Quicksilver is a pretty nifty program, and I used to use it as a free alternative to Launchbar (which used to perform roughly the same tasks). Both programs learn what you want certain shortcuts to mean, and both use Command-Space to activate them. For me, entering 'FX' is Firefox, 'PS' is photoshop, and so on.
However Launchbar has since updated to 4.0 beta release, and in doing so has pre-empted spotlight, as it does (right now, in 10.3) index system-wide metadata. So now you can cue up songs by entering MP3 names, open any kind of files by entering keywords for filename or type, open websites, perform google searches,Google image searches and so on.
It's worth trying out as an alternative to Quicksilver.
I'd love to see how much of the nets resources are taken up by spam mail, viruses, worms, and the like. I would imagine (although I am totally uneducated in the arena of 'tech') that if these problems were wrapped up for good, a whole lot of stress would be removed from the Internets shoulders.
I'm also cynical enough to predict that intel are saying; "The net is dying... AND WE HAVE THE SOLUTION! SIGN UP NOW FOR ONLY $5.99 TO GET A STARTER PACK"
The company also developed so-called sleep transistors that shut off the electrical current to areas of a chip that aren't being used. As a result, power consumption drops -- something that will decrease heat generation and help battery-powered devices last longer between charges.
This sounds like a great way to tackle heat and power problems with laptops (and PCs, it's not like modern PCs don't have heating trouble too). I'd lay a bet though, that it'll still run hotter than the P4s, it seems there should be an addenium to Moores law.
The number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months, and that integrated circuit will get pretty damn shit hot
I'm not quite sure I see the point of this, besides throwing HP a bone in return for having iTunes pre-installed on their machines.
You don't see the point? Then let me show you...
HP is the second largest PC supplier in the US.Apple, is not. I can gaurantee you Apple will ship more ipods in the next 6 months with HPs platform to sell from than they have for the last year. HP has a market reach that is far in excess of Apples, and is an entirely different demograph. Apples target market of young fashion nerds with fat wallets already know about or have ipods, but HP can sell ipods to people that wouldn't be normally reading/. or apple.com.
With this and Microsofts entrance into music sales, it'll be an interesting few months running up to Christmas.
MS compared server 2003 on dual 900 MHz Xeons to Linux on an IBM z900 mainframe.
By my own similar method of comparison I can conclude Apples Mac OS X is 2000 times cheaper than MS server 2003*.
* Mac OS X running on a dual G5 Xserve. MS sever 2003 running on a quad quantum cyberdine systems X-9000 with gold plated tri-lithium cooled case and diamond studded cup holder.
I should have posted this long ago. As a former employee, here is an insider's look at the top 5 things from the HT department of Best Buy (where I worked) that I guarantee they do not want their customers to know.
5. Barely legal bait and switch schemes. They push the limits of the laws with many of their flyer ads with some cheap product, like a 40 dollar DVD player to get you in the store, in hopes of encouraging you to buy something better, ie more expensive. That's the salesmen's job under any circumstance, so it doesn't change with these cheapo sales events either.
4. Open box items are usually returned items, not something that just happened to get opened in store, which rarely happens. I've seen many store employees try to avoid saying it was returned, in fear of losing the sale. Also most employees don't take the time to properly label the open box tags so you may think you are getting all accessories when you are not.
3. I've discussed this before, but here is more on this subject. As part of employee training, monster cables are drilled into employee's heads as a part of all applicable sales add ons from day one. In fact it is part of the "Total Solution" mechanism in place that all employess are to follow during their sales routine. Employees are told straight up that monster's products are superior, but never given any detailed reason why this is supposedly so. The employees I witnessed would typically memorize much of the fluff that was written on the package, on their own behalf, as a way to more quickly answer customer questions, preserve "expert" status, and eliminate possible reservations that the customer might have about spending more on something that was already provided in the box. In fact, this was often lied about. Employees don't like telling customers that zipcords come with their dvd player when asked. If they employees are forced into telling a customer, they will be quick to point how poor in quality they are in comparison to monster's products. One manager would actually say "The only thing (the customer) better be using zipcords cords for is to hold their trunk shut after they've just bought something". AR cables and recoton cables are seen as a failure of doing a proper sale at Best Buy and used only as a last ditch effort to get the customer to buy a little something extra. If an employee doesn't ask you "do you want cables, an antenna, blank discs, tapes, etc. with that?" when you are buying an applicable product, then they are simply not doing their job as instructed.
