While it won't reduce the *quantity* of spam, it will improve the *quality* of information about the origin of a particular e-mail. (Spammers will either just forge non-protected domain names onto their spam or register domains that don't have SPF records.)
If it stops or severely curtails the practice of domain spoofing and joe-jobbing, then it will have accomplished it's purpose. The other anti-spam methods can pickup the ball from there and run with it. Large ISPs will probably simply be happy to not receive millions of bounces every day from e-mail that didn't originate from one of their customers.
now, here's another fun question. why, if this problem has been boiling up for five years now (and it has, hasn't it?) has some group not already tried to quash it?
Google around for the ASRG mailing list archives, or search for RMX, DRIP, DMP, SPF in conjunction with the IETF. There's some good traffic worth reading back in Spring 2003 on the ASRG list when a lot of the reverse-MX proposals were floated onto the list.
Basically, most standard bodies are still trying to parse the problem and find the "perfect solution", a.k.a. the FUSSP.
That, or politics gets involved along with NIH-syndrome.
I don't understand... why can't all email servers just check forward/reverse MX record lookups to help deminish spam. I know that will not end it, but it would drastically help from spoofing email... which is all that AOL's initiative seems to be doing (i.e. not killing it, just preventing their servers from being spoofed).
Initially, that was my question too... why not just require that outbound e-mail be sent from an IP address listed in an MX record?
Well...
1) MX records are designed to specify what IP address will accept mail for a domain
2) A lot of companies use seperate outbound mail servers that are not capable of receiving e-mail (and thus aren't attached to an MX record).
Oh, yeah, and have the email servers not accepting relays, and patch the damn home user windows boxes. Instead of AOL blocking ADSL, they just need to block windows '95-ME, 2000 pro, and XP. They are all home systems, not servers. Network packets can show OS footprints, so this is doable.
Read up on the SMTP protocol, an SMTP server knows *nothing* about the connecting host other then IP address and what the host chooses to identify themselves as in the HELO/EHLO command. (Or by doing a reverse lookup on the IP address, which isn't very informative.) In fact, scanning the connecting host to determine its "footprint" might be considered a misdemeanor/felony under some interpretations of the law.
Just more media hype, I'll beleive it when I see it. AOL just has to rebutt microsoft (MSN) from stealing more AOL users with their latest news about anti-spam pledge from Gate's.
AOL has been testing SPF since well before Microsoft/Gate's announcement last week. In fact, AOL already has a program in place where you can whitelist a domain with them and specify what IP addresses are authorized to send outbound e-mail for your domain. They're probably tired of maintaining that list when SPF could store the information in the DNS system and make it easier on everyone.
I'm a little nervous that this might make it more difficult to own your own domain and use it to send/receive email. Right now this is pretty easy with domain services that forward email to any other email address, partially because people can use their regular ISP SMTP server. With this kind of protocol, that might go away, or at least be more problematic for a non technical person.
I have multiple personal domains, and it's already difficult to send e-mail (if I try to send e-mail from my static, business-class DSL address). However, there are companies springing up who are willing to host my e-mail, allow me to connect over encrypted ports, and send e-mail from just about anywhere (including a web-mail interface for when everything else breaks). The better hosting companies allow one to both send/receive e-mail through their POP3/SMTP servers. I hesitate to recommend GeekMail.com as I just signed up on Friday and haven't had the paperwork processed yet.
I'm also uncomfortable with privacy issues with all of this. Making each email more traceable than it is now makes it harder to have anonymous email. But I have to say that the way things are right now, we need to do something. And since anonymous email has been abused by spammers so much, it might just not be practical while keeping email useful for the rest of us.
SPF allows a domain to be as anonymous as they wish to be. If your domain doesn't publish SPF records, then you can send e-mail from any IP address in the system... but so can spammers who will gleefully forge your domain name onto their spam. E-mail headers already track the IP address of the host that injected e-mail into the system. Those IP addresses typically can be traced back to a specific user and/or credit card (see the RIAA filings against music uploaders). In short, if you want anonymous e-mail, your options are the same as before - use an anonymous e-mail service.
