Since you object so strongly with my sig I have temporarly disabled it. If I stop getting complaints by morrons who accuse me of trying to drive business to myself or something similar I will leave it as such.
I can't help but notice that your mirrors still have advertisements for your hosting service added to the bottom, however.
I want you to know that I'm not trying to drive business towards my hosting company
If that were true, you wouldn't stamp the hosting company's web page at the bottom of every page you mirror. (I won't mention your current sig, either.)
I think you'd be more honest if you'd say that yes, you're trying to drive business to your hosting company, but at least you're giving something back.
You weren't a spammer until you started to lie about it, you see.
The down side of this is that the test launch is limited to BBC employees only. Not only that, the
employees all get a PDA capable of viewing the shows.
Who do I have to blow to work for a company that hands out PDAs with 512 meg CF to all its
employees, just so they can watch TV at work!?
So far as I remember, Apple did indeed patent devices that change color through one of several methods, however I don't think they've released any hardware based on the patent yet.
Most patents reflect something a company is thinking of doing. Few turn into actual product, so this may never come along. It's a cute idea, however.
Actually, that was my own system, not anti-slash. And I only had hello in there for about 5 minutes -- it was a perfectly valid mirror after that. I just sat and watched moderators bat it up and down non-stop for over 12 hours after. It was glorious.:)
Yeah, except you realize that for that $85 figure you come up with, you have to take into account the fact that they're trying to dub in sync, which means they are also sitting in the studio for dead air. Also, they are doing re-takes if something isn't quite right. Now, being veterans at this, presumably, the retakes are getting fewer and fewer as the years go on, but it's still probably not going to be perfect on the first take every time.
Let's assume it takes them two hours for every minute of dialog. That's still $125,000 for a day's work! If it's a day per minute? They still get Thursday afternoon and Friday off, and $125,000 for the week!
I'm sure their agents get a cut, and they spend a day reading the script on their own, but even if it's $100,000 for a full week (mind, we're still assuming the insanely high day-per-minute ratio here), that's some damned good pay. Especially considering that all of these actors work on other major shows as well. Hell, Harry Sherer (principal Skinner, the Reverand, etc) has enough time for his own weekly national radio show. I wouldn't mind a $20,000/day job that left me that kind of free time, even if it was only for 14 weeks a year.
I don't know about you, but I'll rather be keeping my win98 systems safely protected behind nat and a strict firewall than trusting some stranger offering me unofficial service packs.
Most of what he's done is to update libraries. You can find byte-for-byte identical ones in newer releases of the OS and VS/VB libraries. As far as the rest goes, it's not just security. It adds things like the newer start menu, support for >512 megs, and better USB support.
There's no source code of course, but this stuff isn't exactly opaque. Get yourself a copy of IDA Pro or SoftIce and dig in. You might learn a thing or two!
The author's page is here, from
the end of the article. His 98 SE service pack page is
here. He's got an
Amazon.co.uk wishlist linked from that page (your Amazon US account
works there as well). Be sure to check that out if you want to say thanks.:)
Mirrors of the 10.5meg patch are
here,
here,
and
here
In the TV world, 125K per episode is NOTHING for such a popular show. Ray Romano gets 16 times that much (around $2,000,000) per episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond".
I know there's a big difference between live actors and voice actors, but if you're going to be complaining about people making too much, don't complain about these guys.
Okay, but the longer a show remains in syndication, the less each new episode is worth. You come to a point where having 1001 shows in syndication isn't worth much more than 1000, and syndication is where shows like The Simpsons make the bulk of their money.
These guys are substantially increasing the cost of producing a new episode (assuming they didn't also push residuals upward), which means the show is going to get to that cost:returns balance point that much sooner. Two or three years down the line when they lower the new episode count and finally produce the great grand last episode of The Simpsons, and it's all reruns after, will you still be making excuses for these guys? The show could run much longer if everybody weren't holding it hostage to milk it for as much cash as they can. That other folks do it to doesn't make it any less slimy.
Seriously, $125,000 per episode is some REALLY good pay. In their shoes, that kind of mad cash and knowing I was producing something so integral to American culture would be enough.
I believe there are four main voice actors. There are about 20 minutes of show after commercials, and 3/4 of the show is spoken. So 20 * 3/4 / 4 is about 3.5 minutes of dialog per actor.
I'm timing myself at about 7 syllables per second, speaking about as quickly as the Simpsons characters do when on a roll.
So $125,000 / 7 / (3.5*60) comes to about $85 per syllable.
