If my Linux-based cell phone/PDA/FAM (FAM~=familiar - from Psychohistorical Crisis - Donald Kingsbury - a follow on to Asimov's Foundation Trilogy) can't use their content then I won't purchase it - and since Linux has a good chance of being the OS of choice for many/most of these items in the not too distant future I expect the content providers will start to offer stuff I can use.
Again, just as in the early 80's when software producers started drilling laser holes, etc. in floppies to discourage copying, the upshot will be that those who stop the consumer from doing what they want/need to do with the content will end up losing business to those who do allow the consumer her choice of use.
Seven years ago, due to budget constraints at the Canadian Space Agency, a decision was made to use the latest nanobot technology to save weight and allow quantity instead of quality. The objective of deciding if Martian soil would be suitable for nanobot procreation was deemed satisfactory.
Launched from a hot-air balloon, powered by the most useful emissions from Ottawa, the probes closely approached the edge of the atmosphere where a giant sneeze sent all 50 of the little buggers far enough out into space for the solar wind to blow them to Mars.
Today, after their multi-million mil^H^H^H Kilometer journey, they landed near the site of the latest US venture, Walmart Mars, and were trampled into the Martian dust in the stampede for opening day.
The first piece of digital gear I ever had my hands on was the size of a small desk and about 5' high. It had just enough "logic" on it to create an eight bit ring counter (0 1 10 11 100...)
That was in 1965 and the unit was the only one for our whole school district and worth about $30,000 (CDN - about $35000 US at the time)
From there to today's Object Oriented Programming languages has been an interesting time. I wouldn't have missed it for anything, and I honestly think that living through it has given me a perspective that many more recent programmers don't have and IMHO need, sometimes.
Where "brute force and ignorance" solutions are practical, there is no gain in knowing enough about the underlying hardware and bit twiddling to make things run 1000% faster after spending 6 months re-programming to manually optimize. In fact, since (C and other) compilers have become easily architecture tuned, there really are few areas where speed gains from hardware knowledge can be had, let alone made cost effective. Most are at the hardware interface level - the drivers - most recently USB for example.
If you're happy with programming Visual Basic and your employer can afford the hardware costs that ramping up your single CPU "solution" to deal with millions of visitors instead of hundreds, then you don't need to know anything about the underlying hardware at the bit level.
On the other hand, if you need to wring the most "visits" out of off-the-shelf hardware somehow, then you need to know enough to calculate the theoretical CPU cycles per visit.
Somewhere between these two extremes lies reality.
Today I use my hardware knowledge mostly as a "bullshit filter" when dealing with claims and statistics from various vendors. I have an empiric understanding of why (and under what circumstances) a processor with 512 Megs of level 1 cache and a front-side bus at 500MHz might be faster than a processor with 256 Megs of L1 cache and a 800MHz FSB and vice versa. Same thing for cost effectiveness of SCSI vs IDE when dealing with a database app vs. access to large images in a file system (something that came up today with a customer when spec'ing a pair of file servers, one for each type application)
Back in the mid 70s I dealt with people who optimized applications on million $ machines capable of about 100 online users at one time. Today I deal with optimization on $1000-$3000 machines with thousands of 'active' sessions and millions of 'hits' per day. Different situations but similar problems. Major difference is in the cost of "throwing hardware at the problem" (and throwing the operating systems to go with the HW - but then I use Linux so not much of a difference;)
Bottom line is that understanding the underlying hardware helps me quite a bit - but only as a specialist in optimization and cost-effectiveness now, not in getting things to work at all as in the past.
Why shouldn't we hobble them with the same problems we have - computers that BSOD, applications that are so complex it takes a MBA^H^H^H 12 year old to run them, and hardware that changes every 6 months.
Oh, wait, they're working to get Linux up in a major way aren't they...
Forget what I said - yes, we're making it easier for them;)
I've been using IBM keyboards for over 10 years now - but they're getting hard to find. When IBM owned the Lexmark brand, they too made the nice feel ones - but then they got sold and the quality went down. I got hooked on them with the "Selectric" which they feel very much like - and prior to that a Friden justo-writer (mid 60s) that had a similar feel.
My favourite were IBMs with the track ball in the upper right corner - still have a couple but keeping the tiny balls clean was a chore. Even worse was when my wife spilled wine in my favourite - no workee any more:(
I had a few of the plain (no track-ball) ones I'd picked up at a used computer store for $10 each - so I moved to the Logitech Marble Mouse USB trackball. Now that Linux allows for more than one pointing device to be active at a time my main system has both the Marble Mouse track ball and a "normal" Logitech wheel-mouse - best of both worlds!
