraping a bunch of Google Groups, too...
Live by the sword, die by the sword. I guess PalmOne needs to countersue RIM for the form factor itself. IIRC, the original PalmPilot was pitched based entirely on a wooden mock-up of the form factor...
Maybe it's time for them to revisit the MSRP for CDs altogether. When CDs first appeared about 20 years ago, a vinyl LP could be had for six bucks or so. CDs were more than double that price. We were told that the high price was to recoup the R&D costs associated with the new medium.
Surely 20 years has been long enough! Why aren't new albums being released for under $10 as a rule & not the exception?
Price of product & quality of product are the real reasons for declining record company revenues (if their revenues are really declining).
Of course, an undergrad major in biomedical engineering would be a pretty cool "declared major" for someone ultimately planning to go to med school. The best thing to do with any major is to go to grad school, really.
We could use that quote talking about almost any browser except MSIE on almost any platform.
More than Mozilla, though, I'd love to see nmap ported to Palm OS. Are you reading /. today, Fyodor? :-)
This is good advice, but I do want to offer a couple of caveats.
- Be aware that a "competent" family counselor is going to charge by the hour at a rate that will make you believe you've been consulting with a neurosurgeon. And there's no way to tell a "competent" counselor from an "incompetent" counselor until after you've consulted with (and paid) them for a while.
- Be also aware that if any member of your family doesn't want to participate or follow the suggestions of the counselor (assuming that you did luck out & find a competent one), then the whole process is ruined. Of course, the counselor is not going to give you a refund.
If your sister hasn't done so already, get a second opinion. Maybe a third. If the original diagnosis was by a psychiatrist, get an opinion from a neurologist (and vice versa). Schizophrenia is an organic disorder. "Talk therapy" (e.g., family counseling) does not treat organic disorders. It may help with whatever "dysfunction" the therapist identifies within your family, but it isn't going to do anything about your sister's disease.How many American spammers are going to move themselves to China? It's one thing to move the criminal operations overseas, but unless the criminal relocates his own worthless carcass, the fibbies can still go after him. The FBI loves to make cases by "following the money."
It's not just a matter of "outsourcing" the spamming operation overseas. The spammer will have to move to Lower Slobovia, too.