Right. But seeing as practically every hardware firewall in existence today is essentially a general-purpose computer with a specialised OS (be it Cisco IOS, VXWorks or a custom-built Linux) with, if you're lucky or pay a lot of money, some sort of acceleration hardware for things like VPNs, where do you draw the line?
I could sell you a box which boots off CompactFlash, runs one of the common Linux firewalls such as Astaro or Smoothwall, but it would technically be a software firewall. If I customised the user interface, you'd probably never know the difference.
The vibrancy of British music depends on a fair return on the investments that allow British talent to shine.
That sentence in and of itself says all you need to know.
The only artist in the UK I can think of who's represented by an RIAA record company and writes her own songs is Lily Bloody Irritating Allen.
Just to put it into context - American Idol appeared first on UK screens under the name "Pop Idol" long before American Idol was conceived. Not only do we manufacture crap music, we make television shows about it.
That's as maybe, but to just one day uninstall Office wholesale across a network and install some other product, which is how this reads, is a surefire recipe for IT management disaster.
Simple mathematics dictates that when an MP3 player has 80%+ of the market, it'll get the most attention on any OS - including Linux.
Therefore, iPods have been working pretty well with Linux for some time. Everything else? Well, you've got to check that it appears as a USB mass storage device, that it actually plays music transferred to it in this way (rather than depending on the host PC to update a database or somesuch) OR (assuming it's beyond your abilities), you've got to hope and pray that enough Linux users who are savvy enough and driven enough to write their own driver have bought such a device.
But I've found that it's quite common for a comment like "my car keys are buggery expensive to replace because of the immobilizer", people in the US appear to be surprised and I'm wondering if that's because they don't generally have such things or they do but they're ignorant of this.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that it's taken this long and it's only high-end cars. Here in the UK, practically every car on the market for the last 10 years has an immobiliser chip of some sort built into the key. It's sold as a security measure, and the fact that it allows the manufacturer to charge you £70 (around $140) for a replacement key - £30 for the key, £40 to reprogram your car to recognise it - has nothing to do with it;) Are things radically different in the US?
In any case, my understanding was that with most of these, the key leaves the factory with a fixed number, no two keys have the same number and you reprogram the car to recognise the key rather than reprogramming the key to work the car. This sounds to me like a simple case of bad engineering which was never considered when the key was designed.
The upshot is that Nissan will re-design the key so it's not affected by cell-phones, new cars will ship with the redesigned key and owners of existing cars will have to pay a small fortune to replace the keys because it's not a safety recall issue.
I had a belkin one. The design was great except for one fatal flaw.
It provided a cradle which was fixed to a gooseneck which plugged into the cigarette lighter. But it had nothing to anchor it in place so you'd go round a corner and the whole caboodle - complete with £200 worth of iPod - went merrily flying around the car.
Bear in mind that in most cases, all the evidence that a university has is log files.
Now, it is fantastically difficult to get log files to a point whereby they're being recorded to a forensic standard. You don't automatically get it for free when you configure a box - particularly if that box later gets compromised - you've got to jump through all sorts of hoops involving remote logging servers and everything.
Now, toss in the fact that with DHCP there's nothing to stop me noting the IP address of a given box, physically unplugging that box from the network, assigning its IP to my own PC as a static IP address then plugging my PC into the network. Unless explicit steps have been taken to stop this kind of thing, the records anyone would instinctively go to - the DHCP server's logs - will be incorrect.
I mean, what brain-dead college student doesn't know that downloading copywritten music and movies is legally wrong? Who hasn't been told? Who didn't get the memo?
This is the RIAA we're talking about.
This is a group which not only seems to believe a printout of a screenshot, ostensibly showing software which identifies which IP address is sharing which file is adequate evidence of infringement (never mind that you or I could knock out a convincing mock-up in 30 minutes with either Photoshop or, if you're feeling clever, the visual IDE of your choice), they've convinced courts of this.