Back in 1974 I was "walkabout" in Australia for a few months. I was in Sydney for most of the time and ended up doing odd jobs for a local hiring agency - you know - a day sweeping and a day counting and a day digging, etc.
One job we were sent on was to unload this freighter that had been in port for a couple of weeks but behind a picket line. The strike was over but the stuff on board had sat in the heat for far too long. The local longshoremen wouldn't handle these skins and other ex-meat products so they got us in there. We rotated being in the hold and out on the docks, but it really didn't matter where you were within a block of the place; it stunk so bad we were wearing masks to breath. I had to throw away the clothes after the week we were at it.
I don't know - maybe staked out somewhere North of Ayers rock would be appropriate.
On the other hand, if he is going to end up in prison I'd rather he wasn't in our "club fed" here in Canada either. Not only can you get drugs and other ilicit things in there, you can even get Windows (wait, maybe that's not a bad er good thing)
Oh heck - just put him in with Martha. That'll teach 'im.
how much of it is extractable with reasonable effort? A million tons in the whole moon might mean only a few hundred can be extracted without rendering the whole moon into dust. The statements need to be qualified before we can rely on them in any way.
On the other hand, I'm generally in favour of space exploration - especially if we can send some of our polliticians out on non-return trips;)
In fact, the sooner we open up this new frontier to the point where our chompin'-at-the-bit youngsters can get off planet before they ruin this one for the rest of us, the better.
Dear governments of the world - please let those who would sacrifice their lives on a less than 50/50 chance of success in this venture have a go at it. Our fore-fathers had about the same chance when opening up new territories here on Earth - and the energy accumulated in the recent generations is chafing enough that it is causing the rest of us grief.
Hey - my wife buys all sorts of things I want - because I don't have the time or the patience to drive to the mall, find a parking spot close enough that I don't get winded (or run over) getting to the entrance, haggle with the clerk over price (but I supply her with printouts from the Web for comparison), lug it home, etc.
And of course since it is on her card, if there is something wrong, she has to return it because I don't even come close to looking like her.
I've got her trained to take a Knoppix disk with her to check out the laptops and a bunch of recorded DVD -r and +r disks to check out the DVD players - and she knows I hate any screen with less resolution than 1600x1200 and.23 dot pitch.
I even have her trained in the art of selecting patch cables for the video system and how to tell a good USB cable from a bad one - you know, the little things that can cause aggrevation when you actually get to putting things together. In fact, she actually figured out on her own that the digital 8 camera should also read the old Hi-8's we still have - I'm proud of her!
Hey - what do you guys get your wives to do? Cook? Clean? Go for pizza? - get creative - and screw up their statistics even more;)
The optics back then rival all but the absolute best now - and because color was not an issue, the film was first class too. The other thing to remember is that most of this stuff was not 35mm - it was at worst 120/620 (roll film) in something like a Roliflex or it was "gun camera" stock which was longer rolls of similar size - between 6 and 10 times the size of 35mm or larger.
For those who have never seen the results of a large (or even medium) format B&W camera you're in for a surprise - the grain size is smaller, the continuous tone is better (than color) and the results astounding.
The analog hole is not inside the electronics necessarily - it is at the point where the digital data is turned into something we 'wetware' processors (humans) can use our analog input devices (eyes, ears, etc.) to sample the stuff being shown.
At that point another device can be substituted for our eyes/ears and capture a (admittedly slightly inferior) copy and encode it back to digital if necessary.
Only once the eyes and ears are bypassed by feeding direct digital information into our cerebral cortex via teeny-tiny wires will there be a hope of eliminating this "hole" - and even then there is the chance that you could have a bridge put in (anybody got some really tiny roach-clips?)
The analog hole also exists inside the system between the decoder and the display/playback but may not be easily attached to - kind of like the point where your digital cable box now hooks to your TV via coax or s-video and RCP plugs. Until the tuner/decoder and the display unit's video driver circuits are so tightly integrated that there is no single point where the video and audio pass close to where a tech can attach those teeny-tiny roach clips to snag the decoded signal, there will be an analog hole.
The real point of all this is that as usual, the publishing industries are making it far more costly to view their wares for their customers - both in money and in time/frustration (at incompatible formats, licensing hoops to jump through etc.) where the "real" pirates who copy wholesale and actually compete for dollars at the cash register don't get hurt. Making a million duplicates of a DVD is easy - and you don't need CSS decoding to do it - you copy that too! Same thing with "encoded" CDs and anything else that has a retail package worth pirating.
