"Operating System" shall mean software operating system Code (or Code that substantially performs the functions of an operating system) that is a distribution, rebranding, modification or derivative work of the Linux(R) operating system.
IANAL, but this appears to imply they are laying claim to entire distros - including the GPL'd code relased by other people that SCO has no claim whatsoever against.
Seems like a fairly blatant violation of the GPL here, and copyright law. If I have something in, say RedHat or Mandrake, as a contributor, SCO's just given ME a license of sorts. A license to have more lawyers open up a can of Whoop Ass on them.
Sounds like a couple of hundred contributors could get together and fire off a fairly healthy class action suit against SCO.
I didn't say it wouldn't fly. I said it appeared inherently unstable, which would require good computer mediation of the controls to make it fly.
I'm well aware there are flying wing gliders that are relatively stable in flight. But this aircraft appears to be a small turbojet engine embedded in a relatively high aspect ratio wing with no horizontal stabilizer. Which, to me at least, appears to indicate an unstable configuration.
The ratio of Vehicle Mass to Pilot Mass seems rather high (given only their stated maximum pilot weight, and an estimate for the mass of the powerplant, its fuel, and auxiliary equipment) for it to be controlled like a flying wing hang-glider.
But to clarify, "Inherently unstable != Won't fly." There are enough combat aircraft in existence that prove that!
Off the actual topic - but no less crazy a machine. . ..
Yeah, but maybe not quite so bad as being the monkey. Where do they find those guys, Australia?
Calling a passenger a "Monkey" to his (or her!) face, will probably get you hit. My passenger and I met when we were corner workers in the SCCA. I was racing bikes at the time, and he was crazy enough to come along when I got the opportunity to pilot a hack. Only fair, since I did some navigation for him rallying.
The simple fact that they've flown a 1/2 scale model indicates they have the aerodynamic controlls down well enough to get it into the air. From just looking at the model, it seems like it would be inherently unstable and require some respectably fast computer mediation of the controls.
Would _I_ fly it? (assuming I was the size of an "Anime babe") I would have to say "Maybe." If it had a recovery chute, it would probably be safe enough - and a real hoot to fly.
Though laying on TOP of a running jet engine doesn't seem like fun. Worse than piloting an old style racing sidehack...
Actually, I believe it's illegal to upload it, rather than download it.
This is roughly the same as picking up a set of photocopies you see sitting on the curb. Copywritten or not, you haven't done anything wrong by picking them up, as you didn't violate the author's copyright.
The person who made the copies is violating the copyright (originally two words, godamnit!) not the person who picked them up.
This is one of the issues with the RIAA going after Recipients, rather than Source.
If I buy stolen goods at a garage sale, and the cops find me, they take them away and give them back to the owners. They arrest the thief, not the poor sucker who bought the goods.
I'll at least give Redmond credit for issuing warnings rather than subpoenas. Though "Searching for phrase != downloading files I shouldn't have access to."
You know the point well then: Film still beats Digital. I've had similar things happen with my own Sony digital camera. When I want to take serious pictures, I drag out the SLR. Better resulution with the film, and better optics.
So lets not worry about printer damage till the cameras improve their colour accuracy, low light conditions and image quality.
Amen.
Side note: With the original thread being on HP's anti-counterfiting stuff, I realized I missed one fundamental truism. Serious counterfitters don't use inkjets.
"These proofs were done on an HP printer that adds artifacts - see here and here? - when it tries to print something that it thinks is counterfit money. Those gowns were just the right color. Now, I did this proof on photographic paper to show you how the prints will really look."
For what wedding photographers are known to charge, as a customer of theirs I'd be appalled to get proofs done on a cheap HP printer.
If HP's doing their job right - as they described in the article - Money Green gowns won't get stripes. Why? Because while they are money color, they don't look like a bill.
While you're certainly right that there will inevitibly be artifacts cropping up in some prints and scans due to their anti-counterfiting measures, you're not going to be encountering it in a "Professional" environment.
As a User, I agree with you. Any sort of product degradation is bad. I want to use it however I want to use it.
As a Person, it doesn't see so clear. Yes, degradation is bad, but they are doing it for an honorable reason. One of those rare situations where a company is doing something we don't really like, but doing it for the ethically and morally correct reason.
When blaster hit, everyone and their dog knew about it because of the service crash and subsequent reboot it caused, and everyone wanted their computers cleaned and updated, even the 9x and mac users.
As far as I know, this one is silent. It doesn't flame your system when you're infected so the majority of users won't even notice. The press coverage might prompt people to get their AV software updated, but they may just as well say "I don't see anything weird. Must not be infected!"
The reported infection rate is pretty high, so I suspect there will be folks who never know they were hit. We were STILL getting Code Red hits on our IDS system, so you know how long it will take to clean up after this one.
When this first cropped up a number of people pointed out that the DDoS against SCO is probably just a red herring to hide the worm's real intent - to act as a backdoor into countless windows systems for the virus writer's real purpose. Given the last analysis I read on it, that purpose seems likely to be to leave Zombie Emil Gateways for spammers to use.
While it couldn't happen to a "nicer" company, it seems very likely this virus wasn't written by a "Pissed off Linux advocate" or even a "Rabid SCO hater." The DDoS is probably just incidental to the real payload, serving to deflect suspicion from the culprit.
A combined effect? A one less mine, and some chlorine in the gene pool.
But seriously, this seems like one of the most humanatarian uses of BioTech I've ever heard of. They even made the plant sterile on deployment to stop cross contamination.
