I don't want to pay these people $35 to buy a copy of their report, nor do I have time to read the whole thing. But I suspect that anyone who does take the time will find faults with the stated conclusions. They aren't necessarily lying -- it's just that the nature of the topic is complex and therefore subject to multiple interpretations.
Due to the interconnected nature of the economy, I don't think that it is meaningful to just say that it takes a certain amount of raw materials to manufacture a computer. For example, does the figure include the water that the cow drank that went into the hamburger that the trucker ate while delivering the VGA connectors? It also takes a ridiculous amount of water to produce a little bit of beef, you know.
Perhaps that was a bit far-fetched, but you can see how there could be lots of discretion in deciding what to include or exclude in the tally.
One way to see if their methodology is fair is to compare the environmental impact of producing computers with that of other products. Here I sense that between the UN University and InfoWorld, someone is being sloppy / misleading / sensationalistic.
The organization's website says that the amount of fossil fuel used to produce an automobile is roughly equal to the product's weight -- which I estimate at 1000 kg.
Their website then suggests that PC manufacturing is wasteful because manufacturing a PC uses 240 kg of fossil fuels, which is 10 times the weight of the finished product.
The InfoWorld article says that producing a computer uses about the same amount of raw materials as producing a mid-size car.
But another way you could interpret this is that PC manufacturing uses mostly water, while car manufacturing is harmful because it relies more heavily on fossil fuels.
I think that may be a bit unfair to compare the materials used to produce a PC and a car against their respective final weights. The goal of electronics is to fit as much complexity as possible into ever shrinking products. The goal of car manufacturers is to make their cars as roomy and as lightweight as practical. Why don't they celebrate the fact that a solar-powered calculator can compute what it used to take an ENIAC to compute? In that light, we're already making tremendous environmental progress.
What does it mean to say that water is used? If you take the water and mix it with some nasty chemicals, then it's polluted. If you use it to wash some dirt off of something, it's dirty but easily returnable to the environment. If you use it to carry away heat in a sealed heat exchanger, it remains perfectly clean but might make some fish unhappy when you return it to the river at a slightly higher temperature. If you took it from the Seattle, it's no big deal; if you took it from Ethiopia, it's a crime against humanity. How much of the 1500 kg of water in a PC is "used" in each way?
Anyway, I don't doubt that PC manufacturing has some significant environmental impact, and that we should find ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But I'm sure that anyone who wants to write a report with an opposite viewpoint could easily do so. Just be aware that the authors have an interest in picking the comparisons that generate the maximum shock value.
We know that last year, Microsoft released a Korean version of Visual Studio.NET that was tainted with Nimda. The codebase was infected through a subcontractor they hired to perform the translation.
So, technically, that release wasn't delayed because one of their servers was compromised -- they just shipped the infected code on time!
Suppose that we ignore the discussion of whether the EU has the authority to revoke the copyrights of Microsoft's products.
What would be the consequences of such an action? If all Microsoft software were sold for nothing, Microsoft automatically gets 98% market share. Microsoft can survive a period of zero revenue in Europe for a while; its competitors can't. It would practically drive all of its competitors out of business. And the EU couldn't even accuse Microsoft of dumping, unless it had that much chutzpah.
So, justified or not, it would be a really stupid stunt to pull.
We've dropped our long distance service from out land line after bouncing around between AT&T and MCI. We used to get calls every few months from AT&T with special deals for switching from MCI, and vice versa. The deals were nice, but the game got annoying after a while.
We called our phone company and told them we didn't want any long distance carrier at all. We now save the few bucks of long-distance monthly fee. Now, whenever we make a long distance call from home, we dial 101-6868 before any long distance call. It's cheap, there's no monthly charge, the voice quality is good, and the call just shows up on our phone bill.
So, dump your long distance company, find a dial-around service that's right for you, and program it on your speed dial! We haven't gotten any more calls from AT&T or MCI since they've found out that we dumped both of them.
