Wow, I just bought this new cellphone that's only the size of a button and clips to your lapel... and look they give you this free screen/keyboard thingy so you can operate it... and I pooh-pooh'ed this bluetooth thing...
This might be OT, but how many people out there have access to both a GSM and CDMA phone network? In Australia, we now have most metro areas with both networks, but for the last few years all new installations are CDMA only.
For several years I used a couple of different GSM mobiles - a cheap NEC Fido, then a top-of-the-line nokia 9110 - and on only one occasion did I ever get a call go straight to message bank when the phone should have rung.
After my 9110 connected with hard surfaces one too many times, I got a cheap CDMA phone as it offered coverage in a town where I spend a fair bit of time (one of those damn CDMA only areas).
Since then, it often goes to message bank when it should ring - most noticable when you are only a few hundred metres from the tower, or on one occassion sitting about 1.5km from a higher powered tower with a constant good signal for an hour - after which I got a phone call starting "oh, so you're answering your phone now - you weren't 5 minutes ago".
Everyone I speak to has noticed similar behaviour, and they have many different makes/models of Crappy Dodgy Mobile Access phones.
Other things - like getting the same SMS as I come into coverage for 3 days, SMS's being delivered days late, not being able to configure divert on no answer separatly to divert on out of range (that's a missing network feature btw), were also reported by the other CDMA users I spoke to.
Last week I lost the cheap CDMA, and took the opportunity to go back to GSM (we had to tell the telco this was REALLY what we wanted to do several times before they accepted we had it right)
Personally, I'm MUCH happier knowing which half of the time my mobile works now. Does this kind of thing apply to CDMA in the rest of the world?
There are plenty of APIs under Linux too... When you write a perfectly good driver for one version of the OS, which calls various API functions which return the right results and work fine, but then you use it on the next version and it returns a crashed machine because you now have to initialize a particular structure before you use it, it's kind of hard to track down that it's the USB code that is dead when the machine crashes registering the network interface. Not nearly so bad if you can read the API source code to see what is going on, and have a complete set of working device driver examples to cross-check against. (this happened mainly because I didn't know there was a do-nothing-but-be-there-in-case-we-need-to initializer call in 2.4 kernels that actually did something in 2.6)
Probably the best way would be to have the pen pick up the "address" of the file (eg \\server\docs\stuff.doc, or \\workstation1\pics\me.jpg along with a set of credentials for (temporary) access to the file.
Thus the file is made available to only those who have the credentials and address dropped on them from the pen, and the server is optional.
I think linux jobs are fewer because Linux admins, if doing things reasonably well, have less work to do for the same number of machines.
My experience is that MS based installations require regular and repeditive attention. Linux however will generally sit there un-attended, without any need for any kind of attention for years.
Actually, spyware on *NIX would have one major problem that no-longer exists on windows...
SPYWARE IS NOT THE NORM
*NIX users expect to be able to keep spyware off their machines, and for the software they use to be secure. On the other hand, people expect windows to have holes, and that they can't do anything about it.
For example if Mozilla were to have a security hole that let anyone run code on my computer, I would EXPECT to be able to get a fixed version within days of discovering it - probably as quick as someone could write an exploit - thus making it pointless to try and exploit it.
On the other hand, IE might have a fix, possibly, by the time everyone has known about it for months, and given up looking for the patch.
At that rate surely IBM (and/or others) have patents for just about everything MS are trying to patent... or for most components of the patents.....
Is "somebody else patented that before you did" a valid argument in patent law?
IBM won't enter into it unless MS are stupid enough to take them on directly, but the little people MS are using as a leg-up for their argument might just be able to say "your patent is just the combination of all these patents, all owned by other people" - which might remove any argument they can throw at you. (obligatory: IANAL)
All that remains is finding time to find all the necessary patents. Perhaps this is a good open project: looking up the patents that cover stuff MS has patents for/is patenting. Make the info available on a web site so anyone under threat has a ready-reference of defenses, and cases they hae been successfully used in. People will still get dragged into court, but it will only take them an hour to do the research, rather than possible years.
