"How do they allow emergency calls through? Aren't most cell jammers simply frequency based white noise generators?"
Presumably it's a valid micro-cell base station, which just rejects non-112 calls. It'll get the chance to filter calls because it's the closest and strongest base-station for everyone in "the area"
"Maybe some Altruistic Billionaire would be interested in funding these guys. Especially guys who have a track record contributing to the public good."
Maybe he could secure the operating-system he sells first, so it doesn't get used to send spam...
Motorola are notorious for having difficult-to-use software on their mobile telephones. Try to get something from nokia if you ever change telephones, as it's an 'order of magnitude' better. Feels just like using a PDA or even groupware, and they don't seem to have assumed anything stupid about how you'll use it (when you're looking at a text-message for example, it's only a couple of button-presses to delete, file, reply, send it to someone, save the telephone number it was sent from, add that number to an existing contact, add it to the calendar, etc.)
I don't know if the user-interface survived the change to full-colour graphical screens though - my phone is easy to use because it's monochrome LCD which makes it very clear and forces the programmers to think, while some new phones seem to be showing-off their graphical backdrops and shaded borders, at the expense of readability.
"I wonder how well this system works in a snowstorm. Or even after a snowstorm when there's clumps of snow on the sign"
False negatives? Bah, how useless are they. What you want is some false positives, i.e. holding up a piece of card with "30" written on it, and laughing as everyone's cars auto-brake, sound alarms, or email the insurance-company
"To really lure people away from office Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support. I have been having issues with trying to open excell spreadsheets that are password protected. I then have to ask the person to mail me them with the password removed"
That's your reason for not reccomending OpenOffice? It doesn't open encrypted files from a competing office suite
It's fair enough, but to be consistant, that would mean that you could never consider using MS-Office, as not only does it not open encrypted files from OpenOffice, but it doesn't open any OOo files at all!
Even if you 'rig' the contest so that you require MSO file-support, then OpenOffice still comes out ahead, as it reads that format, plus others which MSO doesn't support.
So the only option if you're trying to make OOo look unusable, is to find some even more obscure feature of MSO. "well it doesn't open encrypted files" (don't forget the DMCA), or "when you open ActiveX controls inside a spreadsheet in a powerpoint document, it doesn't display the column protection correctly". But when people say those sort of things, we hear what they really mean: "I'm going to use MS Office regardless, nyahhhhhhhh!"
Even the people who claim "it's what the rest of the world uses" are seeing their claims stretched to the limits of credibility. If you're so worried about losing a deal because your customers take offence at not being able to open whatever odd format they send you, then keep file-converters around - there's no need to let other people dictate what desktop software your company uses. Even between companies who've both standardised on MS-Office, there are still constant problems whenever someone emails documents from one to the other (normally someone with the very latest version and all the bells-n-whistles enabled, doesn't realise that it'll fail in all other versions of the same software).
Emailing documents without checking what the recipient's software supports just reminds me of dumb old modems trying to send at 57600bps to a computer listening at 112000bps, it's just a pathetic lack of communication between parties who should know better.
We all know the stories of secretaries sending emails with a.DOC attachment containing a few lines of text... frankly, these should be treated just like people who forward chain-letters or.EXE screensavers, and helped to select more efficient methods of exchanging information. Again, buying a $500 office suite for everyone in the company just because you have some CEO who doesn't know how to cut-n-paste is getting ridiculous.
Admittedly there's no particular benefit to doing the migration now for the sake of it, it's something to consider next time you think about general software upgrades. And because of the ease of overlapping the two systems (make OpenOffice available to those who want it, and later change the standard file-format over) there's no reason why any of the migration should be painful. And at the end of it, your organisation gets perpetual upgrades to their office-suite for free.
"If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked)"
When the MI5 building was used in a Bond film, someone mentioned that MI5 were worried about the security implications.
To quote: "they feared that filming might reveal the location of one of London's most distinctive landmarks"
It seems obvious that removing the White House from maps is good for security - after all, if nobody knows it's there, they can't attack it?