2. Employee know how. There was a recent Home Theater magazine article on the knowledge of Circuit City, Ultimate Electronics, and Best Buy employees. The rag was trying to determine how well each store knew their stuff. I knew what the results of this absolutely retarded article were going to be before I even began reading it, but as a former employee I read it anyway for curiousity's sake. The results, of course, depended on the individual knowledge of the employee that the writers happened to speak to.
Best Buys's policy is for each employee to know as much as they can about the products they sell in their primary area of responsibility. Yet, in order to do so they have to research the product almost entirely on their own time. During slow times throughout the day when you would think an employee could do a little studying, typically this is when the merchandising manager obegins running around being his/her most concerned about the store's cleanliness and the straighntess of the product on the shelves etc., so employees rarely get to know their products that well and also because of the constant product turnover. Also keep in mind when selling something such as a DVD player you can
And furthermore, it seems to me that fusion research in the EU is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that people here instinctively equate all nuclear power with dangerous, radioactive evil.
Out of the 5 people that say they thought it was crap, 4 of them admitted to playing only a few hours and then stopping.
To these people, I say this.
PUSSY!
As for me, I'm heading back to Mars, this game is the most immersive scary goddamn soul burningly freaky horror fest of infinte scariness ever. I had to play this game *for* my friend on *his* computer, because he was too scared to play it. I'm also fairly sure that his chair is the proud owner of several of my most spontaneous stool samples.
For almost every game i've ever played there were problems, little glitches that demanded certain versions of drivers, stuff like that. Even if the game was well behaved it ran like a dog on my PCs (which are all really old and crap).
But when Quake 3 came out i could run it on a P233 (with MMX!), voodoo 2 12meg and 128MB ram. iD engines scale all the way.
I will be interested in seeing how low people can get Doom 3 running.
I've noticed a trend from the last few years. As PC companys like dell and gateway stuck little extra 'multimedia' keys on the top of the keyboard, they also slowly began to shrik key size.
It was slightly noticeable that the 'full size' keyboard on my powerbook was bigger than the one on my girlfriends PC, but the kicker came when i dug my old Amiga 500 out of storage. The keyboard seemed so massive!
So i ended up taking a very old keyboard from a server in my attic and using that. It's so old it has no windows keys, and the big clunky keys are heavenly compared to the modern flat logitect styles.
The next meeting, which starts Monday, features a workshop aimed at bridging the gap between ICANN and the United Nations, which is becoming increasingly interested in Internet governance.
The UN getting interested in governing the net?
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I'm off to spend the last few weeks of internet existence with the badgers.
No company in the world will ever try and develop software that never needs (costly) upgrades and add-ons. Take a look at Micrsofts behaviour with MS Office, it's a complete cash cow because they can update it when they want and force people into upgrading with changed document types. Even the open source community will be too interested in improving and adding on to thier pet projects to consider leaving it alone.
this article seems pretty flawed.
We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers.
The fundamental difference being bridges cost more to alter than software does. And the capabilities of hardware allows more freedom in software, to which there is no correlation in bridges.
Neural networks, are basically many interconnected neurons, which are mathematical functions performing a weighted sum of the inputs and delivering an output through a non-linear transfer function. They are used in a research oroject I have worked on to determine data patterns in 'electronic noses'.
Personally, i think this article is very full of buzzwords, but using ANNs to pick out spam is very possible and would return an excellent catch rate, especially if the data collected from being 'trained' could be collected and refined for making better networks.
I'm not sure how 'up for it' home end-users would be, it may take a lof of hardware to run (we use a shit load of Xserves, but maybe thats overkill).
It could be great for actual mail servers, like gmail for example.
Unrepentant Mac Apologism time! It seems that there are some "statistics" flying around that can be interpreted to mean that Mac OS X is, practically speaking, no more secure than Windows, and we certainly can't let that sort of stuff go unchecked, now, can we? Whether it's true or not, we mean. So we feel it's our sworn duty to cast all sorts of aspersions on the reliability of said stats and on the character and competence of those who compiled them. Of course, you'll have to keep in mind that absolutely nothing we say on the subject carries any weight whatsoever, since, far from being experts on computer security, our real expertise is in the field of making vegetables out of Play-Doh. (Corn on the cob is our specialty. We can get it all bumpy and everything.) However, while we're not security experts, we've seen one on TV; surely that counts for something.