There is a reason why the principle of "beyond reasonable doubt" exists, and AIUI your argument essentially states that someone who hasn't even had a chance to state their case, let alone establish reasonable doubt, has no right to meaningful legal assistance.
More likely: A $3 piece of electronics (which is soldered in some awkward place and practically impossible to replace without causing damage) failing in order to protect a $0.05 fuse (which is socketed so it can be replaced easily).
Less than that, even. I bet there's a lot of Unix user-land software out there which assumes that "number of seconds since the epoch" is a 32-bit unsigned int, which IIRC runs out in 2038.
It's even worse in the UK where Chip & PIN is supposed to eliminate card fraud.
Of course it doesn't. Instead, it passes the risk onto the consumer, viz: "Your card was used in conjunction with your PIN, therefore either you did it or you were careless with your PIN. Either way, it's your problem".
There was a case recently (google for it) where a major UK bank only issued about 3 or 4 different PINs, so if you didn't change the PIN you'd been issued anyone could guess it correctly in 4 tries.
I've not found the Dell laptops to be any better or worse than the competition,
We're largely a Dell shop as well. The only exception is desktop PCs - I don't like Dell's desktop PC's much.
The conclusion I've come to is that those who lambast Dell laptops for quality are comparing the cheapest Dell laptop with a Thinkpad of equivalent specifications which costs twice as much. But Thinkpads are built like tanks. Get a laptop from one of the pricier lines (eg. Latitude rather than Inspiron) and you're fine.
Those who lambast Dell laptops for price are usually comparing one of the most expensive laptops in the range to Freds No-Name Cheap Nasty OEM'd laptop.
How is it not dark that some teachers CHOOSE to not teach this aspect of history. Why should it have to be made COMPULSORY for history teachers to actually, you know, teach important history?
There's a whole lot of history, y'know. Even if you just count relatively modern (for the sake of argument, let's say industrial revolution and beyond) history, you've got to decide what you teach and inevitably bits will be left out.
Historically, UK school qualifications have had a curriculum containing a bunch of stuff they have to teach and some which is optional (as in: you've got a choice of 5 major topics within the subject, teach any 3 of those). Which "optional" bits to teach is usually at the discretion of the school.
The "news" here is "some schools have decided to choose a more politically correct selection from the list of optional parts for fear of offending some pupils". This is something they're perfectly free to do - if you don't like the idea that schools might exercise this freedom, you shouldn't give it to them.
It seems the government has decided that perhaps the Holocaust should be compulsory and is proposing moving it from the "optional" to the "compulsory" section. The only amazing thing about that is that they thought that one of the most important events in the last 100 years, an event which has already been repeated in the late 20th century in the former Yugoslavia (free clue: "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism), should be optional.
Consider that it could even moderate overzealous law enforcement.
It could, but by an amazing coincidence, whenever anyone reports cases of overzealous law enforcement in the UK, investigation shows that for some strange reason none of the CCTV cameras that cover the area were working.
It's weird, that. You'd think with more CCTV cameras than pretty much anywhere else in the world, we'd be able to make them reasonably reliable by now.
I don't think it's quite as simple as that. All the business partners in question (along, I would imagine, with the agencies doing the enforcing) are in different countries to the one that Allofmp3.com is based in.
It's broadly equivalent to me (in the UK) going after your business partners (in France) when your business is based in the States and doesn't have subsidiaries in either the UK or France. What are you going to do about it?
Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay isn't shipping a physical product which can be impounded at Customs.
Right. But seeing as practically every hardware firewall in existence today is essentially a general-purpose computer with a specialised OS (be it Cisco IOS, VXWorks or a custom-built Linux) with, if you're lucky or pay a lot of money, some sort of acceleration hardware for things like VPNs, where do you draw the line?
I could sell you a box which boots off CompactFlash, runs one of the common Linux firewalls such as Astaro or Smoothwall, but it would technically be a software firewall. If I customised the user interface, you'd probably never know the difference.
