I am still amazed that they tried to sell this and expected not to get caught. It's beggars belief. But then again look at coke, it can't be any better for you (probably much worse) than water from the thames. My dad recently used some to clean an oil spill off his drive, think I will stick with real drinks, like orange and apple juice, that aren't just processed drugs.
If we are able to develop means to 'safely' store radioactive waste (and we are just taking them on their word at the moment) then surely nuclear power will become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Now we just have to develop decent security to keep terrorists out...
This would be the difinitive way of getting around all the little ploys that spammers use, just register to all the crap on the internet and sign up for everything you can, then just mark everything off as spam.
Whenever you get spam let through, ask people to forward a copy to you so that you can add it to the list, and so you can sign up from the details on the email.
The only problem is, this is shooting themselves in the foot, if they eliminate all spam, spammers can't make money, no more spam, no more job for blocking spam till spammers start up again
But still.. would be nice living in a world with no spam, if even only for a bit.
Guess in a few days we will know if it is all just vaporware or not.
If it's for real then we have a lot of fun times to look forward to, no more excuses to not move companies to a Unix based OS, can then start weeding out the crap programs and replacing them with decent open source ones over time till don't need this program either.
Does sound too good to be true though, and when something sounds to good to be true... it usually is.
Isn't it amazing how all this crap gets put through, even though most of the voters are against the proposal the politicians that are supposed to be our representatives in parliment just don't care and put it through anyway.
They keep up this illusion that we are a 'free' country, living in a 'democracy' but things like this just show how bad things really are. Used to be they would snoop and we all know they did, but they pretended they didn't for sake of negative publicity. Now they (the government) are showing how little the voters views really count. They don't need to worry about what we want, they just swing the terrorism card and pretend its all for our good, Big brother 'looking after our best intrests.' How nice of them.
Depends how good you are, my mate was on £23k a year ago, and had had enough, told his boss he wanted more money or he was off, so they gave him £26k, this year he didnt even have to approach his boss, they approached him and gave him £29k.
The only problem is when your either crap and they don't want you any way, or your boss is an ass who thinks your bluffing. Then of course you are going to have to find a new job because you know they wont promote you anyway.
But the costs of this technology are too prohibitive for anyone to buy one as a serious tool, only people with too much money to spend will be getting one until the costs have come down enough for it to be widely available.
It's amazing how the GB per £ keeps going up for new 'toys' The benefits being that as other technologies progress, 'old' models also drop in price allowing the wider marker reasonable access
If Abiword is to take over M$ word, it is going to still need a lot of work, however it's good to see something that looks like it will continue to progress into something greater. It doesn't yet have that much functionality, but this is something that can be built upon as they develop.
To be able to use it cross platform is probably the best function, users tend to not like change. Get them used to a certain desktop/layout and if anything changes they don't know what to do with themselves, they need training in the new applications and functionality of them. If the basic word processing and other similar basic and necessary apps are able to stay constant, so to speak, it may give more encouragment to admins to start the bold plunge of rolling out more linux based systems.
Although I thoroughly disagree with these malicious programs, and any virus of any discription, they do encourage people to create neater code and to develop better code that is invulnerable to these kinds of exploits. One could always hypothesise about how much we may or may not have developed programming code without having to spend money on prevention of these exploits.
Lets think about why the survival time has been cut, just look at the MSBlaster crap and all the variations of it, if you had your computer plugged into an unprotected network whilst installing windows you would have it for sure by the time you had got to your initial welcome to windows screen.
Of course thats why we put a seperate network up with NAT and a Firewall to allow us to do all our installations hooked up.
But in a way the publicity that these viri and worms bring to personal PC security is a good thing. The more people who are actively aware of preventing such things can only be a good thing.
Bandwidth in reality is alreay cheap, there are protocols that are being used by the likes of cisco that make a 56k modem faster than broadband. Why is it not being implimented? The broadband companies need to make the money back from the investment in their infrastructure. Why upgrade to a 512k broadband connection if your modem can go faster? no need. It will be interesting to see when these actual protocols hit the market.