When I was looking for a high speed connection to my home (hard core hobbiest) I explored ADSL (SDSL was not, and still is not, available here) IDSL (144K/sec bi-directional) cable Modem (Was great until the local Cable ISP went belly up and @Home took over making the service useless locally) Satellite, and T1.
My final solution was a T1 through Speakeasy. It's NOT cheap. The local loop alone is around $300 a month from the Telco, with the total charges just over $700 with taxes and what have you. I've heard of people paying much less, but I've never seen it here - and I'm in a telecom intensive area. The T1 prices ranged from a low of $600 (close to the POP) a month to over $1400.
Year old prices, but I haven't seen them drop much.
Sat service was, on a per-meg basis, considerably more expensive, and subject to game-killing latency (I run servers), bandwidth and total data caps.
Now, if you're living in Rural Montana, or Texas, or New Mexico, or some place else where there simply isn't any decent ISP connectivity, DSL, Cablemodem, whatever, Sat service should rock. The price, after initial installation isn't -that- bad (seems comparable to common broadband) and the speeds seem adequate - as long as you can live with the latency.
I realize this isn't a review of the system in question, but the observation of sat systems in general holds. The technology is going to be largely the same. Any time you're bouncing a signal 50k miles (give or take) you're going to have latency. Any time you're dealing with satellite transponders you're going to have bandwidth caps. That's the nature of the beast.
I see lots of comments in the forum like 'spews blocked my server'. Spews did no such thing. Spews is listing their provider. That's what spews does. They list providers. Spam friendly providers.
SPEWS did not diretly block the server, but they did list the netblock it's in on their blocklist which will cause anyone USING the SPEWS list to block the server, which has the same net effect. (In this specific case, it was a Level 2 listing, but we're talking SPEWS as an RBL)
When your provider is listed by spews, it's time to move away. You are supporting your provider, which is supporting spammers.
I see things about evenly divided between the "Well just move!" folks like yourself, and the "Moving may not be an option" folks who understand a bit more about switching ISP's for a business.
The majority of people who are adversly effected by SPEWS broad range blocklists are people who are on Business class accounts, or Co_Lo's, who can't easily afford the outlay and downtime entailed by an ISP migration.
I am "supporing my provider" as you say for a reason. That reason is, quite likely, economic. I choose someisp2.use because I can afford them, they have good support, they're local, whatever. If I'm a legit business I'm certainly NOT doing it to support SPAM, and as others have mentioned, there's not much I can do if the ISP also picks up a few bad eggs - and their management for whatever reason doesn't act on it.
When legitimate customers move away, providers will feel that supporting spam costs them real money. They will figure it out sooner or later: the community hates spam. Really, really hates it. And the community will hate you for not hating spam.
Couldn't agree more. BUT for most business class customers it's not "Just move." It's not like "SBC screwed me over, I'm going with Earthlink insetad!" on a dialup or DSL line. When your bills run into the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for connectivity, it's a whole different world.
SPEWS problem is threefold.
1: Lack of resolution - e.g. blocking an entire/22 because there are a couple of/27's in there sending SPAM is NOT cool.
2: Attitude - Colateral damage is NOT good. making ME spend money to move because THEY want to put pressure on an ISP is bullshit.
3: No accountability - You're caught in a blocklist? Your alternative is to bug your ISP and -wait- for them to maybe take action, and for SPEWS to maybe remove the block, or move. You can't even call them up and say "Hey, you got my/26 in that huge block you put on my upstream." They blocklist your upstream, you're hosed. I may have misread something but from what I can see, if you're caught THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO DIRECTLY TO FIX IT.
Sorry, while we ALL hate SPAM, SPEWS has a history of going too far.
side note: the Level 2 blocklist in this case may be appropriate. But ANY cases where they're catching more legit users than spammers is BAD.
You noticed that too? Found the comment in the article:
"The company said that a state police agency in the Midwest found the lie detector 89 percent accurate, compared with 83 percent for a traditional polygraph."
a little frightening, since under scientifically controlled conditions the "Polygraph" shows no where near that accuracy. And as you so well point out, 90% accuracy is not acceptable for screeners. I didn't see anything in the article differentaiting between false positives and false negatives. For either, 90% just isn't good enough.
I've been a fan of the Space program since I was a kid watching guys in bulky suits bounce around on the Moon. I may have been a fan earlier, but I don't remember much about the space program before Apollo.
Hubble was an amazing piece of hardware, designed to be serviced by the then-existant shuttle fleet. Which, as we all know, isn't what it used to be. NASA's budget is limited. Always has been, always will be. They've got to make decisions on whether to keep servicing an old scope that, admitedly, is still doing good science, or spend their money on new projects that will arguably jump the state of the art as far ahead of Hubble as Hubble did in its day.
With the quality and light gathering abilities of surface based scopes approacing or surpassing Hubble - thanks to advances in adaptive optics and other fields - the decision to discontinue servicing Hubble is understandable. It was a fantastic instrument, and it will be missed when the mission finally ends. Note that the announcement isn't "Turn it off tomorrow." It's "We're not going to do any more servicing, but we'll let run until it dies of natural causes."
Several years ago I worked for a large (who I will leave nameless) ISP who liked to advertise their "Awesome ADSL speeds! Over a 1.5Meg a second down! Guaranteed to our router!"
Why guaranteed only as far as their router? The router in question was a RedBack 1500 with 8000 users provisioned on it, all fed by a pair of OC3's running 145M/Sec.
You do the math. 8000 users expecting 1.5M/sec from 290M/sec worth of pipe?
As you so well point out, the ISP's oversell bandwidth to survive. They know that most users will only use a tiny fraction of their alocation, so most of the time they never realize how bad the situation is.