Anyway, it's like this: faithful viewer C. J. Corbett tipped us off to a Techworld article last week with the ominous title of "Mac OS X security myth exposed" which leads off with this oh-so-fair-and-balanced sentence: "Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined." See, security firm Secunia claims to have compiled some honest-to-goodness statistics proving once and for all that choosing Mac OS X over Windows is your surest path to having some scary 'net dude invade your system, swipe your financial data, and start leering at digital photos of your family members in an... unsavory manner.
How is this possible? Well, numbers don't lie, and while Windows XP Professional clocked "46 advisories in 2003-2004, with 48 percent of vulnerabilities allowing remote attacks and 46 percent enabling system access," Mac OS X racked up 36 such advisories, with 61 percent remotely exploitable and 32 percent allowing the takeover of the system. See? Worse than you ever imagined. It's like a wedge of Swiss cheese with a shotgun blast through the middle or something. Meanwhile, Windows users will no doubt be thrilled to hear that their virus-ridden, spyware-loaded, worm-propagating systems are more secure than they think. Good for them.
There are just a few problems with this argument, however. The first is the claim that Mac OS X isn't much better than Windows XP Professional because it had 36 security advisories compared to Windows's 46. Maybe we're fresh off the turnip truck or something, but 22% fewer advisories sounds quite a bit better to us. Also, if you actually look at the data to which Techworld refers, it's not 36 advisories for Mac OS X at all; it's 33. (Apparently Techworld decided to go back to 2002 to fetch its reported number.) Granted, the Windows number is also 45 instead of 46-- yeesh, Techworld; fact-check much?-- but even so, now we're talking about nearly 27% fewer security advisories for Mac OS X than for Windows XP Professional.
Now take a look at the advisories themselves, and notice how no fewer than eleven of those 33 advisories (that's a third, for the mathematically inept) are titled "Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities" or something similar. Yes, in its advisory count, Secunia is including those advisories it generated just to report that Apple had fixed something. Does anyone else find it a little odd that Secunia penalizes Apple for fixing problems, including ones that were fixed so quickly that Secunia had never found out about them in the first place? (While they may describe a flaw and immediately note the presence of a patch, none of the Windows advisories appears to exist simply to announce that Redmond had fixed a bunch of holes.)
Notice also that Secunia yaps on about how, for Mac OS X, "of the 36 advisories issued in 2003-2004, 61 percent could be exploited across the Internet and 32 percent enabled attackers to take over the system"-- but never mentions how many could be exploited across the Internet to enable attackers to take over the system. Personally, we aren't much concerned about exploits that require local access to a Mac, because if any
In the bad old days of Northern Irelands terrorism, a family of catholics were arrested for bomb making. One of the family members was one of the guilford four. The evidence used to convict the rest of the family came from a semtex detecting machin, which was later found to be contaminated. Every test came up positive for explosive(, laughably, there were no negative controls).
Now Imagine the possibilities with DNA evidence, as it is, DNA is becoming very relied upon for convictions, and the police are getting overly reliant on it. In the future, someone arrested and sampled may get a full iron clad water tight conviction over a laboratory error. A mix up of the DNA sample taken, and a DNA sample taken from the scene of the crime...
This isn't even taking into account the fact that a crooked cop could find it very easy to contaminate a crime scene sample with DNA taken from a suspect.
These concerns could be overcome with good safegaurding, and good laboratory practise, but if the past is anything to go by, it's time to get paranoid.
The people that have dodgy copies of Windows are probably smart enough to get change thier key and get patched, and they are probably smart enough to have a firewall running.
Its the people that buy a standard configuration Dell and throw it on the net as soon as they get home that are probably responsible. No Firewall, no Anti Virus, no clue.
Slashdot Mirror
Quicksilver is a pretty nifty program, and I used to use it as a free alternative to Launchbar (which used to perform roughly the same tasks). Both programs learn what you want certain shortcuts to mean, and both use Command-Space to activate them. For me, entering 'FX' is Firefox, 'PS' is photoshop, and so on.
However Launchbar has since updated to 4.0 beta release, and in doing so has pre-empted spotlight, as it does (right now, in 10.3) index system-wide metadata. So now you can cue up songs by entering MP3 names, open any kind of files by entering keywords for filename or type, open websites, perform google searches,Google image searches and so on.
It's worth trying out as an alternative to Quicksilver.
Drugs+Money=Chicks
I'd love to see how much of the nets resources are taken up by spam mail, viruses, worms, and the like. I would imagine (although I am totally uneducated in the arena of 'tech') that if these problems were wrapped up for good, a whole lot of stress would be removed from the Internets shoulders.
