Good point. That has happened to me as well. A better example for me would be when a "friend of a friend" needed help getting everything set-up on her XP home machine. When I was installing everything, the lady mentioned that her brother owns a local motorcycle shop. She put me in touch with him, and he offered me a bike at a big discount. I could have saved a couple grand on it, but I already had one, so he gave me a helmet for free for helping her out. Oh yeah, and she paid me a ton for setting up her stuff, which only took me like 30min to do.
Although, I suppose if she had bought a mac, then I wouldn't have been able to do much for her. Maybe she wouldn't have needed any help. The only mac I ever bought is collecting dust - mac mini, 1st generation base model - only has a 20gb HD. Still a cool conversation piece.
Complain all you want about Vista(I hate it!) but here's the reality:
Someone important to you will buy a Vista-loaded machine, things will crash constantly, and you will be called in to fix it. If you don't know how to fix it, you'll look like you don't know what you're doing. Happened to me when I tried to resist XP. Linux/Mac are great, but what are you gonna tell this person... "Hey, return this laptop and buy a Mac/Linux-loaded one just because I don't know how to fix Vista". That will make you look even worse! It wasn't always part of my job, but knowing how to fix Windows PC's has opened many doors for me(personally and professionally).
The moral of the story for most of us in IT is this: Love it or hate it, Vista is here to stay. You don't have to use it yourself, but unless you work at Ernie Ball or Google, you should at least be prepared to support this platform and its shortcomings.
But my dilemma is this: It would cost more in man-hours to re-educate my users than it would be to just buy new machines+vista. I'd like to give MS the finger but I know I'll get smacked down.
I see MAJOR hack-potential.
Imagine how nice it would be to swap movies(Crossing my fingers for Divx/xvid)... with a decent connection, most movies should be transferrable in a few minutes...or TV shows - one episode should take less than a minute to transfer.. You're talking to someone and they have a movie/show/clip you haven't seen - just pull out your Zune and swap it. It reminds me of the "good old days" when I had my palmpilot and I would tell someone about a cool program I had - I could just beam it to them and they'd have it, no hassle.
So yeah, as soon as it gets h4x0rd, I'm rushing out and buying one... and come on, you KNOW it's gonna get hacked. It's not really a question of IF, but WHEN.
...and I'm definitely not gonna get it in that "skidmark brown" color.
Well, that's certainly a possibility. It's just depressing to see my geek brethren concentrate so much on money and not on the finer things in life. Yeah, they always have the alize, but no-one to share it with. That being said, your comment was definitely better than mine and I wasn't trying to diss. Rock on, brotha.
It sounds like you're a sort of workaholic, among other things. I'm sure you've accumulated quite a nice stack of cash, but consider this: When you die, you can't take it with you. What really matters are the things that can't pull out at any atm.
Consider this: you wake up one day, you're 38 years old, and all alone. No family, few friends, but you have stacks of cash. Does that sound like fun? I don't think so. Take a pay-cut, hire a middle-manager, and spend sime time out of the office. Your life is waiting for you out there.
If you're self-employed, you should be able to tell when the business is going south. Assuming you've still got marketable skills, finding a job shouldn't be hard. If you're good at living lean, there's always a way out. I don't keep hardly any money in savings. I just keep one of those "zero percent for a year" credit card apps. Those things are a godsend, as long as you're responsible about it.
The best thing you can do is to bring in a "security analyst" that is a CISA(Certified Information Security Analyst). I know a guy who has this cert and he says that there are a lot of banks out there that don't take security seriously(scary, I know). Given the "cost of failure" in this situation, I wouldn't try some harebrained scheme I saw in the movies. I'd just want it done right so I could sleep at night.
I know you're already a kind of "consultant"(i.e: the person with all the answers) but it may be time to swallow your pride and admit you don't know it all.
I could see a capitalist government trying to hide a technology like "free energy". Think about how it would work, and then realize that nobody could make a profit off of it. People that fix your plumbing/AC/refrigerator would also fix your "free energy generator". They would make a little more money. Everybody else would go broke - anyone working with oil/hydroelectric/nuclear/wind power. Trillions of dollars tied to traditional energy would be down the drain. Cars would have much fewer moving parts and therefore would last 30 years instead of the standard 5(maybe 10) years we get out of current new cars. Many other possible impacts, but few would result in anything other than a global economic depression.