Having them read this post would cost me about 168 syllables * $85 is $14,280.
I'm a Windows neophite. Is there a way to get a pop up instead of having to check the event logs? Or do you know of a tool for mailing or otherwise presenting the logs on a regular basis?
Randomizing a mutex name really defeats the purpose of the mutex.
The concept behind using a mutex is to stop reentrancy (is that a real word?) in a cricital section across applications.
You could certainly randomize the generation scheme, however. A hash on the system name and the date would limit additional infections to one per day, for example.
Worms and spyware will simply use a home-made mutex system if we start to block the windows one.
In general, the idea of catching windows library calls is worthless, unless the library call is absolutely necessary to the worm and the functionality cannot be done in any other way (which is not the case in Mr. Darl McBride's example).
Of course. They're going to work around any countermeasure if it goes into popular use. Once upon a time, all programs were allowed to write to the entire filesystem. Remember bootsector viruses? They finally reworked the filesystem and device layer so that user code couldn't touch that area anymore, and those kinds of infections went away. Remember Word macro viruses? New versions of Office warn you about macros that want to run on opening a doc, and those are rapidly vanishing as well.
Similarly, short of reworking the way programs are installed and authorized, nothing is going to work as the long-term solution. That's why Longhorn and the.NET execution framework thange these things exactly.
The mutex check is merely one option which doesn't seem to be in wide-spread use yet. I'm sure there are many others, and yes -- any of them would eventually get worked around for new viruses and trojans.
Interesting concept, but many programs use lots of mutexes, and some don't use them at all.
Imagine running something complex like a database server. Dialog box fun.
Yeah. I guess with something like that, you could have accept/deny mutex, as well as accept/deny app. Then something like C:/SOME/PATH/TO/MSQL.EXE could be allowed to run unencumbered from then on if its MD5 hash hadn't changed.
For that matter, how hard would it be to restrict which programs are allowed to create files with runnable extensions without prompting?
Why can't we have something that protects the registry and pops up whenever something wants to go into software/microsoft/windows/run,/runonce, runonceex, etc? 3/4 of the stuff that goes in there, I end up ripping out later. It's dumb that it's so easy for programs to install things there.
About the first thing any Windows program does is to attempt to
acquire a mutex to see if the program is already running. In the case
of this worm, that's "Jobaka3l." If that exists, the worm dies off without running.
Mutexes are named consistently
enough under Windows that I wish somebody would make a program that
simply caught all attempts at gaining a mutex and popped up a dialog
window if the mutex hadn't been seen before. This would stop most any
new software from running without first checking with the user. This
is no good for a server of course, but ideal for a workstation.
This would also be great for catching spyware crap installs, as
well as things like the RealPlayer toolbar that keeps popping up
adverts by default. Simply tell the mutex checker to decline the
requested mutex from then on and it would have the mutex always fail
from then on -- then those programs could never be run again.
Say what you will about this guy. At least there's finally a CEO who's backing up his position. This is absolutely the first time I've seen someone in his position speak frankly instead of trying to spin the situation with regurgitated rhetoric from their PR department.
I don't think he's right, but for once someone's at least having the discussion, so lay off the insults.
There are already some good writers out there. People eat up comics like VGCats and Penny Arcade. Why not tap these guys as consultants or writers instead of coming into the culture as an outsider?
The original site is on swbell.net (traceroute to see for yourself) -- I'm not sure
how well that will weather a slashdotting. Methinks "edibobb" is about to discover
what 'reasonable bandwidth use' means.
When swbell.net can't take the hurting anymore, here's
a mirror
for ya.
At work we used groupwise, and at the University where I'm taking a night class they use Lotus Notes, so Exchange Server isn't as ubiquitous as you think. Plus, everyone running Windows has outlook express for "free" as well as web mail, so lack of an email client in the office suite isn't that big of a deal.
And I use and prefer Linux, but I won't pretend I'm the rest of the world.
That you think Outlook Express is somehow a replacement for Outlook shows that you're not quite in touch with what most medium-to-large business offices are doing.
Well, a lot of businesses use Lotus Notes. Besides IBM, I know 3M does, Novartis, etc.
Lotus Notes is the Netware of the 21st century. You don't find new installs. You only find companies that selected Notes forever ago, and who annually research the cost of switching to the mainstream, waiting until they're confident they can switch over without too much of a disruption.
Notes is fine, but it's not what the rest of the world is speaking.
That about says it all. They dropped their mail client -- all that's left of it is an address book. They even list "Outlook integration" as a feature.
