I can think of two reasons for a wireless keyboard:
Cleaning around the computer. No wires makes this so much easier, since you can just move the keyboard out of the way when you're dusting. Basically, less clutter, so easier to deal with.
Sharing a computer. If you're working with someone on something, it's easier to pass a wireless keyboard back and forth than pass a wired keyboard about the place.
People do appreciate clutter reduction; this is why non-techs like LCD monitors, wireless keyboards and mice, wireless phone synchronisation, wireless car kits etc.
I looked at the T&Cs for Sitefinder, and decided that I didn't like them (I disliked parts 4,6,7,8,9,12,13 and 14). Since part 10 tells me that my sole remedy is to stop using Sitefinder, I contacted Verisign to ask how to either amend the T&Cs to suit me, or stop using Sitefinder to handle mistyped domains. Their answer? Don't mistype domains.
I doubt that they could enforce their T&Cs on me, since I'm not based in the US, but I personally dislike the idea that I can be obliged to accept a contract just by making a typing error. Further, I really dislike being told that I'm not able to refuse to accept this contract; if I don't like the T&Cs, I should be able to stop using the service.
Um. The numbers are transferred. I've done it several times (I've been on all 5 real networks, plus Virgin with my current number). Landlines bill according to the first 5/6 digits of the mobile number, as do some O2 prepay SIMs. Everyone else bills according to which network the call terminated on.
Further, I'm now on 3, which is a 3G network, and supports video calls. None of the other UK networks support video calling, so any video call routed to them is dropped. However, a friend on 3 can videocall me via my ported number, since the call never leaves 3's network.
The mild jerk as seen on 60Hz TV is a by-product of 3:2 pulldown. A cinema screen is true 24fps, whereas a US TV screen is always 60Hz interlaced.
To get film to run on time on a 60Hz interlaced screen, the standard system is to play one frame from the 24fps film for 3 fields (1.5 frames), then play the next frame for 2 fields (1 frame). This leads to jerkiness, which can also be introduced using a DVE to native 30fps productions. 50Hz territories don't have this issue; 24fps material is played out at 25fps (slightly fast, but not enough to be noticeable).
I'm not bothered about this decision at all, so long as there's no effort to prevent me stripping out the adverts; ideally Mandrake will offer a purchased version without them, but I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to cover their costs with advertising.
Now, if I can't modify it to remove the adverts, and re-upload this version under a new name, that's a different issue.
I know that American bashing is fun for us Europeans, but it's not so much about catching up, as about taking a different view.
We have always taken the view that private individuals have a right to secrecy, and that those individuals should make an effort if they want some data published. The USA has taken the opposite stance; people have a right to reveal information, while keeping it secret should take effort.
In an age where data processing is always manual, the USA had it right; stopping gossip is hard, and there's lots of work involved in revealing information. Further, the more you wish to reveal about someone, the more work you have to perform. Automated data processing has pushed the cost of this work down to the point where it is easy to reveal lots of potentially harmful information in one go.
Basically, it's wrong to look at the Americans as catching up on this one; they took a fundamentally opposed view to us, and it's still not clear who's got the better system (although I prefer the European one).
Except that most people don't type in enough information for the computer to uniquely identify a given piece of information. Case in point: what's the appropriate metadata for "Harry Potter.txt"? Is it a review of a movie, the text of one of the books, some fanfic, a letter to a friend? Or to take your movie example ("just look it up at imdb.org"), what's "Harry Potter.avi"?
Yes, you don't have to fill in all the information, but unless you bother filling it in, the utility of a rich metadata filesystem is greatly reduced, since a lot of the fancy searches return incomplete result sets.
And I doubt they'll be less work than our current filesystems; someone has to get the metadata in there, and none of the projects I've seen address this issue. They're all about making sure of the metadata that's been put in there. Entering it in the first place is usually a matter of filling in a lot of boxes, which I doubt people will bother with (I certainly wouldn't).
My major concern with all these database type filesystems is that the gains are always shown as things like, "Find all films directed by Steven Spielberg", and yet this is not information that the computer can necessarily gather for itself.
