OK, let's differentiate between "illegal" and voiding a warranty. Jailbreaking an iPhone isn't illegal. You can jailbreak it, and Apple isn't going to have the federalies come knocking at your door with a warrant. Yes, it does void your warranty. Which makes perfect sense. This is hardly restricted to Apple, and it's hardly restricted to phones. Any number of products stipulate that "unauthorized modifications" will void the warranty. Burning out your CPU because you massively overclocked the thing voids your warranty. You wouldn't expect Intel to honor a warranty in such a situation, would you? No, because it's totally unreasonable when you're running the device outside it's stated operating parameters. You wouldn't expect GM to honor the warranty on a car if you strapped a rocket to the top and run into a wall. Same goes for the iPhone. You can't expect Apple to honor a warranty on a device that the user has bricked by modifying the firmware or OS with software they haven't reviewed (try flashing your PSP with third-party firmware and sending it in for repairs afterward).
I will say that it's foolish of Apple to place such restrictions on what apps you can run, but that's a bad business decision, not legalized tyranny. A better option might be to only offer approved apps in the store, but allow you to install apps from alternate sources at your own risk, but they didn't make that decision, and it's their decision to make. And when a company makes a stupid product design decision, you have every right to voice your opinion regarding such a decision, and every right to refrain from purchasing it, if you feel that restriction outweighs the benefits of owning the product. So, let's call this what it is: bad business, but not a tyrannical grab for legal power.
Seriously, I bought this thing when it first came out, and I lost 20 pounds in a couple months. I know it seems silly to think that such a non-game will hold your attention and keep you working out, but if you have a desire to work out and lose weight, it will help. If you don't really have an interest in working out, it probably won't hold your attention long. But if you do, it will teach you some basic workouts, and the videogame-esque style may give you that extra ambition to get to it.
Apple could probably block this fairly easily, actually, without breaking support for any of their own products.
1.)Release new version of iTunes that checks specifically for the Pre.
2.)Release new firmware for existing iPods to ensure they work with the new version of iTunes.
3.)Require a firmware update in order to work with the current version of iTunes.
4.)Require a current version of iTunes in order to access the iTunes store.
And just like that, we have a new version of iTunes that's incompatible with the Pre, which iPod owners need to use in order to access the store. Yes, Palm can release an update to re-enable compatibility with iTunes (depending on how Apple chose to handle the software/firmware changes, this could be trivial or difficult), but that seriously hurts one of their big selling points for the Pre, namely that it's iTunes compatible. No one wants a devices whose functionality breaks every few weeks (queue the Microsoft jokes).
I personally live about a 20 minute walk from work. It would be convenient (not to mention faster) for me to drive to work. However, the only available parking in the area is $10 a day, which is far more than I'm willing to pay. A bus trip there costs $2 normally. However, I have a current student ID, so I get to ride for free (not really, there's a per-semester fee automatically included in my tuition if I take the bus or not). So for me, public transit is far more cost-effective. However, parking meters are free on Sundays here in Denver, so I do drive to work on Sundays. Granted, I'm within walking distance, but it's convenient to have the car there, in case I need to get home quickly. Plus, with my Civic averaging around 38 mpg, it costs almost nothing.
I loaded 7 x64 yesterday, and I'm actually quite impressed. It boots faster, has a significantly smaller memory footprint (my Vista install, after booting, clocked in at ~1600MB RAM, 7 is ~1200), and definitely runs games faster. I'm getting in the area of 10 fps faster in Mirror's edge (and that's after enabling ambient occlusion, which I hadn't done under Vista, which is supposed to incur a performance hit). UT3 runs faster, firefox loads faster. And it's not just the speed. The UI is dramatically more polished than Vista. Vista always felt a bit slapped together, and rough around the edges. 7 is cleaner, has fewer annoying quirks.