Disclaimer: I don't work for any telecom company. Beware of dial-around services that rip you off by quoting a cheap per-minute rate but charge a minimum of 15 minutes per call, or that impose a ha-ha-you-used-our-service-this-month fee.
Absolutely, yes! MapsOnUs.com maps have much higher resolution than the blobby MapQuest ones. Sure, it may take a few seconds longer to render, but it's definitely worth the wait.
For maps of Europe, try Map24.com. They have a really awesome Java applet that is very useful if you want to explore the area you are looking at.
Degaussing the magnetic strip on your driver's license might be considered mutilation, and might be illegal. Besides, a store clerk who gets your license with a damaged magnetic stripe might just decide to hand-copy the information on it, which doesn't help your privacy. What you want to do is to refuse to hand over your license in the first place.
The contracts that the merchants have with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express prohibit them from requiring your ID to charge one of their cards.
Furthermore, in some states it is illegal to ask for personal information when taking a credit card. (Texas is not among them.)
The link has a number of other interesting facts:
Visa and MasterCard don't allow their merchants to specify minimum charges or surcharges for using their cards.
If a merchant doesn't comply with the above rules, you can report them to your credit card company.
Some states (Texas not among them) forbid merchants to write your credit card number on a check.
You don't want to put a lot of noisy equipment in the baby room. Axis makes an all-in-one solution. Their webcams include the camera and webserver, with password protection. Output is JPEG, which is easily viewable from any browser.
The 2420 model looks promising. Let's review the requirements:
UK compatibility: yes. Needs 9-15V, 10A AC or 8W DC power supply, which should be possible. As a bonus, it has analog output in PAL (or NTSC).
Good quality static image: up to 704x536 at low frame rate, or up to 25 frames/sec at low resolution.
Audio: optional
Low light bonus: down to 1 lux. Infrared version also available for 0.5 lux.
Not always on: It has motion detection. Or, the wife could just disconnect a cable. (If you really need privacy, why are you using 802.11b?)
Username/password protection: yes
Plus, it runs Linux inside!
I've never used one, but I think this has everything that you want, and more, for a low low price of USD 1240! It comes with a 30-day trial period. If it's out of your price range, you might want to compromise a bit on your requirements and check out their other models.
The interesting question is, will enough people pick up the patch, so that Verisign will see their efforts wasted? This will only happen if the distros redistribute the patch.
Will the Linux distros provide updates to BIND that include the patch? (I bet yes.)
Will Sun, the dot in.com, update Solaris? (This is harder to guess.) As for Microsoft, I think they will sneak in a patch, to Internet Explorer only, the next time they issue an "urgent" security patch -- though their motive is purely to protect their MSN Search revenue.
This is really wonderful! Now someone can write a worm that cleans up after Nachi. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible, since Nachi closes up the infection route that it used. Thanks, Microsoft!
One of the larger clients of my company has this setup: they have a West Coast and an East Coast information center, presumably with identical hardware and software. At any time, one site is live, and the other is dormant. Data are constantly replicated from the live site to be backed up at the other site. Each Friday evening, they switch roles -- the backup site goes live, and the live site becomes the backup. That way, they know for sure that the backup copy is just as good as the live copy. They rehearse the switchover every week, so it should be no big deal should an emergency happen. With some fancy IP routing, I'll bet that the transition can appear to be transparent, too.
They would still need backups to guard against data corruption. And yes, their hardware and software would cost approximately twice as much. But I have to say, I'm impressed by their idea.
So, you think that Canada has a progressive approach regarding copyright issues, eh? Then why does it tax blank recording media to supposedly pay recording artists? The lobby group that receives all this money hasn't distributed any of it! The current 21-cent or 77-cent tax per CD-R amounts to about the value of the disc itself. Despite the fact that demand and capacity go up and prices fall as technology improves, they want to increase the levies.
Canadians now "pay" recording artists when buying writable CD and DVD media even if they are used to backup your computer data or store a copy of your favorite Linux distro. They may soon have to pay this tax for flash memory for their digital cameras.
The point is, the Canadian industry is not taking any more of a conciliatory approach to the problem of filesharing as you suggest.