Then, I just remembered that I read a few articles on how "antimatter weapons" could be many times more powerful (and compact) than current nukes. As I recall(faintly), the only problem with this was that they required a vast amount of energy to work - like all the US powerplants working together for ten years to make one bomb.
Combining these two "technologies", a person working in their garage could make a weapon that could easily level a major city. They would not need any extraordinary materials/training, just a jolly-roger type of bomb-cookbook. Imagine if the 9/11 hijackers had access to this. The US would just be a crater right now.
With that being said, I like the idea of thermodynamics a lot better. Even if free energy DID exist, we'd be better off without it.
I know the listed speeds are dramatically different, but I've noticed that celeron processors are dramatically slower than their full-priced counterparts. I'd like to see that comparison against two equally-spec'd "350MHz" machines. THAT one, I'd believe.
It just backs up my longtime axiom: "Friends don't let friends buy celerons"
Here's your better link. From info in TFA and here, it looks like Streamcast is alleging that Skype(and others) did one(or more) of many things:
a. use an enterprise to launder money generated by a pattern of racketeering activity
b. a victim business owner cannot make payments to a loan shark; upon default, the loan shark says: "you're either going to die or you're going to give me your business." Given the threat to this life, the victim transfers control of his business to the loan shark. Usually, the victim business owner remains the owner on paper but the loan shark controls the business and receives all income from the business. Thus, the loan shark has acquired and maintained interest or control over an enterprise (i.e. the business) through a pattern of racketeering (i.e., loan sharking and extortion).
c. [Streamcast] has been injured by reason of the defendants' investment of the proceeds of racketeering activity / (1) a defendant person[Skype] (2) was employed by or associated with an enterprise (3) that engaged in or affected interstate commerce and that (4) the defendant person operated or managed the enterprise (5) through a pattern (6) of racketeering activity, and (7) the plaintiff[Streamcast] was injured in its business or property by reason of the pattern of racketeering activity.
I've had PocketPC-Phones for a while, and I agree - TCPMP(aka BetaPlayer) is definitely the best video player.
For encoding, there's a great prog called "pocket-DVD Studio". It will grab a DVD or File, and DIVX it. It works fast-@1hr per dvd. Most movies are ~200MB. It'll crop letterboxes, allow you to pick the output resolution/bitrate/audio, and tell you the final file-size before it even starts. afaik, nothing else does the trick. Stay away from pocketdivxencoder-It's corrupted a few of my files.
If google wanted to, they could make Orkut better than MySpace, in the span of a week. MySpace would get caught "sans culottes" like hotmail did when gmail came out.
I use Orkut, and it is slow, feature-poor, and prone to errors. I don't know who at Google is responsible for it, but I've complained a number of times about it and nothing ever gets done about anything. (I'm a sysadmin, so yes I've already tried different connections, browsers, hardware, etc. all the same) My reason for trying it is the MySpace/YouTube debacle, but if none of my friends like Orkut, what am I to do...
And by the way, if the $47M is gross revenue, it is likely that the MySpace is losing money overall. That would be nice. They are such ad-whores.
Apparently, 90 percent of the CE industry and seven movie studios now back Blu-ray Disc. And most of the IT industry (except Microsoft) also supports Blu-ray Disc.
In a PR-War such as this, I think any combatant would be quick to proclaim victory first. It doesn't take Sun Tzu to figure that one out. I mean, who exactly ARE all these "backers" anyway? Without a credible list of backers and non-backers(on both sides), how are we to determine the true victor at this time?
Oh, and about the DRM thing - I wouldn't worry about that. Any system created by man can be defeated by man. Think DeCSS. I think we will see similar hacks with BD, HD-DVD, HVD, etc. The MPAA will get all red-eyed, but there won't be anything they can do about it at the end of the day.
I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but doesn't anyone remember watching this exact thing being done near San Diego? There was a discovery channel special on it. They embedded cheap little magnets in the highway and the vehicles tracked based on those. They even had a public demonstration on it. The group that did it was called "PATH" from Berkeley and their summary of the experiment(from 1997!) is Here.