Also, as other people point out, the ISP's have an interesting way of defining "Unlimited" to mean what they want it to mean - usually something like "Full speed for 5% of the time." Worse, for us users anyway, their business model doesn't WANT users who are savvy. They want Lemmings who'll knock off some emails, do a little surfing, and not use more than a fraction of the advertised bandwidth they're sold.
It's the way the business works.
You want 1.53M/sec bi-directional 24x7 that you can actually USE? Get a T1. Want a decent pipe, at a price per month less than the lease on a BMW M3? Get cable or DSL and be willing to deal with some ISP bullshit from people who don't really want your business unless you're like the other Lemmings...
Actually, the burden of proof would be on those who claim there is some meaning in it. Reading the article, and references to the manuscript, the "It's a hoax" proposition now has a plausible explanation as to how a hoax could be perpetrated. While not conclusive evidence.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
Anyone can claim anything, but the more outrageous the claim the more evidence they need to support it. Someone could claim the book was the work of Aliens. That claim would take more conclusive evidence than "It was part of a clever scam." While this doesn't prove the hoax theory, it gives it more plausibility than simple supposition.
Honestly, do you think it's more likely to be an authentic encoded manuscript of alchemy? Occam's Razor favors the hoax. To challenge your analogy, it's much more like a 25th century scholar looking back and saying Roswell was a hoax than Kitty Hawk was.
1-6: I agree. Concorde was a pretty airplane that went ungodly fast for an insane amount of cash per passenger mile. Though on 5 you make reference to the TU144 that flew briefly with Aeroflot and had the disasterous tendency to fall out fo ths sky. That particular Tupolov design was an abject failure and was designed about the same time as the Concorde. In fact, if memory serves, it actually flew before Concorde, though Concorde entered commercial service first.
At the end of the day, it is all down to how quickly people (or goods) need to arrive at their destination. Living in the UK, one of my favourite past times is canal boating. The UK canal network is one of the most under-utilised resources we have. Yet transportation of goods by canal may be slow, and it requires more manpower, but overall the costs to transport are about the same as by road. And the impact on the environment is far less.
That sounds like a large chunk of the Rail system in the U.S. where there is still a great deal of freight traffic, but our passenger system is underfunded, under utilized, and, unfortunately, not especially effective.
Concorde was the most beautiful aircraft ever developed, and I was sad to see it go. Now that it has gone, there will be enough people who will miss it to demand something as fast and as sophisticated as a replacement. I fear that they will have a long time to wait, but in the meantime anything reliable the X prize will generate is only going to increase their expectations.
Personally, I'd say Blackbird was the most beautiful (and flat out amazing) aircraft ever developed.
I have to question how many people who actually used it will miss Concorde. I'm sure there will be some regular trans-atlantic fliers who'll miss being able to "Fly to Manhattan for brunch" but the vast majority of air travellers are not so well heeled. The super-sonic passenger jets are pretty and sexy and alluring, but they aren't economical. The airlines can charge a premium for speed - as they did with Concorde - but they need to have enough people willing to shell out the extra money to keep the flight full.
The more efficient per passenger you are the less of a premium you'll need to charge. That, unfortunately, implies a larger aircraft. Larger aircraft means more people per flight willing to pay the premium, and a more expensive initial outlay for the aircraft in the first place. This economy of scale is why the Jumbos and future Super Jumbos are popular with the airlines: they're efficient.
In order for a commercial super-sonic airliner to be practical they'll need to solve a few issues and design to a number of goals.
1: "Supercruise" engines with the ability to cruise in supersonic flight without afterburner. The F22 is currently the only aircraft I'm aware of that can do this (may be others, of course) but even it requires burners to reach maximum speed.
2: Mitigated "Sonic boom" - since the boom is the main reason Concorde was only allowed to operate super-sonic over water. Until there is a way to abate the boom, there's no way super-sonic aircraft will be allowed to operate over populated areas.
3: Operational efficiency comparable to conventional commercial airliners. Unless the airlines can turn a profit, or at least operate the plane as a loss-leader, they won't buy into the technology.
While this is certainly an interesting thread here, I'm still not sure how the X-Prize relates to Concorde and super-sonic airliners. The goal of the prize is to promote commercial low-cost spaceflight. Its the same concept as the airly aviation prizes that encouraged long range high speed flights - pushing the envelope.
Concorde, and the Tu144 are well within the current envelope. If the airlines were really pushing for a super-sonic airliner, the technology is pretty much there already to give it to them. The fact is they aren't that interested.
What we can hope for from X-Prize is commercial pressure to open up space.
I haven't done the math on flight times, but I do remember Boeing's stated reason for dropping the Sonic Cruiser project - namely that development costs weren't likely to be justified in the face of current and projected airline economics.
As I remember the Boeing super-sonic passenger jet was developed and dropped quite some time ago, and there's really not much on the boards for trans-sonic passenger aircraft at the moment. While you're definately right about the progress in technology, there are other issues besides simple development costs.
Airlines have to look very closely at their expenditures in order to turn a profit. Unless the operational benefits (eg: Speed. And, um, well, that seems to be about it.) can outweigh the added costs (expensive new aircraft, higher fuel costs, (probably) fewer passengers per flight) the airlines will have no reason to buy the supersonic aircraft. What killed Concorde was not enough people willing to spend the exceptionally high airfare for the faster flight. Even with a new, more efficient, aircraft, it'll still be a premium service.
We won't go into the ecology/economy of passenger miles per gallon of fuel advantages you get with a high sub-sonic aircraft.