So if you're looking for a suite that you can use in a Microsoft-centric office, you'd better have another solution for talking to that Exchange server.
Is it just me, or is this remarkably silly? Exchange/Outlook is the hub of most offices' operations these days. Not speaking Exchange's calendar and contact protocols is tantamount to not speaking the Word file format five or six years back.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'd be more honest if you'd say that yes, you're trying to drive business to your hosting company, but at least you're giving something back.
You weren't a spammer until you started to lie about it, you see.
That, or his jockey shorts are a few sizes too small.
Who do I have to blow to work for a company that hands out PDAs with 512 meg CF to all its employees, just so they can watch TV at work!?
Most patents reflect something a company is thinking of doing. Few turn into actual product, so this may never come along. It's a cute idea, however.
Actually, that was my own system, not anti-slash. And I only had hello in there for about 5 minutes -- it was a perfectly valid mirror after that. I just sat and watched moderators bat it up and down non-stop for over 12 hours after. It was glorious. :)
Actually, I'd want to see the pay-per-punch. :)
I'm sure their agents get a cut, and they spend a day reading the script on their own, but even if it's $100,000 for a full week (mind, we're still assuming the insanely high day-per-minute ratio here), that's some damned good pay. Especially considering that all of these actors work on other major shows as well. Hell, Harry Sherer (principal Skinner, the Reverand, etc) has enough time for his own weekly national radio show. I wouldn't mind a $20,000/day job that left me that kind of free time, even if it was only for 14 weeks a year.
There's no source code of course, but this stuff isn't exactly opaque. Get yourself a copy of IDA Pro or SoftIce and dig in. You might learn a thing or two!
Mirrors of the 10.5meg patch are here, here, and here
These guys are substantially increasing the cost of producing a new episode (assuming they didn't also push residuals upward), which means the show is going to get to that cost:returns balance point that much sooner. Two or three years down the line when they lower the new episode count and finally produce the great grand last episode of The Simpsons, and it's all reruns after, will you still be making excuses for these guys? The show could run much longer if everybody weren't holding it hostage to milk it for as much cash as they can. That other folks do it to doesn't make it any less slimy.
Seriously, $125,000 per episode is some REALLY good pay. In their shoes, that kind of mad cash and knowing I was producing something so integral to American culture would be enough.
I'm timing myself at about 7 syllables per second, speaking about as quickly as the Simpsons characters do when on a roll.
So $125,000 / 7 / (3.5*60) comes to about $85 per syllable.
Having them read this post would cost me about 168 syllables * $85 is $14,280.
I'm a Windows neophite. Is there a way to get a pop up instead of having to check the event logs? Or do you know of a tool for mailing or otherwise presenting the logs on a regular basis?
Similarly, short of reworking the way programs are installed and authorized, nothing is going to work as the long-term solution. That's why Longhorn and the .NET execution framework thange these things exactly.
The mutex check is merely one option which doesn't seem to be in wide-spread use yet. I'm sure there are many others, and yes -- any of them would eventually get worked around for new viruses and trojans.
Why can't we have something that protects the registry and pops up whenever something wants to go into software/microsoft/windows/run, /runonce, runonceex, etc? 3/4 of the stuff that goes in there, I end up ripping out later. It's dumb that it's so easy for programs to install things there.
Mutexes are named consistently enough under Windows that I wish somebody would make a program that simply caught all attempts at gaining a mutex and popped up a dialog window if the mutex hadn't been seen before. This would stop most any new software from running without first checking with the user. This is no good for a server of course, but ideal for a workstation.
This would also be great for catching spyware crap installs, as well as things like the RealPlayer toolbar that keeps popping up adverts by default. Simply tell the mutex checker to decline the requested mutex from then on and it would have the mutex always fail from then on -- then those programs could never be run again.
I don't think he's right, but for once someone's at least having the discussion, so lay off the insults.
There are already some good writers out there. People eat up comics like VGCats and Penny Arcade. Why not tap these guys as consultants or writers instead of coming into the culture as an outsider?
When swbell.net can't take the hurting anymore, here's a mirror for ya.
That you think Outlook Express is somehow a replacement for Outlook shows that you're not quite in touch with what most medium-to-large business offices are doing.
Notes is fine, but it's not what the rest of the world is speaking.
So if you're looking for a suite that you can use in a Microsoft-centric office, you'd better have another solution for talking to that Exchange server.
Is it just me, or is this remarkably silly? Exchange/Outlook is the hub of most offices' operations these days. Not speaking Exchange's calendar and contact protocols is tantamount to not speaking the Word file format five or six years back.