"The article mentions nothing about servers... Does this mean that Windows 2000 Server users will have to upgrade to Windows Server 2003?"
Don't servers typically use wget and lynx for browsers? You can have a graphical browser open on the workstation you're connecting from, and copy URLs into the SSH window.
Does syslogd count as spyware under this interpretation?
Howabout other daemons which "run in the background and store information"? Doesn't even/dev/random store data derived from keypresses (source of entropy, etc.) and run without most users' knowledge
"The only people really affected by things like the Broadcast Flag and encryption of content are the ordinary, paying, law-abiding consumers. The pirates still pirate, and we can do less and less with the things that we OWN - or rather, we can only do what the media moguls' whims let us do."
Quiz question: the purpose of the broadcast flag is: [ ] to prevent "piracy" [ ] to control ordinary consumers [ ] to sell the same thing multiple times
Maybe they just finished playing Theme Park Tycoon and liked the way it displayed information. Next up, you'll have to wear sensors to say if you're hungry or tired...
"Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?"
Pumped hydroelectric storage already does store large amounts of electricity (search for Dinorwig power station) - fuel cells will make it easier, and won't require mountainous terrain.
"Is there anykind of a browser plug-in I could use to deciper steganographically enhanced JPEG images"
With this new vulnerability, you could have steganographic JPEGs which popup the message in a dialog-box - no need for any special decryption software to be installed!
"Here's a post at GamingGroove with a list of mirrors...nobody like that BS Kontiki crap."
Thanks. The torrents that people here are linking to seem fairly reliable, and it's certainly a relief to roll-back the machine to before that godawful gamespot application was installed...
I wonder what it was actually downloading to my PC...
Is this 'gamespot' website a virus or something? Instead of an HTML link, it has a popup window, with javascript to detect if the popup didn't open and critisize you for not allowing a popup, then it loads a javascript page which does nothing (immediately closes, looks like a bug).
Try it in internet explorer, it loads a generic javascript library, then calls a function to load a popup window which installs a security threat, err, activeX control, which rapes your machine (don't know about that yet, will have to check later if it tampered with anything), which loads another 2 popup windows which take your email address again, then displays a pretend download window which should theoretically download the file, but seems to be stuck on 0% regardless of your connection speed.
Me, I use an <a href=""> when I want to link to a file. It amazes me the lengths some people will go to to make their website not work.
"So, if I take my wi-fi enabled laptop to the control room of a nuclear plant, and the signal causes a plant trip to due super-sensitive electronics used to measure signals in pico-amps, the plant has no right to prevent the same thing from happening again?"
"It seemed to install correctly on my iBook, but on rebooting the Apple logo morphed into a deep red pentagram. Flames then started belching from the optical drive, the screen became a window into the lower reaches of hell, sulphurous fumes vented from the keyboard and all the cables caught fire."
"Translucency screenshots http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.p ng http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png"
Presumably someone will be developing window decorations for the "nearly all transparent" windows so that you can control them without having max.min.close buttons lying around the edge of a transparent non-window?
(Yes I know this isn't an X problem, it will just make KDE, WindowMaker, etc. look weird if any of these transparent clocks and characters actually get used, with their fully-opaque titlebars hanging on the screen like a rolled window...)
Slashdot Mirror
"How do they allow emergency calls through? Aren't most cell jammers simply frequency based white noise generators?"
Presumably it's a valid micro-cell base station, which just rejects non-112 calls. It'll get the chance to filter calls because it's the closest and strongest base-station for everyone in "the area"
"Maybe some Altruistic Billionaire would be interested in funding these guys. Especially guys who have a track record contributing to the public good."
Maybe he could secure the operating-system he sells first, so it doesn't get used to send spam...
"Do all phones suck this bad?"
Motorola are notorious for having difficult-to-use software on their mobile telephones. Try to get something from nokia if you ever change telephones, as it's an 'order of magnitude' better. Feels just like using a PDA or even groupware, and they don't seem to have assumed anything stupid about how you'll use it (when you're looking at a text-message for example, it's only a couple of button-presses to delete, file, reply, send it to someone, save the telephone number it was sent from, add that number to an existing contact, add it to the calendar, etc.)
