From the article, it's not clear to me whether they're A) prioritizing requests so customers with fewer requests are more likely to get them or B) simply delaying the requests of active users, even if they have the movie, in order to save shipping.
There's two effects going on 1) light users have much better chances of getting movies that are in high demand quickly -- heavy users generally have to wait until the movie is no longer in heavy demand before getting a new movie (unless they manage to get it on the day it comes out -- probably a weakness in their algorithm) and 2) heavy users will often have shipments of replacement movies delayed by a day or two, even though the movie is available now.
Netflix has been admitting that #1 happens for a while (presumably since Jan 2005, I guess) but has been actively denying that #2 happens, at least until very recently. We've been discussing this sort of thing on the Netflix Operations discussion list for quite some time now, and this is the first time that I've heard Netflix admit that #2 happens.
There are other ways that throttling could be done -- Netflix could deny that they've received certain movies right away, and instead check them in tomorrow or the next day. They could also deliberately ship a movie to somebody from across the country rather than from their same city, even though the movie is available in the same city, which would delay the receipt of the movie by a few days. People have accused Netflix of deliberately doing both of these things on the list above, and they seem to happen more often than one would expect, but not often enough to really show that Netflix has been doing it intentionally. It may be that Netflix has experimented with these methods of throttling, or that it was just a few accidents that were blown out of porportion. I don't know.
But the throttling that Netflix is now admitting to -- we've known they've been doing this for a long time, and they've been denying at least part of the it for a long time.
Of course only Netflix knows for sure.
Well, what is `false advertising' is not for Netflix to decide -- it's for a court of law. But the users of Netflix have definately been able to determine at least much of what Netflix has been doing, for a long time. I'm glad to see that Netflix is finally admitting it.
Great great grandma had her first kid when she was 15.
Great grandma had her first kid when she was 16.
Grandma had her first kid when she was 14.
Mom had me when we was 15.
Now, I'm 10, and great great grandma is 69, and we're watching Hanky Panky. And great great great grandma is here too -- but her urn is on top of the TV, so she's not really watching it.
Fiction, yes, but I'll bet there's more than a few living great great grandmas out there.
I personally believe that even the greatest computer graphics cannot create greater fear than that which is created by the player's mind.
Remember this, from the early 1980s?
You'll never see Infocom's graphics on any computer screen. Because there's never been any computer built by man that could handle the images we produce. And there never will be. We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination - a technology so powerful, it makes any picture that's ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison.
(Of course, they did later change their mind... later Infocom games did incorporate graphics. But still...)
You've got between 1 and 2 amp-hours of 12 volts to work with.
That's a big battery for a cell phone.
Most cell phones nowadays have one Li-ion or Lipo cell -- 4.2 volts maximum / 3.6 volts nominal. Assuming we have two batteries (from two phones), that means we'll need 6 Watt hours (1 Ah * 12 V / 2 batteries = 6 Wh -- I'm going with your lower limit of one amp hour @ 12 volts) from each battery. So that works out to about a 1.5 Ah LiPo cell. Most modern cell phones have batteries about 1/3 to 1/2 that -- they usually go for small size rather than large capacity.
particularly because the low internal resistance of such batteries
Actually, the Li-ion cells used by cell phones generally have relatively large internal resistances, and can only tolerate relatively low discharge rates -- like 2C tops. (2C = twice the discharge rate needed to totally discharge a battery in an hour. So 2C for a 1.5 Ah battery is 3A.) Do not confuse them with modern LiPo cells used for things like R/C applications that can tolerate discharge rates like 20C.
People have been using cell phone batteries to power R/C planes for years -- but generally they're only sutiable for lazy, slow flyer type airplanes. Moderate to high performance airplanes require too high of a discharge rate to use them.
But your general point is correct -- the amount of energy in one of these batteries is roughly the amount of energy needed to cook an egg (within an order of magnitude, at least:), assuming that not too much of it is wasted. (And you certainly won't make it work just by using your phone as a portable microwave.)
