I had this problem and wanted to find a disc that played reliably on my DVD player, my girlfriend's, and my parents. So I started a survey, using 11 demo discs, and have been seeing if I could find at least one disc that played in all the systems.
So far, with five data points, I'm down to one disc that has played perfectly in my SD4900, SD3750, XBOX, PS-2, and DVD726; by the end of the weekend I'll finish the testing and hopefully, then, know what media to stock up on.
It's amazing how many people are pointing out that the company has a right to do this and in the end the employee can only put up or leave.
Yes, we know. Move on, nothing to see here.
Taken to its basic components, any relationship is one where any entity can do whatever it is they want to do and the other entity can decide whether or not they want to put up with it based on some sort of cost/benefit analysis. This works in *both* directions -- Some of my users (salespeople with eight-digit sales per year) pretty much have a 'get out of jail for free' card at work.
But relationships are not just "put up with it or leave." The company presumably has an interest in you working for them because otherwise, well, they wouldn't employ you (ignoring the possibility they're doing this as a way to persuade people to quit so they can outsource them to India without severance pay or unemployment benefit hit). In the end, relationships where each party does the very minimal required of them sort of suck both on the personal and professional levels.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you want your relationship with your company to have some flexibility in it, and in order for it to have flexibility in one side, it needs to have flexibility in the other side also. So if you're getting work phone calls on your personal cell, it's perfectly reasonable to say "look, I'm bending here and using my cell phone for work purposes and that's OK -- would you bend a little and let me keep it?" If, on the other hand, they absolutely refuse to be flexible, then absolutely you're under no obligation to be flexible yourself -- if they don't allow you a personal cellphone, then don't allow them to use that cellphone to contact you.
Companies that don't want your personal life intruding into their business shouldn't intrude with business into your personal life. Now, mind you, that's a perfectly reasonable and rational approach to which the company may respond with "tough, we can replace you with an Indian for $5/hr. Want to see who blinks first?" That's something you have to deal with and figure out how far you're willing to go.
Of course, "since the era of software patents began" one of the things that changed OTHER than the advent of software patents is also our ability to quickly (and verbosely, so verbosely) discuss every case of bad patent, leading to a perception of increased incidents of bad patents. It's like child abduction -- it's always happened, of course, but now with the advent of Amber Alerts, flashing freeway signs, and immediate media saturation when a child is abducted, there's an increase in perception that abductions are a serious problem.
It's not law enforcement's job to differentiate between my 2" pen knife and my Benchmade -- it's the politicians' job. If the law says knife blade, the cops look for knife blades. If the law said "bad ass blades over six inches," that's what the cops would go for.
Though realistically, you're also inaccurate because the laws do treat different knives differently. It's legal for me to walk around with a 3.5" knife, but not if it's 4.5. It's legal if it's single-edged, but not if it's double-edged. And don't even get me started about my balisongs.
You're absolutely right -- multitools are a compromise solution trying to optimize a whole bunch of conflicting goals. If I'm at home, I'll never reach for one of my multitools first -- I'll go for one of the real tools.
But the goal of a multitool is *NOT* to be a best-of-breed solution. It's to present an adequate compromise that you'll be able to carry relatively easily on you and that will present the best chances that you have the OK tool for the job when you need it. Multitools are smaller than their toolchest equivalents, more portable, and binary -- you either have a multitool or you don't -- you can't bring your multitool and forget your pliers, for example.
Swiss army knives, unfortunately, are not really multitools. Their metal is incredibly soft and they're not constructed in a way that makes it easy to open them (at least, not as easy as most actual Multitools). For ease of use, check out how easy it is to open one of the main blades on a Wave, or deploy the pliers on a Gerber.
Re:Security Threat of USB Flash Drives
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I work for a financial services company and that, in fact, is exactly what we've done. Only we went low-tech and disabled USB. Period. Of course, most people don't get floppies or CD drives either (not sure what the point of not giving CD drives is -- it's not like you can somehow hack an RO CD drive to become a CDRW).
Are you saying there's a way to disable *JUST* USB Mass Storage? Because I'd love to know about that.