On a related note, I also remember seeing(in the same show) a piece on a van that was rigged to self-drive. They navigated cross-country on public roads with 97% of the driving being automated. This was done by CS majors using standard equipment publicly available at the time(no later than '97). It shouldn't take much adaptation to make it user-friendly and foolproof enough to survive public use... lawyers may be another story though.
SO, MY question is... why are we having so much difficulty with this now?...and why is GM billing this as some "amazing new discovery that is 3 years on the horizon"? Couldn't GM just go to those college students and buy the technology off of them for a few six-packs?
It seems like the only real barriers to this technology will be political, but that's just my $.02
btw, some of the print-quality files are enormous, so keep browsing limited to the pdf versions to avoid (rapid) slashdotting. Maybe a kind soul can post a torrent of all of them if too many people hit it?
Not only this, but I could see common VOIP applications building an option that would block (or use whitelisting on) phone calls from certain countries or area codes.
This is what makes VOIP such a great thing: innovative technologies cannot be squelched by a self-serving monopoly. If the customer wants a technology and his current "phone provider" doesn't care, he will simply switch to another provider who is willing to cater to the customer. What is right and wrong will be decided by the actual customer by choosing one phone provider over another, and not by throngs of high-priced lawyers screaming "free speech!!!"
An example of a technology that a customer would want but would never get in the USA could be this: Taking an idea from the ORDB, you could build a function into VOIP applications that allows the user to subscribe to a community-maintained list of telemarketers. If this function were implemented in POTS lines, we would have never needed the do-not-call list because telemarketers would have only called a few people before being blocked by the world. (Unfortunately for the proletariat, the US telephone companies always liked telemarketers because they brought in consistent revenue by virtue that they made heavy use of phone lines. I speculate that the deregulation of phone lines somewhat weakened and fragmented the big-telecom-lobby, and that's why we were able to get the do-not-call-list?)
Caller-ID-block is a weakness in this system, but if everyone also blocked the "blocked caller ID" people, then only the spammers would have caller-ID-block and the knot would untie itself.
My offtopic friend, all you need to do is become a master of this tool, formflood. It's on sourceforge and will allow you to single-handedly slashdot any page with a form(i.e. Phishing sites). Enjoy!
Spyware has been around for a very long time and it won't go away. I think if M$ could have stopped it, they would - it's a lot like viruses. As long as the spyware websites say "Free screensavers and such", there will be people that will install them.
And as far as linux/firefox/etc goes - those are programs created by humans, and they are not perfect either. Their (relatively) low usage numbers don't make them a target for spyware/malware YET.
That may be true, but when you're talking about lifting multi-million dollar satellites into a specific orbit, you don't want to use technology that does not perform absolutely perfectly.
I was talking with a guy in-the-know, and he said that if the parts in your launch vehicle didn't boast some ridiculously high MTBF(mean time between failures), nobody with a satellite would even consider contracting your services.
Taking that into consideration, the shortcomings are quite serious now, aren't they? I don't think this rig is ready for prime-time yet...
The program should recognize which server it came from("received" in full headers), and blackhole that server because it's obviously an open relay, at the very least.
On a related note, I find it amazing that various antivirus/antispam vendors are still using the "From" line to report abuses. Do viruses or spam ever come from real email addresses? Not usually. I'm pretty much the victim of a "joe-job" on a regular basis because of this.
It will not do anything to stop the spead of spam, and this is why:
These 120 spammers represent a very small section of the entire spammer population, and I doubt that they've got big guys like Ralsky on it. You won't see M$ getting anywhere near the spam gangs, either. In fact, when you think about it, M$ is the reason some spam gangs even exist! Think about all the security holes in XP that allow it to be hijacked and used as a spam relay. Also, think about the "open-relay-by-default" nature of some M$ mailserver products. Maybe these lawsuits are Microsoft's way of saying "Our bad!"
Given the difficulty/cost of tracking down spammers and nailing them, I think it will just turn spamming into a different industry. The (smart) spammers will just go farther underground and become more sophisticated in their ways of avoiding detection/liability. These 120 guys were probably just amateurs that didn't know what they were doing anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. That has happened to me as well. A better example for me would be when a "friend of a friend" needed help getting everything set-up on her XP home machine. When I was installing everything, the lady mentioned that her brother owns a local motorcycle shop. She put me in touch with him, and he offered me a bike at a big discount. I could have saved a couple grand on it, but I already had one, so he gave me a helmet for free for helping her out. Oh yeah, and she paid me a ton for setting up her stuff, which only took me like 30min to do.