And you would need a higher frequency to cook and egg.
Probably not. Microwave ovens work at 2.4 GHz. Cell phones use various bands, but most of the modern ones are in the microwave region (somewhat close to the frequencies used by microwave ovens) and would probably heat things like eggs just fine. A bigger problem is the lack of power -- your microwave oven has 700 watts or so, and it's kept in an enclosed space so much of the power goes into heating your food. With a cell phone (or wireless card -- 802.11b works at 2.4 GHz too) next to your egg, it would heat your egg, yes, but with only a small fraction of a watt being emitted, and only a small fraction of that being absorbed by the egg even under ideal conditions, it's unlikely that the energy absorbed by the egg in an hour of phone use would raise it's degrees by more than a few degrees at most. (And don't forget that as the eggs get warmer than the air around them, they'll start losing heat to the air, which will put an absolute limit on how hot it could get, no matter how long you kept at it.)
The slashdot editor got hoaxed.
Yup. Or maybe knew it was a hoax, and was just sharing the hoax with us?
Now, if they were telling us how to use a modern Intel chip to fry an egg -- THAT I'd believe. 70 watts of power, pumped through a square inch or so to the heat sink? There's plenty of heat to cook several eggs at once:)
What about those you use the replies (via the unsubscribe request) for verifying that your email address is in fact valid (and active)?
Of course it's valid and active. It was verified as part of the user signing up for the mailing list. I'm not talking about spam here -- I'm talking about legitimate mailing lists, lists that somebody had to explicitly subscribe themselves to, and then verify that it was them that signed them up.
I understand that you're saying `never respond to a spam's unsubscribe instructions', and that's generally good advice, but if it's for a mailing list that you EXPLICITLY subscribed to (not even not cliking on `do not send me any more emails' somewhere), use the frickin' unsubscribe. Or procmail (or it's equivilent) it to/dev/null. But don't report it as spam...
That's not specific to AOL. There's a number of ISPs or hosts (or have been, anyways) which will start blocking all emails (to all users) from your mail server after a few emails are reported as spam. Which seems reasonable... at first. Looking a bit deeper, apparantly some users will report mail as spam rather than unsubscribe -- even for a mailing list that they explicitly subscribed to themselves (i.e. send a mail to list-subscribe@whatever, then reply to the confirmation email with the special cookie...) Even when every single email has unsubscribe instructions at the bottom. Even though the emails aren't `spammy' at all. (Though it can happen when somebody sends spam to a mailing list too, but that's not really what I'm talking about.)
Tends to be a drag when you're running a legitimate mailing list and somebody can't be bothered to look at the procedure for getting unsubscribed... and suddenly emails to everybody at his ISP start bouncing, and the people who aren't getting their mails think it's because YOU screwed something up.
It also happens when somebody explicitly sets up a ~/.forward on your system (on their account) to forward all their mail somewhere else. Which seems reasonable, but then they go reporting spams received wherever they read their mail, and that system decides that `oho! This site must be an open relay! Look at the Received: headers!' and submits you to a RBL without even bothering to try and forward a spam through your system.
There's lots of knee-jerk reactions going on out there in the name of `fighting spam'. Perhaps they're the right thing to do most of the time, but not all the time. And trying to convince somebody that they made a mistake? Fergetabout...
perhaps it would violate some rules on misuse of government property for political purposes?
Except that government property is used for `political purposes' by politicians all the time. And it's perfectly legal (if done properly, of course.)
Ever get a letter from your representatives with a signature instead of a stamp? He's using his franking priviledges to send mail out to everybody. Sure, the letter may ask you to support some worthy cause or something, but even that's politics (after all, politics aren't always `bad'.) It may even be as simple as to make you aware of his name, to let you know that he's doing something, so you can remember it when it's time to vote. All paid for by your tax dollars.
Maybe the Wikipedia code can be modified so that a "hot" article can only have X lines of changes per user per period of time.