In answer to above the DSL protocol is the way in which your line is utalised to incorprate digital signals down a standard telephone wire. see here for more info
I am not particularly a big fan of patents in general because of the amount of abuse that the system receives, this 'extra' cash in the coffers could either go one of two ways. Patents will be forced to become more realistic and used properly, or people will be able to 'specialise' patents to an even greater degree and so create more crap than before.
A lot of items that have been created owe their innitial conception to some far sighted sci-fi writer, I remember with fondness a lot of the early analog's (My dad has been getting them for years) and reading some of the things they thought of, that to them were impossibilities. Yet we are starting to realise some of their dreams and make them realities. How long before our dreams become realities also? It's not something we can really place a time limitation on, but as we progress in general we get through technilogical barriers, and then make huge leaps forward. The joys of innovation.
And as a side note, lots of UI's appear difficult to use and understand, but if you understand them then it becomes easy. Take a look at the QWERTY keyboard for example. To a complete novice the keys are laid out in a random formation that does nothing to help them type. They want 'A' to be at the top and 'Z' to be at the bottom. But as they progress and learn about 'Home Keys' typing becomes a lot quicker and easier, just because a UI looks different, doesn't mean that with practice it wouldn't be a lot simpler and easier to use
You can write up about security, and tell people to code properly and validate everything but there are always going to be either exceptionally skilled hackers or totally inept users who will be able to do something that you didn't think of, and cause problems.
Look at some of the breaches that have been published in the last few years, and then consider if they are the ones they published (usually because they caught the person who hacked them) how many more are unpublished, either because they couldn't catch the attacker, couldn't figure out how the hacker got in in the first place or because said attacker penetrated so deeply they didn't want to be embarresed by it.
But as a good point, it allows people to keep being employed in the network security industry:P So all in all it's a good thing...
This looks like really good stuff, being able to localise the temperature dissipation would be handy for lots of technologies. I hope that this one gets developed fully and hits the markets soon. The better the cooling capacity the more we can clock our chips:)
As for having to refill the cooling agent periodically, I doubt that this would be a problem with mobile phones, this would be a completly self contained cooling system, much like a heatsink is today, (only a heatsink doesnt have a liquid running around the inside of it:P). The likelyhood is that by the time the liquid would need replacing - if ever, the phone would be at lesat a few years old, and so the owner would probably have it lying around in some drawer since they got their brand spanking new top of the range all singing all dancing holographic video phone...
It's companies like this that really have the confidence and trust of the 'mass' market. By openly supporting and helping people that will for the most part not give them any return they really show up the likes of SCO with all the crap they have been shovelling out of their head office. And of course, even though they don't see any actual profit or return of investment by this good will gesture it makes people like me have a greater desire to support the company by buying their products over their rivals.
And the odds on any of these machines even finishing the challange? Pretty slim, Red Team looks to have the best chances, pretty nice looking machine they've got going as well. All in the name of science and progression I guess.. but if the army vehicles auto targeting equipment couldn't distinguish the difference between a helicoptor and an incomming vehichle.. what are the odds on the software they put on the 'finished' development being any better? also pretty slim.
May as well just spend the money on deveoloping the something worthwhile.
according to the new stuff thats been passed through the EU though, as long as you only have the MP3s for your own use, and not to make money out of them, then they won't do anything about it. Sometimes it is good to live in the UK:P RIAA style tactics cannot be employed over here until that gets changed
They have themselves protected by having veto options on all EU directives, so if you did find out they were breaking some infringment then as soon as you brought the hired goons in they would veto the law.
Then you had better damn well hope that you could run fast and hide well.. because they would come after you, and your family, and your pet dog pingo, and even your goldfish goldie... no mercy
While there are many lessons to be learnt from history, the human race in general seems not to care, actually let me rephrase that.... the people with all the money and the governments supposedly representing the masses but actually more likely on the pay check of said rich people/companies do not care in the slightest. They would prefer to opress progressive science by stopping technological advancement by whatever means necessary, because it would put a dent in their profits!!
There are many domains out there taken up by very very disgruntled customers, and in some respects you can agree with the company and look at it from their point of view, that there is only so much they can do realisticly or they would go bust from people abusing the system.