Jump through the hoops, because as the spam problem gets worse more and more large domains are going to implement whitelist procedures. SPF might mitigate that a bit, so instead of talking to all of the large ISPs and telling them what your e-mail servers are, you can just publish a SPF record.
Well, in the near-term, SPF won't do anything to slow the quantity of spam. Regardless of what the most die-hard rabid supporters would like everyone to believe.
SPF is an attempt to stop the practice of domain-forging or "joe-jobbing". Which, for a business domain is important. Right now, anyone can pretend to be joe@mycompany.com and either tarnish our company's name, or simply make life extremely difficult for us when our ISP cuts us off for spamming (when we didn't do it).
However, it is likely to have some beneficial side-effects like making domain-based whitelisting/blacklisting more effective. It raises the bar one more notch for a spammer (now they have to either find a non-protected domain to forge, route their spam through authorized servers for a domain where it's likely to be noticed and blocked, or register throw-away domains to push their product).
(And SPF is very similar to what AOL already requires if you want to have your domain whitelisted with them. You're required to list the IP addresses that send outbound e-mail for your domain, anything else gets dumped in the bit-bucket or at least is likely to get tagged as spam by the filters.)
Actually, there are a few possible avenues of attack on a domain protected by stringent SPF/RMX records:
1) hack the DNS records for the domain, add your list of zombie machines to the SPF record (moderate difficulty, watchdog monitoring of the SPF record could detect it quickly)
2) DoS on the SOA server for the domain so that SPF information can't be retrieved. (difficult, DNS caching would bypass until the TTL expires)
3) Forge the DNS reply (possible, but very tricky and relies on timing of packets, probably not a practical attack)
4) Hijack a client PC that is authorized to send mail through one of the authorized SMTP servers (easy, but alert admins of the SMTP servers could quash the outbound mail flood)
5) Hijack an authorized SMTP server (easy to difficult depending on how well the server is secured, but has the biggest payoff)
So... you're saying that it's okay for domain forging to continue just so that people can still e-mail party invitations, putting any old from address on it that they want?
It's pretty simple math - if domain forging is possible and undetecable, then spammers will continue to forge domains.
Something has to change, and as a mail admin - I want control over who is allowed to send e-mail purporting to be an agent of my company. That means domain forging has to be stopped or placed under my control to either allow or disallow. E-Mail is pretty much already badly broken, breaking a greeting card site (who has other options like SRS, or even sending using their *own* domain name), is a minor additional loss.
And as I've stated before - SPF is really not different then what AOL already does for popular domains that communicate with their membership.
Those domains are required (if they want to be whitelisted) to list their outbound mail server IPs with AOL. E-mail from other IP addresses, purporting to be from said domain, get dropped in the bit-bucket.
Hence, this is a nice logical step for AOL because they won't have to maintain their own list of authorized outbound mail servers for thousands of domains. Instead, they can just check the domain's DNS records for SPF information.
Too bad many, many ISP's block outbound port 25 to anything besides their own mail servers.
Mostly because domain forging has been so badly abused by spam/worms. ISPs that don't block port 25 risk getting listed by the various blackhole lists. But you can also look at it as maybe clients should be sending unencrypted/unauthenticated communications to the default SMTP port. (Instead, using either SSL or SSH to connect to the SMTP server on a port other then 25.)
Maybe if enough major e-mail hosts like AOL and such start implimenting this though, and if it becomes standard and widespread, those ports would be re-opened.
That's a quite reasonable expectation. It all depends on how the spam wars play out over the next year or two.
ASRG? you mean the group that's been contemplating their navel for the past year (probably longer?) It was obvious last spring that IETF/ASRG would be a day late dollar short.