I believe this qualifies as an attempt at a technical solution to a social (or political) problem -- one of those things that usually doesn't work.
Ultimately, one of the fundamental `goals' of Wikipedia has always been that anybody can edit anything at any time. And it's a worthy goal, but there are those that would abuse it, and recent changes have attempted to reduce the abuse, while doing as little damage to the `openness' as possible.
It's a tricky problem. But so far I think Wikipedia is doing a very good job of it.
The new revision hopes to bring an end to the huge legal fights surrounding the core of the Internet.
Um, DNS is not the core of the Internet. It's a very important/useful/popular service, yes, but it's not the core of the Internet. (If you must say something is the `core', I'd say it's the TCP/IP protocol itself.)
Now, perhaps.com is the `core' of DNS, but even that's not really accurate. It's just the most popular top level domain...
But then again, if you think that the WWW is the Internet, then you might think that your domain name is the core of it. (It's not, and it's not, but it might be a popular misconception.)
I've got a 3w-7810 card. With 6 200 MB IDE drives, it's sequental RAID-5 write performance is about 13 MB/s. A single drive could do better than that!
So I did the same thing you did -- used it as JBOD and did RAID 5 in software. It's still slower than I think it should be, but at least it can write at 40 MB/s now.
from day one they've been in the business of making better products, not cheaper products.
Eh? I don't know about `day 1', but it wasn't that long ago that AMD was lagging behind Intel in terms of performance, power consumption (though that wasn't such a concern back then) and such. For example, the K5 was intended to compete against the Pentium chips, but the Pentium Pro came out almost immediately after the K5 did and it blew the K5 away. The K6's came closer to beating the Intel offerings, but even then, the Intel chips had a small performance lead, and the fact that 3Dnow never took off further hurt the K6 chips. Back then, people bought AMD because it was cheaper, not because it was better.
Going back even further, the AMD 8086, 80286, 80386 and Am486 chips generally were just clones of the Intel offerings -- with similar performance, but coming out some time later at a lower price.
But things have changed. AMD has finally caught up to and passed Intel in many respects, and I suspect that the reason that Intel is still selling so many chips is more due to interia than anything else.
I don't think so. Lots of people have been saying that software patents aren't needed, for a long time, and this is just one more guy. Sure, he's a guy with `credentials', but even that's not so unusual.
When the patent process actually changes, THEN you can say the tide is turning. Until then, the tide is just growing, like it has been for a long time...
But ya know, you can do the same thing by putting dissimilar metals into the ocean, and not ever worry about stunting its growth
... or you could mount a small solar panel on/above one of the trees, and it'll generate 100x the energy of an entire grove of trees wired up:) (during daylight, anyways.)
five year old cars are the bread and butter of junkyards throughout the US
While I do agree with you, and said similar things in my post, 2001 - 1986 = 15, not 5:)
By (US) law, I think auto manufacturers need to make spare sparts available for 10 years, so you shouldn't have trouble finding parts until at least that long. In practice, I've never had problems finding parts for cars that were even 20 years old, but it's certainly possible.
In 2001 I broke an engine mount on a 1986 car and there was only 1 of that part left in North America (by computer search anyway.) I had to scrap the car.
Isn't one all you needed? Couldn't you have had it overnighted to you for a bunch of dollars?
You may or not be aware, but used car junk yards now keep similar databases, and can find you parts that are sitting on a junked car in another state, and you can have it shipped to you -- for a nice premium, of course, but if you need it, you need it.
And of course if it's just a motor mount, you can usually improvise. You could probably take another motor mount off the car (assuming they're identical) and bring it to a welder or a machinist who could have worked something out for you.
However, in order to write off 100% of the monthly fee, he needs to be able to "prove" that he plays his MMORPG only to make money, not just for the fun of it.
Somehow, I doubt it.
After all, many of us have jobs/businesses that we consider `fun'... but we can still deduct legitimate business expenses.