Although, I suppose if she had bought a mac, then I wouldn't have been able to do much for her. Maybe she wouldn't have needed any help. The only mac I ever bought is collecting dust - mac mini, 1st generation base model - only has a 20gb HD. Still a cool conversation piece.
Complain all you want about Vista(I hate it!) but here's the reality:
Someone important to you will buy a Vista-loaded machine, things will crash constantly, and you will be called in to fix it. If you don't know how to fix it, you'll look like you don't know what you're doing. Happened to me when I tried to resist XP. Linux/Mac are great, but what are you gonna tell this person... "Hey, return this laptop and buy a Mac/Linux-loaded one just because I don't know how to fix Vista". That will make you look even worse! It wasn't always part of my job, but knowing how to fix Windows PC's has opened many doors for me(personally and professionally).
The moral of the story for most of us in IT is this: Love it or hate it, Vista is here to stay. You don't have to use it yourself, but unless you work at Ernie Ball or Google, you should at least be prepared to support this platform and its shortcomings.
But my dilemma is this: It would cost more in man-hours to re-educate my users than it would be to just buy new machines+vista. I'd like to give MS the finger but I know I'll get smacked down.
I see MAJOR hack-potential.
...and I'm definitely not gonna get it in that "skidmark brown" color.
Imagine how nice it would be to swap movies(Crossing my fingers for Divx/xvid)... with a decent connection, most movies should be transferrable in a few minutes...or TV shows - one episode should take less than a minute to transfer.. You're talking to someone and they have a movie/show/clip you haven't seen - just pull out your Zune and swap it. It reminds me of the "good old days" when I had my palmpilot and I would tell someone about a cool program I had - I could just beam it to them and they'd have it, no hassle.
So yeah, as soon as it gets h4x0rd, I'm rushing out and buying one... and come on, you KNOW it's gonna get hacked. It's not really a question of IF, but WHEN.
They're stoners. whoaaaa....
Well, that's certainly a possibility. It's just depressing to see my geek brethren concentrate so much on money and not on the finer things in life. Yeah, they always have the alize, but no-one to share it with. That being said, your comment was definitely better than mine and I wasn't trying to diss. Rock on, brotha.
It sounds like you're a sort of workaholic, among other things. I'm sure you've accumulated quite a nice stack of cash, but consider this: When you die, you can't take it with you. What really matters are the things that can't pull out at any atm.
Consider this: you wake up one day, you're 38 years old, and all alone. No family, few friends, but you have stacks of cash. Does that sound like fun? I don't think so. Take a pay-cut, hire a middle-manager, and spend sime time out of the office. Your life is waiting for you out there.
If you're self-employed, you should be able to tell when the business is going south. Assuming you've still got marketable skills, finding a job shouldn't be hard. If you're good at living lean, there's always a way out. I don't keep hardly any money in savings. I just keep one of those "zero percent for a year" credit card apps. Those things are a godsend, as long as you're responsible about it.
The best thing you can do is to bring in a "security analyst" that is a CISA(Certified Information Security Analyst). I know a guy who has this cert and he says that there are a lot of banks out there that don't take security seriously(scary, I know). Given the "cost of failure" in this situation, I wouldn't try some harebrained scheme I saw in the movies. I'd just want it done right so I could sleep at night.
I know you're already a kind of "consultant"(i.e: the person with all the answers) but it may be time to swallow your pride and admit you don't know it all.
I could see a capitalist government trying to hide a technology like "free energy". Think about how it would work, and then realize that nobody could make a profit off of it. People that fix your plumbing/AC/refrigerator would also fix your "free energy generator". They would make a little more money. Everybody else would go broke - anyone working with oil/hydroelectric/nuclear/wind power. Trillions of dollars tied to traditional energy would be down the drain. Cars would have much fewer moving parts and therefore would last 30 years instead of the standard 5(maybe 10) years we get out of current new cars. Many other possible impacts, but few would result in anything other than a global economic depression.