The bottom line is that to the consumer, the DRM stuff is sand in the gears of them getting the "quiet enjoyment" out of what they've paid their bucks for. The analog hole just ensures that there will be copies floating around for those who have had enough with trying to cope with the publishers' roadblocks to enjoyment - even for people who purchase the real thing.
The war on DRM has already been fought - 20 years ago when the software purchasing public told the software vendors, who drilled laser holes and used screwy disk formats, to take a hike. The problem is that the current generation of publishers don't remember - or think that technology is going to help - it won't. The consumer will get their way because they vote with their dollars and just as 20 years ago, new companies will step up to the plate with product that will pull those dollars away from those who put roadblocks up.
Harken back to the days of laser-drilled holes in floppy diskettes and wierd formats and such - and the backlash of the software users against the producers that in no small part ended up with the engendering of the Open Software movment. It put some vendors out of business because so many of their customers had such troubles getting replacement disks when their machines ate the original and put their own businesses at risk (or affected the game playing time).
The customer is king - and the vendors (including the associations like RIAA) are going to have to get used to the fact that the customer won't put up with any problem that causes them to have to stand in line for a return or wait on hold for hours to get a new key or whatever.
"Anti-piracy" measures don't protect against wholesale piracy - they just piss off the end customer.
"I paid for this CD (DVD, download, whatever) and if I can't listen to the music on it whenever I want, wherever I want, with no hassles, then I'll either get an unlocked copy or I will purchase something else and I'll return this for a full refund and shout at the clerk while I'm doing it." I can just hear the CEO of a major retail store telling his suppliers that he holds them personally responsible for the increase in return rate on DVDs and CDs and the fact that 100% of his frontline people refuse to talk to irate customers anymore.
DRM in the consumer world (not the intra-corporate - different story) will not fly unless and until the purveyors of the content ensure that the consumer not only accepts that what they are purchasing is limited in some way, but that the limiting mechanism never intrudes for the life of the product. This means for example, that it will be fine with most consumers if their copy is personally watermarked such that copies (if any) can be traced back to the original but if the copy is in the posession of the original purchaser there will be no repercussions and if it is in the posession of someone else, the original purchaser will not be impacted (Caveat emptor); and there is no automated way that the publisher or anyone else can know when and where the purchaser plays the work (or watches the video or reads the e-book or...) i.e. no monitoring.
2004 is the year of the desktop as far as Linux people are concerned. IBM is reportedly pushing all their people to put Linux on their desktop by the end of the year and there are major governmental pushes all over the world to adopt Open Source (which in most places means Linux but in some means putting Open Office on Windoze).
The point is these are somewhat captive and specific-use oriented desktops, not those of the great unwashed public which account for upwards of 90% of the market. I don't know that it will take 10 years but it might - M$ won't sit back and allow the erosion of their virtual monopoly to take place without a fight and this will include everything from economic incentives for game producers (can't do that for hardware OEMs anymore can they? but the judge didn't say anything about software producers) to "lowering" their prices. Yes, I predict the "value" to the consumer may increase because M$ will bundle more and more into their "base" offerings as they have done in the past - to the point where on a new system the fact that you get "everything" included (OS, game applications, mildly hobbled office apps, etc.) for only a mere $300 over the cost of the hardware will turn people's heads. Problem is you wont' be able to purchase these things individually anymore (have you tried to purchase just Word lately?) so the real value won't be known - marketing M$ style 101.
There are still lots of apps that people "must" have that we (Linux) don't quite get right. That's a lot of inertia to overcome.
On the other hand, I see a ray of sunshine in M$ move to a new OS that is not backwards compatible with much of the software out there. Personally I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, and it remains to be seen just how incompatible they will be - but this coupled with some more work on binary compatibility stuff (WINE, etc.) will make moving to Linux that much easier for some.
Yeah - as long as they have enough energy they can bake extra chemicals and metals out of the rocks - and if the atmosphere gets a bit contaminated along the way the EPA will send out a team of inspectors and NASA won't have to worry about getting volunteers anymore;)
Of course this assumes there are useful chemicals and metals, etc. in the rocks - which discovery I believe is one of the objectives of the current batch of probes.