Who knows, maybe one day there will be a ruling of "invalid as listed on the Many Silly PATENTS web site - mspatents.net"
When the mechanical control thingy packed it in on our dishwasher (some 10 years back) I wired it up to my laptop with a vision of giving it some new "improved" wash cycles....
It was almost a goer when the I accidentally prodded the wrong thing with the screwdriver.... mothers worry over the silliest things - the fusebox protected my screwdriver from having it's tip blown clean off quite well - well I thought so:-}
Wow, what a coincidence....
My copy hasn't crashed once since my last uninstall...
Which was about the time partition magic fried my XP partition, and I realized I didn't need to bring it back because I had only run linux for months anyway.
Hmm, the power button on my PC does different things depending on whether I press it, or hold it down for 4 seconds.... same applies to laptops. That behaviour is supported by the BIOS.
I know, it's not a device of limited resources, but then again the conputer case does only have two buttons on it.
That was possible at least in 1999... not sure how long before that though. I think it came in with ATX power supplies.
The menus on my KDE desktop come up before I release the button (both left and right).... and in the applications... Not sure of current MacOS, but older versions REQUIRED you to hold the button down to keep the menu there (you then dragged to the option you wanted, and released to activate it) - You can also drive the menus in KDE this way if you choose (you don't even have to set an option, just do it that way).
Most touch pads (the mouse pads on laptops) respond to tapping (click), also tap-drag (normal drag) and tap-tap (double-click) - I would think the tap-drag case would give prior art on the "duration of holding a button"
And exactly what will guarantee that the people who progam the machines used the "open" code, not a copy they hacked for a fee?
You would have to have several people bring in a copy they checked, or trust, then run a diff on all the copies (so that even if you paid off almost all the people, you would still get a difference somewhere). Then compile and upload it to the machines under group supervision.
The biggest problem here is not reducing the number of people that have to be compromised to an insignificant number (such as one or two).
Why use a low-data-speed, expensive to install, expensive to use, limited technology?
While each user's equipment is more expensive with WiFi, the user gets far more flexibility in their equipment, and the cost is more than offset by the cheaper access point (it can cost hundreds of thousands to set up a phone tower).
Using WiFi results in a high speed data connection, with internet access as part of the bundle, and the option to make normal phone calls if you want (using VoIP).
For example the letter "E" is the most commonly used letter in english...
It's just a basic code (ie sounds swapped for letters rather than letters swapped for letters). Some basic cryptographic analysis of the activity would have it cracked in no time.
Adjustments would need to be made for the type of work they were doing, but that's easy enough.
If just one person called the police, it would be a waste of time.... If everyone called the police every time a legitimate looking like took them to a porn site, or an email arrived containing porn (yes, I have had spam arrive containing child porn) that would be wasting police time, however it would be so common that police could no-longer consider having porn on your computer as unusual - because they would be dealing with thousands of people who had complained about it being forced on them every day.
If the average computer user gets half as much spam as I do (over 95% of my mail gets tossed by spam filters) and just 1% of that spam contains porn, there can't be many computers out there that have not had some form of porn stored on their hard disk at some time, and most of those would have it in un-allocated space because it was deleted.
damn, good thing Mozilla doesn't eat all the CPU time when that happens...
One handy tip - if you want to stop a popup bomb like this, edit/etc/hosts and add "127.0.0.1 hostname" (where hostname is the problem site) to recover your browser without having to kill it (works on linux, didn't try windows)
I actually like this approach.... If your company turns up in SPAM, you get the following benefits:
1) a free tax audit (nothing like keeping it interesting) 2) somebody going through your books to find out who you paid to deliver your spam 3) somebody going through all your computers to see if you sent it yourself.
The company then needs to be fined at around $1 per item. If there is no proof of the number of items, government agencies are quite good at guessing what the number might have been (usually twice what it could possibly have been, and doubled again for good measure)
The spam provider also gets all the above. This basically means it costs $2 per item, plus a huge amount if inconvenience, to send spam.
Ok, so you can't catch one or the other if they are outside your juristiction, but it would thin out the ones that are.