I have had a biology teacher who was a proud member of the Promise Keepers (our section on evolution was ten minutes, mostly consisting of "Now, you don't have to believe any of this."), a college algebra teacher who had trouble adding two single-digit numbers without a calculator and who let us use cheat sheets for every exam, including the final (could only be 1"x1", but in 6pt font, that's every formula for the test), a statistics and probability teacher who spent most of the class discussing the latest goings on with the various school athletic organizations (she was the cross-country coach), an AP English teacher who had a penchant for "losing" papers she didn't want to grade (and when she did grade papers, the first few submissions would have corrections and comments, the rest had nothing but a grade, rumor has it she never read them, just assigned a grade based on what she thought that student would do), a physics teacher so mind-bogglingly incompetent that my sophomore year a student organization devoted to her termination had more members than any other club (she was really, really bad, a powerpoint teacher), a German teacher who spent more time showing us slides of her various trips to Germany than teaching (we did a lot of projects in English in that class), a Spanish teach who spent an entire semester not teaching Spanish because it was more important that we learn about the cultures of South American nations (Spanish-speaking or otherwise), a seventh-grade math teacher who didn't mark off points for wrong answers because, and I quote, "Check marks lower self-esteem" (no, I am not making that up). The list goes on and on. We watched the Leo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet, rather than reading it, I had an English teacher in middle school who thought Billy Maddison was an educational film, you name it. I attended a private Catholic school until fifth grade, and while I wouldn't have wanted to study Biology there, I was about two years' worth of curriculum ahead of my classmates when I transferred into public school.
Now, I did have a handful of good teachers. Namely, two good middle school science teachers, my sociology teacher, 20th Century History teacher, CAD teacher, art teacher (I made a bong mug), and good elementary teachers (until public school. Although they were about as friendly as Catholic school nuns are widely supposed to be). That's it. And, those teachers were the ones always getting into it with the administration. The most wildly incompetent teachers were the ones in the administration's best graces. My sociology teacher couldn't get textbooks for his class, for example.
A large part of the problem is the incompetent teachers. They have no interest in emphasizing retention. Starting College Algebra, but don't remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions? No problem, the first month of the class will be spent reviewing it! It is very much the case that the further you progress through the curriculum, the less you are expected to remember. Instead of booting the kids who can't handle fractions out of the College Algebra course and sending them back to a more appropriate course, the curriculum is dumbed-down to fit them (I once had to make up a test in College Algebra, along with a classmate a year ahead of me who was about to graduate valedictorian. We were sitting out in the hall, and I was breezing through the test, while my classmate looked quite perplexed, stuck on the first problem. Finally, she turned to me and asked "What does perimeter mean?" God I hate this country...). As a result, your average and above-average students not only don't learn the material they should, but they often lose confidence and interest in school in particular, and learning in general (luckily I still enjoy learning, I just chose to learn out of the state-sponsored daycare/prison).
Bricking a Wii with homebrew is easy. Very easy. Bricking a Wii with the Homebrew Channel, alone and unaided is, so far as I have seen, impossible. HBC doesn't brick Wiis, but it allows you to run code that potentially could. There's homebrew code designed to change your Wii's region, there's code designed to allow you to download and install specific updates and packages from Nintendo's servers, and the checking is on the user. You decide to patch your NTSC Wii with PAL updates, you could brick it. Screw up a region swap (the Wiis of each region differ solely on software, the hardware is identical, with the notable exception of Korean Wiis), you could brick it. Plenty of ways to do it. There's been a bit of a "scene war" between Tweezers (the guys who brought you HBC and the Twilight Princess hack) and Waninkoko (although honestly, most of the friction seems to come from Marcan and Waninkoko). Basically, Waninkoko releases an app for the Wii that allows you to do some cool things, but in doing so, makes a brick a much more likely possibility. Tweezers points this out, and gets really mad that he's using their work as a basis for his, and it's a constant childish back-and-forth between them. But the general consensus is, Waninkoko's apps run a higher risk of bricks. It boils down to, do you really know what you're doing?