Ultimately, the IRS sees the difference between a hobby and a business that a business makes a profit (or at least it's intended to make a profit, and I believe that it needs to do so at least 3 out of 5 years or so, but I'm not sure on that point.) If you're making a profit playing MMORPGs, then you should be able to deduct the expenses incurred in playing those games... but you'll also have to report the income. It doesn't really matter if it was `fun' or not.
Of course, I'm not a CPA, and this is not intended as tax advice. Consult your tax advisor.
There's lots of things that users prefer to security. My point is that security is not something that most end-users worry much about -- at least until a lack of it bites them in the ass.
one of the easiest ways to kill it is to throw in so many features that users can never find the one they want.
Not all features have to be visible to the end user.
I doubt a single user out there, if asked, would prefer WMF support with this worm to just dropping WMF altogether.
This is just one example, and it's a very bad one, because you forgot the most likely option -- they'll get keep their WMF support, and the hole will be closed. And I think they'll get this option in six days or less from Microsoft. (Which I agree is, at this point, too long, and I suspect that it'll go out sooner than that due to public pressure.)
If I recall correctly, Word (Office?) documents often (usually?) have internal pictures in WMF format, and users certainly will care if the pictures in their Word documents stop working. People may not be aware of it. but they're using WMF pictures extensively, even today.
I've spent a good deal of time dealing with Microsoft file formats in a *nix world, and one thing I've done is set up systems to automatically convert Word documents to things that are more www friendly, and WMF files are still appearing in that system at a rather high rate, even today. (My system then converts them to PNGs.) People might tolerate breaking the pictures in their documents for a week, but they won't like the idea of them never working again.
That's why the rest of us don't carry stuff around unless we're willing to think about it.
Yes. Only Microsoft has old code in their products that hasn't been touched in a while. While I certainly can admire OpenBSD's (periodic?) complete code audits, I'm also aware that that sort of thing is very rare, especially in closed source software.
/., aka Bizarro World, where I end up defending Microsoft...
Windows needs to get rid of it's current file system and use a *nix file system, with no "file extensions". there is NO need for file extensions as all the information needed for Windows to recognize a file is in its metadata
Huh? *nix files have extensions too. *nix has `magic numbers' at the beginning of files that generally tell the OS and applications what this file is and such, but 1) some applications still use extensions, even in *nix, 2) Windows also similarly uses magic numbers for many things, and 3) it's not really metadata, as it's part of the file itself.
What does this have to do with the filesystem? MacOS's filesystem has a seperate data and resource fork, and OS/2's HPFS had extended attributes, but this stuff is all based on the standard file contents and names, and doesn't require any special filesystems (and wouldn't be fixed by switching to another filesystem.)
in other words a (picture) data file can contain executable code to "help" Windows display it!!
It sounds pretty crazy in 2006, I agree, but this sort of thing used to be quite common.
I don't know how long you've been on the Internet and Usenet and such, but up until a decade ago much software was posted to Usenet in the form of shar files. Basically these were just shell scripts that created all the files that were enclosed. Normally they were harmless, but it would have been trivial to add code to do whatever to a shar file, and people would run it for you. (I think using `unshar' would protect you against this sort of thing, however.)
I can provide some more modern examples too..doc files can have macros embedded in them, and when loaded (even just to view) the macros are run. Now you can disable this, but it wasn't always the case.
Postscript? Sure, it is used by printers, but it's a whole language. And until recently, you could tell your postscript interpeter to run things for you with the right command. Now, this probably wasn't too dangerous for your printer, but if you were just viewing the file with ghostscript? Oops.
As much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft, this isn't the first time something like this has come up when you think you're just viewing something. And it probably won't be the last.
If there ever was a smoking-gun lead-pipe indictment of Microsoft's sloppy love of whizzo features, security, stability, maintainability, administerability be damned; this has GOT to be it. If the filetype API is that flawed, we need to just get rid of.WMF files, period.
Good luck with that. If history has taught us anything, it's that end users generally prefer features to security, and they'll tolerate increased security only as long as it doesn't take away features that they want. Microsoft didn't start the trend, but they do keep it well fed.