I'm also cynical enough to predict that intel are saying;
"The net is dying... AND WE HAVE THE SOLUTION! SIGN UP NOW FOR ONLY $5.99 TO GET A STARTER PACK"
Robocop.
1) Serve the public trust.
2) Protect the innocent.
3) Uphold the law.
click this!
I have 1 GB of ram and a 1 GHz G4, and yet I can't run out of ram, despite running 61 programs (as shown above).
And REAL programs, Photoshop, Word, etc.
OS X handles Ram well.
This sounds like a great way to tackle heat and power problems with laptops (and PCs, it's not like modern PCs don't have heating trouble too). I'd lay a bet though, that it'll still run hotter than the P4s, it seems there should be an addenium to Moores law.
Introducing Microsoft Longhorn Millenium edition!
Preorder now and recieve a copy of Duke Nukem Forever!
I'm not quite sure I see the point of this, besides throwing HP a bone in return for having iTunes pre-installed on their machines.
/. or apple.com.
You don't see the point? Then let me show you...
HP is the second largest PC supplier in the US.Apple, is not. I can gaurantee you Apple will ship more ipods in the next 6 months with HPs platform to sell from than they have for the last year. HP has a market reach that is far in excess of Apples, and is an entirely different demograph. Apples target market of young fashion nerds with fat wallets already know about or have ipods, but HP can sell ipods to people that wouldn't be normally reading
With this and Microsofts entrance into music sales, it'll be an interesting few months running up to Christmas.
MS compared server 2003 on dual 900 MHz Xeons to Linux on an IBM z900 mainframe.
By my own similar method of comparison I can conclude Apples Mac OS X is 2000 times cheaper than MS server 2003*.
* Mac OS X running on a dual G5 Xserve. MS sever 2003 running on a quad quantum cyberdine systems X-9000 with gold plated tri-lithium cooled case and diamond studded cup holder.
an interesting little insight from a disgruntled staff member.
Top 5 things Best Buy doesn't want you to know
I should have posted this long ago. As a former employee, here is an insider's look at the top 5 things from the HT department of Best Buy (where I worked) that I guarantee they do not want their customers to know.
5. Barely legal bait and switch schemes. They push the limits of the laws with many of their flyer ads with some cheap product, like a 40 dollar DVD player to get you in the store, in hopes of encouraging you to buy something better, ie more expensive. That's the salesmen's job under any circumstance, so it doesn't change with these cheapo sales events either.
4. Open box items are usually returned items, not something that just happened to get opened in store, which rarely happens. I've seen many store employees try to avoid saying it was returned, in fear of losing the sale. Also most employees don't take the time to properly label the open box tags so you may think you are getting all accessories when you are not.
3. I've discussed this before, but here is more on this subject. As part of employee training, monster cables are drilled into employee's heads as a part of all applicable sales add ons from day one. In fact it is part of the "Total Solution" mechanism in place that all employess are to follow during their sales routine. Employees are told straight up that monster's products are superior, but never given any detailed reason why this is supposedly so. The employees I witnessed would typically memorize much of the fluff that was written on the package, on their own behalf, as a way to more quickly answer customer questions, preserve "expert" status, and eliminate possible reservations that the customer might have about spending more on something that was already provided in the box. In fact, this was often lied about. Employees don't like telling customers that zipcords come with their dvd player when asked. If they employees are forced into telling a customer, they will be quick to point how poor in quality they are in comparison to monster's products. One manager would actually say "The only thing (the customer) better be using zipcords cords for is to hold their trunk shut after they've just bought something". AR cables and recoton cables are seen as a failure of doing a proper sale at Best Buy and used only as a last ditch effort to get the customer to buy a little something extra. If an employee doesn't ask you "do you want cables, an antenna, blank discs, tapes, etc. with that?" when you are buying an applicable product, then they are simply not doing their job as instructed.
2. Employee know how. There was a recent Home Theater magazine article on the knowledge of Circuit City, Ultimate Electronics, and Best Buy employees. The rag was trying to determine how well each store knew their stuff. I knew what the results of this absolutely retarded article were going to be before I even began reading it, but as a former employee I read it anyway for curiousity's sake. The results, of course, depended on the individual knowledge of the employee that the writers happened to speak to.