I've got a few things to cover here. First of all, we're not talking about a "firmware" mod here. HBC is installed as a Wii channel. For those who are unfamiliar with the Wii's architecture, a brief overview. The Wii uses a three-stage loading system. First, it boots from Boot1, which is hard coded in ROM, can never be modified (I think it's contained in the Starlett core, but with wiibrew.org apparently having been/.'d, I can't double-check now). Boot1 then verifies the signature on Boot2, which is contained in NAND, and as such can be updated and modified. Boot2 then proceeds to verify the signature of the installed System Menu, and verifies and loads whichever IOS version the installed System Menu requires. That's the Wii's boot process, and HBC doesn't interfere with it in any way. HBC relies on a bug in various IOS versions to allow HBC to be fakesigned as a legitimate channel to install itself (original IOS and Boot1/2 versions checked signatures using a strcmp() function which terminated successfully after reading a null byte, so a faked sig just needs to start with a null byte). HBC itself is essentially brick-proof. These guys went out of their way to make sure HBC doesn't brick any Wiis. Now, you can use HBC to load less stable code which could potentially brick your Wii. It's stored in NAND just like any other installable channel, and simply does not take part in the boot process (of course, Team Tweezers' Boot2 replacement, BootMii, will change all that, but that's another mod for another time)
So, Nintendo saying that installing HBC makes for a costlier repair would be a bit like Dell saying it needed to charge more for repairs because a bittorrent client was installed. It doesn't make any sense, since they generally have to blank the NAND before sending it back anyway. Plus, as one of the commenters on the hackmii page pointed out, this creates a stupid situation where a physically damaged out of warranty Wii is actually less expensive to repair than a softmoded Wii. So, if you have a modded Wii go bad, your best option is to destroy the NAND chip to the point of unreadability and send it back, and pay for a normal OoW repair instead of a more expensive repair.
It's possible that the BIOS payload wouldn't need to have the entire program. All you would need is for a simple downloader to survive a hard drive wipe, which could run with root privileges to download and run a malware installer once the OS was up and running. That way, the malware author can always be ensured a current installation, and can use smaller code to download different packages for different operating systems. Really quite elegant, and would require a hardware programmer to wipe clean with current motherboard implementations.
Quick bit of research and I can probably tell you exactly why the dll wouldn't work. It was probably amtlib.dll, which is involved in activation, and either he's running 64 bit Photoshop, and he used the 32 bit hacked dll, or vice versa.
That wasn't worth posting, and definitely isn't front page material. Screens, links, more than two paragraphs, any evidence or information at all? Clearly just an "Oh, shiny!" headline to catch the eye, but no substance.
The problem with your reasoning is that you assume "public good" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) is the single motivating factor behind political action. To put it simply, while new legislation, training, and infrastructure seem to a reasonable person to be expensive downsides, to a politician, it's gravy. They get more authority and political power, more funding now, and more funding in the long term. Whereas with private enterprise, a savvy employee will attempt to minimize costs, and produce the most efficient solution to a given problem, it's in the interest of politicians to get as much money as they can, and the power that comes with it. Essentially, government eliminates most of the incentives towards efficiency (the so-called "tragedy of the commons").
Okay, so we've got most of the "you can run Vista with 4GB?!" jokes out of the way (hopefully). Here's my take on the situation.
I have Vista x64 running in a machine with 8GB physical memory, and no page file. I can do this because I'm never running enough memory-hungry processes that I will exceed 8GB allocated memory. So, while the OS may be good at deciding what gets swapped to the hard disk, in my case, there's simply no need, as everything I'm running can be contained entirely within physical memory (and for the curious, I've been running like this for a year and a half, haven't run out of memory yet).
However, if you don't have enough physical memory to store all the processes you might be running at once, then at some point the OS will need to swap to the hard drive, or it will simply run out of memory. I'm honestly not sure exactly how Vista handles things when it runs out of memory (never been a problem, never looked into it), but it wouldn't be good (probably BSoD, crash crash crash). I can tell you from personal experience that I regularly exceed 4GB memory usage (transcoding a DVD while playing a BluRay movie while...). With your configuration, that's when you'd start to crash.
Long story short, with just 4GB, I would leave the swap file as is. Really, you should only disable the swap file if you know based on careful observation that your memory usage never exceeds the size of your installed physical memory. If you're comfortable with the risks involved, and you know your system and usage habits well, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it be.