You ever tried closing everything on a Windows machine then making the machine vaguely useful in real-world scenarios?
It's not just Unix software which is guilty of gratuitously using the TCP/IP stack for IPC.
The vibrancy of British music depends on a fair return on the investments that allow British talent to shine.
That sentence in and of itself says all you need to know.
The only artist in the UK I can think of who's represented by an RIAA record company and writes her own songs is Lily Bloody Irritating Allen.
Just to put it into context - American Idol appeared first on UK screens under the name "Pop Idol" long before American Idol was conceived. Not only do we manufacture crap music, we make television shows about it.
That's as maybe, but to just one day uninstall Office wholesale across a network and install some other product, which is how this reads, is a surefire recipe for IT management disaster.
And here we come to the crux of the matter.
Simple mathematics dictates that when an MP3 player has 80%+ of the market, it'll get the most attention on any OS - including Linux.
Therefore, iPods have been working pretty well with Linux for some time. Everything else? Well, you've got to check that it appears as a USB mass storage device, that it actually plays music transferred to it in this way (rather than depending on the host PC to update a database or somesuch) OR (assuming it's beyond your abilities), you've got to hope and pray that enough Linux users who are savvy enough and driven enough to write their own driver have bought such a device.
Not at all, actually.
But I've found that it's quite common for a comment like "my car keys are buggery expensive to replace because of the immobilizer", people in the US appear to be surprised and I'm wondering if that's because they don't generally have such things or they do but they're ignorant of this.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that it's taken this long and it's only high-end cars. Here in the UK, practically every car on the market for the last 10 years has an immobiliser chip of some sort built into the key. It's sold as a security measure, and the fact that it allows the manufacturer to charge you £70 (around $140) for a replacement key - £30 for the key, £40 to reprogram your car to recognise it - has nothing to do with it ;) Are things radically different in the US?
In any case, my understanding was that with most of these, the key leaves the factory with a fixed number, no two keys have the same number and you reprogram the car to recognise the key rather than reprogramming the key to work the car. This sounds to me like a simple case of bad engineering which was never considered when the key was designed.
The upshot is that Nissan will re-design the key so it's not affected by cell-phones, new cars will ship with the redesigned key and owners of existing cars will have to pay a small fortune to replace the keys because it's not a safety recall issue.
Actually, I just typed £ - didn't bother with typing £ in full.
It's directly above 3 on a UK keyboard.
(I kid! and no, I don't know how to put the symbol in slashcode)
It's easy. Type "£".
I had a belkin one. The design was great except for one fatal flaw.
It provided a cradle which was fixed to a gooseneck which plugged into the cigarette lighter. But it had nothing to anchor it in place so you'd go round a corner and the whole caboodle - complete with £200 worth of iPod - went merrily flying around the car.
Bear in mind that in most cases, all the evidence that a university has is log files.
Now, it is fantastically difficult to get log files to a point whereby they're being recorded to a forensic standard. You don't automatically get it for free when you configure a box - particularly if that box later gets compromised - you've got to jump through all sorts of hoops involving remote logging servers and everything.
Now, toss in the fact that with DHCP there's nothing to stop me noting the IP address of a given box, physically unplugging that box from the network, assigning its IP to my own PC as a static IP address then plugging my PC into the network. Unless explicit steps have been taken to stop this kind of thing, the records anyone would instinctively go to - the DHCP server's logs - will be incorrect.
I mean, what brain-dead college student doesn't know that downloading copywritten music and movies is legally wrong? Who hasn't been told? Who didn't get the memo?
This is the RIAA we're talking about.
This is a group which not only seems to believe a printout of a screenshot, ostensibly showing software which identifies which IP address is sharing which file is adequate evidence of infringement (never mind that you or I could knock out a convincing mock-up in 30 minutes with either Photoshop or, if you're feeling clever, the visual IDE of your choice), they've convinced courts of this.
