It's not the IP address that matters, it's the fact that a single source made 32 attempts to login to your account. This warning might prompt you to take additional steps, such as changing your password to something random.
I once had someone try repeatedly to access one of my online accounts. I changed the lost password challenge question to "Go f**k yourself".
No, it's kinds similar to if you have no intention of paying for a Miley Cyrus concert, but your friend decides to go and buys a Miley Cyrus DVD while he's there, and when he gets home, you ask to borrow the DVD so you can make a copy of it for yourself, thus obtaining a Miley Cyrus DVD without having to actually purchase one. Nothing is lost by you not attending the concert, but something is lost by you not paying for the DVD you now possess.
Your logic states "I didn't intend to pay for it, therefore nothing is lost if I grab it for free". I disagree with your rationalization.
I'm fully aware of the *legal* distinction. Nevertheless, I used the term "stealing" deliberately. This is not akin to singing "Happy Birthday" without putting a royalty cheque in the mail. This is knowingly helping yourself to products that cost hundreds of dollars to obtain legally.
When I was a child, stealing was an easily understood concept. When something was offered for sale and (without the seller's consent) you took it without paying, that was called stealing.
As adults, we convolute the simple truths that children understand. You assert that copyright holders are not deprived on anything "they had before". That may be true, but they are deprived of the money I should have paid to own their product. I still call that stealing.
So, have I "been brainwashed by big media interests", or have you been brainwashed by people who deal in legal semantics?
isohunt.com and a search for "The Teaching Company" - free
Or, if you prefer not to steal copyrighted materials, you could pay the company for the excellent products they provide, and even get a nice companion book to go with the audio:
The title is implying that mutation occurs *every* generation. This is not required for evolution to take place. It could have been that mutations only occurred once in a number of generations, and people in between were perfect copies.
I could see, potentially, someone trademarking/soundmarking a specific, unique sound. A particular recorded clip, for example. However, 'dynamically' generated sounds like someone blowing a duck call - how can that be 'sound marked'? After all, every time someone blows a duck call, the sound will be *slightly* different, unique, if you will.
How can you trademark/soundmark something which DOES NOT YET EXIST?
Even recorded sounds are "slightly different" than the original. And when you replay a recording, 'dynamically' generated sounds are produced by your speakers. Every sound system introduces some distortion and infidelity. Just because each duck call would be slightly different doesn't change the fact that they would be recognized as the same sound - a quack.
Similarly, if the RIAA sued you for copyright infringement of music, it would be useless to argue that your copy of a song was in a lossy format, and therefore not really a copy of the original work. Nor could you argue that the song copy DOES NOT YET EXIST until your earphones produce sound waves.
I started out with a company that sold removable-platter hard drives. We had 75MB and 150MB versions, both about the size a dishwasher. Computer parts weren't expendable back then; we repaired everything.
Since the platters were removable, the read/write heads were prone to damage from dust and such, despite significant airflow and filtering when the lid was locked down. Heads had to be replaced regularly.
It takes considerable physical force to drive a stack of read/write heads back and forth across large (approx. 16") platters in a matter of milliseconds. This was accomplished by means of large electromagnetic coils. The head assembly was built as light as possible. To keep the whole machine from jumping across the floor, the moving coil pushed and pulled against a piece of thick, heavy steel that looked like a short, stocky cannon.
Aligning a replacement head had to be done live. To prevent catastrophic disk damage, however, these devices had an "emergency retract" system that would yank the heads back off the platters if the power failed, platters lost speed or something similar. Imagine a large but light-weight head assembly attached to a huge coil, pulsed by a large capacitive discharge, anchored to a small steel cannon. If you were aligning a head and had your fingers in the way of that, it would easily take them off. It was necessary to insert a special safety pin to prevent this from happening.