Also, consider when this feature was created -- Windows 3.0 or so. Back then, most Windows boxes weren't networked, and so if you got software, you installed it from a floppy. Email existed, but you generally read it via a serial port while logged into another computer with a terminal emulator. Transferring files was done via kermit and xmodem and such, though floppies were probably used more often. There were no web pages to look at, no graphics images sent to you via email (though you might download one via a BBS.)
In any event, Microsoft probably though they were making the wmf format more adaptable to any unanticipated future needs by adding that feature -- and given the computing environment back then, it probably wasn't such a bad decision. (In hindsight it was a bad idea, but hindsight is always 20/20.) In any event, it got carried around as Windows was upgraded over and over and probably wasn't given much thought. At least not until somebody realized that it could be used today to do bad things.
Guess it depends on how you define `work', I guess. Certainly, this doesn't strike me as useful enough to stop using fat32 on systems where I need to access the same files in Windows and Linux.
That's why I said they aren't worth talking about. It's rare for a bit error to not be corrected automatically and it's rare for a bit error to actually matter given the size and organization of most files today. Unless it causes a program crash, most of the time it's just a glitch in a video or audio stream that is ignored.
Depends on your data. And as for your video or audio stream -- you'll notice that it's 1) probably compressed and 2) a single bit (or sector worth of bits) error will generally not ruin the entire stream.
But I'd be NUTS to archive and compress this stuff on DVD - one bad sector and I'd lose it all.
It's not that bad. Even if you do the worst possible thing -- put one 4.3 GB tar.gz file onto a DVD -- a single bad sector will only make 50% of the data unusable on the average. (Note that I said `on the average' -- it could be that you lose only a tiny bit, or it could be that you lose 100%.)
But as I suggested, this is the wrong way to safely use compression. You could simply use bzip2 instead of gzip, for example. bzip2 compresses streams into blocks, usually 900 KB long, and each block is handled independently. A single sector error will corrupt only one or two blocks, and so that's all that will be corrupted -- the rest can be recovered. And that's just one of many possible ways of making sure that a single bad sector will only corrupt a small part of your backup.
On an enterprise scale, there may be times when you have to archive and compress.
On an enterprise scale, you'll probably find that most tape drives implement compression in the drive firmware itself, and that most enterprises use it. It 1) speeds backups up and 2) allows you to put more `typical' data onto the tape. (Of course, it can't further compress already compressed data, but much (most?) of what's backed up is not already compressed.) And a single bad block on the tape typically only corrupts a small part of the backup (a few MB tops), not the entire media.
In any event, quit saying that `compression is bad, mmmkay?' It's not. It's a useful tool, and done properly it does not signifigantly endanger your backups or your data.
Gee, recovery time is really when I want to know if I have a corrupted backup...
Well, sure. That's why I've instituted a policy where all backup tapes will give six months notice before developing any errors not correctable by the drive itself.
That's why one has to use checksum files or PARs - or back up twice (then you don't care as the odds of losing the same file on two backups is very small - unless the drive is failing in such a way as to record errors in the same spot on multiple media - very unlikely.)
Backing up twice is nice, but if you don't know that the bits you read from the tape are incorrect, why would you even bother to look at the other tape? Being able to recover from an error is a good thing -- but it's also important to actually know that there was an error, and yes, par2 or checksums of some sort will help you determine that. Most of the time the drive itself will also report an error, but it's best not to rely on that.
As for par2 files, they require so much cpu to calculate that you'll not find many people actually using them. I do, you do, but you probably won't find a company with 100 TB to back up weekly using them. (And really, if I had even 1 TB to back up in one shot (250 DVD-Rs... ouch! I'd probably go buy some big IDE drives instead) I probably wouldn't be using them either. But as long as I'm doing a few DVD-Rs at a time, no problem.
Bit errors are so rare it's not worth discussing.