And the ones that aren't? Unfortunately the internet is designed to prevent anyone stopping anything. But eventually all the spammers will congregate in places with available bandwidth - those places will get pissed off with them, and make laws... moving the spammers to the next place with lots of bandwidth. This will be an exponential thing - the less places they can hide, the faster they will piss off the people they are hiding behind. The best way to get this effect rolling is to start where the bandwidth is best... it has to start somewhere!
As a side note: I did once work out that if it takes 1 second to delete each spam, and each spam is 1kb in size, 1 million spams consumes about (from memory) $7500 worth of user's time and network bandwidth to be processeed by the people receiving it.
I wonder what the total cost per day of spam is worldwide?
Not wanting to destroy any hardware, I just remapped all the mouse buttons to button 1, and uninstalled everything that didn't have pretty pictures. Then I uninstalled everything that had useful features....
we still seem to celebrate the continued operation of human beings after 21 years - and they are proven to be quite reliable at that point (well at least most of them).
Windows = generic term Microsoft Windows = trademark
Theoretically, as Microsoft could not trademark the word "Windows", requiring them to use the company name to identify "their implementation of a concept", this should mean is that: IBM could release/trademark "IBM Windows", Sun could release/trademark "Sun Windows" Lindows can release "Lindows" but probably can't trademark it due to its very minor distinction from a generic term - this doesn't mean they can't use it, they just can't register it as a trademark.
Interestingly lindows.com refers to the operating system as "LindowsOS" - not "Lindows"
The obvious analogy is DOS... as in DR-DOS vs MS-DOS vs IBM-DOS vs.... (I think the Amiga ran something-DOS too)
All are named by their generic terms, prefixed by their respective manufacturer (Digital Research, Microsoft, International Business Machines)
Given that Microsoft did not object to the use of the name "Disk Operating System" in these cases, what makes them think they should start with the name "Windows"?
Slashdot Mirror
is this where I recharge my electric car?
I wonder if there's a practical application for all that potential.....
just needs a little tweak in the obstacle avoidance circuit :-)
because the other one left?
wow, at $400 million for each launch, that would make $10 million for developing the vehicle from scratch the ultimate victory for outsourcing....
Wow, I just bought this new cellphone that's only the size of a button and clips to your lapel... and look they give you this free screen/keyboard thingy so you can operate it... and I pooh-pooh'ed this bluetooth thing...
This might be OT, but how many people out there have access to both a GSM and CDMA phone network?
In Australia, we now have most metro areas with both networks, but for the last few years all new installations are CDMA only.
For several years I used a couple of different GSM mobiles - a cheap NEC Fido, then a top-of-the-line nokia 9110 - and on only one occasion did I ever get a call go straight to message bank when the phone should have rung.
After my 9110 connected with hard surfaces one too many times, I got a cheap CDMA phone as it offered coverage in a town where I spend a fair bit of time (one of those damn CDMA only areas).
Since then, it often goes to message bank when it should ring - most noticable when you are only a few hundred metres from the tower, or on one occassion sitting about 1.5km from a higher powered tower with a constant good signal for an hour - after which I got a phone call starting "oh, so you're answering your phone now - you weren't 5 minutes ago".
Everyone I speak to has noticed similar behaviour, and they have many different makes/models of Crappy Dodgy Mobile Access phones.
Other things - like getting the same SMS as I come into coverage for 3 days, SMS's being delivered days late, not being able to configure divert on no answer separatly to divert on out of range (that's a missing network feature btw), were also reported by the other CDMA users I spoke to.
Last week I lost the cheap CDMA, and took the opportunity to go back to GSM (we had to tell the telco this was REALLY what we wanted to do several times before they accepted we had it right)
Personally, I'm MUCH happier knowing which half of the time my mobile works now.
Does this kind of thing apply to CDMA in the rest of the world?
There are plenty of APIs under Linux too...
When you write a perfectly good driver for one version of the OS, which calls various API functions which return the right results and work fine, but then you use it on the next version and it returns a crashed machine because you now have to initialize a particular structure before you use it, it's kind of hard to track down that it's the USB code that is dead when the machine crashes registering the network interface. Not nearly so bad if you can read the API source code to see what is going on, and have a complete set of working device driver examples to cross-check against.