I haven't compared battery meters between Linux and Windows, but I've long suspected the over-estimation issue is a result of modern batteries themselves. A characteristic of earlier batteries was that the output voltage would drop as the battery discharged. One could get a fairly reliable measure of battery charge by simply putting a voltmeter across the battery terminals. (This works well with the lead-acid battery in your car, for example).
An ideal battery, however, should provide a constant output voltage, and successive generations of batteries have improved on this. If you imagine a graph of output voltage over time, modern batteries maintain a fairly horizontal line until very close the end of their charge, at which point the output voltage falls off precipitously.
This presents a new challenge. How do you determine the charge level of a battery when it "appears" to have a good charge right until the end? External measurement won't suffice, you need a "smart" battery that can provide information about its internal state. I think this is what the InfoLithium® battery in my Sony camera is supposed to do.
In Windows, the default warning times can be a killer. I've seen Windows laptops die with no warning at all, only to have the warning message appear after they're plugged in and powered back on. On some laptops I've had to set the warning time to as much as 25 minutes to ensure enough time to get an adapter plugged in before it dies.
Did you even read my comment? Different printers have different printable areas / margins, and different fonts. What the driver does is a Windows issue, not a Word issue.
Different versions of Word is not what usually causes formatting to change when opening a document on a different machine. It's having different printer drivers installed (especially for the default printer) that causes problems. In fact, merely selecting a different printer on the originating computer can throw page formatting out of whack. Printers often have different printable margins, and even the list of fonts available changes depending on the printer selected.
Interface issues aside, perhaps the most surprising functional change between Office 2003 and Office 2007 was that they took away the ability to click "Insert -> Picture -> From Scanner or Camera". In Word 2007, it's necessary to save a scanned image as a file (outside of Word), and then locate/insert the file (within Word).
I would be pleased if I could scan into a document directly again.
That's not the answer. I'm telling you that for some time I sat there thinking, "Man, this DVD looks like shit". With Blu-Ray, I'm often thinking "Man, this picture looks awesome"!
The fact that the human brain can adjust to inferior video quality doesn't change the fact that it's inferior.
I stopped caring about blu-rays, they became too much hassle (and too expensive) for not enough of a quality boost.
I disagree. First of all, it can be as hassle-free as plugging one cable between a player and a screen. What's the big deal?
As for quality, try watching something like Planet
Earth in full 1080p resolution. Many of the scenes are positively breathtaking in their detail and clarity. I happen to be watching on a bargain 72"
TV. At this size, DVD's are very visibly inferior in resolution. I recently rewatched Terminator 2: Judgment Day on DVD and was struck by how noticeable the quality difference was. It really detracted from my enjoyment of the movie until I became caught up in the action enough to stop thinking about it.
I've sat beside people who simply can't tell the difference, however. I suspect these are the same people who stretch standard 4:3 aspect ratio programs across their wide-screen TV's and are oblivious to the distortion.
The strobe light effect you mention appears to slow down, stop, or reverse falling droplets, but is merely an illusion. The individual droplets in each frame are actually replaced by successive droplets that are sufficiently similar-looking to give the illusion that you're seeing one individual droplet frozen in space.
With the sand example, the droplets are visibly different in size and shape. You don't want some sleight-of-hand trick with a strobe light, where you turn out the lights and quickly put a different droplet in place. You want to keep individual droplets in frame and follow them as they form and fall. Having the camera fall in unison with the sand seems like a pretty good way to do it.
I guess it is too hard to get yourself trained and armed and stop thinking the police will protect you, because they won't, unless it is convenient to them to do so.
I would confront the asshole, and if he wanted to kill me for my iphone, then that person should be OFF the streets anyway.
I take it you consider yourself some kind of tough guy. You know how to fight and are possibly armed. You're not going to take shit from any lowlife street thug.
You are also an idiot. Here's why:
Only an idiot would advocate the kind of vigilantism you're describing,
and believe that society would be better if more citizens were weapon-toting
tough guys like you.