Actually, they're quite common. However, your drives (tape, CD, DVD, hard, etc.) typically have some error correction built in, and can recover transparantly from a few bit errors per sector. Which is why you almost never see single bit errors -- the drives typically take care of them and you never see them until they become so numerous that firmware can't recover, and an error is reported, and the entire block is usually garbage. However, obscure bugs in drivers and firmware do sometimes cause the error to be swallowed up and no error is reported. It's very rare, but it does happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix has been admitting that #1 happens for a while (presumably since Jan 2005, I guess) but has been actively denying that #2 happens, at least until very recently. We've been discussing this sort of thing on the Netflix Operations discussion list for quite some time now, and this is the first time that I've heard Netflix admit that #2 happens.
There are other ways that throttling could be done -- Netflix could deny that they've received certain movies right away, and instead check them in tomorrow or the next day. They could also deliberately ship a movie to somebody from across the country rather than from their same city, even though the movie is available in the same city, which would delay the receipt of the movie by a few days. People have accused Netflix of deliberately doing both of these things on the list above, and they seem to happen more often than one would expect, but not often enough to really show that Netflix has been doing it intentionally. It may be that Netflix has experimented with these methods of throttling, or that it was just a few accidents that were blown out of porportion. I don't know.
But the throttling that Netflix is now admitting to -- we've known they've been doing this for a long time, and they've been denying at least part of the it for a long time.
Well, what is `false advertising' is not for Netflix to decide -- it's for a court of law. But the users of Netflix have definately been able to determine at least much of what Netflix has been doing, for a long time. I'm glad to see that Netflix is finally admitting it.Great great grandma had her first kid when she was 15.
Great grandma had her first kid when she was 16.
Grandma had her first kid when she was 14.
Mom had me when we was 15.
Now, I'm 10, and great great grandma is 69, and we're watching Hanky Panky. And great great great grandma is here too -- but her urn is on top of the TV, so she's not really watching it.
Fiction, yes, but I'll bet there's more than a few living great great grandmas out there.
Most cell phones nowadays have one Li-ion or Lipo cell -- 4.2 volts maximum / 3.6 volts nominal. Assuming we have two batteries (from two phones), that means we'll need 6 Watt hours (1 Ah * 12 V / 2 batteries = 6 Wh -- I'm going with your lower limit of one amp hour @ 12 volts) from each battery. So that works out to about a 1.5 Ah LiPo cell. Most modern cell phones have batteries about 1/3 to 1/2 that -- they usually go for small size rather than large capacity.
Actually, the Li-ion cells used by cell phones generally have relatively large internal resistances, and can only tolerate relatively low discharge rates -- like 2C tops. (2C = twice the discharge rate needed to totally discharge a battery in an hour. So 2C for a 1.5 Ah battery is 3A.) Do not confuse them with modern LiPo cells used for things like R/C applications that can tolerate discharge rates like 20C.People have been using cell phone batteries to power R/C planes for years -- but generally they're only sutiable for lazy, slow flyer type airplanes. Moderate to high performance airplanes require too high of a discharge rate to use them.
But your general point is correct -- the amount of energy in one of these batteries is roughly the amount of energy needed to cook an egg (within an order of magnitude, at least :), assuming that not too much of it is wasted. (And you certainly won't make it work just by using your phone as a portable microwave.)
Now, if they were telling us how to use a modern Intel chip to fry an egg -- THAT I'd believe. 70 watts of power, pumped through a square inch or so to the heat sink? There's plenty of heat to cook several eggs at once :)
I understand that you're saying `never respond to a spam's unsubscribe instructions', and that's generally good advice, but if it's for a mailing list that you EXPLICITLY subscribed to (not even not cliking on `do not send me any more emails' somewhere), use the frickin' unsubscribe. Or procmail (or it's equivilent) it to /dev/null. But don't report it as spam ...
Tends to be a drag when you're running a legitimate mailing list and somebody can't be bothered to look at the procedure for getting unsubscribed ... and suddenly emails to everybody at his ISP start bouncing, and the people who aren't getting their mails think it's because YOU screwed something up.