Of course the RIAA has a viable market without having to worry about file sharing. All they need to do is offer me music that is: 1. Decently priced; 2. Priced a-la-carte; 3. Allows for me to archive and re-present it however I wish with minimal limitations.
Ever heard of iTMS?:)
Oh, and the shower? Get off of it. We keep making jokes about porn, and you know the vast majority of us actually look at porn, but as soon as someone says, soberly and reasonably, "yes, I pay for porn and this is why" you flip?
Well, for one, I do. Specifically, I pay for two types of porn:
A) Broadcast porn (i.e. "stuff on the television") because 1. It's of a higher visual quality than the standard net stuff; 2. I don't have to hunt around for it; 3. Unless I'm traveling, I like watching porn on my TV more than I like watching it on my computer. Yes, I could use either my PS2 or my XBOX to stream porn from my desktop, but when I want porn, I don't want to have to go and boot up one of these systems.
B) Truly excellent or unusual online porn. I have no problem using my money to encourage people out there who do good work and who cater to my (shamefully, these days, pretty vanilla) tastes. I pay for Red vs. Blue even though I could get it for free -- why not porn?
Lastly, to be honest, I've found porn downloads via, say, Kazaa to be fraught with disappointment. For one thing, there's the horrendously slow speeds often times; also, the unclear (or outright deceptive) descriptions can be a bitch. I still do it every once in a while, but for visual porn, my TV's a primary source these days. One exception to this is written porn -- www.asstr.org is your friend, and I use them pretty much exclusively for my written porn.
Only by that most subjective definition of spam that goes like this: "Spam is what I don't want to get."
The problem with spam is its cost-shifting. Snailmail doesn't have that problem. They're paying to send you stuff. You're not, typically, paying to receive it.
Oh, and have you considered contacting AOL and asking them not to send you any more CDs?
You *should* be taking the heat for actions of spammers using your system. Ever hear of the phrase "attractive nuisance"?
It's your responsibility to secure your system. If it can be trivially used to harm my system, I don't see a problem with me suing you. We're not talking about some sort of orange book sniffing with the spammers carefully monitoring EM transmissions from your keyboard to get your password -- we're talking about you (no offense intended), being too lame to manage your own MTA systems. Get off the net or take responsibility for the actions of your system.
AOL is the domain of the clueless user, no doubt, and their marketing is a little annoying, given the plethora of discs they send to everyone, their grandmother, and their dead relatives.
On the other hand, their spam stance has been pretty solid for a while now. Despite the large number of clueless users on AOL, I can't remember the last time I got spam from them, and they've been remarkably good net denizens in this regard -- they were the first large ISP (to the best of my knowledge) to start using SPF, for example.
On the spam front, I think they're definitely whitehats. More than that, they're 800lb gorillas wearing white hats. This is a very, very good thing.
This really feels like Intel's finally feeling its stranglehold on the industry wavering a little (given AMD's 64bit success). I'd like to believe that this is going to lead them to start treating us like customers, rather than prisoners. Certainly, this is a nice first step.
Why not require a personal firewall? How about prior restraint (the concept, not the legal definition)?
If I'm putting a Solaris box on their network, I don't want to have to install ZoneAlarm on it. I know how to secure Solaris boxes, thankyouverymuch. If they see a problem coming from my IP, they have my permission to nuke it, but until then, leave me alone.
In other words, presume innocent and assume the user will deal with it until proven otherwise -- and then respond with extreme prejudice.
You want to win in the business arena, make the best product and convince people to use it. Don't look at it as a holy jihad, because the business people sure as hell won't. He got the product for free? That's great for him. There's no EULA that goes with Linux that requires your loyalty or support. There's no GPL clause that says you must declare your fealty to the Open Source Movement. And that's how it should be, because Linux, if it wins, should win on its merits, not on the religious zeal of its converts.
The only 'right thing for Linux' that business users should be required to do -- or castigated for not doing -- is abiding by the GPL. That's "abiding," as in "not breaking," not "not supporting anyone who doubts the veracity of the GPL."
Wait. Huh? I just looked and I didn't mention it was a graphic novel. That's good, because it isn't. It's an actual watchamcallit, tip of my tongue... oh yeah, book. The only illustrations are on the covers.