Your capitalization of the word OFF suggests you are using it in the colloquial
sense, meaning to KILL someone. Perhaps you are more than just an idiot. Perhaps
you are a homicidal idiot.
There are people walking the streets of every city who are crazy. When you
confront a stranger you have no way of knowing who you are dealing with. The
person you confront could be armed themselves, and mentally deranged enough
to use their weapon for no good reason at all.
I've been in altercations with people who were clearly prepared to use a level of violence far beyond what the situation called for - people who were clearly not rational. It's not cowardly to avoid such confrontations. It's the intelligent thing to do.
What makes a botnet potentially devastating is that it can create traffic that's indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. When a large enough number of computers from random locations request a page from your webserver, how do you sort the bad requests from the good? It's the slashdot effect on steroids.
If all the traffic was originating from within a particular country, it would be straightfoward to drop that traffic and let other traffic through.
It's interesting to note that in the early days, it wasn't possible to determine geographic location based on IP address. Address blocks were originally assigned rather haphazardly. As the number of networks grew, routers had to store larger and larger routing tables. Eventually this led to a push to reorganize address block allocations in a more hierarchical fashion, which ultimately made geolocation possible.
The decision whether to repair or to wipe a computer is not always easy. I've been fixing computers for a long time, to the point where many of my clients are other IT professionals in need of support, and my hourly rates are significant.
A common scenario involves multiple malware infections on a computer with numerous applications installed. Wiping and properly reinstalling the machine will give guaranteed results, but will take hours due to the large number of updates and patches required. With luck it's not some low-end desktop full of no-name hardware with hard-to-find drivers.
So the first choice is usually to repair the infections rather than wipe the computer, but here's the catch - some of these buggers are HARD to get rid of, particularly in the case of new variants for which effective removal tools aren't available.
I've cleaned computers to the point where every malware scanner I run reports clean, but malicious activity like bogus DNS resolution or blocking of executables is still evident.
Now it gets tough. Say you've already spent 2 hours scanning & disinfecting a machine and it's beginning to smell like you may be up against a root kit or something your favourite tools can't detect. You have to make a call. Do you keep digging, spending more time, and risk having to give up and reinstall in the end, or cut the losses and wipe now? If the malware uses new tricks you haven't seen before, you could spend HOURS digging, and if unsuccessful, still be facing 3 or 4 more hours to reinstall from scratch.
There are times I would like to keep going out of sheer curiosity, but when someone brings in a computer for malware removal, you can't run up a bill that would rival the cost of replacing the computer! Choosing to reinstall does not mean you lack skills - it's a cost/benefit decision.
I could offer differing thoughts on a number of the points you make, but why bother? You make choices that you're comfortable with. So do I. I don't assume anyone is an "idiot" because they make different choices than me. That was my point.
I take umbrage when called an IDIOT for not using sudo. I've been an administrator for many years on numerous flavours of *nix and I've NEVER had a problem caused by misapplication of root priviledge.
I've also habitually run Windows with administrative priviledges, because I personally find that the benefits of a limited account are insufficient to outweigh the repeated inconveniences it imposes on me.
I've also eschewed running antivirus software on my current (Vista x64) desktop.
Do any of these choices make me an IDIOT? I don't think so. In fact, if IQ tests mean anything, I can point out that I'm a member of Mensa, and in the high range even within that group.
Do these choices make me careless? Quite the opposite. I am knowledgeable and very CAREFUL.
Typing "sudo" in front of a command does not make you intellectually superior. What's to stop you from typing "sudo something_stupid"?
The problem I've found with older oscilloscopes is not that they stop working, but are simply too slow for use with modern electronics.
I bought an entry-level scope back in the 80's that was good for signals up to about 20 MHz IIRC. This was plenty fast compared to a state-of-the-art Intel 80386 running at 16 MHz back then. It wouldn't be much use today where CPU's are clocked in GHz.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the IP address that matters, it's the fact that a single source made 32 attempts to login to your account. This warning might prompt you to take additional steps, such as changing your password to something random.