Digital rights management requires a whole closed system to make it hard to crack.
It's not possible to implement many features of DRM management using open-source software -- it's too easy for someone to code a loophole when the source is available.
For example, what if you wanted to mark a document was as read-only and unprintable for everyone except the author? If OpenOffice.org supported DRM like this, one would simply hack the program to to disregard such restrictions. It would be a sure bet that someone would create a DRM-circumventing variant, and the DRM-enforcing version would quickly become irrelevant.
At UC Berkeley (home of Unix!), around May 1999, I was a teaching assistant for CS 61B (Introduction to Data Structures). The course was taught in Java (and before that, C). The UC Berkeley CS labs for introductory undergrad courses are all Unix (Solaris x86, HP-UX, DEC OSF/1).
The lecturer received a letter from a Microsoft rep with a proposition to switch to Microsoft technologies, offering all of the software that we could possibly want. It was, of course, immediately tossed into the recycling bin with some sort of remark containing the word "slimey."
I'm terribly sorry that I mismoderated your comment as a Troll because it wasn't obvious at the time what you were trying to say. Now I finally get it -- you're looking for the magic header of DOS.exe files by examining its Base64-encoded representation. DOS.exe files always start with MZ, which translates to TV in Base64.
It's possible, though not likely, that the payload will slip through your filter if for some reason it was uuencoded instead of Base64 encoded. Also, other types of files such as.vbs aren't covered by the rule, so there still needs to be another filter based on file extension.
By posting a reply to the discussion, I hope that it will undo my moderation and bump your comment up a point. And next time, try to express yourself more clearly -- even the metamoderator didn't get it.
I would always get very nasty-looking fsck errors on my Solaris machines whenever they crashed. Although the messages looked nasty, the filesystems seemed to be fine after being repaired by fsck. The problem was that the fscks interrupted the boot process until manual intervention was given.
One day, I discovered a journaling mode for UFS. The journaling feature had been available since Solaris 7. See mount_ufs(1M).
You simply add logging to the mount options of your UFS volumes in/etc/vfstab. Reboot once so that you remount those volumes (presumably including your root partition) with journaling turned on.
That's all! I haven't had to fsck since I did that.
It has been known for a long time that metadata are hidden within Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft even has Knowledge Base article 237361 explaining how to reduce the amount of metadata appearing in MS Word 2000 documents.
Here's an excerpt:
This step-by-step article explains various methods that you can use to minimize the amount of metadata in your Word documents.
Whenever you create, open, or save a document in Microsoft Word 2000, the document may contain content that you may not want to share with others when you distribute the document electronically. This information is known as "metadata". Metadata is used for a variety of purposes to enhance the editing, viewing, filing, and retrieval of Office documents.
Some metadata is easily accessible through the Microsoft Word user interface; other metadata is only accessible through extraordinary means, such as opening a document in a low-level binary file editor. Here are some examples of metadata that may be stored in your documents:
Your name
Your initials
Your company or organization name
The name of your computer
The name of the network server or hard disk where you saved the document
Other file properties and summary information
Non-visible portions of embedded OLE objects
The names of previous document authors
Document revisions
Document versions
Template information
Hidden text
Comments
Metadata is created in a variety of ways in Word documents. As a result, there is no single method to remove all such content from your documents. The following sections describe areas where metadata may be saved in Word documents.
I'll bet there are more, but they won't disclose them.
It's a pity that more people don't just save as RTF. It's just as good for most uses, and it's a less obscure format.
The funny thing is, my dad and I dug up an old Apple II from the closet two years ago. We hadn't used it in so long, it was time to get rid of it. For nostalgia's sake, I decided to use it one last time. I stuck in a floppy, powered it up, the floppy drive whirred for one second, and there was Karateka on the green monochrome screen!
It has been so long, everyone has forgotten about the instant boot of the old personal computers.
As a child, I was never able to win Karateka -- I always got killed by the princess near the end. This time, with modern technology, I found the solution on Google. After 15 years, I finally finished the game, and I could toss the computer away.