Outside of a work environment, I've rarely encounter anyone who keeps consistent, useful filenames, let alone metadata indexes; it seems to me that people will skimp on the metadata, and thus limit the usefulness to metadata that the computer can collect automatically ("All movies that last under 90 minutes"). It's like CD collections, or books; libraries have nicely catalogued and ordered collections. Private individuals don't; they have roughly ordered collections on the shelf, and don't bother keeping them in any better order. I suspect the same will happen with these metadata systems; people won't do the work needed to make them truely useful.
It sounds like the plastic is used to optically stretch the pixels at the edge of the screen over the seam; the software then modifies the image passed out to allow for these unusual shaped pixels.
I don't see the DoS attack here; as far as I can glean from the article, an attacker scanning every possible port on an unused IP address is blocked. No-one other than the attacker is blocked, so there's no DoS.
Something like Blaster scans the network for vunerable machines; some of these IPs are unassigned. Billy Goat detects the attempts to access unassigned IPs, and alerts admins/firewalls your box off/generally makes noise.
The result is that something like Blaster gets caught before your whole network is infested; Billy Goat ignores a slashdotting, since all the traffic goes to assigned IPs.
It sounds like a nice extension of egress filtering; you know which of your IPs are unassigned, and so you assume that boxes trying to access unused IPs are up to no good, and act accordingly (firewall the affected box off, and investigate). Slows worm propagation, and discourages people from scanning your entire address space unnecessarily.
It's extremely card dependant. Flash chips vary between 10,000 and 1,000,000 erases per erase unit (often 32 or 64Kbytes). However, the card can do write-balancing, which moves data around to even out the number of erases each EU receives.
So, you are extremely unlucky if you get less than 10,000 write cycles. A million should be about right, more is good luck:)
It means that users who pay for counterfeit copies of Symantec's products discover that they are counterfeit; there has been a spam going round which advertises Norton SystemWorks. In fact the copy they send you is pirated.
Users who aren't currently bothered about the origins of their Symantec software lose out; users who thought they had bought Symantec-blessed copies will be notified at install time, not 12 months down the road when they can't get updates, and get accused of piracy if they complain.
Depends what you're sending. Uncompressed HDTV gets serialized onto 1.485GBit/s SMPTE 292 links; this is a lot of data. When you compress it, it is possible to get reasonable results at around 10-20MBit/s, but it does depend on how much compression you're happy with, and how much encoder delay is OK.
Yes, and that chocolate bar has been devalued when you try to sell it to someone else, who now may not buy it. Maybe he won't make chocolate anymore becaus e its not worth his time when people just go around stealing it.
Yes, it was stolen. If you have it and it wasn't paid for, you stole it. That's a moral term in this case, not a legal one. The law necessarily has to make very explicit distinctions between actions, for...ahem...legal reasons. Thats why we have terms like "tax avoision".
But in this case, it has been paid for; the person who got chocolate from the store owner paid for it. Saying that it was stolen, because the person who you sold it to gave it to someone else, doesn't make sense to me; are you really claiming that I stole my wallet, because it was given to me for my birthday?
Copyright infringement is a different thing to theft; the end result may well be less money for the originators of items, but the differences in the process are significant, and worth keeping sight of. Otherwise, you start to argue that the only way to legalise copyright infringement is to legalise theft (although getting rid of copyright would also work, as would adding a need for monetary consideration).
Um. Not all DRM is unbeneficial to the consumer. My mail server has digital rights management set up; it prevents anyone not on my internal network from sending e-mail to the world. This is a good thing for me, since it means that my machine is not abused for other people's e-mail, and a good thing for you, since it prevents my machine being used for spam.
Compulsory DRM may or may not be a bad thing, and I would agree that many of the schemes being thrown around are not good, but not all DRM is bad.
There are dual-mode phones already; I have an NEC e606 in front of me, which functions as a 3G CDMA phone on UMTS networks, and as a 2G TDMA phone on GSM networks.
I feel like ranting here, so just ignore me; the reason GSM was mandated (rather than leaving the market to decide) was to facilitate competition. Likewise with UMTS (which is a CDMA system, incidentally - my NEC e606 even uses Qualcomm's patents).
The idea is that handsets are expensive, but SIM cards are cheap (I can buy a prepay SIM for £5, but SIM-free handsets are at least £100). Given a guarantee that all phones of a given generation take the same SIM type (so all 2G SIMs are equivalent to the handset, and all 3G SIMs are equivalent to the handset), I can get a handset I like, and then purchase a SIM for the network I want; if I dislike the handset, I can buy a new one without hassling the network, and if I dislike the service, I can buy a new SIM cheaply.