The X-Prize is certainly a noble goal and a very cool concept, but it's unlikely to lead to anything in the commercial aircraft world. After all, Boeing, Airbus, etc., already have the technical knowhow to put things into orbit.
No. Not whine. Valid criticism of an imperfect solution. As you note yourself, this is not the be-all solution. In fact, it's really not much of a solution at all unless everyone's playing by the rules. And we all know how well spammers like to play by the rules.
The criticism is right. As are a number of others, particularly with all the spam zombies out there who provide the spammers with open relays. Even if they implement this and slow it down so the spammers can "only" send 8000 a day, that's 8000 a day PER MACHINE. If BubbaSpammer has 1000 zombies, he can still send 8 MILLION spams a day even if they implement this.
Sorry, mate. Just because someone criticizes the solution, doesn't mean they're whining.
And no, it's not "a pretty good solution for the moment" as you say. It's a proposed solution, with a number of holes, nothing more.
I couldn't find a reference in the article, but we can only hope they're not taking the frequencies away from someone who's actuially using them for something. Considering how BAD most FM radio is these days, I'm sure they can carve out a couple of Mhz worth of bandwidth in the Commercial FM portion that no one would miss.
Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
Actually, supersonic flight was a hot technology 40 some-odd years ago, and was more or less abandoned as impractical, uneconomical, and inefficient. Even Boeing has dropped their recent Sonic Cruiser concept (high subsonic cruise) in favor of slower, bigger, more efficient aircraft.
Now, I do NOT want to belittle the work of Scaled Composites. They do some incredible engineering there, and they deserve kudos for getting Spaceship One this far. As you say, they've still got a long way to go before reacing "Suborbital Flight" stage, but this is a nice step and every successful burn of the Hybrid engine gives them more data.
The X-Prize contest is certainly seeing some interesting engineering and innovations - though it seems unlikely any of the systems explored to win it will lead to the ultimate goal of the prize. Namely: Putting spaceflight within reach of "mear mortals."
Even these X-Prize craft are only suborbital birds, and that's a LONG way from putting people into orbit for a few quick laps around the equater.
It's unfair of a company to keep quiet about patent infringement until their invention has become a standard, and then try to leverage their way into a monopoly with patent litigation. If they had been forthcoming about their patent in the first place, perhaps other (better?) standards would be invented. Or, if the idea behind the patent really is that good, the original copmany would en up with most of the market share, and come by it honestly.
Fair is a concept most/.ers, Open Sourcers, etc., mostly understand in concept. Treat the other guys fairly. Share your code, and ideas, and skills, and the whole community improves. There may even be some Profit in there, but that's not the driving force behind a community effort.
Business, and fair, unfortunately, aren't often heard in the same sentence. It's certainly NOT fair for a company to hold onto a patent and not tell competitors of potential infringement until they can glean a large profit from a law suit. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Worse, the current patent system is mired in inconsistant and inappropriate grants, and a sheer volume of patents that make it impractical to do proper research.
In a "Fair" world, if a company can show they made a reasonable effort to make sure their product wasn't infringing someone elses patent, AND the patent holder made no effort to investigate possible infringement when they become aware of it (and how could they NOT have, given Roxio's market share?) then any suit should be summarily tossed out.
Having my bike's speed/performance information floating "in space" in my field of vision would be rather cool. Since the guages on a bike are inevitibly located low in the rider's field of view (practically 'down' on a sport bike in a tuck) this could be a real nice addition to the bike.
The only questions I'd have about it (having read their site, but not the NYT article) would be how much does it weigh, and how does the off-center mounting of the display affect the helmet's aerodynamics? If it's designed to inetgrate with the bike's instrumentation (tach, oil pressure, temp, gear position, etc.) it seems there must be some kind of connection between the bike and the display, which makes me think it would be practical to move the GPS unit to the bike and off the rider's head.
Helmets are heavy.
Weight is bad.
Now, if I could get a good headset, a 2M or 70cm antenna, and portable VHF radio to integrate with the VFR, and this . ..
Well . . . . Ok. Download program. Click. Wait for automated tool to acomplish the scanning and infection for you. Then dead server.
Some of the Script Kiddiot tools for attacking Windows boxen are that far along. Kind of sad really.
The media's made "Hacker" the generic term for "Anyone doing something to a computer besides running a shrink wrapped program." Good, bad, or indifferent, they don't know the difference and probably don't really care. Something we'll probably have to just live with in this Media driven society.
Now, ultimately, whoever's DDoSing SCO, while probably bringing a barely concealed smile to the face of most/.ers, isn't really accomplishing anything. While the attack couldn't happen to a more deserving company (Windows is at least good for games, right?) the only "good" thing coming out of it is that those Zombies aren't hitting someone undeserving of some Script Kidiot's wrath.
Without rehashing all the corporate history of the SCO/Caldera legacy, I can only say "Are you sure?" I don't believe they can lay claim to the SCO name, IP, assets, etc., and still claim "But that's not really us." They may not be under the same control or operating under the same business model, but they are still SCO.
It would be kind of like DaimlerChrysler claiming they never made the Plymouth Aries K. They certainly didn't in modern times, of course. But they acquired what used to be Chrysler Corp., who owned Plymouth, who made the K. The legacy came with the purchase. But, to add a nice SCO twist to this whimsical example, let's imagine DC is sueing all surviving Aries K owners for not paying a mendatory re-engine fee to become a Mercedes. "You didn't really buy that Plymouth from us, so you don't actually own it."
Ok, so maybe it is a stupid analogy . . . Kinda like the whole SCO suit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Operating System" shall mean software operating system Code (or Code that substantially performs the functions of an operating system) that is a distribution, rebranding, modification or derivative work of the Linux(R) operating system.