It sounds to me like EOLAS has finally done what the DOJ and all the security experts in the world have wanted to do for years - remove IE from its tight integration into the OS and stop IE and all of the various things it is included into from executing insecure code without any user interaction. I expect my customer support load will go down:)
Of course if you'd been reading up on the art of lawsuit as practiced by SCO, you'd be suing all those who use keyboards too - a much larger field to mow:)
IMHO the prior art is in the proposal to create the.name TLD since the use of second and third level domain names for owners' names was implicit in its creation
I don't know about you, but I have over 1Tb in the house already and I back up a bunch of remote servers (rsync) to my main file server. I'd love to be able to take a full backup off-site (will it fit into a safe-deposit box?)
Most CPU boards today have 2-4 USB ports (high-speed) so you could put two on different ports and get the Linux system do do RAID 1 I'd bet. Anybody tried this with USB drives?
Of course they probably count all the messages they blocked from our MTA despite the fact that they were legitimate.
Seems that their heuristics don't care if you've fixed whatever problem they seem to think you have - they continue to block you anyway. One of our servers incurred their undying wrath for some reason - yet the others of our pool are fine - no obvious reason, just had to route anything to AOL from one of the other servers - what a pain.
Slashdot Mirror
If my Linux-based cell phone/PDA/FAM (FAM~=familiar - from Psychohistorical Crisis - Donald Kingsbury - a follow on to Asimov's Foundation Trilogy) can't use their content then I won't purchase it - and since Linux has a good chance of being the OS of choice for many/most of these items in the not too distant future I expect the content providers will start to offer stuff I can use.
Again, just as in the early 80's when software producers started drilling laser holes, etc. in floppies to discourage copying, the upshot will be that those who stop the consumer from doing what they want/need to do with the content will end up losing business to those who do allow the consumer her choice of use.
Launched from a hot-air balloon, powered by the most useful emissions from Ottawa, the probes closely approached the edge of the atmosphere where a giant sneeze sent all 50 of the little buggers far enough out into space for the solar wind to blow them to Mars.
Today, after their multi-million mil^H^H^H Kilometer journey, they landed near the site of the latest US venture, Walmart Mars, and were trampled into the Martian dust in the stampede for opening day.
Oops
That was in 1965 and the unit was the only one for our whole school district and worth about $30,000 (CDN - about $35000 US at the time)
From there to today's Object Oriented Programming languages has been an interesting time. I wouldn't have missed it for anything, and I honestly think that living through it has given me a perspective that many more recent programmers don't have and IMHO need, sometimes.
Where "brute force and ignorance" solutions are practical, there is no gain in knowing enough about the underlying hardware and bit twiddling to make things run 1000% faster after spending 6 months re-programming to manually optimize. In fact, since (C and other) compilers have become easily architecture tuned, there really are few areas where speed gains from hardware knowledge can be had, let alone made cost effective. Most are at the hardware interface level - the drivers - most recently USB for example.
If you're happy with programming Visual Basic and your employer can afford the hardware costs that ramping up your single CPU "solution" to deal with millions of visitors instead of hundreds, then you don't need to know anything about the underlying hardware at the bit level.
On the other hand, if you need to wring the most "visits" out of off-the-shelf hardware somehow, then you need to know enough to calculate the theoretical CPU cycles per visit.
Somewhere between these two extremes lies reality.
Today I use my hardware knowledge mostly as a "bullshit filter" when dealing with claims and statistics from various vendors. I have an empiric understanding of why (and under what circumstances) a processor with 512 Megs of level 1 cache and a front-side bus at 500MHz might be faster than a processor with 256 Megs of L1 cache and a 800MHz FSB and vice versa. Same thing for cost effectiveness of SCSI vs IDE when dealing with a database app vs. access to large images in a file system (something that came up today with a customer when spec'ing a pair of file servers, one for each type application)
Back in the mid 70s I dealt with people who optimized applications on million $ machines capable of about 100 online users at one time. Today I deal with optimization on $1000-$3000 machines with thousands of 'active' sessions and millions of 'hits' per day. Different situations but similar problems. Major difference is in the cost of "throwing hardware at the problem" (and throwing the operating systems to go with the HW - but then I use Linux so not much of a difference ;)
Bottom line is that understanding the underlying hardware helps me quite a bit - but only as a specialist in optimization and cost-effectiveness now, not in getting things to work at all as in the past.