Products that use RAM as the storage media have been around for years. They're exactly what you're describing: a few standard DDR DIMMS and a battery on a PCI card, usually. However, no one in an enterprise environment would actually trust data to such a device, and they never really took off. Home users don't generally have the power and data backup capacity to safely use such a device (and not even the most hardened masochist wants to reinstall or restore everything whenever a breaker goes), and enterprise users can't tolerate the risk level. Sure, you can have backup power, but the risk of losing data and downtime restoring it just isn't tolerable in most enterprise environments.
I would have liked to have seen them test this drive in a much more powerful system. I mean, a P4 with 1GB RAM, and a fairly dated chipset (955x) as the SATA controller? No one is going to put a drive like this in a system that old. I'd guess that we might see different results on a more powerful system. At some point in those tests, other components of this fairly slow (by today's standards) machine. Throw some serious power behind it, and you can be sure that you're not bottlenecked, and the full power of the drive shows. Can't say for sure if this is actually the case, as I don't have a drive to test, but it's a definite possibility. Hopefully someone else does a similar review with a more powerful testbed.
Consider the Great Northern Railroad. Built under the administration of James J. Hill, the railroad was noted for being built by purchasing property rights, where other railroads would simply run native Americans and farmers off their land. And, it did it without federal subsidies (admittedly, some of the lines it purchased were originally built on subsidies, but it is telling that GNR could keep those lines profitable, when the federal grant recipients failed to do so). Without government-subsidized transcontinental boondoggles being unquestionably and unendingly funded by tax dollars, in an environment where other railroads were forced to compete based on efficiency and consumer satisfaction, the GNR would likely have been more successful, for reasons stated in my previous post (government sponsorship promotes inefficiency and misallocation of resources, and prolongs the existence of otherwise unprofitable companies). It did work once for railroads, and could work fine for paved roads.
As I see it, the second largest barrier to private roads is simply the misconception that only governments can provide roads. The evidence says that private organizations could build and maintain private roads, but the government barrier to market entry, combined with the public perception of private roads effectively prevents it from happening on any large scale.
Right, because in all of known history, no private entity has ever thought to themselves "You know, I bet I could transport things more efficiently on an even, paved surface, which could pay for itself after several years. Why, I bet I could even get people to pay for the right to use that same road and turn a profit because of it." Nope, not once. There are no private roads to be found anywhere at all in the US precisely because no one ever thought of it except government authorities.
There are private roads in this country. Precisely because someone did think of exactly the above scenario. The fact that the government spends huge volumes of other people's cash (without earning it through productive activities, of course) on highways provides a huge barrier to market entry. Sure, it makes sense to build my own private roads around my own facilities, but why build my own highway from point A to point B, since I'll still have to pay for upkeep of the government's highways (taxes), plus my own road? Plus, with the government running the show, you have the natural inefficiency of a large bureaucracy, with the typical budget overruns and unnecessary expenditures, not to mention lackluster maintenance. A private organization would have standards to maintain, and customers to keep happy, and they'd be doing it with their own money, providing incentive for efficiency and adherence to a budget. Plus, those who either don't drive at all, or who don't drive on that particular road, wouldn't be unjustly forced to pay for other people's transportation. You pay for what you use, not for what others use. If a branch of a government road is left largely unused, you still pay for it with your taxes, and the few people using that road reap the benefit at the expense of everyone else. If a private company has an under-utilized segment of road, it will increase the fees for the few using it, and if they're not willing to pay, they'll shut it down, allowing their customers to decide what's more valuable, a faster drive at greater expense, or a longer route at lower cost. Government intervention promotes misallocation of scarce resources, because they don't have to earn the money they spend, and they can always tax/inflate more.
The same can be said for virtually any of the government's activities. Private schools are less numerous and more expensive precisely because the government forces everyone to pay for their generally crappy schools. You don't have an option to opt-out and not pay those taxes if you don't use the "service". Government is a large barrier to competition generally.