I once had someone try repeatedly to access one of my online accounts. I changed the lost password challenge question to "Go f**k yourself".
No, it's kinds similar to if you have no intention of paying for a Miley Cyrus concert, but your friend decides to go and buys a Miley Cyrus DVD while he's there, and when he gets home, you ask to borrow the DVD so you can make a copy of it for yourself, thus obtaining a Miley Cyrus DVD without having to actually purchase one. Nothing is lost by you not attending the concert, but something is lost by you not paying for the DVD you now possess.
Your logic states "I didn't intend to pay for it, therefore nothing is lost if I grab it for free". I disagree with your rationalization.
I'm fully aware of the *legal* distinction. Nevertheless, I used the term "stealing" deliberately. This is not akin to singing "Happy Birthday" without putting a royalty cheque in the mail. This is knowingly helping yourself to products that cost hundreds of dollars to obtain legally.
When I was a child, stealing was an easily understood concept. When something was offered for sale and (without the seller's consent) you took it without paying, that was called stealing.
As adults, we convolute the simple truths that children understand. You assert that copyright holders are not deprived on anything "they had before". That may be true, but they are deprived of the money I should have paid to own their product. I still call that stealing.
So, have I "been brainwashed by big media interests", or have you been brainwashed by people who deal in legal semantics?
isohunt.com and a search for "The Teaching Company" - free
Or, if you prefer not to steal copyrighted materials, you could pay the company for the excellent products they provide, and even get a nice companion book to go with the audio:
The Teaching Company
The title is implying that mutation occurs *every* generation. This is not required for evolution to take place. It could have been that mutations only occurred once in a number of generations, and people in between were perfect copies.
if they had actually sold it on E-Bay.
I don't trust a company that won't use their own product.
I just know there is a Disney lawyer sitting in a back room somewhere thinking, "Man, we just gotta get a trademark on the sound of farts!"
More likely there is a Disney lawyer about to claim prior art on the duck quack.
I could see, potentially, someone trademarking/soundmarking a specific, unique sound. A particular recorded clip, for example. However, 'dynamically' generated sounds like someone blowing a duck call - how can that be 'sound marked'? After all, every time someone blows a duck call, the sound will be *slightly* different, unique, if you will.
How can you trademark/soundmark something which DOES NOT YET EXIST?
Even recorded sounds are "slightly different" than the original. And when you replay a recording, 'dynamically' generated sounds are produced by your speakers. Every sound system introduces some distortion and infidelity. Just because each duck call would be slightly different doesn't change the fact that they would be recognized as the same sound - a quack.
Similarly, if the RIAA sued you for copyright infringement of music, it would be useless to argue that your copy of a song was in a lossy format, and therefore not really a copy of the original work. Nor could you argue that the song copy DOES NOT YET EXIST until your earphones produce sound waves.
I started out with a company that sold removable-platter hard drives. We had 75MB and 150MB versions, both about the size a dishwasher. Computer parts weren't expendable back then; we repaired everything.
Since the platters were removable, the read/write heads were prone to damage from dust and such, despite significant airflow and filtering when the lid was locked down. Heads had to be replaced regularly.
It takes considerable physical force to drive a stack of read/write heads back and forth across large (approx. 16") platters in a matter of milliseconds. This was accomplished by means of large electromagnetic coils. The head assembly was built as light as possible. To keep the whole machine from jumping across the floor, the moving coil pushed and pulled against a piece of thick, heavy steel that looked like a short, stocky cannon.
Aligning a replacement head had to be done live. To prevent catastrophic disk damage, however, these devices had an "emergency retract" system that would yank the heads back off the platters if the power failed, platters lost speed or something similar. Imagine a large but light-weight head assembly attached to a huge coil, pulsed by a large capacitive discharge, anchored to a small steel cannon. If you were aligning a head and had your fingers in the way of that, it would easily take them off. It was necessary to insert a special safety pin to prevent this from happening.