CAN-SPAM? enforced? there's nothing there to be enforced! Why do you think they didn't name the bill "CANT-SPAM"? There is no "final ultimate solution" to the spam problem, especially one that depends on legal action.
A good first step is going to be stopping the forging of domains - or at least allowing domain owners to force outbound e-mail for their domains to pass through authorized servers. Where, unlike desktop machines, the mail admin has a bit more control over security measures. It also allows domain-based whitelist/blacklists to be more effective, makes it more difficult for client machines to send out spam/worms. (And while there are decent proposals out there to do this, the ASRG folks laughed those proposals off the list last spring - now they're "studying" the concept under the header of LMAP.)
Hash-cash is a non-starter, although people keep plucking at it. If you're going to spend cycles requiring computers to calculate huge numbers for each individual recipient - why not go the one final step and require that the e-mail body be encrypted using the recipient's public-key using PGP/GPG?
As long as you're using (3) external drives, rotated periodically (child-parent-grandparent scheme), with at least one of the three stored off-site... you're reasonably secure.
You should still be burning snapshots / archival material off to DVD-R periodically with the idea that if you lose a single disc you don't lose everything. The contents of the DVD-R should be protected by recovery data so that even if the media gets badly scratched, you'll have decent odds of being able to repair the damage. (And if you store all of the files in a single folder with tar/zip, with a single parity set protecting them, you can even recover the data if the table-of-contents gets damaged.)
TY's (as the other posted commented) are reported to be the best CD-R / DVD-R that you can get. You should probably ditch the CD-R format and switch to using DVD-R instead. Mostly due to storage space and having to deal with only 1/7th the number of discs. Best place to get TY media is online (search the alt.video.dvdr newsgroup at google).
In addition you should be looking to add parity/recovery data to your CD-R/DVD-R backup files, which serves two purposes: (a) allows you to verify that the files are still readable and intact (b) allows you to recover damaged files if you have enough recovery data. It allows you to recover from scratches that the underlying ECC was unable to correct for.
The easiest product to use right now is called PAR or PAR2 (I prefer QuickPar). Basically, put all of your files in a single folder (or zip things up into seperate archive files and put those in a single folder) and then use QuickPar to create recovery data. For a CD-R, I usually collect around 650Mb of data together, and then create another 45Mb of recovery data. For DVD-R, I do 4Gb of data and 0.35Gb of recovery data.
Building any sort of PVR is difficult
on
Build Your Own PVR
·
· Score: 1
Digital video is still fairly new, tech-wise, and it's still rapidly changing (MPEG4, HDTV, new codecs). Plus, you're trying to perform a specialized task on top of a generalized platform - which is naturally going to be more complex then a dedicated solution would be.
So between the rapidly changing codec terrain, the scads of possible devices, varying levels of operating system support, and the fact that pushing video around is an order of magnitude (or two) more demanding then audio - I'm not surprised that not everyone can do it. I've tried off and on for the past 5 years or so, with varying success depending on how patient I was and how much cash I was willing to sink into products.
While I don't have personal experience with Apple's video products, they or Adobe will probably be the first ones to truly make it as easy as audio. Some of that has already happened, which means that everyone else will probably catch up in a year or two. But I wouldn't be surprised if it took until 2005/2006 for video on the desktop to be as easy as audio on the desktop. Audio CD ripping/encoding was somewhat mysterious even 3 years ago, now it's pretty commonplace.
The deep pipelines in the P4 perform poorly, period. Even when running simple desktop apps on a Windows machine, I notice my P4-2.5GHz w/1GB RAM at work often jerks around or lags, while my Athlon 1900XP+ w/256MB RAM at home works like lightning. Obviously processor is not the whole story, but I think that under typical, multi-tasking usage, the deep pipelines are even more painful than benchmarks suggest.
Um, no...
A far simpler explanation is that you're using a different motherboard with different hardware drivers. Some chipsets are "smoother" then others and it (mostly) has nothing to do with the CPU.