Re:Free Access great for pedophiles
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 1
That's a good thing.
Anonymity benefits our society far more than it harms it.
Hand-held optical devices that measure distance have been around for a while -- I have the Bushnell Yardage Pro 500 which lets me get a distance reading up to about 1000 yds. Hell, Bushnell makes range finders specifically for golfers.
The only problem with these that I've found is that you need some decent flat surface perpendicular to the laser to reflect it -- so trying to laze, say, a building works pretty well, but trying to laze the flag on the green would be problematic (and I've had issues trying to laze some mammals and such at longer distances when trying to set my sights).
Price is not a good reason to build an HTPC unless you're willing to make a whole bunch of compromises and don't care about aesthetics.
I priced out what it would take me to build a minimally-decent HTPC system, accounting for the specialized case (quiet, small, looks like it's an HT component), motherboard (because full-size ATX wouldn't fit in that case), processor, memory, decent TV capture cards, hard drive, DVD burner, etc. Hint: It wasn't $200. More like $700.
There is no patch and there can be no technical patch. This thing propagates by social engineering -- the 'click here' vulnerability. It's not the RPC/DCOM worm. You'll need to patch people.
Has anyone EVER been charged for accidentally installing a virus on their machine? Not 'convicted', not even 'prosecuted,' but charged?
Millions of these messages are running around on the net right now. It's pretty much the best Get Out of Jail Free card you're likely ever going to get for participating in a DDoS attack against the Mordor Alliance.
One of the things they argued when the question of disclosing people's identities came up was that if they had to go through the courts the settlements were going to have to be larger in order to cover their costs. I have no real doubt that that's likely what will happen here -- we're further down the line and they've invested more effort, so they'll likely ask for more money.
What happens then is anyone's guess -- I'm hoping someone gets a $20,000 settlement offer and decides "fuck it, I'm going to court." Well, and that they win:)
Slashdot Mirror
I had this problem and wanted to find a disc that played reliably on my DVD player, my girlfriend's, and my parents. So I started a survey, using 11 demo discs, and have been seeing if I could find at least one disc that played in all the systems.
So far, with five data points, I'm down to one disc that has played perfectly in my SD4900, SD3750, XBOX, PS-2, and DVD726; by the end of the weekend I'll finish the testing and hopefully, then, know what media to stock up on.
BTW, so far the winner's Prodisc 4x DVD-R.
It's amazing how many people are pointing out that the company has a right to do this and in the end the employee can only put up or leave.
Yes, we know. Move on, nothing to see here.
Taken to its basic components, any relationship is one where any entity can do whatever it is they want to do and the other entity can decide whether or not they want to put up with it based on some sort of cost/benefit analysis. This works in *both* directions -- Some of my users (salespeople with eight-digit sales per year) pretty much have a 'get out of jail for free' card at work.
But relationships are not just "put up with it or leave." The company presumably has an interest in you working for them because otherwise, well, they wouldn't employ you (ignoring the possibility they're doing this as a way to persuade people to quit so they can outsource them to India without severance pay or unemployment benefit hit). In the end, relationships where each party does the very minimal required of them sort of suck both on the personal and professional levels.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you want your relationship with your company to have some flexibility in it, and in order for it to have flexibility in one side, it needs to have flexibility in the other side also. So if you're getting work phone calls on your personal cell, it's perfectly reasonable to say "look, I'm bending here and using my cell phone for work purposes and that's OK -- would you bend a little and let me keep it?" If, on the other hand, they absolutely refuse to be flexible, then absolutely you're under no obligation to be flexible yourself -- if they don't allow you a personal cellphone, then don't allow them to use that cellphone to contact you.
Companies that don't want your personal life intruding into their business shouldn't intrude with business into your personal life. Now, mind you, that's a perfectly reasonable and rational approach to which the company may respond with "tough, we can replace you with an Indian for $5/hr. Want to see who blinks first?" That's something you have to deal with and figure out how far you're willing to go.