IANAL, but this appears to imply they are laying claim to entire distros - including the GPL'd code relased by other people that SCO has no claim whatsoever against.
Seems like a fairly blatant violation of the GPL here, and copyright law. If I have something in, say RedHat or Mandrake, as a contributor, SCO's just given ME a license of sorts. A license to have more lawyers open up a can of Whoop Ass on them.
Sounds like a couple of hundred contributors could get together and fire off a fairly healthy class action suit against SCO.
I didn't say it wouldn't fly. I said it appeared inherently unstable, which would require good computer mediation of the controls to make it fly.
I'm well aware there are flying wing gliders that are relatively stable in flight. But this aircraft appears to be a small turbojet engine embedded in a relatively high aspect ratio wing with no horizontal stabilizer. Which, to me at least, appears to indicate an unstable configuration.
The ratio of Vehicle Mass to Pilot Mass seems rather high (given only their stated maximum pilot weight, and an estimate for the mass of the powerplant, its fuel, and auxiliary equipment) for it to be controlled like a flying wing hang-glider.
But to clarify, "Inherently unstable != Won't fly." There are enough combat aircraft in existence that prove that!
Off the actual topic - but no less crazy a machine. . . .
Yeah, but maybe not quite so bad as being the monkey. Where do they find those guys, Australia?
Calling a passenger a "Monkey" to his (or her!) face, will probably get you hit. My passenger and I met when we were corner workers in the SCCA. I was racing bikes at the time, and he was crazy enough to come along when I got the opportunity to pilot a hack. Only fair, since I did some navigation for him rallying.
The simple fact that they've flown a 1/2 scale model indicates they have the aerodynamic controlls down well enough to get it into the air. From just looking at the model, it seems like it would be inherently unstable and require some respectably fast computer mediation of the controls.
Would _I_ fly it? (assuming I was the size of an "Anime babe") I would have to say "Maybe." If it had a recovery chute, it would probably be safe enough - and a real hoot to fly.
Though laying on TOP of a running jet engine doesn't seem like fun. Worse than piloting an old style racing sidehack...
Actually, I believe it's illegal to upload it, rather than download it.
This is roughly the same as picking up a set of photocopies you see sitting on the curb. Copywritten or not, you haven't done anything wrong by picking them up, as you didn't violate the author's copyright.
The person who made the copies is violating the copyright (originally two words, godamnit!) not the person who picked them up.
This is one of the issues with the RIAA going after Recipients, rather than Source.
If I buy stolen goods at a garage sale, and the cops find me, they take them away and give them back to the owners. They arrest the thief, not the poor sucker who bought the goods.
I'll at least give Redmond credit for issuing warnings rather than subpoenas. Though "Searching for phrase != downloading files I shouldn't have access to."
You know the point well then: Film still beats Digital. I've had similar things happen with my own Sony digital camera. When I want to take serious pictures, I drag out the SLR. Better resulution with the film, and better optics.
So lets not worry about printer damage till the cameras improve their colour accuracy, low light conditions and image quality.
Amen.
Side note: With the original thread being on HP's anti-counterfiting stuff, I realized I missed one fundamental truism. Serious counterfitters don't use inkjets.
No dilemma here.
"These proofs were done on an HP printer that adds artifacts - see here and here? - when it tries to print something that it thinks is counterfit money. Those gowns were just the right color. Now, I did this proof on photographic paper to show you how the prints will really look."
For what wedding photographers are known to charge, as a customer of theirs I'd be appalled to get proofs done on a cheap HP printer.
If HP's doing their job right - as they described in the article - Money Green gowns won't get stripes. Why? Because while they are money color, they don't look like a bill.
While you're certainly right that there will inevitibly be artifacts cropping up in some prints and scans due to their anti-counterfiting measures, you're not going to be encountering it in a "Professional" environment.
As a User, I agree with you. Any sort of product degradation is bad. I want to use it however I want to use it.
As a Person, it doesn't see so clear. Yes, degradation is bad, but they are doing it for an honorable reason. One of those rare situations where a company is doing something we don't really like, but doing it for the ethically and morally correct reason.
As you say yourself (emphasis mine):
When blaster hit, everyone and their dog knew about it because of the service crash and subsequent reboot it caused, and everyone wanted their computers cleaned and updated, even the 9x and mac users.
As far as I know, this one is silent. It doesn't flame your system when you're infected so the majority of users won't even notice. The press coverage might prompt people to get their AV software updated, but they may just as well say "I don't see anything weird. Must not be infected!"
The reported infection rate is pretty high, so I suspect there will be folks who never know they were hit. We were STILL getting Code Red hits on our IDS system, so you know how long it will take to clean up after this one.
When this first cropped up a number of people pointed out that the DDoS against SCO is probably just a red herring to hide the worm's real intent - to act as a backdoor into countless windows systems for the virus writer's real purpose. Given the last analysis I read on it, that purpose seems likely to be to leave Zombie Emil Gateways for spammers to use.
.
While it couldn't happen to a "nicer" company, it seems very likely this virus wasn't written by a "Pissed off Linux advocate" or even a "Rabid SCO hater." The DDoS is probably just incidental to the real payload, serving to deflect suspicion from the culprit.
Yet another Bottom Feeding spammer . .
A combined effect? A one less mine, and some chlorine in the gene pool.
But seriously, this seems like one of the most humanatarian uses of BioTech I've ever heard of. They even made the plant sterile on deployment to stop cross contamination.
Awesome development if it works as advertised.