However, in a large number of cases, these companies are displaying gross incompetencies, and because they are too big a corporation to care about the 'little guy' as long as they continue to make obscene amounts of profits they wont care in the slightest. As a general rule, they wont even notice the loss of income from a few sites highlighting the negative aspects of said company. And as such they dont really care. That is until you get someone bored in the legal deptartment who decides that someone on the internet using a link that has not been ratified by their press office, coupled with the fact that the owner of the site didnt even pay them money for the privilidge of free speech. Then of course they think that making a court case out of it will help the public to see just how nice they REALLY are.......
I love my books, you cant quite get the same enjoyment out of a quick google, than you can out of looking through an encylopedia searching for in-depth information on a wide range of topics.
The internet is amazing, and has its uses, but for me it will still never superceed books in general. Sometimes its quicker to find stuff in a book than it is online. And of course that doesnt just apply to encylopedias. I have a fairly large collection of books, and I still keep expanding. Its a bit difficult to curl up with a computer to read a few chapters before bed:P
Games are becoming more and more like the film industry, seeing just how much they can get away with and still make it to mainstream market. Also like the film industry they have to have as much violence, nearly nakid pixels, and if you can get lots of swearing in the narrative... all the better.
I remember when games didn't need all this crap added to them to make them good to play.. like the first couple of the dizzy series, and time and magik.. great games...
Think I will go dig my emulator out and have another go... you can see a field, exits are [north] [east] and [south]
The main issue is that staff/students may not be particularly aware of any immediate hazards in their working area either arising from their own work or that of colleagues. The concern is that even if warnings were given verbally in the event of any incident they may be unable to respond because the volume of the music system would prevent such warnings being heard.
The first is that if the fire alarm system was to operate someone wearing headphones may either not hear the alarm or may take some time before realising that an alarm was operating. This then has implications for their safe evacuation from the building.
Secondly, headphone wearers may not be aware of others coming into their area and therefore may not be immediately aware of intruders who may pose a risk to their personal safety.
Because of this, the University Health and Safety Committee advise that Heads of Schools should not permit staff and students to use headphones for recreational purposes because it might jeopardise their personal safety.
not hear a fire alarm?? please.. those things are bloody loud. Obviously someone who was very very bored in admin.
Slashdot Mirror
I am still amazed that they tried to sell this and expected not to get caught. It's beggars belief. But then again look at coke, it can't be any better for you (probably much worse) than water from the thames. My dad recently used some to clean an oil spill off his drive, think I will stick with real drinks, like orange and apple juice, that aren't just processed drugs.
If we are able to develop means to 'safely' store radioactive waste (and we are just taking them on their word at the moment) then surely nuclear power will become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Now we just have to develop decent security to keep terrorists out...
ooooooo whats that big see through thing
:P
<doctor>we call that a window
<pt>urghhh M$ windows
<dr>no no, this is a REAL window, look no leaks
Bout time some of us took a walk outside I think, go walk in the countryside where we cant even get wireless for our laptops
This would be the difinitive way of getting around all the little ploys that spammers use, just register to all the crap on the internet and sign up for everything you can, then just mark everything off as spam.
.. would be nice living in a world with no spam, if even only for a bit.
Whenever you get spam let through, ask people to forward a copy to you so that you can add it to the list, and so you can sign up from the details on the email.
The only problem is, this is shooting themselves in the foot, if they eliminate all spam, spammers can't make money, no more spam, no more job for blocking spam till spammers start up again
But still
Guess in a few days we will know if it is all just vaporware or not.
... it usually is.
If it's for real then we have a lot of fun times to look forward to, no more excuses to not move companies to a Unix based OS, can then start weeding out the crap programs and replacing them with decent open source ones over time till don't need this program either.
Does sound too good to be true though, and when something sounds to good to be true
Isn't it amazing how all this crap gets put through, even though most of the voters are against the proposal the politicians that are supposed to be our representatives in parliment just don't care and put it through anyway.