I notice the article doesn't mention if any of the data on these computers was encrypted. It's one thing to hack into a Windows desktop. It's quite another to have to break a 1024-bit AES cipher to actually make use of the data you find. This should be (yet another) wakeup call that any data of any importance should be encrypted with a strong cipher. It's not like it's difficult to do, and it's not like the software is expensive (TrueCrypt, anyone?). I encrypt all my personal data, and if it was compromised, worst case scenario my identity might be stolen. These idiots (sorry, that's Representatives...) are storing personal information about political dissidents and refugees. If THAT data is compromised, worst case scenario people get killed, and entire political movements are quashed by force.
"We want to help you catalog your entire life on your hard drive. Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, we're going to use the contents of your hard drive to serve you contextual adds." <Jedi Mind Trick>This isn't the conflict of interests you're looking for.</Jedi Mind Trick>
I handle IT for a civil engineering firm, and we've been loading our new machines with Vista. For the curious, I've built all the machines myself in house, and we've had virtually no problems so far (aside from initially experimenting with 64 bit, our Autodesk programs wouldn't run properly in 64 bit). However, on the most recent machine, we decided to try SP1 to see how it worked with our software. I loaded the machine on the 10th, and KB937287 came out on the 12th. When we loaded the machine on the 10th, it worked perfectly, just like all the others we've loaded with Vista, with slight performance improvements in some areas (mostly file operations like copying and saving). However, after KB937287 installed, Autodesk Civil 3D 2008 would crash with unhandled exception fatal errors every time it started. I uninstalled all the new updates (wasn't sure which one it was at the time), uninstalled SP1, and all was well. Then, the update server reinstalled KB937287 (other non-SP1 Vista machines had installed it just fine, so I assumed it would work). The fatal errors started right back up. Apparently, the SP1 uninstall doesn't quite work as advertised, so now I have to come in over the weekend to reload the machine.
The funny thing is, I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate at home, and I already installed SP1 on it before installing KB937287, and it is working fine. Of course, I haven't tried C3D on it, but no problems for me so far.
Here's a good one: the product description page for the drive lists its approximate capacity for storing different media types. They specifically state that it can hold approximately:
500,000 songs (MP3)
800 hours of DVD quality video
Then, in their list of restricted files, it states that you cannot share MP3 or VOB files. Seems to me that this borders on fraudulent advertising: "You can use this device to store and share as much data as 500,000 MP3 songs, but you can't actually share MP3 songs." Granted, they have a bullet-point which indicates that common media formats cannot be used, but then why are they using those same formats to illustrate the capacity of the drive?
This is the logical position. However, if we were to actually adopt the logical position, there is no need for most of the laws on the books. Why have laws against hacking if it is already illegal to trespass on private property? A computer system is private property, so breaking into it is logically covered under existing trespassing laws. Why have laws against spamming when the problem could easily be handled under existing harassment law? An ideal legal system is one that extrapolates new precedents from existing laws, rather than a system that grows increasingly complex and unwieldy in the face of new technology.
Experience has shown me quite well that preemptively upgrading to IE7 may not be such a good idea. I have yet to determine exactly why, but upgrading to IE7 has caused numerous problems with several of my clients related to printing emails from Outlook (and, no, they are not interested in going to Thunderbird). For example, when printing HTML emails from specific domains, they are always shrunk to fit on a single page, with no option to change this, which means the resulting printout can only be read with a magnifying glass. Or another, certain emails (not specific to a certain domain or sender) will not print with headers, no matter what. There is a workaround to these problems, but it involves forwarding the email back to yourself then printing it, which, while easy, is ridiculous to have to perform every time. Reverting back to IE6 solves all these problems, and nothing else I've been able to find will. So while MS will certainly require IE7 to access certain features in the future, for now it just creates more problems than it solves. Every user I've spoken to who has upgraded to IE7 has hated it and had nothing but problems. Maybe these bugs are just a way to convince people to "upgrade" Outlook to 2007.