I have half a dozen AMD systems, some motherboards run like silk when under load, others are quite jerky/laggy. (I still prefer my AMD systems over Intel, party because by supporting the competition I make sure that Intel can't rest on their laurels or unilateraly implement restrictive technology.)
Authorities Arrest Chicago-Area Man in Movie-Piracy Case
Thursday January 22, 10:23 pm ET
By Sarah McBride, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
LOS ANGELES -- In a high-profile strike against online movie piracy, federal authorities Thursday arrested and charged a Chicago-area man with copyright infringement after he allegedly copied and distributed videotapes he allegedly obtained from a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and illegal interception of a satellite signal.
...
According to an affidavit filed by a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William Russell Sprague of Homewood, Ill., told investigators that over the past few years, he received approximately 60 videotapes of movies under consideration for Hollywood awards from actor and academy member Carmine Caridi, 70. Mr. Sprague told authorities that he copied the movies and distributed them to family and friends.
One of the things I used to record prior to a trip was the driving directions. (e.g. get off at exit 273A, make a left on MacAuthur Blvd, go 3 lights...)
It actually was quite handy not to have to read a scrap of paper in the middle of the night while barreling down a crowded highway at 65.
The 8cm CD is still around. In fact, it's *easier* to find 8cm CD-R media then it used to be.
I have a Sony digital camera that uses 8cm CDs to store the images, which is darned handy. When I'm done shooting, finalize the CD, pop it in the nearest PC and make copies for friends/relatives.
I also have a mini-CD mp3 player... 210Mb is around 2-3 hours of decent quality MP3 music.
I'm fairly sure that the 8cm CD is still used in Japan to sell singles.
Eh, I worked at a trucking firm for almost a decade. The majority of them are quite friendly, a bit gruff around the edges, but if you treat them with respect you'll get respect back. Hell, some of them were quite the computer tinkerers in their spare time.
Back when I was commuting every day, I kept a CB-radio hooked up in the car to keep an ear on channel 19. Nothing worse then sitting in a traffic jam on some stretch of interstate with no information about what / why / where. Usually, the truckers knew what was going on so you knew whether or not to just stick it out or get off at the next exit and try the side roads.
Tough to listen to channel 19 if you have passengers in the car though... I generally just turned the volume down or you could get a speaker that clips to your safety belt (so the speaker is up around your ear).
Start from the basic truth that man is inherently evil.
Without externally imposed limits (law, peer pressure, community pressure) or internally chosen limits (moral code), a person will do whatever benefits them, regardless of it's impact on other people / environment / etc... basically, the ends justify the means, and if they can get away with it, they will do it.
Where am I?
In the village
What do you want?
Information
Whose side are you on?
That Would Be Telling. We want
information, information, information.
You Won't Get It!
By Hook Or By Crook, We Will!
Who are you?
The New Number Two
Who is Number One?
You Are Number Six.
I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN!
Agree with the other poster, look for a keyboard designed to work in a rackmount environment. It can only be about 18" wide, which is just enough for the main keys and the cursor keys. The number pad is usually activated by the numlock or some other toggle.
Do yourself one better and look for a mini-keyboard that also includes either a trackpoint-style pointer (a little nubby between the G/H/B keys) or a trackpad. Most of the time you can also use an external mouse with these which gets you the best of both worlds.
Downside is cost...
One that caught my eye, but seems to be out of stock is the IBM Trackpoint Space Saver (22P5150).
Slashdot Mirror
a major blow against spam.
While it won't reduce the *quantity* of spam, it will improve the *quality* of information about the origin of a particular e-mail. (Spammers will either just forge non-protected domain names onto their spam or register domains that don't have SPF records.)