Best Buys's policy is for each employee to know as much as they can about the products they sell in their primary area of responsibility. Yet, in order to do so they have to research the product almost entirely on their own time. During slow times throughout the day when you would think an employee could do a little studying, typically this is when the merchandising manager obegins running around being his/her most concerned about the store's cleanliness and the straighntess of the product on the shelves etc., so employees rarely get to know their products that well and also because of the constant product turnover. Also keep in mind when selling something such as a DVD player you can
And furthermore, it seems to me that fusion research in the EU is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that people here instinctively equate all nuclear power with dangerous, radioactive evil.
Yes, because it's not like Europe uses the most nuclear power in the world, and france in particular makes 75% of its power from nuclear power stations (over 3 times more than the avergae 17% , link here)
Just because Europe trys to act 'green' doesn't mean it acts stupidly.
Out of the 5 people that say they thought it was crap, 4 of them admitted to playing only a few hours and then stopping.
To these people, I say this.
PUSSY!
As for me, I'm heading back to Mars, this game is the most immersive scary goddamn soul burningly freaky horror fest of infinte scariness ever. I had to play this game *for* my friend on *his* computer, because he was too scared to play it. I'm also fairly sure that his chair is the proud owner of several of my most spontaneous stool samples.
Big thumbs up from me, BUY THIS GAME!
and then dive! dive! dive! until everyone in the back starts floating.
And thats how it got the name, 'vomit comet'.
For almost every game i've ever played there were problems, little glitches that demanded certain versions of drivers, stuff like that. Even if the game was well behaved it ran like a dog on my PCs (which are all really old and crap).
But when Quake 3 came out i could run it on a P233 (with MMX!), voodoo 2 12meg and 128MB ram. iD engines scale all the way.
I will be interested in seeing how low people can get Doom 3 running.
Apple (and MS) are both being sued over 6 patents held by BTG, which their pnline updating systems allegedly violate.
Link here.
Looks like fun and games ahead for Apples lawyers.
I've noticed a trend from the last few years. As PC companys like dell and gateway stuck little extra 'multimedia' keys on the top of the keyboard, they also slowly began to shrik key size.
It was slightly noticeable that the 'full size' keyboard on my powerbook was bigger than the one on my girlfriends PC, but the kicker came when i dug my old Amiga 500 out of storage. The keyboard seemed so massive!
So i ended up taking a very old keyboard from a server in my attic and using that. It's so old it has no windows keys, and the big clunky keys are heavenly compared to the modern flat logitect styles.
The next meeting, which starts Monday, features a workshop aimed at bridging the gap between ICANN and the United Nations, which is becoming increasingly interested in Internet governance.
The UN getting interested in governing the net?
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I'm off to spend the last few weeks of internet existence with the badgers.
No company in the world will ever try and develop software that never needs (costly) upgrades and add-ons. Take a look at Micrsofts behaviour with MS Office, it's a complete cash cow because they can update it when they want and force people into upgrading with changed document types. Even the open source community will be too interested in improving and adding on to thier pet projects to consider leaving it alone.
this article seems pretty flawed.
We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers.
The fundamental difference being bridges cost more to alter than software does. And the capabilities of hardware allows more freedom in software, to which there is no correlation in bridges.
hmmm, just my 2 euro-cents.
Neural networks, are basically many interconnected neurons, which are mathematical functions performing a weighted sum of the inputs and delivering an output through a non-linear transfer function. They are used in a research oroject I have worked on to determine data patterns in 'electronic noses'.
Link for info here
Personally, i think this article is very full of buzzwords, but using ANNs to pick out spam is very possible and would return an excellent catch rate, especially if the data collected from being 'trained' could be collected and refined for making better networks.
I'm not sure how 'up for it' home end-users would be, it may take a lof of hardware to run (we use a shit load of Xserves, but maybe thats overkill).
It could be great for actual mail servers, like gmail for example.
Unrepentant Mac Apologism time! It seems that there are some "statistics" flying around that can be interpreted to mean that Mac OS X is, practically speaking, no more secure than Windows, and we certainly can't let that sort of stuff go unchecked, now, can we? Whether it's true or not, we mean. So we feel it's our sworn duty to cast all sorts of aspersions on the reliability of said stats and on the character and competence of those who compiled them. Of course, you'll have to keep in mind that absolutely nothing we say on the subject carries any weight whatsoever, since, far from being experts on computer security, our real expertise is in the field of making vegetables out of Play-Doh. (Corn on the cob is our specialty. We can get it all bumpy and everything.) However, while we're not security experts, we've seen one on TV; surely that counts for something.