Of course, "since the era of software patents began" one of the things that changed OTHER than the advent of software patents is also our ability to quickly (and verbosely, so verbosely) discuss every case of bad patent, leading to a perception of increased incidents of bad patents. It's like child abduction -- it's always happened, of course, but now with the advent of Amber Alerts, flashing freeway signs, and immediate media saturation when a child is abducted, there's an increase in perception that abductions are a serious problem.
Though realistically, you're also inaccurate because the laws do treat different knives differently. It's legal for me to walk around with a 3.5" knife, but not if it's 4.5. It's legal if it's single-edged, but not if it's double-edged. And don't even get me started about my balisongs.
You're absolutely right -- multitools are a compromise solution trying to optimize a whole bunch of conflicting goals. If I'm at home, I'll never reach for one of my multitools first -- I'll go for one of the real tools.
But the goal of a multitool is *NOT* to be a best-of-breed solution. It's to present an adequate compromise that you'll be able to carry relatively easily on you and that will present the best chances that you have the OK tool for the job when you need it. Multitools are smaller than their toolchest equivalents, more portable, and binary -- you either have a multitool or you don't -- you can't bring your multitool and forget your pliers, for example.
Swiss army knives, unfortunately, are not really multitools. Their metal is incredibly soft and they're not constructed in a way that makes it easy to open them (at least, not as easy as most actual Multitools). For ease of use, check out how easy it is to open one of the main blades on a Wave, or deploy the pliers on a Gerber.
I work for a financial services company and that, in fact, is exactly what we've done. Only we went low-tech and disabled USB. Period. Of course, most people don't get floppies or CD drives either (not sure what the point of not giving CD drives is -- it's not like you can somehow hack an RO CD drive to become a CDRW).
Are you saying there's a way to disable *JUST* USB Mass Storage? Because I'd love to know about that.
I remember my daddy telling me when I was a child "go ahead, look at porn as much as you'd like, but I better not catch you paying for it!"
To this day, his stance is that the two things in life you don't pay for are porn and fire extinguishers*.
*Long story
Of course the RIAA has a viable market without having to worry about file sharing. All they need to do is offer me music that is:
:)
1. Decently priced;
2. Priced a-la-carte;
3. Allows for me to archive and re-present it however I wish with minimal limitations.
Ever heard of iTMS?
Oh, and the shower? Get off of it. We keep making jokes about porn, and you know the vast majority of us actually look at porn, but as soon as someone says, soberly and reasonably, "yes, I pay for porn and this is why" you flip?
Well, for one, I do. Specifically, I pay for two types of porn:
A) Broadcast porn (i.e. "stuff on the television") because 1. It's of a higher visual quality than the standard net stuff; 2. I don't have to hunt around for it; 3. Unless I'm traveling, I like watching porn on my TV more than I like watching it on my computer. Yes, I could use either my PS2 or my XBOX to stream porn from my desktop, but when I want porn, I don't want to have to go and boot up one of these systems.
B) Truly excellent or unusual online porn. I have no problem using my money to encourage people out there who do good work and who cater to my (shamefully, these days, pretty vanilla) tastes. I pay for Red vs. Blue even though I could get it for free -- why not porn?
Lastly, to be honest, I've found porn downloads via, say, Kazaa to be fraught with disappointment. For one thing, there's the horrendously slow speeds often times; also, the unclear (or outright deceptive) descriptions can be a bitch. I still do it every once in a while, but for visual porn, my TV's a primary source these days. One exception to this is written porn -- www.asstr.org is your friend, and I use them pretty much exclusively for my written porn.
Only by that most subjective definition of spam that goes like this: "Spam is what I don't want to get."
The problem with spam is its cost-shifting. Snailmail doesn't have that problem. They're paying to send you stuff. You're not, typically, paying to receive it.
Oh, and have you considered contacting AOL and asking them not to send you any more CDs?
You *should* be taking the heat for actions of spammers using your system. Ever hear of the phrase "attractive nuisance"?
It's your responsibility to secure your system. If it can be trivially used to harm my system, I don't see a problem with me suing you. We're not talking about some sort of orange book sniffing with the spammers carefully monitoring EM transmissions from your keyboard to get your password -- we're talking about you (no offense intended), being too lame to manage your own MTA systems. Get off the net or take responsibility for the actions of your system.