Skepticism is not the "lazy person's default position." Skepticism is the result of actually looking at the claims of global warming proponents and looking at simple, readily-available data and determining that the two are incompatible. If human CO2 emissions are the cause of climate change, then explain why global temperatures dropped from the mid 40s to the mid 70s. Or even better, explain why, according to statistics compiled by the same research group that compiled the statistics for the graph linked to above, there was no measurable increase in global temperatures from 1998 to 2005. There was no concurrent decrease in human CO2 emissions during either of those two time periods. In fact, CO2 emissions rose steadily during both. And yet global temperatures did not follow suit. This is not conjecture, this is fact, and this information is available to anyone who takes the time to look. But it is the lazy people who took the time to look. Sure.
As to the consensus amongst scientists, this is simply not true. Thereareplenty of respected researchers who disagree with the panicked conclusion that human CO2 emissions are about to destroy us all.
One final subject on which I'd like to touch, and that is how the proponents and skeptics of global warming relate to one another. Search for information on the views and opinions of the global warming skeptics, and you'll find that they (for the most part, there are always exceptions) deal in data. When they attempt to refute claims by the proponents, they use research, they use statistics, they use facts. The proponents, on the other hand, seemingly have no problem resorting to personal attacks and skirting the issues entirely. For example, Michael Mann (creator of the infamous hockey stick graph) versus McIntyre and McKitrick. For those unfamiliar (shame on you!) with the hockey stick graph and the controversy surrounding it, a brief primer. The hockey stick graph is the result of research by one Michael Mann, purporting to show historical global temperatures over the past 1000 years. The graph shows a stable, steady temperature until the beginning of the 20th century, when temperatures spike. This was the impetus behind the Kyoto Protocol. McIntyre and McKitrick performed research debunking this graph and the statistical methods used in its creation. They point out any number of flaws, such as the absence of the so-called "little ice age", and its general incompatibility with known historical temperatures. To debunk this bad science, they used facts, they used reality, and they did not resort to attacking Mann's character and credibility. Do a quick google search about their research, and you'll see that they stick to the science. Now, do a search about those who disagree with them. It's full of personal attacks, irrelevant statements, and some claims that border on libel. It should say something that the skeptics are sticking to the science, and their opponents are, in return, attacking them like this was a political campaign (which, in many ways, it has become). Hell, just read how Gore, the poster boy for the global warming crowd, characterizes the skeptics. Came right out and said that they are in the same category as people who think the moon landing was staged. Scientists don't need to attack the character of other scientists. They stick to research, and the facts.
Is global climate changing? Yes, of course it is. The history of this planet's climate is a history of dramatic changes, from i
Laws for sex offenders are out of control. Just recently, a 12 year old and a 13 year old were both convicted as sex offenders for having consensual sex with one another (admittedly too young, but...). And of course the registry will, for the rest of their lives, merely say that they raped a child, not noting the details. And now this...
Yes, because who wants to see widespread use of a technology that helps you shoot more accurately? Everyone's much better off if everyone shoots a bit more wildly than they have to, right?
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OK, let's differentiate between "illegal" and voiding a warranty. Jailbreaking an iPhone isn't illegal. You can jailbreak it, and Apple isn't going to have the federalies come knocking at your door with a warrant. Yes, it does void your warranty. Which makes perfect sense. This is hardly restricted to Apple, and it's hardly restricted to phones. Any number of products stipulate that "unauthorized modifications" will void the warranty. Burning out your CPU because you massively overclocked the thing voids your warranty. You wouldn't expect Intel to honor a warranty in such a situation, would you? No, because it's totally unreasonable when you're running the device outside it's stated operating parameters. You wouldn't expect GM to honor the warranty on a car if you strapped a rocket to the top and run into a wall. Same goes for the iPhone. You can't expect Apple to honor a warranty on a device that the user has bricked by modifying the firmware or OS with software they haven't reviewed (try flashing your PSP with third-party firmware and sending it in for repairs afterward).