I don't know if the user-interface survived the change to full-colour graphical screens though - my phone is easy to use because it's monochrome LCD which makes it very clear and forces the programmers to think, while some new phones seem to be showing-off their graphical backdrops and shaded borders, at the expense of readability.
"The German language article says he came to a stop about 20km before a toll booth..."
There are places in Germany more than 20km from toll-booths?
"I wonder how well this system works in a snowstorm. Or even after a snowstorm when there's clumps of snow on the sign"
False negatives? Bah, how useless are they. What you want is some false positives, i.e. holding up a piece of card with "30" written on it, and laughing as everyone's cars auto-brake, sound alarms, or email the insurance-company
"...as it is not very practical to give everyone on the highway a ticket."
The british government might have some solutions to sell you, involving digital cameras, radar, and numberplate-recognition...
"To really lure people away from office Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support. I have been having issues with trying to open excell spreadsheets that are password protected. I then have to ask the person to mail me them with the password removed"
.DOC attachment containing a few lines of text... frankly, these should be treated just like people who forward chain-letters or .EXE screensavers, and helped to select more efficient methods of exchanging information. Again, buying a $500 office suite for everyone in the company just because you have some CEO who doesn't know how to cut-n-paste is getting ridiculous.
That's your reason for not reccomending OpenOffice? It doesn't open encrypted files from a competing office suite
It's fair enough, but to be consistant, that would mean that you could never consider using MS-Office, as not only does it not open encrypted files from OpenOffice, but it doesn't open any OOo files at all!
Even if you 'rig' the contest so that you require MSO file-support, then OpenOffice still comes out ahead, as it reads that format, plus others which MSO doesn't support.
So the only option if you're trying to make OOo look unusable, is to find some even more obscure feature of MSO. "well it doesn't open encrypted files" (don't forget the DMCA), or "when you open ActiveX controls inside a spreadsheet in a powerpoint document, it doesn't display the column protection correctly". But when people say those sort of things, we hear what they really mean: "I'm going to use MS Office regardless, nyahhhhhhhh!"
Even the people who claim "it's what the rest of the world uses" are seeing their claims stretched to the limits of credibility. If you're so worried about losing a deal because your customers take offence at not being able to open whatever odd format they send you, then keep file-converters around - there's no need to let other people dictate what desktop software your company uses. Even between companies who've both standardised on MS-Office, there are still constant problems whenever someone emails documents from one to the other (normally someone with the very latest version and all the bells-n-whistles enabled, doesn't realise that it'll fail in all other versions of the same software).
Emailing documents without checking what the recipient's software supports just reminds me of dumb old modems trying to send at 57600bps to a computer listening at 112000bps, it's just a pathetic lack of communication between parties who should know better.
We all know the stories of secretaries sending emails with a
Admittedly there's no particular benefit to doing the migration now for the sake of it, it's something to consider next time you think about general software upgrades. And because of the ease of overlapping the two systems (make OpenOffice available to those who want it, and later change the standard file-format over) there's no reason why any of the migration should be painful. And at the end of it, your organisation gets perpetual upgrades to their office-suite for free.
"If you take a look at these aerial views of DC you can see how the federal government had the overhead views of the whitehouse and the capitol removed (or blocked)"
When the MI5 building was used in a Bond film, someone mentioned that MI5 were worried about the security implications.
To quote: "they feared that filming might reveal the location of one of London's most distinctive landmarks"
It seems obvious that removing the White House from maps is good for security - after all, if nobody knows it's there, they can't attack it?
"BEWARE - Way too proprietary! It currently only works with ONE planet!"
Try this. I don't think it has paging capabilities though.
"but it needs a good internet connection and a decent graphics card"
The good news: surrounded by PCs with graphics cards twice as fast as the fastest ones you can buy in a shop.