There is a reason why the principle of "beyond reasonable doubt" exists, and AIUI your argument essentially states that someone who hasn't even had a chance to state their case, let alone establish reasonable doubt, has no right to meaningful legal assistance.
Maybe they were too busy running away to get a good look at it?
Not now it isn't, but did Microsoft retain any rights to Xenix?
I don't think I have ever seen a legal, full version of Office installed on an individual, privately owned PC.
Business PCs, yeah, sure. Only a very foolish business pirates software across the entire office.
There are still real hardware internal modems, as well as RS232 ones out there - but they're not particularly easy to get hold of.
More likely: A $3 piece of electronics (which is soldered in some awkward place and practically impossible to replace without causing damage) failing in order to protect a $0.05 fuse (which is socketed so it can be replaced easily).
Less than that, even. I bet there's a lot of Unix user-land software out there which assumes that "number of seconds since the epoch" is a 32-bit unsigned int, which IIRC runs out in 2038.
It's even worse in the UK where Chip & PIN is supposed to eliminate card fraud.
Of course it doesn't. Instead, it passes the risk onto the consumer, viz: "Your card was used in conjunction with your PIN, therefore either you did it or you were careless with your PIN. Either way, it's your problem".
There was a case recently (google for it) where a major UK bank only issued about 3 or 4 different PINs, so if you didn't change the PIN you'd been issued anyone could guess it correctly in 4 tries.
I've not found the Dell laptops to be any better or worse than the competition,
We're largely a Dell shop as well. The only exception is desktop PCs - I don't like Dell's desktop PC's much.
The conclusion I've come to is that those who lambast Dell laptops for quality are comparing the cheapest Dell laptop with a Thinkpad of equivalent specifications which costs twice as much. But Thinkpads are built like tanks. Get a laptop from one of the pricier lines (eg. Latitude rather than Inspiron) and you're fine.
Those who lambast Dell laptops for price are usually comparing one of the most expensive laptops in the range to Freds No-Name Cheap Nasty OEM'd laptop.
How is it not dark that some teachers CHOOSE to not teach this aspect of history. Why should it have to be made COMPULSORY for
history teachers to actually, you know, teach important history?
There's a whole lot of history, y'know. Even if you just count relatively modern (for the sake of argument, let's say industrial revolution and beyond) history, you've got to decide what you teach and inevitably bits will be left out.
Historically, UK school qualifications have had a curriculum containing a bunch of stuff they have to teach and some which is optional (as in: you've got a choice of 5 major topics within the subject, teach any 3 of those). Which "optional" bits to teach is usually at the discretion of the school.
The "news" here is "some schools have decided to choose a more politically correct selection from the list of optional parts for fear of offending some pupils". This is something they're perfectly free to do - if you don't like the idea that schools might exercise this freedom, you shouldn't give it to them.
It seems the government has decided that perhaps the Holocaust should be compulsory and is proposing moving it from the "optional" to the "compulsory" section. The only amazing thing about that is that they thought that one of the most important events in the last 100 years, an event which has already been repeated in the late 20th century in the former Yugoslavia (free clue: "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism), should be optional.
Consider that it could even moderate overzealous law enforcement.
It could, but by an amazing coincidence, whenever anyone reports cases of overzealous law enforcement in the UK, investigation shows that for some strange reason none of the CCTV cameras that cover the area were working.
It's weird, that. You'd think with more CCTV cameras than pretty much anywhere else in the world, we'd be able to make them reasonably reliable by now.
But lets be frank. Hes not trying to stop the sale of Halo 3. Hes generating 'awareness'.
Too right he is.
Did Father Ted ever make it to the USA? I can't help but think of "The Passion of St. Tibulus"
I don't think it's quite as simple as that. All the business partners in question (along, I would imagine, with the agencies doing the enforcing) are in different countries to the one that Allofmp3.com is based in.
It's broadly equivalent to me (in the UK) going after your business partners (in France) when your business is based in the States and doesn't have subsidiaries in either the UK or France. What are you going to do about it?