If it stops or severely curtails the practice of domain spoofing and joe-jobbing, then it will have accomplished it's purpose. The other anti-spam methods can pickup the ball from there and run with it. Large ISPs will probably simply be happy to not receive millions of bounces every day from e-mail that didn't originate from one of their customers.
now, here's another fun question. why, if this problem has been boiling up for five years now (and it has, hasn't it?) has some group not already tried to quash it?
Google around for the ASRG mailing list archives, or search for RMX, DRIP, DMP, SPF in conjunction with the IETF. There's some good traffic worth reading back in Spring 2003 on the ASRG list when a lot of the reverse-MX proposals were floated onto the list.
Basically, most standard bodies are still trying to parse the problem and find the "perfect solution", a.k.a. the FUSSP.
That, or politics gets involved along with NIH-syndrome.
I don't understand... why can't all email servers just check forward/reverse MX record lookups to help deminish spam. I know that will not end it, but it would drastically help from spoofing email... which is all that AOL's initiative seems to be doing (i.e. not killing it, just preventing their servers from being spoofed).
Initially, that was my question too... why not just require that outbound e-mail be sent from an IP address listed in an MX record?
Well...
1) MX records are designed to specify what IP address will accept mail for a domain
2) A lot of companies use seperate outbound mail servers that are not capable of receiving e-mail (and thus aren't attached to an MX record).
Oh, yeah, and have the email servers not accepting relays, and patch the damn home user windows boxes. Instead of AOL blocking ADSL, they just need to block windows '95-ME, 2000 pro, and XP. They are all home systems, not servers. Network packets can show OS footprints, so this is doable.
Read up on the SMTP protocol, an SMTP server knows *nothing* about the connecting host other then IP address and what the host chooses to identify themselves as in the HELO/EHLO command. (Or by doing a reverse lookup on the IP address, which isn't very informative.) In fact, scanning the connecting host to determine its "footprint" might be considered a misdemeanor/felony under some interpretations of the law.
Just more media hype, I'll beleive it when I see it. AOL just has to rebutt microsoft (MSN) from stealing more AOL users with their latest news about anti-spam pledge from Gate's.
AOL has been testing SPF since well before Microsoft/Gate's announcement last week. In fact, AOL already has a program in place where you can whitelist a domain with them and specify what IP addresses are authorized to send outbound e-mail for your domain. They're probably tired of maintaining that list when SPF could store the information in the DNS system and make it easier on everyone.
I'm a little nervous that this might make it more difficult to own your own domain and use it to send/receive email. Right now this is pretty easy with domain services that forward email to any other email address, partially because people can use their regular ISP SMTP server. With this kind of protocol, that might go away, or at least be more problematic for a non technical person.
I have multiple personal domains, and it's already difficult to send e-mail (if I try to send e-mail from my static, business-class DSL address). However, there are companies springing up who are willing to host my e-mail, allow me to connect over encrypted ports, and send e-mail from just about anywhere (including a web-mail interface for when everything else breaks). The better hosting companies allow one to both send/receive e-mail through their POP3/SMTP servers. I hesitate to recommend GeekMail.com as I just signed up on Friday and haven't had the paperwork processed yet.
I'm also uncomfortable with privacy issues with all of this. Making each email more traceable than it is now makes it harder to have anonymous email. But I have to say that the way things are right now, we need to do something. And since anonymous email has been abused by spammers so much, it might just not be practical while keeping email useful for the rest of us.
SPF allows a domain to be as anonymous as they wish to be. If your domain doesn't publish SPF records, then you can send e-mail from any IP address in the system... but so can spammers who will gleefully forge your domain name onto their spam. E-mail headers already track the IP address of the host that injected e-mail into the system. Those IP addresses typically can be traced back to a specific user and/or credit card (see the RIAA filings against music uploaders). In short, if you want anonymous e-mail, your options are the same as before - use an anonymous e-mail service.
AOL Whitelisting Guidelines
Jump through the hoops, because as the spam problem gets worse more and more large domains are going to implement whitelist procedures. SPF might mitigate that a bit, so instead of talking to all of the large ISPs and telling them what your e-mail servers are, you can just publish a SPF record.