The bad news: that means I'm still at work at 6pm Friday. Let's see how Doom3 runs on an nVidia quadro FX4000...
"The article mentions nothing about servers... Does this mean that Windows 2000 Server users will have to upgrade to Windows Server 2003?"
Don't servers typically use wget and lynx for browsers? You can have a graphical browser open on the workstation you're connecting from, and copy URLs into the SSH window.
Does syslogd count as spyware under this interpretation?
/dev/random store data derived from keypresses (source of entropy, etc.) and run without most users' knowledge
Howabout other daemons which "run in the background and store information"? Doesn't even
"The only people really affected by things like the Broadcast Flag and encryption of content are the ordinary, paying, law-abiding consumers. The pirates still pirate, and we can do less and less with the things that we OWN - or rather, we can only do what the media moguls' whims let us do."
Quiz question: the purpose of the broadcast flag is:
[ ] to prevent "piracy"
[ ] to control ordinary consumers
[ ] to sell the same thing multiple times
List them in order of importance
"You mean like Firefox?"
Or Thunderbirds
Maybe they just finished playing Theme Park Tycoon and liked the way it displayed information. Next up, you'll have to wear sensors to say if you're hungry or tired...
US land area: 9,161,923 sq km
Arable land: 19.3%
(Source: CIA)
Thus: 4% of arable land = 70,000 sq km
"Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts
Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?"
Pumped hydroelectric storage already does store large amounts of electricity (search for Dinorwig power station) - fuel cells will make it easier, and won't require mountainous terrain.
"Is there anykind of a browser plug-in I could use to deciper steganographically enhanced JPEG images"
With this new vulnerability, you could have steganographic JPEGs which popup the message in a dialog-box - no need for any special decryption software to be installed!
"Here's a post at GamingGroove with a list of mirrors...nobody like that BS Kontiki crap."
Thanks. The torrents that people here are linking to seem fairly reliable, and it's certainly a relief to roll-back the machine to before that godawful gamespot application was installed...
I wonder what it was actually downloading to my PC...
Is this 'gamespot' website a virus or something? Instead of an HTML link, it has a popup window, with javascript to detect if the popup didn't open and critisize you for not allowing a popup, then it loads a javascript page which does nothing (immediately closes, looks like a bug).
Try it in internet explorer, it loads a generic javascript library, then calls a function to load a popup window which installs a security threat, err, activeX control, which rapes your machine (don't know about that yet, will have to check later if it tampered with anything), which loads another 2 popup windows which take your email address again, then displays a pretend download window which should theoretically download the file, but seems to be stuck on 0% regardless of your connection speed.
Me, I use an <a href=""> when I want to link to a file. It amazes me the lengths some people will go to to make their website not work.
"Until we up the pay in the patent office and address the real problems these will continue."
There's an easier way to solve these problems whilst paying less money to the patent office.
No money at all, in fact.
"So, if I take my wi-fi enabled laptop to the control room of a nuclear plant, and the signal causes a plant trip to due super-sensitive electronics used to measure signals in pico-amps, the plant has no right to prevent the same thing from happening again?"
Not if you're renting an apartment there...
"It seemed to install correctly on my iBook, but on rebooting the Apple logo morphed into a deep red pentagram. Flames then started belching from the optical drive, the screen became a window into the lower reaches of hell, sulphurous fumes vented from the keyboard and all the cables caught fire."
Doom4 is available already?
and for the mac?
"Translucency screenshotsp ng
http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.
http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png"
Presumably someone will be developing window decorations for the "nearly all transparent" windows so that you can control them without having max.min.close buttons lying around the edge of a transparent non-window?
(Yes I know this isn't an X problem, it will just make KDE, WindowMaker, etc. look weird if any of these transparent clocks and characters actually get used, with their fully-opaque titlebars hanging on the screen like a rolled window...)
"or is Lexmark implementing a no-refilled-toner circuit on the sly in the replacement printers?"
Maybe it gives the electric shock to anyone installing a non-approved ink cartridge?