I haven't compared battery meters between Linux and Windows, but I've long suspected the over-estimation issue is a result of modern batteries themselves. A characteristic of earlier batteries was that the output voltage would drop as the battery discharged. One could get a fairly reliable measure of battery charge by simply putting a voltmeter across the battery terminals. (This works well with the lead-acid battery in your car, for example).
An ideal battery, however, should provide a constant output voltage, and successive generations of batteries have improved on this. If you imagine a graph of output voltage over time, modern batteries maintain a fairly horizontal line until very close the end of their charge, at which point the output voltage falls off precipitously.
This presents a new challenge. How do you determine the charge level of a battery when it "appears" to have a good charge right until the end? External measurement won't suffice, you need a "smart" battery that can provide information about its internal state. I think this is what the InfoLithium® battery in my Sony camera is supposed to do.
In Windows, the default warning times can be a killer. I've seen Windows laptops die with no warning at all, only to have the warning message appear after they're plugged in and powered back on. On some laptops I've had to set the warning time to as much as 25 minutes to ensure enough time to get an adapter plugged in before it dies.
Did you even read my comment? Different printers have different printable areas / margins, and different fonts. What the driver does is a Windows issue, not a Word issue.
Different versions of Word is not what usually causes formatting to change when opening a document on a different machine. It's having different printer drivers installed (especially for the default printer) that causes problems. In fact, merely selecting a different printer on the originating computer can throw page formatting out of whack. Printers often have different printable margins, and even the list of fonts available changes depending on the printer selected.
Interface issues aside, perhaps the most surprising functional change between Office 2003 and Office 2007 was that they took away the ability to click "Insert -> Picture -> From Scanner or Camera". In Word 2007, it's necessary to save a scanned image as a file (outside of Word), and then locate/insert the file (within Word).
I would be pleased if I could scan into a document directly again.
That's not the answer. I'm telling you that for some time I sat there thinking, "Man, this DVD looks like shit". With Blu-Ray, I'm often thinking "Man, this picture looks awesome"!
The fact that the human brain can adjust to inferior video quality doesn't change the fact that it's inferior.
I stopped caring about blu-rays, they became too much hassle (and too expensive) for not enough of a quality boost.
I disagree. First of all, it can be as hassle-free as plugging one cable between a player and a screen. What's the big deal?
As for quality, try watching something like Planet Earth in full 1080p resolution. Many of the scenes are positively breathtaking in their detail and clarity. I happen to be watching on a bargain 72" TV. At this size, DVD's are very visibly inferior in resolution. I recently rewatched Terminator 2: Judgment Day on DVD and was struck by how noticeable the quality difference was. It really detracted from my enjoyment of the movie until I became caught up in the action enough to stop thinking about it.
I've sat beside people who simply can't tell the difference, however. I suspect these are the same people who stretch standard 4:3 aspect ratio programs across their wide-screen TV's and are oblivious to the distortion.
The strobe light effect you mention appears to slow down, stop, or reverse falling droplets, but is merely an illusion. The individual droplets in each frame are actually replaced by successive droplets that are sufficiently similar-looking to give the illusion that you're seeing one individual droplet frozen in space.
With the sand example, the droplets are visibly different in size and shape. You don't want some sleight-of-hand trick with a strobe light, where you turn out the lights and quickly put a different droplet in place. You want to keep individual droplets in frame and follow them as they form and fall. Having the camera fall in unison with the sand seems like a pretty good way to do it.
I guess it is too hard to get yourself trained and armed and stop thinking the police will protect you, because they won't, unless it is convenient to them to do so.
I would confront the asshole, and if he wanted to kill me for my iphone, then that person should be OFF the streets anyway.