Anyway, back on subject... PalmOS boots almost instantly, and I'm quite sure that any Palm today is more powerful than any Apple II ever was. If you could hook up a keyboard and a decent display to one, you would have your instant boot computer.
Actually, several anti-virus companies named this worm W32/Blaster. There ought to be some kind of campaign to make sure people call it W32/Blaster, and not just Blaster. Where's RMS when you need him?
But under Linux, it's so easy to spoof a MAC address.
/sbin/nameif aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
Or, one could transplant a network adapters from one machine to another, especially PCMCIA or USB adapters, and defeat the machine identification unintentionally.
Checking MAC address is a good attempt to keep out unauthorized machines, but hardly foolproof.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to pay these people $35 to buy a copy of their report, nor do I have time to read the whole thing. But I suspect that anyone who does take the time will find faults with the stated conclusions. They aren't necessarily lying -- it's just that the nature of the topic is complex and therefore subject to multiple interpretations.
Due to the interconnected nature of the economy, I don't think that it is meaningful to just say that it takes a certain amount of raw materials to manufacture a computer. For example, does the figure include the water that the cow drank that went into the hamburger that the trucker ate while delivering the VGA connectors? It also takes a ridiculous amount of water to produce a little bit of beef, you know. Perhaps that was a bit far-fetched, but you can see how there could be lots of discretion in deciding what to include or exclude in the tally.
One way to see if their methodology is fair is to compare the environmental impact of producing computers with that of other products. Here I sense that between the UN University and InfoWorld, someone is being sloppy / misleading / sensationalistic.
I think that may be a bit unfair to compare the materials used to produce a PC and a car against their respective final weights. The goal of electronics is to fit as much complexity as possible into ever shrinking products. The goal of car manufacturers is to make their cars as roomy and as lightweight as practical. Why don't they celebrate the fact that a solar-powered calculator can compute what it used to take an ENIAC to compute? In that light, we're already making tremendous environmental progress.
What does it mean to say that water is used? If you take the water and mix it with some nasty chemicals, then it's polluted. If you use it to wash some dirt off of something, it's dirty but easily returnable to the environment. If you use it to carry away heat in a sealed heat exchanger, it remains perfectly clean but might make some fish unhappy when you return it to the river at a slightly higher temperature. If you took it from the Seattle, it's no big deal; if you took it from Ethiopia, it's a crime against humanity. How much of the 1500 kg of water in a PC is "used" in each way?
Anyway, I don't doubt that PC manufacturing has some significant environmental impact, and that we should find ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But I'm sure that anyone who wants to write a report with an opposite viewpoint could easily do so. Just be aware that the authors have an interest in picking the comparisons that generate the maximum shock value.
So, what happens if you feed it an M. C. Escher drawing? Or a drawing of a Klein bottle?
We know that last year, Microsoft released a Korean version of Visual Studio .NET that was tainted with Nimda. The codebase was infected through a subcontractor they hired to perform the translation.
So, technically, that release wasn't delayed because one of their servers was compromised -- they just shipped the infected code on time!
Suppose that we ignore the discussion of whether the EU has the authority to revoke the copyrights of Microsoft's products.
What would be the consequences of such an action? If all Microsoft software were sold for nothing, Microsoft automatically gets 98% market share. Microsoft can survive a period of zero revenue in Europe for a while; its competitors can't. It would practically drive all of its competitors out of business. And the EU couldn't even accuse Microsoft of dumping, unless it had that much chutzpah.
So, justified or not, it would be a really stupid stunt to pull.
You can still make long distance calls from your land line using a 10-10-??? dial-around number.
We've dropped our long distance service from out land line after bouncing around between AT&T and MCI. We used to get calls every few months from AT&T with special deals for switching from MCI, and vice versa. The deals were nice, but the game got annoying after a while.
We called our phone company and told them we didn't want any long distance carrier at all. We now save the few bucks of long-distance monthly fee. Now, whenever we make a long distance call from home, we dial 101-6868 before any long distance call. It's cheap, there's no monthly charge, the voice quality is good, and the call just shows up on our phone bill.