Oh, wait, they're working to get Linux up in a major way aren't they... ;)
Forget what I said - yes, we're making it easier for them
The fact that it ran on DOS was the only thing going for it - you could still get lots of DOS software and run in character mode :)
My favourite were IBMs with the track ball in the upper right corner - still have a couple but keeping the tiny balls clean was a chore. Even worse was when my wife spilled wine in my favourite - no workee any more :(
I had a few of the plain (no track-ball) ones I'd picked up at a used computer store for $10 each - so I moved to the Logitech Marble Mouse USB trackball. Now that Linux allows for more than one pointing device to be active at a time my main system has both the Marble Mouse track ball and a "normal" Logitech wheel-mouse - best of both worlds!
One job we were sent on was to unload this freighter that had been in port for a couple of weeks but behind a picket line. The strike was over but the stuff on board had sat in the heat for far too long. The local longshoremen wouldn't handle these skins and other ex-meat products so they got us in there. We rotated being in the hold and out on the docks, but it really didn't matter where you were within a block of the place; it stunk so bad we were wearing masks to breath. I had to throw away the clothes after the week we were at it.
On the other hand, if he is going to end up in prison I'd rather he wasn't in our "club fed" here in Canada either. Not only can you get drugs and other ilicit things in there, you can even get Windows (wait, maybe that's not a bad er good thing)
Oh heck - just put him in with Martha. That'll teach 'im.
Must be an inquiry - and I'd bet the the statment "over my dead body" counts as an offer to pay too.
On the other hand, "F&*k you!" probably means "we're in serious discussions" - I mean it has an exclamation point for gosh sakes - must be serious!
On the other hand, I'm generally in favour of space exploration - especially if we can send some of our polliticians out on non-return trips ;)
In fact, the sooner we open up this new frontier to the point where our chompin'-at-the-bit youngsters can get off planet before they ruin this one for the rest of us, the better.
Dear governments of the world - please let those who would sacrifice their lives on a less than 50/50 chance of success in this venture have a go at it. Our fore-fathers had about the same chance when opening up new territories here on Earth - and the energy accumulated in the recent generations is chafing enough that it is causing the rest of us grief.
And of course since it is on her card, if there is something wrong, she has to return it because I don't even come close to looking like her.
I've got her trained to take a Knoppix disk with her to check out the laptops and a bunch of recorded DVD -r and +r disks to check out the DVD players - and she knows I hate any screen with less resolution than 1600x1200 and .23 dot pitch.
I even have her trained in the art of selecting patch cables for the video system and how to tell a good USB cable from a bad one - you know, the little things that can cause aggrevation when you actually get to putting things together. In fact, she actually figured out on her own that the digital 8 camera should also read the old Hi-8's we still have - I'm proud of her!
Hey - what do you guys get your wives to do? Cook? Clean? Go for pizza? - get creative - and screw up their statistics even more ;)
For those who have never seen the results of a large (or even medium) format B&W camera you're in for a surprise - the grain size is smaller, the continuous tone is better (than color) and the results astounding.
I expect the war games people will have a field day with all this stuff.
Last I checked the Sharp Zaurus allowed SD and it runs Linux.
At that point another device can be substituted for our eyes/ears and capture a (admittedly slightly inferior) copy and encode it back to digital if necessary.
Only once the eyes and ears are bypassed by feeding direct digital information into our cerebral cortex via teeny-tiny wires will there be a hope of eliminating this "hole" - and even then there is the chance that you could have a bridge put in (anybody got some really tiny roach-clips?)
The analog hole also exists inside the system between the decoder and the display/playback but may not be easily attached to - kind of like the point where your digital cable box now hooks to your TV via coax or s-video and RCP plugs. Until the tuner/decoder and the display unit's video driver circuits are so tightly integrated that there is no single point where the video and audio pass close to where a tech can attach those teeny-tiny roach clips to snag the decoded signal, there will be an analog hole.
The real point of all this is that as usual, the publishing industries are making it far more costly to view their wares for their customers - both in money and in time/frustration (at incompatible formats, licensing hoops to jump through etc.) where the "real" pirates who copy wholesale and actually compete for dollars at the cash register don't get hurt. Making a million duplicates of a DVD is easy - and you don't need CSS decoding to do it - you copy that too! Same thing with "encoded" CDs and anything else that has a retail package worth pirating.
The bottom line is that to the consumer, the DRM stuff is sand in the gears of them getting the "quiet enjoyment" out of what they've paid their bucks for. The analog hole just ensures that there will be copies floating around for those who have had enough with trying to cope with the publishers' roadblocks to enjoyment - even for people who purchase the real thing.