Then, I just remembered that I read a few articles on how "antimatter weapons" could be many times more powerful (and compact) than current nukes. As I recall(faintly), the only problem with this was that they required a vast amount of energy to work - like all the US powerplants working together for ten years to make one bomb.
Combining these two "technologies", a person working in their garage could make a weapon that could easily level a major city. They would not need any extraordinary materials/training, just a jolly-roger type of bomb-cookbook. Imagine if the 9/11 hijackers had access to this. The US would just be a crater right now.
With that being said, I like the idea of thermodynamics a lot better. Even if free energy DID exist, we'd be better off without it.
I know the listed speeds are dramatically different, but I've noticed that celeron processors are dramatically slower than their full-priced counterparts. I'd like to see that comparison against two equally-spec'd "350MHz" machines. THAT one, I'd believe.
It just backs up my longtime axiom: "Friends don't let friends buy celerons"
Here's your better link. From info in TFA and here, it looks like Streamcast is alleging that Skype(and others) did one(or more) of many things:
a. use an enterprise to launder money generated by a pattern of racketeering activity
b. a victim business owner cannot make payments to a loan shark; upon default, the loan shark says: "you're either going to die or you're going to give me your business." Given the threat to this life, the victim transfers control of his business to the loan shark. Usually, the victim business owner remains the owner on paper but the loan shark controls the business and receives all income from the business. Thus, the loan shark has acquired and maintained interest or control over an enterprise (i.e. the business) through a pattern of racketeering (i.e., loan sharking and extortion).
c. [Streamcast] has been injured by reason of the defendants' investment of the proceeds of racketeering activity / (1) a defendant person[Skype] (2) was employed by or associated with an enterprise (3) that engaged in or affected interstate commerce and that (4) the defendant person operated or managed the enterprise (5) through a pattern (6) of racketeering activity, and (7) the plaintiff[Streamcast] was injured in its business or property by reason of the pattern of racketeering activity.
I've had PocketPC-Phones for a while, and I agree - TCPMP(aka BetaPlayer) is definitely the best video player.
For encoding, there's a great prog called "pocket-DVD Studio". It will grab a DVD or File, and DIVX it. It works fast-@1hr per dvd. Most movies are ~200MB. It'll crop letterboxes, allow you to pick the output resolution/bitrate/audio, and tell you the final file-size before it even starts. afaik, nothing else does the trick. Stay away from pocketdivxencoder-It's corrupted a few of my files.
If google wanted to, they could make Orkut better than MySpace, in the span of a week. MySpace would get caught "sans culottes" like hotmail did when gmail came out.
I use Orkut, and it is slow, feature-poor, and prone to errors. I don't know who at Google is responsible for it, but I've complained a number of times about it and nothing ever gets done about anything. (I'm a sysadmin, so yes I've already tried different connections, browsers, hardware, etc. all the same) My reason for trying it is the MySpace/YouTube debacle, but if none of my friends like Orkut, what am I to do...
And by the way, if the $47M is gross revenue, it is likely that the MySpace is losing money overall. That would be nice. They are such ad-whores.
This was the paragraph that caught my eye:
Apparently, 90 percent of the CE industry and seven movie studios now back Blu-ray Disc. And most of the IT industry (except Microsoft) also supports Blu-ray Disc.
In a PR-War such as this, I think any combatant would be quick to proclaim victory first. It doesn't take Sun Tzu to figure that one out. I mean, who exactly ARE all these "backers" anyway? Without a credible list of backers and non-backers(on both sides), how are we to determine the true victor at this time?
Oh, and about the DRM thing - I wouldn't worry about that. Any system created by man can be defeated by man. Think DeCSS. I think we will see similar hacks with BD, HD-DVD, HVD, etc. The MPAA will get all red-eyed, but there won't be anything they can do about it at the end of the day.
I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but doesn't anyone remember watching this exact thing being done near San Diego? There was a discovery channel special on it. They embedded cheap little magnets in the highway and the vehicles tracked based on those. They even had a public demonstration on it. The group that did it was called "PATH" from Berkeley and their summary of the experiment(from 1997!) is Here. ...and why is GM billing this as some "amazing new discovery that is 3 years on the horizon"? Couldn't GM just go to those college students and buy the technology off of them for a few six-packs?