(this happened mainly because I didn't know there was a do-nothing-but-be-there-in-case-we-need-to initializer call in 2.4 kernels that actually did something in 2.6)
Probably the best way would be to have the pen pick up the "address" of the file (eg \\server\docs\stuff.doc, or \\workstation1\pics\me.jpg
along with a set of credentials for (temporary) access to the file.
Thus the file is made available to only those who have the credentials and address dropped on them from the pen, and the server is optional.
I think linux jobs are fewer because Linux admins, if doing things reasonably well, have less work to do for the same number of machines.
My experience is that MS based installations require regular and repeditive attention. Linux however will generally sit there un-attended, without any need for any kind of attention for years.
Actually, spyware on *NIX would have one major problem that no-longer exists on windows...
SPYWARE IS NOT THE NORM
*NIX users expect to be able to keep spyware off their machines, and for the software they use to be secure. On the other hand, people expect windows to have holes, and that they can't do anything about it.
For example if Mozilla were to have a security hole that let anyone run code on my computer, I would EXPECT to be able to get a fixed version within days of discovering it - probably as quick as someone could write an exploit - thus making it pointless to try and exploit it.
On the other hand, IE might have a fix, possibly, by the time everyone has known about it for months, and given up looking for the patch.
Lifetime of an exploit DOES have an impact.
//TODO: GL: bread, milk, eggs //FIXME: put a sticky note on my monitor so my grocery list isn't scattered through whatever I'm coding.
A patent a day?
At that rate surely IBM (and/or others) have patents for just about everything MS are trying to patent... or for most components of the patents.....
Is "somebody else patented that before you did" a valid argument in patent law?
IBM won't enter into it unless MS are stupid enough to take them on directly, but the little people MS are using as a leg-up for their argument might just be able to say "your patent is just the combination of all these patents, all owned by other people" - which might remove any argument they can throw at you. (obligatory: IANAL)
All that remains is finding time to find all the necessary patents. Perhaps this is a good open project: looking up the patents that cover stuff MS has patents for/is patenting. Make the info available on a web site so anyone under threat has a ready-reference of defenses, and cases they hae been successfully used in. People will still get dragged into court, but it will only take them an hour to do the research, rather than possible years.
Who knows, maybe one day there will be a ruling of "invalid as listed on the Many Silly PATENTS web site - mspatents.net"
When the mechanical control thingy packed it in on our dishwasher (some 10 years back) I wired it up to my laptop with a vision of giving it some new "improved" wash cycles....
:-}
It was almost a goer when the I accidentally prodded the wrong thing with the screwdriver.... mothers worry over the silliest things - the fusebox protected my screwdriver from having it's tip blown clean off quite well - well I thought so
My copy hasn't crashed once since my last uninstall...
Which was about the time partition magic fried my XP partition, and I realized I didn't need to bring it back because I had only run linux for months anyway.
Sharp PC4500 Laptops had an 80186 - mine also had a whopping 1.6 MEGS of ram, and the standard 20 meg hard drive :)
Hmm, the power button on my PC does different things depending on whether I press it, or hold it down for 4 seconds.... same applies to laptops. That behaviour is supported by the BIOS.
I know, it's not a device of limited resources, but then again the conputer case does only have two buttons on it.
That was possible at least in 1999... not sure how long before that though. I think it came in with ATX power supplies.
The menus on my KDE desktop come up before I release the button (both left and right).... and in the applications...
Not sure of current MacOS, but older versions REQUIRED you to hold the button down to keep the menu there (you then dragged to the option you wanted, and released to activate it) - You can also drive the menus in KDE this way if you choose (you don't even have to set an option, just do it that way).
Most touch pads (the mouse pads on laptops) respond to tapping (click), also tap-drag (normal drag) and tap-tap (double-click) - I would think the tap-drag case would give prior art on the "duration of holding a button"
And exactly what will guarantee that the people who progam the machines used the "open" code, not a copy they hacked for a fee?
You would have to have several people bring in a copy they checked, or trust, then run a diff on all the copies (so that even if you paid off almost all the people, you would still get a difference somewhere). Then compile and upload it to the machines under group supervision.
The biggest problem here is not reducing the number of people that have to be compromised to an insignificant number (such as one or two).