Well, in the near-term, SPF won't do anything to slow the quantity of spam. Regardless of what the most die-hard rabid supporters would like everyone to believe.
SPF is an attempt to stop the practice of domain-forging or "joe-jobbing". Which, for a business domain is important. Right now, anyone can pretend to be joe@mycompany.com and either tarnish our company's name, or simply make life extremely difficult for us when our ISP cuts us off for spamming (when we didn't do it).
However, it is likely to have some beneficial side-effects like making domain-based whitelisting/blacklisting more effective. It raises the bar one more notch for a spammer (now they have to either find a non-protected domain to forge, route their spam through authorized servers for a domain where it's likely to be noticed and blocked, or register throw-away domains to push their product).
(And SPF is very similar to what AOL already requires if you want to have your domain whitelisted with them. You're required to list the IP addresses that send outbound e-mail for your domain, anything else gets dumped in the bit-bucket or at least is likely to get tagged as spam by the filters.)
Actually, there are a few possible avenues of attack on a domain protected by stringent SPF/RMX records:
1) hack the DNS records for the domain, add your list of zombie machines to the SPF record (moderate difficulty, watchdog monitoring of the SPF record could detect it quickly)
2) DoS on the SOA server for the domain so that SPF information can't be retrieved. (difficult, DNS caching would bypass until the TTL expires)
3) Forge the DNS reply (possible, but very tricky and relies on timing of packets, probably not a practical attack)
4) Hijack a client PC that is authorized to send mail through one of the authorized SMTP servers (easy, but alert admins of the SMTP servers could quash the outbound mail flood)
5) Hijack an authorized SMTP server (easy to difficult depending on how well the server is secured, but has the biggest payoff)
So... you're saying that it's okay for domain forging to continue just so that people can still e-mail party invitations, putting any old from address on it that they want?
It's pretty simple math - if domain forging is possible and undetecable, then spammers will continue to forge domains.
Something has to change, and as a mail admin - I want control over who is allowed to send e-mail purporting to be an agent of my company. That means domain forging has to be stopped or placed under my control to either allow or disallow. E-Mail is pretty much already badly broken, breaking a greeting card site (who has other options like SRS, or even sending using their *own* domain name), is a minor additional loss.
And as I've stated before - SPF is really not different then what AOL already does for popular domains that communicate with their membership.
Those domains are required (if they want to be whitelisted) to list their outbound mail server IPs with AOL. E-mail from other IP addresses, purporting to be from said domain, get dropped in the bit-bucket.
Hence, this is a nice logical step for AOL because they won't have to maintain their own list of authorized outbound mail servers for thousands of domains. Instead, they can just check the domain's DNS records for SPF information.
Too bad many, many ISP's block outbound port 25 to anything besides their own mail servers.
Mostly because domain forging has been so badly abused by spam/worms. ISPs that don't block port 25 risk getting listed by the various blackhole lists. But you can also look at it as maybe clients should be sending unencrypted/unauthenticated communications to the default SMTP port. (Instead, using either SSL or SSH to connect to the SMTP server on a port other then 25.)
Maybe if enough major e-mail hosts like AOL and such start implimenting this though, and if it becomes standard and widespread, those ports would be re-opened.
That's a quite reasonable expectation. It all depends on how the spam wars play out over the next year or two.
(laughs hysterically)
ASRG? you mean the group that's been contemplating their navel for the past year (probably longer?) It was obvious last spring that IETF/ASRG would be a day late dollar short.
CAN-SPAM? enforced? there's nothing there to be enforced! Why do you think they didn't name the bill "CANT-SPAM"? There is no "final ultimate solution" to the spam problem, especially one that depends on legal action.