On a related note, I also remember seeing(in the same show) a piece on a van that was rigged to self-drive. They navigated cross-country on public roads with 97% of the driving being automated. This was done by CS majors using standard equipment publicly available at the time(no later than '97). It shouldn't take much adaptation to make it user-friendly and foolproof enough to survive public use... lawyers may be another story though.
SO, MY question is... why are we having so much difficulty with this now?
It seems like the only real barriers to this technology will be political, but that's just my $.02
Beat your red light ticket here
Good site for beating speeding tickets here
Other helpful links here
Are these ones like the one you saw?
http://iase.disa.mil/iaposters/
btw, some of the print-quality files are enormous, so keep browsing limited to the pdf versions to avoid (rapid) slashdotting. Maybe a kind soul can post a torrent of all of them if too many people hit it?
Flash is evil!!
This page says exactly what I've always thought about Flash.
In this respect, Flashblock for Mozilla is the best program ever - to get rid of annoying flash ads.
Not only this, but I could see common VOIP applications building an option that would block (or use whitelisting on) phone calls from certain countries or area codes.
This is what makes VOIP such a great thing: innovative technologies cannot be squelched by a self-serving monopoly. If the customer wants a technology and his current "phone provider" doesn't care, he will simply switch to another provider who is willing to cater to the customer. What is right and wrong will be decided by the actual customer by choosing one phone provider over another, and not by throngs of high-priced lawyers screaming "free speech!!!"
An example of a technology that a customer would want but would never get in the USA could be this: Taking an idea from the ORDB, you could build a function into VOIP applications that allows the user to subscribe to a community-maintained list of telemarketers. If this function were implemented in POTS lines, we would have never needed the do-not-call list because telemarketers would have only called a few people before being blocked by the world. (Unfortunately for the proletariat, the US telephone companies always liked telemarketers because they brought in consistent revenue by virtue that they made heavy use of phone lines. I speculate that the deregulation of phone lines somewhat weakened and fragmented the big-telecom-lobby, and that's why we were able to get the do-not-call-list?)
Caller-ID-block is a weakness in this system, but if everyone also blocked the "blocked caller ID" people, then only the spammers would have caller-ID-block and the knot would untie itself.
My offtopic friend, all you need to do is become a master of this tool, formflood. It's on sourceforge and will allow you to single-handedly slashdot any page with a form(i.e. Phishing sites). Enjoy!
Spyware has been around for a very long time and it won't go away. I think if M$ could have stopped it, they would - it's a lot like viruses. As long as the spyware websites say "Free screensavers and such", there will be people that will install them.
And as far as linux/firefox/etc goes - those are programs created by humans, and they are not perfect either. Their (relatively) low usage numbers don't make them a target for spyware/malware YET.
That may be true, but when you're talking about lifting multi-million dollar satellites into a specific orbit, you don't want to use technology that does not perform absolutely perfectly.
I was talking with a guy in-the-know, and he said that if the parts in your launch vehicle didn't boast some ridiculously high MTBF(mean time between failures), nobody with a satellite would even consider contracting your services.
Taking that into consideration, the shortcomings are quite serious now, aren't they? I don't think this rig is ready for prime-time yet...
In Soviet Russia, magazines purchase you!
The program should recognize which server it came from("received" in full headers), and blackhole that server because it's obviously an open relay, at the very least.
On a related note, I find it amazing that various antivirus/antispam vendors are still using the "From" line to report abuses. Do viruses or spam ever come from real email addresses? Not usually. I'm pretty much the victim of a "joe-job" on a regular basis because of this.
It will not do anything to stop the spead of spam, and this is why:
These 120 spammers represent a very small section of the entire spammer population, and I doubt that they've got big guys like Ralsky on it. You won't see M$ getting anywhere near the spam gangs, either. In fact, when you think about it, M$ is the reason some spam gangs even exist! Think about all the security holes in XP that allow it to be hijacked and used as a spam relay. Also, think about the "open-relay-by-default" nature of some M$ mailserver products. Maybe these lawsuits are Microsoft's way of saying "Our bad!"
Given the difficulty/cost of tracking down spammers and nailing them, I think it will just turn spamming into a different industry. The (smart) spammers will just go farther underground and become more sophisticated in their ways of avoiding detection/liability. These 120 guys were probably just amateurs that didn't know what they were doing anyway.