When I was looking for a high speed connection to my home (hard core hobbiest) I explored ADSL (SDSL was not, and still is not, available here) IDSL (144K/sec bi-directional) cable Modem (Was great until the local Cable ISP went belly up and @Home took over making the service useless locally) Satellite, and T1.
My final solution was a T1 through Speakeasy. It's NOT cheap. The local loop alone is around $300 a month from the Telco, with the total charges just over $700 with taxes and what have you. I've heard of people paying much less, but I've never seen it here - and I'm in a telecom intensive area. The T1 prices ranged from a low of $600 (close to the POP) a month to over $1400.
Year old prices, but I haven't seen them drop much.
Sat service was, on a per-meg basis, considerably more expensive, and subject to game-killing latency (I run servers), bandwidth and total data caps.
Now, if you're living in Rural Montana, or Texas, or New Mexico, or some place else where there simply isn't any decent ISP connectivity, DSL, Cablemodem, whatever, Sat service should rock. The price, after initial installation isn't -that- bad (seems comparable to common broadband) and the speeds seem adequate - as long as you can live with the latency.
I realize this isn't a review of the system in question, but the observation of sat systems in general holds. The technology is going to be largely the same. Any time you're bouncing a signal 50k miles (give or take) you're going to have latency. Any time you're dealing with satellite transponders you're going to have bandwidth caps. That's the nature of the beast.
The question is whether it fills your needs.
I see lots of comments in the forum like 'spews blocked my server'. Spews did no such thing. Spews is listing their provider. That's what spews does. They list providers. Spam friendly providers.
/22 because there are a couple of /27's in there sending SPAM is NOT cool.
/26 in that huge block you put on my upstream." They blocklist your upstream, you're hosed. I may have misread something but from what I can see, if you're caught THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO DIRECTLY TO FIX IT.
SPEWS did not diretly block the server, but they did list the netblock it's in on their blocklist which will cause anyone USING the SPEWS list to block the server, which has the same net effect. (In this specific case, it was a Level 2 listing, but we're talking SPEWS as an RBL)
When your provider is listed by spews, it's time to move away. You are supporting your provider, which is supporting spammers.
I see things about evenly divided between the "Well just move!" folks like yourself, and the "Moving may not be an option" folks who understand a bit more about switching ISP's for a business.
The majority of people who are adversly effected by SPEWS broad range blocklists are people who are on Business class accounts, or Co_Lo's, who can't easily afford the outlay and downtime entailed by an ISP migration.
I am "supporing my provider" as you say for a reason. That reason is, quite likely, economic. I choose someisp2.use because I can afford them, they have good support, they're local, whatever. If I'm a legit business I'm certainly NOT doing it to support SPAM, and as others have mentioned, there's not much I can do if the ISP also picks up a few bad eggs - and their management for whatever reason doesn't act on it.
When legitimate customers move away, providers will feel that supporting spam costs them real money. They will figure it out sooner or later: the community hates spam. Really, really hates it. And the community will hate you for not hating spam.
Couldn't agree more. BUT for most business class customers it's not "Just move." It's not like "SBC screwed me over, I'm going with Earthlink insetad!" on a dialup or DSL line. When your bills run into the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for connectivity, it's a whole different world.
SPEWS problem is threefold.
1: Lack of resolution - e.g. blocking an entire
2: Attitude - Colateral damage is NOT good. making ME spend money to move because THEY want to put pressure on an ISP is bullshit.
3: No accountability - You're caught in a blocklist? Your alternative is to bug your ISP and -wait- for them to maybe take action, and for SPEWS to maybe remove the block, or move. You can't even call them up and say "Hey, you got my
Sorry, while we ALL hate SPAM, SPEWS has a history of going too far.
side note: the Level 2 blocklist in this case may be appropriate. But ANY cases where they're catching more legit users than spammers is BAD.
a little frightening, since under scientifically controlled conditions the "Polygraph" shows no where near that accuracy. And as you so well point out, 90% accuracy is not acceptable for screeners. I didn't see anything in the article differentaiting between false positives and false negatives. For either, 90% just isn't good enough.
I've been a fan of the Space program since I was a kid watching guys in bulky suits bounce around on the Moon. I may have been a fan earlier, but I don't remember much about the space program before Apollo.
Hubble was an amazing piece of hardware, designed to be serviced by the then-existant shuttle fleet. Which, as we all know, isn't what it used to be.
NASA's budget is limited. Always has been, always will be. They've got to make decisions on whether to keep servicing an old scope that, admitedly, is still doing good science, or spend their money on new projects that will arguably jump the state of the art as far ahead of Hubble as Hubble did in its day.
With the quality and light gathering abilities of surface based scopes approacing or surpassing Hubble - thanks to advances in adaptive optics and other fields - the decision to discontinue servicing Hubble is understandable. It was a fantastic instrument, and it will be missed when the mission finally ends. Note that the announcement isn't "Turn it off tomorrow." It's "We're not going to do any more servicing, but we'll let run until it dies of natural causes."
Amen, jusdisgi.
Several years ago I worked for a large (who I will leave nameless) ISP who liked to advertise their "Awesome ADSL speeds! Over a 1.5Meg a second down! Guaranteed to our router!"
Why guaranteed only as far as their router? The router in question was a RedBack 1500 with 8000 users provisioned on it, all fed by a pair of OC3's running 145M/Sec.
You do the math. 8000 users expecting 1.5M/sec from 290M/sec worth of pipe?
As you so well point out, the ISP's oversell bandwidth to survive. They know that most users will only use a tiny fraction of their alocation, so most of the time they never realize how bad the situation is.