The war on DRM has already been fought - 20 years ago when the software purchasing public told the software vendors, who drilled laser holes and used screwy disk formats, to take a hike. The problem is that the current generation of publishers don't remember - or think that technology is going to help - it won't. The consumer will get their way because they vote with their dollars and just as 20 years ago, new companies will step up to the plate with product that will pull those dollars away from those who put roadblocks up.
This article shows it's already been done. I think there was a pointer to it or something similar from /. not too long ago.
Harken back to the days of laser-drilled holes in floppy diskettes and wierd formats and such - and the backlash of the software users against the producers that in no small part ended up with the engendering of the Open Software movment. It put some vendors out of business because so many of their customers had such troubles getting replacement disks when their machines ate the original and put their own businesses at risk (or affected the game playing time).
The customer is king - and the vendors (including the associations like RIAA) are going to have to get used to the fact that the customer won't put up with any problem that causes them to have to stand in line for a return or wait on hold for hours to get a new key or whatever.
"Anti-piracy" measures don't protect against wholesale piracy - they just piss off the end customer.
"I paid for this CD (DVD, download, whatever) and if I can't listen to the music on it whenever I want, wherever I want, with no hassles, then I'll either get an unlocked copy or I will purchase something else and I'll return this for a full refund and shout at the clerk while I'm doing it." I can just hear the CEO of a major retail store telling his suppliers that he holds them personally responsible for the increase in return rate on DVDs and CDs and the fact that 100% of his frontline people refuse to talk to irate customers anymore.
DRM in the consumer world (not the intra-corporate - different story) will not fly unless and until the purveyors of the content ensure that the consumer not only accepts that what they are purchasing is limited in some way, but that the limiting mechanism never intrudes for the life of the product. This means for example, that it will be fine with most consumers if their copy is personally watermarked such that copies (if any) can be traced back to the original but if the copy is in the posession of the original purchaser there will be no repercussions and if it is in the posession of someone else, the original purchaser will not be impacted (Caveat emptor); and there is no automated way that the publisher or anyone else can know when and where the purchaser plays the work (or watches the video or reads the e-book or...) i.e. no monitoring.
"Quiet enjoyment" is what they need to achieve.
The point is these are somewhat captive and specific-use oriented desktops, not those of the great unwashed public which account for upwards of 90% of the market. I don't know that it will take 10 years but it might - M$ won't sit back and allow the erosion of their virtual monopoly to take place without a fight and this will include everything from economic incentives for game producers (can't do that for hardware OEMs anymore can they? but the judge didn't say anything about software producers) to "lowering" their prices. Yes, I predict the "value" to the consumer may increase because M$ will bundle more and more into their "base" offerings as they have done in the past - to the point where on a new system the fact that you get "everything" included (OS, game applications, mildly hobbled office apps, etc.) for only a mere $300 over the cost of the hardware will turn people's heads. Problem is you wont' be able to purchase these things individually anymore (have you tried to purchase just Word lately?) so the real value won't be known - marketing M$ style 101.
There are still lots of apps that people "must" have that we (Linux) don't quite get right. That's a lot of inertia to overcome.
On the other hand, I see a ray of sunshine in M$ move to a new OS that is not backwards compatible with much of the software out there. Personally I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, and it remains to be seen just how incompatible they will be - but this coupled with some more work on binary compatibility stuff (WINE, etc.) will make moving to Linux that much easier for some.
It's going to be an interesting decade.
Of course this assumes there are useful chemicals and metals, etc. in the rocks - which discovery I believe is one of the objectives of the current batch of probes.
It sounds to me like EOLAS has finally done what the DOJ and all the security experts in the world have wanted to do for years - remove IE from its tight integration into the OS and stop IE and all of the various things it is included into from executing insecure code without any user interaction. I expect my customer support load will go down :)
Of course if you'd been reading up on the art of lawsuit as practiced by SCO, you'd be suing all those who use keyboards too - a much larger field to mow :)
IMHO the prior art is in the proposal to create the .name TLD since the use of second and third level domain names for owners' names was implicit in its creation
Most CPU boards today have 2-4 USB ports (high-speed) so you could put two on different ports and get the Linux system do do RAID 1 I'd bet. Anybody tried this with USB drives?
Seems that their heuristics don't care if you've fixed whatever problem they seem to think you have - they continue to block you anyway. One of our servers incurred their undying wrath for some reason - yet the others of our pool are fine - no obvious reason, just had to route anything to AOL from one of the other servers - what a pain.