Of course, it hasn't quite worked out like this; cheap calls tend to be tied to both handset purchase and long term commitment. The only benefit left is SIM swapping; I can have one SIM card for each network in each country I travel within, and swap SIMs to give me the best coverage and cheap calls.
It's also spun in the opposite direction to normal DVDs, so that even if you got an 8cm DVD-R blank, the spiral would be wrong, and so you could not copy the disc.
Further, this prevents you imaging a GameCube disc for storage or transmission via a PC, since your DVD drive cannot read the media.
I use the acronyms here, because I assume that/. has a technical audience. I would hope that manufacturers of consumer WiFi kit provide a simple option in the standard setup sequence to "turn on security". If they don't, then that's something the manufacturers should be doing.
If the manufacturers don't tell you to turn on security (or have WEP on by default), then I'd say they are at fault. My cellphone (a GSM phone) came with a warning in the manual that it would indicate if I was using an insecure connection; why shouldn't WiFi equipment have a similar warning in it's setup guide?
Expecting, like the NH law does, that people like these would be able to secure a network well enough to keep war drivers and others out is unreasonable. They need a working wireless network, they bought it in a box, they can barely manage to install it. They have no clue on security. If they had to get a clue, they would have to hire an expert. That would cost enough money to make them do without the wireless network in many cases.
I fail to see why it's unreasonable to expect them to do *something* to indicate that it's private. As far as I can tell, the bill does not require your WiFi network to be completely secure, merely to have been confiqured in a way that indicates that you've tried to secure it.
In other words, if you turn on WEP or use IPSec, the law definitely won't protect me if I connect to your WiFi AP; it doesn't matter that WEP is broken, or that you've used a silly password. What matters is that I've had to bypass your security to use your AP.
Last I looked, 3G has the big advantage of coverage. The 3G cell nearest me in London (UK) has the same coverage area as all the Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK; until Wi-Fi can cover me all the way on my train from Waterloo to home, it's not going to be able to compete.
Slashdot Mirror
People do appreciate clutter reduction; this is why non-techs like LCD monitors, wireless keyboards and mice, wireless phone synchronisation, wireless car kits etc.
I doubt that they could enforce their T&Cs on me, since I'm not based in the US, but I personally dislike the idea that I can be obliged to accept a contract just by making a typing error. Further, I really dislike being told that I'm not able to refuse to accept this contract; if I don't like the T&Cs, I should be able to stop using the service.
Further, I'm now on 3, which is a 3G network, and supports video calls. None of the other UK networks support video calling, so any video call routed to them is dropped. However, a friend on 3 can videocall me via my ported number, since the call never leaves 3's network.
To get film to run on time on a 60Hz interlaced screen, the standard system is to play one frame from the 24fps film for 3 fields (1.5 frames), then play the next frame for 2 fields (1 frame). This leads to jerkiness, which can also be introduced using a DVE to native 30fps productions. 50Hz territories don't have this issue; 24fps material is played out at 25fps (slightly fast, but not enough to be noticeable).
Now, if I can't modify it to remove the adverts, and re-upload this version under a new name, that's a different issue.
We have always taken the view that private individuals have a right to secrecy, and that those individuals should make an effort if they want some data published. The USA has taken the opposite stance; people have a right to reveal information, while keeping it secret should take effort.
In an age where data processing is always manual, the USA had it right; stopping gossip is hard, and there's lots of work involved in revealing information. Further, the more you wish to reveal about someone, the more work you have to perform. Automated data processing has pushed the cost of this work down to the point where it is easy to reveal lots of potentially harmful information in one go.
Basically, it's wrong to look at the Americans as catching up on this one; they took a fundamentally opposed view to us, and it's still not clear who's got the better system (although I prefer the European one).
Yes, you don't have to fill in all the information, but unless you bother filling it in, the utility of a rich metadata filesystem is greatly reduced, since a lot of the fancy searches return incomplete result sets.
And I doubt they'll be less work than our current filesystems; someone has to get the metadata in there, and none of the projects I've seen address this issue. They're all about making sure of the metadata that's been put in there. Entering it in the first place is usually a matter of filling in a lot of boxes, which I doubt people will bother with (I certainly wouldn't).