It also happens when somebody explicitly sets up a ~/.forward on your system (on their account) to forward all their mail somewhere else. Which seems reasonable, but then they go reporting spams received wherever they read their mail, and that system decides that `oho! This site must be an open relay! Look at the Received: headers!' and submits you to a RBL without even bothering to try and forward a spam through your system.
There's lots of knee-jerk reactions going on out there in the name of `fighting spam'. Perhaps they're the right thing to do most of the time, but not all the time. And trying to convince somebody that they made a mistake? Fergetabout ...
Ever get a letter from your representatives with a signature instead of a stamp? He's using his franking priviledges to send mail out to everybody. Sure, the letter may ask you to support some worthy cause or something, but even that's politics (after all, politics aren't always `bad'.) It may even be as simple as to make you aware of his name, to let you know that he's doing something, so you can remember it when it's time to vote. All paid for by your tax dollars.
Ultimately, one of the fundamental `goals' of Wikipedia has always been that anybody can edit anything at any time. And it's a worthy goal, but there are those that would abuse it, and recent changes have attempted to reduce the abuse, while doing as little damage to the `openness' as possible.
It's a tricky problem. But so far I think Wikipedia is doing a very good job of it.
Now, perhaps .com is the `core' of DNS, but even that's not really accurate. It's just the most popular top level domain ...
But then again, if you think that the WWW is the Internet, then you might think that your domain name is the core of it. (It's not, and it's not, but it might be a popular misconception.)
So I did the same thing you did -- used it as JBOD and did RAID 5 in software. It's still slower than I think it should be, but at least it can write at 40 MB/s now.
Going back even further, the AMD 8086, 80286, 80386 and Am486 chips generally were just clones of the Intel offerings -- with similar performance, but coming out some time later at a lower price.
But things have changed. AMD has finally caught up to and passed Intel in many respects, and I suspect that the reason that Intel is still selling so many chips is more due to interia than anything else.
When the patent process actually changes, THEN you can say the tide is turning. Until then, the tide is just growing, like it has been for a long time ...
By (US) law, I think auto manufacturers need to make spare sparts available for 10 years, so you shouldn't have trouble finding parts until at least that long. In practice, I've never had problems finding parts for cars that were even 20 years old, but it's certainly possible.
You may or not be aware, but used car junk yards now keep similar databases, and can find you parts that are sitting on a junked car in another state, and you can have it shipped to you -- for a nice premium, of course, but if you need it, you need it.
And of course if it's just a motor mount, you can usually improvise. You could probably take another motor mount off the car (assuming they're identical) and bring it to a welder or a machinist who could have worked something out for you.
After all, many of us have jobs/businesses that we consider `fun' ... but we can still deduct legitimate business expenses.
Ultimately, the IRS sees the difference between a hobby and a business that a business makes a profit (or at least it's intended to make a profit, and I believe that it needs to do so at least 3 out of 5 years or so, but I'm not sure on that point.) If you're making a profit playing MMORPGs, then you should be able to deduct the expenses incurred in playing those games ... but you'll also have to report the income. It doesn't really matter if it was `fun' or not.
Of course, I'm not a CPA, and this is not intended as tax advice. Consult your tax advisor.
If I recall correctly, Word (Office?) documents often (usually?) have internal pictures in WMF format, and users certainly will care if the pictures in their Word documents stop working. People may not be aware of it. but they're using WMF pictures extensively, even today.
I've spent a good deal of time dealing with Microsoft file formats in a *nix world, and one thing I've done is set up systems to automatically convert Word documents to things that are more www friendly, and WMF files are still appearing in that system at a rather high rate, even today. (My system then converts them to PNGs.) People might tolerate breaking the pictures in their documents for a week, but they won't like the idea of them never working again.
Yes. Only Microsoft has old code in their products that hasn't been touched in a while. While I certainly can admire OpenBSD's (periodic?) complete code audits, I'm also aware that that sort of thing is very rare, especially in closed source software.Fortunately, I don't need to dual boot between the two very often and so it's not a very big deal for me.