Why use a low-data-speed, expensive to install, expensive to use, limited technology?
While each user's equipment is more expensive with WiFi, the user gets far more flexibility in their equipment, and the cost is more than offset by the cheaper access point (it can cost hundreds of thousands to set up a phone tower).
Using WiFi results in a high speed data connection, with internet access as part of the bundle, and the option to make normal phone calls if you want (using VoIP).
Why? Just analyse the activity.
For example the letter "E" is the most commonly used letter in english...
It's just a basic code (ie sounds swapped for letters rather than letters swapped for letters).
Some basic cryptographic analysis of the activity would have it cracked in no time.
Adjustments would need to be made for the type of work they were doing, but that's easy enough.
If just one person called the police, it would be a waste of time.... If everyone called the police every time a legitimate looking like took them to a porn site, or an email arrived containing porn (yes, I have had spam arrive containing child porn) that would be wasting police time, however it would be so common that police could no-longer consider having porn on your computer as unusual - because they would be dealing with thousands of people who had complained about it being forced on them every day.
If the average computer user gets half as much spam as I do (over 95% of my mail gets tossed by spam filters) and just 1% of that spam contains porn, there can't be many computers out there that have not had some form of porn stored on their hard disk at some time, and most of those would have it in un-allocated space because it was deleted.
damn, good thing Mozilla doesn't eat all the CPU time when that happens...
/etc/hosts and add "127.0.0.1 hostname" (where hostname is the problem site) to recover your browser without having to kill it (works on linux, didn't try windows)
One handy tip - if you want to stop a popup bomb like this, edit
I actually like this approach....
If your company turns up in SPAM, you get the following benefits:
1) a free tax audit (nothing like keeping it interesting)
2) somebody going through your books to find out who you paid to deliver your spam
3) somebody going through all your computers to see if you sent it yourself.
The company then needs to be fined at around $1 per item. If there is no proof of the number of items, government agencies are quite good at guessing what the number might have been (usually twice what it could possibly have been, and doubled again for good measure)
The spam provider also gets all the above.
This basically means it costs $2 per item, plus a huge amount if inconvenience, to send spam.
Ok, so you can't catch one or the other if they are outside your juristiction, but it would thin out the ones that are.
And the ones that aren't? Unfortunately the internet is designed to prevent anyone stopping anything. But eventually all the spammers will congregate in places with available bandwidth - those places will get pissed off with them, and make laws... moving the spammers to the next place with lots of bandwidth. This will be an exponential thing - the less places they can hide, the faster they will piss off the people they are hiding behind.
The best way to get this effect rolling is to start where the bandwidth is best... it has to start somewhere!
As a side note:
I did once work out that if it takes 1 second to delete each spam, and each spam is 1kb in size, 1 million spams consumes about (from memory) $7500 worth of user's time and network bandwidth to be processeed by the people receiving it.
I wonder what the total cost per day of spam is worldwide?
Not wanting to destroy any hardware, I just remapped all the mouse buttons to button 1, and uninstalled everything that didn't have pretty pictures.
Then I uninstalled everything that had useful features....
Experiance complete!
we still seem to celebrate the continued operation of human beings after 21 years - and they are proven to be quite reliable at that point (well at least most of them).
Windows = generic term
.... (I think the Amiga ran something-DOS too)
Microsoft Windows = trademark
Theoretically, as Microsoft could not trademark the word "Windows", requiring them to use the company name to identify "their implementation of a concept", this should mean is that:
IBM could release/trademark "IBM Windows",
Sun could release/trademark "Sun Windows"
Lindows can release "Lindows" but probably can't trademark it due to its very minor distinction from a generic term - this doesn't mean they can't use it, they just can't register it as a trademark.
Interestingly lindows.com refers to the operating system as "LindowsOS" - not "Lindows"
The obvious analogy is DOS... as in
DR-DOS vs MS-DOS vs IBM-DOS vs
All are named by their generic terms, prefixed by their respective manufacturer (Digital Research, Microsoft, International Business Machines)
Given that Microsoft did not object to the use of the name "Disk Operating System" in these cases, what makes them think they should start with the name "Windows"?