Also, as other people point out, the ISP's have an interesting way of defining "Unlimited" to mean what they want it to mean - usually something like "Full speed for 5% of the time." Worse, for us users anyway, their business model doesn't WANT users who are savvy. They want Lemmings who'll knock off some emails, do a little surfing, and not use more than a fraction of the advertised bandwidth they're sold.
It's the way the business works.
You want 1.53M/sec bi-directional 24x7 that you can actually USE? Get a T1. Want a decent pipe, at a price per month less than the lease on a BMW M3? Get cable or DSL and be willing to deal with some ISP bullshit from people who don't really want your business unless you're like the other Lemmings...
Actually, the burden of proof would be on those who claim there is some meaning in it. Reading the article, and references to the manuscript, the "It's a hoax" proposition now has a plausible explanation as to how a hoax could be perpetrated. While not conclusive evidence.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
Anyone can claim anything, but the more outrageous the claim the more evidence they need to support it. Someone could claim the book was the work of Aliens. That claim would take more conclusive evidence than "It was part of a clever scam." While this doesn't prove the hoax theory, it gives it more plausibility than simple supposition.
Honestly, do you think it's more likely to be an authentic encoded manuscript of alchemy? Occam's Razor favors the hoax. To challenge your analogy, it's much more like a 25th century scholar looking back and saying Roswell was a hoax than Kitty Hawk was.
1-6: I agree. Concorde was a pretty airplane that went ungodly fast for an insane amount of cash per passenger mile. Though on 5 you make reference to the TU144 that flew briefly with Aeroflot and had the disasterous tendency to fall out fo ths sky. That particular Tupolov design was an abject failure and was designed about the same time as the Concorde. In fact, if memory serves, it actually flew before Concorde, though Concorde entered commercial service first.
At the end of the day, it is all down to how quickly people (or goods) need to arrive at their destination. Living in the UK, one of my favourite past times is canal boating. The UK canal network is one of the most under-utilised resources we have. Yet transportation of goods by canal may be slow, and it requires more manpower, but overall the costs to transport are about the same as by road. And the impact on the environment is far less.
That sounds like a large chunk of the Rail system in the U.S. where there is still a great deal of freight traffic, but our passenger system is underfunded, under utilized, and, unfortunately, not especially effective.
Concorde was the most beautiful aircraft ever developed, and I was sad to see it go. Now that it has gone, there will be enough people who will miss it to demand something as fast and as sophisticated as a replacement. I fear that they will have a long time to wait, but in the meantime anything reliable the X prize will generate is only going to increase their expectations.
Personally, I'd say Blackbird was the most beautiful (and flat out amazing) aircraft ever developed.
I have to question how many people who actually used it will miss Concorde. I'm sure there will be some regular trans-atlantic fliers who'll miss being able to "Fly to Manhattan for brunch" but the vast majority of air travellers are not so well heeled. The super-sonic passenger jets are pretty and sexy and alluring, but they aren't economical. The airlines can charge a premium for speed - as they did with Concorde - but they need to have enough people willing to shell out the extra money to keep the flight full.
The more efficient per passenger you are the less of a premium you'll need to charge. That, unfortunately, implies a larger aircraft. Larger aircraft means more people per flight willing to pay the premium, and a more expensive initial outlay for the aircraft in the first place. This economy of scale is why the Jumbos and future Super Jumbos are popular with the airlines: they're efficient.
In order for a commercial super-sonic airliner to be practical they'll need to solve a few issues and design to a number of goals.
1: "Supercruise" engines with the ability to cruise in supersonic flight without afterburner. The F22 is currently the only aircraft I'm aware of that can do this (may be others, of course) but even it requires burners to reach maximum speed.
2: Mitigated "Sonic boom" - since the boom is the main reason Concorde was only allowed to operate super-sonic over water. Until there is a way to abate the boom, there's no way super-sonic aircraft will be allowed to operate over populated areas.
3: Operational efficiency comparable to conventional commercial airliners. Unless the airlines can turn a profit, or at least operate the plane as a loss-leader, they won't buy into the technology.
While this is certainly an interesting thread here, I'm still not sure how the X-Prize relates to Concorde and super-sonic airliners. The goal of the prize is to promote commercial low-cost spaceflight. Its the same concept as the airly aviation prizes that encouraged long range high speed flights - pushing the envelope.
Concorde, and the Tu144 are well within the current envelope. If the airlines were really pushing for a super-sonic airliner, the technology is pretty much there already to give it to them. The fact is they aren't that interested.
What we can hope for from X-Prize is commercial pressure to open up space.
I haven't done the math on flight times, but I do remember Boeing's stated reason for dropping the Sonic Cruiser project - namely that development costs weren't likely to be justified in the face of current and projected airline economics.
As I remember the Boeing super-sonic passenger jet was developed and dropped quite some time ago, and there's really not much on the boards for trans-sonic passenger aircraft at the moment. While you're definately right about the progress in technology, there are other issues besides simple development costs.
Airlines have to look very closely at their expenditures in order to turn a profit. Unless the operational benefits (eg: Speed. And, um, well, that seems to be about it.) can outweigh the added costs (expensive new aircraft, higher fuel costs, (probably) fewer passengers per flight) the airlines will have no reason to buy the supersonic aircraft. What killed Concorde was not enough people willing to spend the exceptionally high airfare for the faster flight. Even with a new, more efficient, aircraft, it'll still be a premium service.
We won't go into the ecology/economy of passenger miles per gallon of fuel advantages you get with a high sub-sonic aircraft.