So, dump your long distance company, find a dial-around service that's right for you, and program it on your speed dial! We haven't gotten any more calls from AT&T or MCI since they've found out that we dumped both of them.
Disclaimer: I don't work for any telecom company. Beware of dial-around services that rip you off by quoting a cheap per-minute rate but charge a minimum of 15 minutes per call, or that impose a ha-ha-you-used-our-service-this-month fee.
Absolutely, yes! MapsOnUs.com maps have much higher resolution than the blobby MapQuest ones. Sure, it may take a few seconds longer to render, but it's definitely worth the wait.
For maps of Europe, try Map24.com. They have a really awesome Java applet that is very useful if you want to explore the area you are looking at.
The Homer Simpson Dot Pal would make comments, such as when the Microsoft Word spellchecker detects a typo.
Degaussing the magnetic strip on your driver's license might be considered mutilation, and might be illegal. Besides, a store clerk who gets your license with a damaged magnetic stripe might just decide to hand-copy the information on it, which doesn't help your privacy. What you want to do is to refuse to hand over your license in the first place.
The contracts that the merchants have with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express prohibit them from requiring your ID to charge one of their cards. Furthermore, in some states it is illegal to ask for personal information when taking a credit card. (Texas is not among them.)
The link has a number of other interesting facts:
You don't want to put a lot of noisy equipment in the baby room. Axis makes an all-in-one solution. Their webcams include the camera and webserver, with password protection. Output is JPEG, which is easily viewable from any browser.
The 2420 model looks promising. Let's review the requirements:
Plus, it runs Linux inside!
I've never used one, but I think this has everything that you want, and more, for a low low price of USD 1240! It comes with a 30-day trial period. If it's out of your price range, you might want to compromise a bit on your requirements and check out their other models.
The interesting question is, will enough people pick up the patch, so that Verisign will see their efforts wasted? This will only happen if the distros redistribute the patch.
Will the Linux distros provide updates to BIND that include the patch? (I bet yes.) Will Sun, the dot in .com, update Solaris? (This is harder to guess.) As for Microsoft, I think they will sneak in a patch, to Internet Explorer only, the next time they issue an "urgent" security patch -- though their motive is purely to protect their MSN Search revenue.
DJBDNS already has a patch available.
This is really wonderful! Now someone can write a worm that cleans up after Nachi. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible, since Nachi closes up the infection route that it used. Thanks, Microsoft!
If I may nitpick... Japan and England are both in DVD region 2. Region 2 consists of Japan, Europe, South Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East.
However, if you throw your DVDs away, move to Korea, and buy a new collection, then I'll accept your argument. =)
One of the larger clients of my company has this setup: they have a West Coast and an East Coast information center, presumably with identical hardware and software. At any time, one site is live, and the other is dormant. Data are constantly replicated from the live site to be backed up at the other site. Each Friday evening, they switch roles -- the backup site goes live, and the live site becomes the backup. That way, they know for sure that the backup copy is just as good as the live copy. They rehearse the switchover every week, so it should be no big deal should an emergency happen. With some fancy IP routing, I'll bet that the transition can appear to be transparent, too.
They would still need backups to guard against data corruption. And yes, their hardware and software would cost approximately twice as much. But I have to say, I'm impressed by their idea.
So, you think that Canada has a progressive approach regarding copyright issues, eh? Then why does it tax blank recording media to supposedly pay recording artists? The lobby group that receives all this money hasn't distributed any of it! The current 21-cent or 77-cent tax per CD-R amounts to about the value of the disc itself. Despite the fact that demand and capacity go up and prices fall as technology improves, they want to increase the levies.
Canadians now "pay" recording artists when buying writable CD and DVD media even if they are used to backup your computer data or store a copy of your favorite Linux distro. They may soon have to pay this tax for flash memory for their digital cameras.
The point is, the Canadian industry is not taking any more of a conciliatory approach to the problem of filesharing as you suggest.
Digital rights management requires a whole closed system to make it hard to crack.