A good first step is going to be stopping the forging of domains - or at least allowing domain owners to force outbound e-mail for their domains to pass through authorized servers. Where, unlike desktop machines, the mail admin has a bit more control over security measures. It also allows domain-based whitelist/blacklists to be more effective, makes it more difficult for client machines to send out spam/worms. (And while there are decent proposals out there to do this, the ASRG folks laughed those proposals off the list last spring - now they're "studying" the concept under the header of LMAP.)
Hash-cash is a non-starter, although people keep plucking at it. If you're going to spend cycles requiring computers to calculate huge numbers for each individual recipient - why not go the one final step and require that the e-mail body be encrypted using the recipient's public-key using PGP/GPG?
As long as you're using (3) external drives, rotated periodically (child-parent-grandparent scheme), with at least one of the three stored off-site... you're reasonably secure.
You should still be burning snapshots / archival material off to DVD-R periodically with the idea that if you lose a single disc you don't lose everything. The contents of the DVD-R should be protected by recovery data so that even if the media gets badly scratched, you'll have decent odds of being able to repair the damage. (And if you store all of the files in a single folder with tar/zip, with a single parity set protecting them, you can even recover the data if the table-of-contents gets damaged.)
TY's (as the other posted commented) are reported to be the best CD-R / DVD-R that you can get. You should probably ditch the CD-R format and switch to using DVD-R instead. Mostly due to storage space and having to deal with only 1/7th the number of discs. Best place to get TY media is online (search the alt.video.dvdr newsgroup at google).
In addition you should be looking to add parity/recovery data to your CD-R/DVD-R backup files, which serves two purposes: (a) allows you to verify that the files are still readable and intact (b) allows you to recover damaged files if you have enough recovery data. It allows you to recover from scratches that the underlying ECC was unable to correct for.
The easiest product to use right now is called PAR or PAR2 (I prefer QuickPar). Basically, put all of your files in a single folder (or zip things up into seperate archive files and put those in a single folder) and then use QuickPar to create recovery data. For a CD-R, I usually collect around 650Mb of data together, and then create another 45Mb of recovery data. For DVD-R, I do 4Gb of data and 0.35Gb of recovery data.
Digital video is still fairly new, tech-wise, and it's still rapidly changing (MPEG4, HDTV, new codecs). Plus, you're trying to perform a specialized task on top of a generalized platform - which is naturally going to be more complex then a dedicated solution would be.
So between the rapidly changing codec terrain, the scads of possible devices, varying levels of operating system support, and the fact that pushing video around is an order of magnitude (or two) more demanding then audio - I'm not surprised that not everyone can do it. I've tried off and on for the past 5 years or so, with varying success depending on how patient I was and how much cash I was willing to sink into products.
While I don't have personal experience with Apple's video products, they or Adobe will probably be the first ones to truly make it as easy as audio. Some of that has already happened, which means that everyone else will probably catch up in a year or two. But I wouldn't be surprised if it took until 2005/2006 for video on the desktop to be as easy as audio on the desktop. Audio CD ripping/encoding was somewhat mysterious even 3 years ago, now it's pretty commonplace.
The deep pipelines in the P4 perform poorly, period. Even when running simple desktop apps on a Windows machine, I notice my P4-2.5GHz w/1GB RAM at work often jerks around or lags, while my Athlon 1900XP+ w/256MB RAM at home works like lightning. Obviously processor is not the whole story, but I think that under typical, multi-tasking usage, the deep pipelines are even more painful than benchmarks suggest.
Um, no...
A far simpler explanation is that you're using a different motherboard with different hardware drivers. Some chipsets are "smoother" then others and it (mostly) has nothing to do with the CPU.
I have half a dozen AMD systems, some motherboards run like silk when under load, others are quite jerky/laggy. (I still prefer my AMD systems over Intel, party because by supporting the competition I make sure that Intel can't rest on their laurels or unilateraly implement restrictive technology.)
Authorities Arrest Chicago-Area Man in Movie-Piracy Case
...