I take it you consider yourself some kind of tough guy. You know how to fight and are possibly armed. You're not going to take shit from any lowlife street thug.
You are also an idiot. Here's why:
I've been in altercations with people who were clearly prepared to use a level of violence far beyond what the situation called for - people who were clearly not rational. It's not cowardly to avoid such confrontations. It's the intelligent thing to do.
What makes a botnet potentially devastating is that it can create traffic that's indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. When a large enough number of computers from random locations request a page from your webserver, how do you sort the bad requests from the good? It's the slashdot effect on steroids.
If all the traffic was originating from within a particular country, it would be straightfoward to drop that traffic and let other traffic through.
It's interesting to note that in the early days, it wasn't possible to determine geographic location based on IP address. Address blocks were originally assigned rather haphazardly. As the number of networks grew, routers had to store larger and larger routing tables. Eventually this led to a push to reorganize address block allocations in a more hierarchical fashion, which ultimately made geolocation possible.
The decision whether to repair or to wipe a computer is not always easy. I've been fixing computers for a long time, to the point where many of my clients are other IT professionals in need of support, and my hourly rates are significant.
A common scenario involves multiple malware infections on a computer with numerous applications installed. Wiping and properly reinstalling the machine will give guaranteed results, but will take hours due to the large number of updates and patches required. With luck it's not some low-end desktop full of no-name hardware with hard-to-find drivers.
So the first choice is usually to repair the infections rather than wipe the computer, but here's the catch - some of these buggers are HARD to get rid of, particularly in the case of new variants for which effective removal tools aren't available.
I've cleaned computers to the point where every malware scanner I run reports clean, but malicious activity like bogus DNS resolution or blocking of executables is still evident.
Now it gets tough. Say you've already spent 2 hours scanning & disinfecting a machine and it's beginning to smell like you may be up against a root kit or something your favourite tools can't detect. You have to make a call. Do you keep digging, spending more time, and risk having to give up and reinstall in the end, or cut the losses and wipe now? If the malware uses new tricks you haven't seen before, you could spend HOURS digging, and if unsuccessful, still be facing 3 or 4 more hours to reinstall from scratch.
There are times I would like to keep going out of sheer curiosity, but when someone brings in a computer for malware removal, you can't run up a bill that would rival the cost of replacing the computer! Choosing to reinstall does not mean you lack skills - it's a cost/benefit decision.
is not the relevant number. The probability calculation needs to consider how many are large enough to take down a large aircraft.
Thanks for correcting me on that. I misread "No 6502" as "Number 6502".
The article mentions "Z-80" among the parts used. The Z-80 itself is an 8-Bit CPU.
I could offer differing thoughts on a number of the points you make, but why bother? You make choices that you're comfortable with. So do I. I don't assume anyone is an "idiot" because they make different choices than me. That was my point.
I take umbrage when called an IDIOT for not using sudo. I've been an administrator for many years on numerous flavours of *nix and I've NEVER had a problem caused by misapplication of root priviledge.
I've also habitually run Windows with administrative priviledges, because I personally find that the benefits of a limited account are insufficient to outweigh the repeated inconveniences it imposes on me.
I've also eschewed running antivirus software on my current (Vista x64) desktop.
Do any of these choices make me an IDIOT? I don't think so. In fact, if IQ tests mean anything, I can point out that I'm a member of Mensa, and in the high range even within that group.
Do these choices make me careless? Quite the opposite. I am knowledgeable and very CAREFUL.
Typing "sudo" in front of a command does not make you intellectually superior. What's to stop you from typing "sudo something_stupid"?
The problem I've found with older oscilloscopes is not that they stop working, but are simply too slow for use with modern electronics.
I bought an entry-level scope back in the 80's that was good for signals up to about 20 MHz IIRC. This was plenty fast compared to a state-of-the-art Intel 80386 running at 16 MHz back then. It wouldn't be much use today where CPU's are clocked in GHz.