AOL is the domain of the clueless user, no doubt, and their marketing is a little annoying, given the plethora of discs they send to everyone, their grandmother, and their dead relatives.
On the other hand, their spam stance has been pretty solid for a while now. Despite the large number of clueless users on AOL, I can't remember the last time I got spam from them, and they've been remarkably good net denizens in this regard -- they were the first large ISP (to the best of my knowledge) to start using SPF, for example.
On the spam front, I think they're definitely whitehats. More than that, they're 800lb gorillas wearing white hats. This is a very, very good thing.
Oh, and Microsoft? Spawn of the devil.
This really feels like Intel's finally feeling its stranglehold on the industry wavering a little (given AMD's 64bit success). I'd like to believe that this is going to lead them to start treating us like customers, rather than prisoners. Certainly, this is a nice first step.
Why not require a personal firewall? How about prior restraint (the concept, not the legal definition)?
If I'm putting a Solaris box on their network, I don't want to have to install ZoneAlarm on it. I know how to secure Solaris boxes, thankyouverymuch. If they see a problem coming from my IP, they have my permission to nuke it, but until then, leave me alone.
In other words, presume innocent and assume the user will deal with it until proven otherwise -- and then respond with extreme prejudice.
Who marked this guy insightful?
You want to win in the business arena, make the best product and convince people to use it. Don't look at it as a holy jihad, because the business people sure as hell won't. He got the product for free? That's great for him. There's no EULA that goes with Linux that requires your loyalty or support. There's no GPL clause that says you must declare your fealty to the Open Source Movement. And that's how it should be, because Linux, if it wins, should win on its merits, not on the religious zeal of its converts.
The only 'right thing for Linux' that business users should be required to do -- or castigated for not doing -- is abiding by the GPL. That's "abiding," as in "not breaking," not "not supporting anyone who doubts the veracity of the GPL."
I take offense to this. I'm a pretty serious gun nut, but I'm not a huge linux geek.
Wait. Huh? I just looked and I didn't mention it was a graphic novel. That's good, because it isn't. It's an actual watchamcallit, tip of my tongue ... oh yeah, book. The only illustrations are on the covers.
That's a good thing.
Anonymity benefits our society far more than it harms it.
Hand-held optical devices that measure distance have been around for a while -- I have the Bushnell Yardage Pro 500 which lets me get a distance reading up to about 1000 yds. Hell, Bushnell makes range finders specifically for golfers.
The only problem with these that I've found is that you need some decent flat surface perpendicular to the laser to reflect it -- so trying to laze, say, a building works pretty well, but trying to laze the flag on the green would be problematic (and I've had issues trying to laze some mammals and such at longer distances when trying to set my sights).
Price is not a good reason to build an HTPC unless you're willing to make a whole bunch of compromises and don't care about aesthetics.
I priced out what it would take me to build a minimally-decent HTPC system, accounting for the specialized case (quiet, small, looks like it's an HT component), motherboard (because full-size ATX wouldn't fit in that case), processor, memory, decent TV capture cards, hard drive, DVD burner, etc. Hint: It wasn't $200. More like $700.
There is no patch and there can be no technical patch. This thing propagates by social engineering -- the 'click here' vulnerability. It's not the RPC/DCOM worm. You'll need to patch people.
Anybody know where Gates' dad went to College? I'm kinda wondering if the legacy system might have had something to do with his admission to Harvard.
Has anyone EVER been charged for accidentally installing a virus on their machine? Not 'convicted', not even 'prosecuted,' but charged? Millions of these messages are running around on the net right now. It's pretty much the best Get Out of Jail Free card you're likely ever going to get for participating in a DDoS attack against the Mordor Alliance.
I want:
A) "Other Amazon Shoppers who contributed to Howard Dean also purchased..."
B) One-click ordering
One of the things they argued when the question of disclosing people's identities came up was that if they had to go through the courts the settlements were going to have to be larger in order to cover their costs. I have no real doubt that that's likely what will happen here -- we're further down the line and they've invested more effort, so they'll likely ask for more money.
:)
What happens then is anyone's guess -- I'm hoping someone gets a $20,000 settlement offer and decides "fuck it, I'm going to court." Well, and that they win