The X-Prize is certainly a noble goal and a very cool concept, but it's unlikely to lead to anything in the commercial aircraft world. After all, Boeing, Airbus, etc., already have the technical knowhow to put things into orbit.
Whine!
No. Not whine. Valid criticism of an imperfect solution. As you note yourself, this is not the be-all solution. In fact, it's really not much of a solution at all unless everyone's playing by the rules. And we all know how well spammers like to play by the rules.
The criticism is right. As are a number of others, particularly with all the spam zombies out there who provide the spammers with open relays. Even if they implement this and slow it down so the spammers can "only" send 8000 a day, that's 8000 a day PER MACHINE. If BubbaSpammer has 1000 zombies, he can still send 8 MILLION spams a day even if they implement this.
Sorry, mate. Just because someone criticizes the solution, doesn't mean they're whining.
And no, it's not "a pretty good solution for the moment" as you say. It's a proposed solution, with a number of holes, nothing more.
I couldn't find a reference in the article, but we can only hope they're not taking the frequencies away from someone who's actuially using them for something. Considering how BAD most FM radio is these days, I'm sure they can carve out a couple of Mhz worth of bandwidth in the Commercial FM portion that no one would miss.
Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
Actually, supersonic flight was a hot technology 40 some-odd years ago, and was more or less abandoned as impractical, uneconomical, and inefficient. Even Boeing has dropped their recent Sonic Cruiser concept (high subsonic cruise) in favor of slower, bigger, more efficient aircraft.
Now, I do NOT want to belittle the work of Scaled Composites. They do some incredible engineering there, and they deserve kudos for getting Spaceship One this far. As you say, they've still got a long way to go before reacing "Suborbital Flight" stage, but this is a nice step and every successful burn of the Hybrid engine gives them more data.
The X-Prize contest is certainly seeing some interesting engineering and innovations - though it seems unlikely any of the systems explored to win it will lead to the ultimate goal of the prize. Namely: Putting spaceflight within reach of "mear mortals."
Even these X-Prize craft are only suborbital birds, and that's a LONG way from putting people into orbit for a few quick laps around the equater.
It's unfair of a company to keep quiet about patent infringement until their invention has become a standard, and then try to leverage their way into a monopoly with patent litigation. If they had been forthcoming about their patent in the first place, perhaps other (better?) standards would be invented. Or, if the idea behind the patent really is that good, the original copmany would en up with most of the market share, and come by it honestly.
/.ers, Open Sourcers, etc., mostly understand in concept. Treat the other guys fairly. Share your code, and ideas, and skills, and the whole community improves. There may even be some Profit in there, but that's not the driving force behind a community effort.
Fair is a concept most
Business, and fair, unfortunately, aren't often heard in the same sentence. It's certainly NOT fair for a company to hold onto a patent and not tell competitors of potential infringement until they can glean a large profit from a law suit. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Worse, the current patent system is mired in inconsistant and inappropriate grants, and a sheer volume of patents that make it impractical to do proper research.
In a "Fair" world, if a company can show they made a reasonable effort to make sure their product wasn't infringing someone elses patent, AND the patent holder made no effort to investigate possible infringement when they become aware of it (and how could they NOT have, given Roxio's market share?) then any suit should be summarily tossed out.
I know.
Fat chance.
Having my bike's speed/performance information floating "in space" in my field of vision would be rather cool. Since the guages on a bike are inevitibly located low in the rider's field of view (practically 'down' on a sport bike in a tuck) this could be a real nice addition to the bike.
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The only questions I'd have about it (having read their site, but not the NYT article) would be how much does it weigh, and how does the off-center mounting of the display affect the helmet's aerodynamics? If it's designed to inetgrate with the bike's instrumentation (tach, oil pressure, temp, gear position, etc.) it seems there must be some kind of connection between the bike and the display, which makes me think it would be practical to move the GPS unit to the bike and off the rider's head.
Helmets are heavy.
Weight is bad.
Now, if I could get a good headset, a 2M or 70cm antenna, and portable VHF radio to integrate with the VFR, and this . .
Not just download, run, click, dead server.
/.ers, isn't really accomplishing anything. While the attack couldn't happen to a more deserving company (Windows is at least good for games, right?) the only "good" thing coming out of it is that those Zombies aren't hitting someone undeserving of some Script Kidiot's wrath.
Well . . . . Ok. Download program. Click. Wait for automated tool to acomplish the scanning and infection for you. Then dead server.
Some of the Script Kiddiot tools for attacking Windows boxen are that far along. Kind of sad really.
The media's made "Hacker" the generic term for "Anyone doing something to a computer besides running a shrink wrapped program." Good, bad, or indifferent, they don't know the difference and probably don't really care. Something we'll probably have to just live with in this Media driven society.
Now, ultimately, whoever's DDoSing SCO, while probably bringing a barely concealed smile to the face of most
Without rehashing all the corporate history of the SCO/Caldera legacy, I can only say "Are you sure?" I don't believe they can lay claim to the SCO name, IP, assets, etc., and still claim "But that's not really us." They may not be under the same control or operating under the same business model, but they are still SCO.
It would be kind of like DaimlerChrysler claiming they never made the Plymouth Aries K. They certainly didn't in modern times, of course. But they acquired what used to be Chrysler Corp., who owned Plymouth, who made the K. The legacy came with the purchase. But, to add a nice SCO twist to this whimsical example, let's imagine DC is sueing all surviving Aries K owners for not paying a mendatory re-engine fee to become a Mercedes. "You didn't really buy that Plymouth from us, so you don't actually own it."
Ok, so maybe it is a stupid analogy . . . Kinda like the whole SCO suit.