Thursday January 22, 10:23 pm ET
By Sarah McBride, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
LOS ANGELES -- In a high-profile strike against online movie piracy, federal authorities Thursday arrested and charged a Chicago-area man with copyright infringement after he allegedly copied and distributed videotapes he allegedly obtained from a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and illegal interception of a satellite signal.
According to an affidavit filed by a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William Russell Sprague of Homewood, Ill., told investigators that over the past few years, he received approximately 60 videotapes of movies under consideration for Hollywood awards from actor and academy member Carmine Caridi, 70. Mr. Sprague told authorities that he copied the movies and distributed them to family and friends.
Having used a digital voice recorder for a bit...
One of the things I used to record prior to a trip was the driving directions. (e.g. get off at exit 273A, make a left on MacAuthur Blvd, go 3 lights...)
It actually was quite handy not to have to read a scrap of paper in the middle of the night while barreling down a crowded highway at 65.
The 8cm CD is still around. In fact, it's *easier* to find 8cm CD-R media then it used to be.
I have a Sony digital camera that uses 8cm CDs to store the images, which is darned handy. When I'm done shooting, finalize the CD, pop it in the nearest PC and make copies for friends/relatives.
I also have a mini-CD mp3 player... 210Mb is around 2-3 hours of decent quality MP3 music.
I'm fairly sure that the 8cm CD is still used in Japan to sell singles.
Eh, I worked at a trucking firm for almost a decade. The majority of them are quite friendly, a bit gruff around the edges, but if you treat them with respect you'll get respect back. Hell, some of them were quite the computer tinkerers in their spare time.
Back when I was commuting every day, I kept a CB-radio hooked up in the car to keep an ear on channel 19. Nothing worse then sitting in a traffic jam on some stretch of interstate with no information about what / why / where. Usually, the truckers knew what was going on so you knew whether or not to just stick it out or get off at the next exit and try the side roads.
Tough to listen to channel 19 if you have passengers in the car though... I generally just turned the volume down or you could get a speaker that clips to your safety belt (so the speaker is up around your ear).
So... do you think we tripled their daily readership numbers? It was a very well-written article, will probably get linked to hither-n-yon.
I'm just wondering what the feedback effect would be... "Hey, we posted an article about SCO and our readership went through the roof!"
Agreed, espionage is probably a better term then burglary.
But then, maybe the RIAA's attempt to make copying synonymous with theft is working well, eh?
Start from the basic truth that man is inherently evil.
Without externally imposed limits (law, peer pressure, community pressure) or internally chosen limits (moral code), a person will do whatever benefits them, regardless of it's impact on other people / environment / etc... basically, the ends justify the means, and if they can get away with it, they will do it.
Heck, at least you can turn the checkmark off!
I don't think that was possible in the AOL branded version of Netscape (v6 IIRC?).
So, while not perfect, at least it seems to be a trainable mutt.
Of course, since WinAmp v5 still doesn't support multi-byte ID3 tags (e.g. non-western character sets), I dumped it again and switched to FooBar2000.
Where am I?
In the village
What do you want?
Information
Whose side are you on?
That Would Be Telling. We want information, information, information.
You Won't Get It!
By Hook Or By Crook, We Will!
Who are you?
The New Number Two
Who is Number One?
You Are Number Six.
I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN!
(with apologies to the Prisoner)
Agree with the other poster, look for a keyboard designed to work in a rackmount environment. It can only be about 18" wide, which is just enough for the main keys and the cursor keys. The number pad is usually activated by the numlock or some other toggle.
Do yourself one better and look for a mini-keyboard that also includes either a trackpoint-style pointer (a little nubby between the G/H/B keys) or a trackpad. Most of the time you can also use an external mouse with these which gets you the best of both worlds.
Downside is cost...
One that caught my eye, but seems to be out of stock is the IBM Trackpoint Space Saver (22P5150).