Outside of a work environment, I've rarely encounter anyone who keeps consistent, useful filenames, let alone metadata indexes; it seems to me that people will skimp on the metadata, and thus limit the usefulness to metadata that the computer can collect automatically ("All movies that last under 90 minutes"). It's like CD collections, or books; libraries have nicely catalogued and ordered collections. Private individuals don't; they have roughly ordered collections on the shelf, and don't bother keeping them in any better order. I suspect the same will happen with these metadata systems; people won't do the work needed to make them truely useful.
It sounds like the plastic is used to optically stretch the pixels at the edge of the screen over the seam; the software then modifies the image passed out to allow for these unusual shaped pixels.
I don't see the DoS attack here; as far as I can glean from the article, an attacker scanning every possible port on an unused IP address is blocked. No-one other than the attacker is blocked, so there's no DoS.
The result is that something like Blaster gets caught before your whole network is infested; Billy Goat ignores a slashdotting, since all the traffic goes to assigned IPs.
It sounds like a nice extension of egress filtering; you know which of your IPs are unassigned, and so you assume that boxes trying to access unused IPs are up to no good, and act accordingly (firewall the affected box off, and investigate). Slows worm propagation, and discourages people from scanning your entire address space unnecessarily.
So, you are extremely unlucky if you get less than 10,000 write cycles. A million should be about right, more is good luck :)
Users who aren't currently bothered about the origins of their Symantec software lose out; users who thought they had bought Symantec-blessed copies will be notified at install time, not 12 months down the road when they can't get updates, and get accused of piracy if they complain.
Depends what you're sending. Uncompressed HDTV gets serialized onto 1.485GBit/s SMPTE 292 links; this is a lot of data. When you compress it, it is possible to get reasonable results at around 10-20MBit/s, but it does depend on how much compression you're happy with, and how much encoder delay is OK.
Copyright infringement is a different thing to theft; the end result may well be less money for the originators of items, but the differences in the process are significant, and worth keeping sight of. Otherwise, you start to argue that the only way to legalise copyright infringement is to legalise theft (although getting rid of copyright would also work, as would adding a need for monetary consideration).
Compulsory DRM may or may not be a bad thing, and I would agree that many of the schemes being thrown around are not good, but not all DRM is bad.
There are dual-mode phones already; I have an NEC e606 in front of me, which functions as a 3G CDMA phone on UMTS networks, and as a 2G TDMA phone on GSM networks.
The idea is that handsets are expensive, but SIM cards are cheap (I can buy a prepay SIM for £5, but SIM-free handsets are at least £100). Given a guarantee that all phones of a given generation take the same SIM type (so all 2G SIMs are equivalent to the handset, and all 3G SIMs are equivalent to the handset), I can get a handset I like, and then purchase a SIM for the network I want; if I dislike the handset, I can buy a new one without hassling the network, and if I dislike the service, I can buy a new SIM cheaply.
Of course, it hasn't quite worked out like this; cheap calls tend to be tied to both handset purchase and long term commitment. The only benefit left is SIM swapping; I can have one SIM card for each network in each country I travel within, and swap SIMs to give me the best coverage and cheap calls.
Further, this prevents you imaging a GameCube disc for storage or transmission via a PC, since your DVD drive cannot read the media.
If the manufacturers don't tell you to turn on security (or have WEP on by default), then I'd say they are at fault. My cellphone (a GSM phone) came with a warning in the manual that it would indicate if I was using an insecure connection; why shouldn't WiFi equipment have a similar warning in it's setup guide?
I fail to see why it's unreasonable to expect them to do *something* to indicate that it's private. As far as I can tell, the bill does not require your WiFi network to be completely secure, merely to have been confiqured in a way that indicates that you've tried to secure it.
In other words, if you turn on WEP or use IPSec, the law definitely won't protect me if I connect to your WiFi AP; it doesn't matter that WEP is broken, or that you've used a silly password. What matters is that I've had to bypass your security to use your AP.
It does work; I've run a couple of the example programs, and I've managed to get it to run a modified one of my own.
Last I looked, 3G has the big advantage of coverage. The 3G cell nearest me in London (UK) has the same coverage area as all the Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK; until Wi-Fi can cover me all the way on my train from Waterloo to home, it's not going to be able to compete.
Until then, a better GPS for the world is a good idea; if nothing else, two systems means that if one fails, the other is still useful.