What does this have to do with the filesystem? MacOS's filesystem has a seperate data and resource fork, and OS/2's HPFS had extended attributes, but this stuff is all based on the standard file contents and names, and doesn't require any special filesystems (and wouldn't be fixed by switching to another filesystem.)
I don't know how long you've been on the Internet and Usenet and such, but up until a decade ago much software was posted to Usenet in the form of shar files. Basically these were just shell scripts that created all the files that were enclosed. Normally they were harmless, but it would have been trivial to add code to do whatever to a shar file, and people would run it for you. (I think using `unshar' would protect you against this sort of thing, however.)
I can provide some more modern examples too. .doc files can have macros embedded in them, and when loaded (even just to view) the macros are run. Now you can disable this, but it wasn't always the case.
Postscript? Sure, it is used by printers, but it's a whole language. And until recently, you could tell your postscript interpeter to run things for you with the right command. Now, this probably wasn't too dangerous for your printer, but if you were just viewing the file with ghostscript? Oops.
As much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft, this isn't the first time something like this has come up when you think you're just viewing something. And it probably won't be the last.
Good luck with that. If history has taught us anything, it's that end users generally prefer features to security, and they'll tolerate increased security only as long as it doesn't take away features that they want. Microsoft didn't start the trend, but they do keep it well fed.Also, consider when this feature was created -- Windows 3.0 or so. Back then, most Windows boxes weren't networked, and so if you got software, you installed it from a floppy. Email existed, but you generally read it via a serial port while logged into another computer with a terminal emulator. Transferring files was done via kermit and xmodem and such, though floppies were probably used more often. There were no web pages to look at, no graphics images sent to you via email (though you might download one via a BBS.)
In any event, Microsoft probably though they were making the wmf format more adaptable to any unanticipated future needs by adding that feature -- and given the computing environment back then, it probably wasn't such a bad decision. (In hindsight it was a bad idea, but hindsight is always 20/20.) In any event, it got carried around as Windows was upgraded over and over and probably wasn't given much thought. At least not until somebody realized that it could be used today to do bad things.
But as I suggested, this is the wrong way to safely use compression. You could simply use bzip2 instead of gzip, for example. bzip2 compresses streams into blocks, usually 900 KB long, and each block is handled independently. A single sector error will corrupt only one or two blocks, and so that's all that will be corrupted -- the rest can be recovered. And that's just one of many possible ways of making sure that a single bad sector will only corrupt a small part of your backup.
On an enterprise scale, you'll probably find that most tape drives implement compression in the drive firmware itself, and that most enterprises use it. It 1) speeds backups up and 2) allows you to put more `typical' data onto the tape. (Of course, it can't further compress already compressed data, but much (most?) of what's backed up is not already compressed.) And a single bad block on the tape typically only corrupts a small part of the backup (a few MB tops), not the entire media.In any event, quit saying that `compression is bad, mmmkay?' It's not. It's a useful tool, and done properly it does not signifigantly endanger your backups or your data.
As for par2 files, they require so much cpu to calculate that you'll not find many people actually using them. I do, you do, but you probably won't find a company with 100 TB to back up weekly using them. (And really, if I had even 1 TB to back up in one shot (250 DVD-Rs ... ouch! I'd probably go buy some big IDE drives instead) I probably wouldn't be using them either. But as long as I'm doing a few DVD-Rs at a time, no problem.
Actually, they're quite common. However, your drives (tape, CD, DVD, hard, etc.) typically have some error correction built in, and can recover transparantly from a few bit errors per sector. Which is why you almost never see single bit errors -- the drives typically take care of them and you never see them until they become so numerous that firmware can't recover, and an error is reported, and the entire block is usually garbage. However, obscure bugs in drivers and firmware do sometimes cause the error to be swallowed up and no error is reported. It's very rare, but it does happen.