They keep up this illusion that we are a 'free' country, living in a 'democracy' but things like this just show how bad things really are. Used to be they would snoop and we all know they did, but they pretended they didn't for sake of negative publicity. Now they (the government) are showing how little the voters views really count. They don't need to worry about what we want, they just swing the terrorism card and pretend its all for our good, Big brother 'looking after our best intrests.' How nice of them.
Depends how good you are, my mate was on £23k a year ago, and had had enough, told his boss he wanted more money or he was off, so they gave him £26k, this year he didnt even have to approach his boss, they approached him and gave him £29k.
The only problem is when your either crap and they don't want you any way, or your boss is an ass who thinks your bluffing. Then of course you are going to have to find a new job because you know they wont promote you anyway.
But the costs of this technology are too prohibitive for anyone to buy one as a serious tool, only people with too much money to spend will be getting one until the costs have come down enough for it to be widely available.
It's amazing how the GB per £ keeps going up for new 'toys' The benefits being that as other technologies progress, 'old' models also drop in price allowing the wider marker reasonable access
If Abiword is to take over M$ word, it is going to still need a lot of work, however it's good to see something that looks like it will continue to progress into something greater. It doesn't yet have that much functionality, but this is something that can be built upon as they develop.
To be able to use it cross platform is probably the best function, users tend to not like change. Get them used to a certain desktop/layout and if anything changes they don't know what to do with themselves, they need training in the new applications and functionality of them. If the basic word processing and other similar basic and necessary apps are able to stay constant, so to speak, it may give more encouragment to admins to start the bold plunge of rolling out more linux based systems.
Although I thoroughly disagree with these malicious programs, and any virus of any discription, they do encourage people to create neater code and to develop better code that is invulnerable to these kinds of exploits. One could always hypothesise about how much we may or may not have developed programming code without having to spend money on prevention of these exploits.
Lets think about why the survival time has been cut, just look at the MSBlaster crap and all the variations of it, if you had your computer plugged into an unprotected network whilst installing windows you would have it for sure by the time you had got to your initial welcome to windows screen. Of course thats why we put a seperate network up with NAT and a Firewall to allow us to do all our installations hooked up. But in a way the publicity that these viri and worms bring to personal PC security is a good thing. The more people who are actively aware of preventing such things can only be a good thing.
Bandwidth in reality is alreay cheap, there are protocols that are being used by the likes of cisco that make a 56k modem faster than broadband. Why is it not being implimented? The broadband companies need to make the money back from the investment in their infrastructure. Why upgrade to a 512k broadband connection if your modem can go faster? no need. It will be interesting to see when these actual protocols hit the market.
In answer to above the DSL protocol is the way in which your line is utalised to incorprate digital signals down a standard telephone wire. see here for more info
I am not particularly a big fan of patents in general because of the amount of abuse that the system receives, this 'extra' cash in the coffers could either go one of two ways. Patents will be forced to become more realistic and used properly, or people will be able to 'specialise' patents to an even greater degree and so create more crap than before.
Patents in general are still a bad thing IMHO.
A lot of items that have been created owe their innitial conception to some far sighted sci-fi writer, I remember with fondness a lot of the early analog's (My dad has been getting them for years) and reading some of the things they thought of, that to them were impossibilities. Yet we are starting to realise some of their dreams and make them realities. How long before our dreams become realities also? It's not something we can really place a time limitation on, but as we progress in general we get through technilogical barriers, and then make huge leaps forward. The joys of innovation.
And as a side note, lots of UI's appear difficult to use and understand, but if you understand them then it becomes easy. Take a look at the QWERTY keyboard for example. To a complete novice the keys are laid out in a random formation that does nothing to help them type. They want 'A' to be at the top and 'Z' to be at the bottom. But as they progress and learn about 'Home Keys' typing becomes a lot quicker and easier, just because a UI looks different, doesn't mean that with practice it wouldn't be a lot simpler and easier to use
You can write up about security, and tell people to code properly and validate everything but there are always going to be either exceptionally skilled hackers or totally inept users who will be able to do something that you didn't think of, and cause problems.
:P So all in all it's a good thing...