Anyway, it's like this: faithful viewer C. J. Corbett tipped us off to a Techworld article last week with the ominous title of "Mac OS X security myth exposed" which leads off with this oh-so-fair-and-balanced sentence: "Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined." See, security firm Secunia claims to have compiled some honest-to-goodness statistics proving once and for all that choosing Mac OS X over Windows is your surest path to having some scary 'net dude invade your system, swipe your financial data, and start leering at digital photos of your family members in an... unsavory manner.
How is this possible? Well, numbers don't lie, and while Windows XP Professional clocked "46 advisories in 2003-2004, with 48 percent of vulnerabilities allowing remote attacks and 46 percent enabling system access," Mac OS X racked up 36 such advisories, with 61 percent remotely exploitable and 32 percent allowing the takeover of the system. See? Worse than you ever imagined. It's like a wedge of Swiss cheese with a shotgun blast through the middle or something. Meanwhile, Windows users will no doubt be thrilled to hear that their virus-ridden, spyware-loaded, worm-propagating systems are more secure than they think. Good for them.
There are just a few problems with this argument, however. The first is the claim that Mac OS X isn't much better than Windows XP Professional because it had 36 security advisories compared to Windows's 46. Maybe we're fresh off the turnip truck or something, but 22% fewer advisories sounds quite a bit better to us. Also, if you actually look at the data to which Techworld refers, it's not 36 advisories for Mac OS X at all; it's 33. (Apparently Techworld decided to go back to 2002 to fetch its reported number.) Granted, the Windows number is also 45 instead of 46-- yeesh, Techworld; fact-check much?-- but even so, now we're talking about nearly 27% fewer security advisories for Mac OS X than for Windows XP Professional.
Now take a look at the advisories themselves, and notice how no fewer than eleven of those 33 advisories (that's a third, for the mathematically inept) are titled "Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities" or something similar. Yes, in its advisory count, Secunia is including those advisories it generated just to report that Apple had fixed something. Does anyone else find it a little odd that Secunia penalizes Apple for fixing problems, including ones that were fixed so quickly that Secunia had never found out about them in the first place? (While they may describe a flaw and immediately note the presence of a patch, none of the Windows advisories appears to exist simply to announce that Redmond had fixed a bunch of holes.)
Notice also that Secunia yaps on about how, for Mac OS X, "of the 36 advisories issued in 2003-2004, 61 percent could be exploited across the Internet and 32 percent enabled attackers to take over the system"-- but never mentions how many could be exploited across the Internet to enable attackers to take over the system. Personally, we aren't much concerned about exploits that require local access to a Mac, because if any
RTFA, or at least think about it, how can they be trying to clear stock by STOPPING SALES. there is no stock, you cannot buy an iMac from Apple.
This is a fuck-up on Apples part, I assume due to the engineering problems of getting a G5 into an iMac case.
DVDs are manufactured with recyclable plastic. It's your fault if you buy this and don't recycle it. Only you can prevent forest fires.
DVDs are not recyclable, CDs and DVDs from the manufacturers that have been rejected are ground up for use as filler in building sites.
Here is a site that shows you how to reuses CDs/DVDs as a disco ball, or bird scarer...
Using old Abba CDs to make a disco ball has a certain justice to it.
How can we watch 9 & 1/2 weeks?
I guess you'll need to get 33 copies of 'Another 48hours' with it.
In the bad old days of Northern Irelands terrorism, a family of catholics were arrested for bomb making. One of the family members was one of the guilford four. The evidence used to convict the rest of the family came from a semtex detecting machin, which was later found to be contaminated. Every test came up positive for explosive(, laughably, there were no negative controls).
Now Imagine the possibilities with DNA evidence, as it is, DNA is becoming very relied upon for convictions, and the police are getting overly reliant on it. In the future, someone arrested and sampled may get a full iron clad water tight conviction over a laboratory error. A mix up of the DNA sample taken, and a DNA sample taken from the scene of the crime...
This isn't even taking into account the fact that a crooked cop could find it very easy to contaminate a crime scene sample with DNA taken from a suspect.
These concerns could be overcome with good safegaurding, and good laboratory practise, but if the past is anything to go by, it's time to get paranoid.
The people that have dodgy copies of Windows are probably smart enough to get change thier key and get patched, and they are probably smart enough to have a firewall running.
Its the people that buy a standard configuration Dell and throw it on the net as soon as they get home that are probably responsible. No Firewall, no Anti Virus, no clue.