It's not possible to implement many features of DRM management using open-source software -- it's too easy for someone to code a loophole when the source is available.
For example, what if you wanted to mark a document was as read-only and unprintable for everyone except the author? If OpenOffice.org supported DRM like this, one would simply hack the program to to disregard such restrictions. It would be a sure bet that someone would create a DRM-circumventing variant, and the DRM-enforcing version would quickly become irrelevant.
What does it matter if a self-DOS charge gets piled on top of fraud charges? We all know that the SCO execs are going to jail anyway. =)
At UC Berkeley (home of Unix!), around May 1999, I was a teaching assistant for CS 61B (Introduction to Data Structures). The course was taught in Java (and before that, C). The UC Berkeley CS labs for introductory undergrad courses are all Unix (Solaris x86, HP-UX, DEC OSF/1).
The lecturer received a letter from a Microsoft rep with a proposition to switch to Microsoft technologies, offering all of the software that we could possibly want. It was, of course, immediately tossed into the recycling bin with some sort of remark containing the word "slimey."
Dear pe1chl,
I'm terribly sorry that I mismoderated your comment as a Troll because it wasn't obvious at the time what you were trying to say. Now I finally get it -- you're looking for the magic header of DOS .exe files by examining its Base64-encoded representation. DOS .exe files always start with MZ, which translates to TV in Base64.
It's possible, though not likely, that the payload will slip through your filter if for some reason it was uuencoded instead of Base64 encoded. Also, other types of files such as .vbs aren't covered by the rule, so there still needs to be another filter based on file extension.
By posting a reply to the discussion, I hope that it will undo my moderation and bump your comment up a point. And next time, try to express yourself more clearly -- even the metamoderator didn't get it.
I would always get very nasty-looking fsck errors on my Solaris machines whenever they crashed. Although the messages looked nasty, the filesystems seemed to be fine after being repaired by fsck. The problem was that the fscks interrupted the boot process until manual intervention was given.
One day, I discovered a journaling mode for UFS. The journaling feature had been available since Solaris 7. See mount_ufs(1M).
You simply add logging to the mount options of your UFS volumes in /etc/vfstab. Reboot once so that you remount those volumes (presumably including your root partition) with journaling turned on.
That's all! I haven't had to fsck since I did that.
It has been known for a long time that metadata are hidden within Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft even has Knowledge Base article 237361 explaining how to reduce the amount of metadata appearing in MS Word 2000 documents. Here's an excerpt:
This step-by-step article explains various methods that you can use to minimize the amount of metadata in your Word documents.
I'll bet there are more, but they won't disclose them.
It's a pity that more people don't just save as RTF. It's just as good for most uses, and it's a less obscure format.
The funny thing is, my dad and I dug up an old Apple II from the closet two years ago. We hadn't used it in so long, it was time to get rid of it. For nostalgia's sake, I decided to use it one last time. I stuck in a floppy, powered it up, the floppy drive whirred for one second, and there was Karateka on the green monochrome screen!
It has been so long, everyone has forgotten about the instant boot of the old personal computers.
As a child, I was never able to win Karateka -- I always got killed by the princess near the end. This time, with modern technology, I found the solution on Google. After 15 years, I finally finished the game, and I could toss the computer away.
Anyway, back on subject... PalmOS boots almost instantly, and I'm quite sure that any Palm today is more powerful than any Apple II ever was. If you could hook up a keyboard and a decent display to one, you would have your instant boot computer.
Actually, several anti-virus companies named this worm W32/Blaster. There ought to be some kind of campaign to make sure people call it W32/Blaster, and not just Blaster. Where's RMS when you need him?
Hey! You're weakening the Linux trademark by verbing it! Stop that!
But under Linux, it's so easy to spoof a MAC address.
Or, one could transplant a network adapters from one machine to another, especially PCMCIA or USB adapters, and defeat the machine identification unintentionally.
Checking MAC address is a good attempt to keep out unauthorized machines, but hardly foolproof.
Did you just say... Flint Hills? With real hills? In Kansas? Did the guys take that into account in the study?