Look at some of the breaches that have been published in the last few years, and then consider if they are the ones they published (usually because they caught the person who hacked them) how many more are unpublished, either because they couldn't catch the attacker, couldn't figure out how the hacker got in in the first place or because said attacker penetrated so deeply they didn't want to be embarresed by it.
But as a good point, it allows people to keep being employed in the network security industry
This looks like really good stuff, being able to localise the temperature dissipation would be handy for lots of technologies. I hope that this one gets developed fully and hits the markets soon. The better the cooling capacity the more we can clock our chips :)
:P). The likelyhood is that by the time the liquid would need replacing - if ever, the phone would be at lesat a few years old, and so the owner would probably have it lying around in some drawer since they got their brand spanking new top of the range all singing all dancing holographic video phone...
As for having to refill the cooling agent periodically, I doubt that this would be a problem with mobile phones, this would be a completly self contained cooling system, much like a heatsink is today, (only a heatsink doesnt have a liquid running around the inside of it
It's companies like this that really have the confidence and trust of the 'mass' market. By openly supporting and helping people that will for the most part not give them any return they really show up the likes of SCO with all the crap they have been shovelling out of their head office.
And of course, even though they don't see any actual profit or return of investment by this good will gesture it makes people like me have a greater desire to support the company by buying their products over their rivals.
And the odds on any of these machines even finishing the challange? Pretty slim, Red Team looks to have the best chances, pretty nice looking machine they've got going as well. All in the name of science and progression I guess .. but if the army vehicles auto targeting equipment couldn't distinguish the difference between a helicoptor and an incomming vehichle .. what are the odds on the software they put on the 'finished' development being any better? also pretty slim.
May as well just spend the money on deveoloping the something worthwhile.
according to the new stuff thats been passed through the EU though, as long as you only have the MP3s for your own use, and not to make money out of them, then they won't do anything about it. Sometimes it is good to live in the UK :P RIAA style tactics cannot be employed over here until that gets changed
They have themselves protected by having veto options on all EU directives, so if you did find out they were breaking some infringment then as soon as you brought the hired goons in they would veto the law.
.. because they would come after you, and your family, and your pet dog pingo, and even your goldfish goldie. .. no mercy
Then you had better damn well hope that you could run fast and hide well
While there are many lessons to be learnt from history, the human race in general seems not to care, actually let me rephrase that .. .. the people with all the money and the governments supposedly representing the masses but actually more likely on the pay check of said rich people/companies do not care in the slightest. They would prefer to opress progressive science by stopping technological advancement by whatever means necessary, because it would put a dent in their profits!!
There are many domains out there taken up by very very disgruntled customers, and in some respects you can agree with the company and look at it from their point of view, that there is only so much they can do realisticly or they would go bust from people abusing the system.
.. .. ..
However, in a large number of cases, these companies are displaying gross incompetencies, and because they are too big a corporation to care about the 'little guy' as long as they continue to make obscene amounts of profits they wont care in the slightest. As a general rule, they wont even notice the loss of income from a few sites highlighting the negative aspects of said company. And as such they dont really care. That is until you get someone bored in the legal deptartment who decides that someone on the internet using a link that has not been ratified by their press office, coupled with the fact that the owner of the site didnt even pay them money for the privilidge of free speech. Then of course they think that making a court case out of it will help the public to see just how nice they REALLY are.
I love my books, you cant quite get the same enjoyment out of a quick google, than you can out of looking through an encylopedia searching for in-depth information on a wide range of topics.
:P
The internet is amazing, and has its uses, but for me it will still never superceed books in general. Sometimes its quicker to find stuff in a book than it is online. And of course that doesnt just apply to encylopedias. I have a fairly large collection of books, and I still keep expanding. Its a bit difficult to curl up with a computer to read a few chapters before bed
Games are becoming more and more like the film industry, seeing just how much they can get away with and still make it to mainstream market. Also like the film industry they have to have as much violence, nearly nakid pixels, and if you can get lots of swearing in the narrative... all the better.
.. like the first couple of the dizzy series, and time and magik.. great games...
I remember when games didn't need all this crap added to them to make them good to play
Think I will go dig my emulator out and have another go... you can see a field, exits are [north] [east] and [south]