I will say that it's foolish of Apple to place such restrictions on what apps you can run, but that's a bad business decision, not legalized tyranny. A better option might be to only offer approved apps in the store, but allow you to install apps from alternate sources at your own risk, but they didn't make that decision, and it's their decision to make. And when a company makes a stupid product design decision, you have every right to voice your opinion regarding such a decision, and every right to refrain from purchasing it, if you feel that restriction outweighs the benefits of owning the product. So, let's call this what it is: bad business, but not a tyrannical grab for legal power.
Seriously, I bought this thing when it first came out, and I lost 20 pounds in a couple months. I know it seems silly to think that such a non-game will hold your attention and keep you working out, but if you have a desire to work out and lose weight, it will help. If you don't really have an interest in working out, it probably won't hold your attention long. But if you do, it will teach you some basic workouts, and the videogame-esque style may give you that extra ambition to get to it.
Apple could probably block this fairly easily, actually, without breaking support for any of their own products.
1.)Release new version of iTunes that checks specifically for the Pre.
2.)Release new firmware for existing iPods to ensure they work with the new version of iTunes.
3.)Require a firmware update in order to work with the current version of iTunes.
4.)Require a current version of iTunes in order to access the iTunes store.
And just like that, we have a new version of iTunes that's incompatible with the Pre, which iPod owners need to use in order to access the store. Yes, Palm can release an update to re-enable compatibility with iTunes (depending on how Apple chose to handle the software/firmware changes, this could be trivial or difficult), but that seriously hurts one of their big selling points for the Pre, namely that it's iTunes compatible. No one wants a devices whose functionality breaks every few weeks (queue the Microsoft jokes).
I personally live about a 20 minute walk from work. It would be convenient (not to mention faster) for me to drive to work. However, the only available parking in the area is $10 a day, which is far more than I'm willing to pay. A bus trip there costs $2 normally. However, I have a current student ID, so I get to ride for free (not really, there's a per-semester fee automatically included in my tuition if I take the bus or not). So for me, public transit is far more cost-effective. However, parking meters are free on Sundays here in Denver, so I do drive to work on Sundays. Granted, I'm within walking distance, but it's convenient to have the car there, in case I need to get home quickly. Plus, with my Civic averaging around 38 mpg, it costs almost nothing.
I loaded 7 x64 yesterday, and I'm actually quite impressed. It boots faster, has a significantly smaller memory footprint (my Vista install, after booting, clocked in at ~1600MB RAM, 7 is ~1200), and definitely runs games faster. I'm getting in the area of 10 fps faster in Mirror's edge (and that's after enabling ambient occlusion, which I hadn't done under Vista, which is supposed to incur a performance hit). UT3 runs faster, firefox loads faster. And it's not just the speed. The UI is dramatically more polished than Vista. Vista always felt a bit slapped together, and rough around the edges. 7 is cleaner, has fewer annoying quirks.
Gotta get back to work...
I have had a biology teacher who was a proud member of the Promise Keepers (our section on evolution was ten minutes, mostly consisting of "Now, you don't have to believe any of this."), a college algebra teacher who had trouble adding two single-digit numbers without a calculator and who let us use cheat sheets for every exam, including the final (could only be 1"x1", but in 6pt font, that's every formula for the test), a statistics and probability teacher who spent most of the class discussing the latest goings on with the various school athletic organizations (she was the cross-country coach), an AP English teacher who had a penchant for "losing" papers she didn't want to grade (and when she did grade papers, the first few submissions would have corrections and comments, the rest had nothing but a grade, rumor has it she never read them, just assigned a grade based on what she thought that student would do), a physics teacher so mind-bogglingly incompetent that my sophomore year a student organization devoted to her termination had more members than any other club (she was really, really bad, a powerpoint teacher), a German teacher who spent more time showing us slides of her various trips to Germany than teaching (we did a lot of projects in English in that class), a Spanish teach who spent an entire semester not teaching Spanish because it was more important that we learn about the cultures of South American nations (Spanish-speaking or otherwise), a seventh-grade math teacher who didn't mark off points for wrong answers because, and I quote, "Check marks lower self-esteem" (no, I am not making that up). The list goes on and on. We watched the Leo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet, rather than reading it, I had an English teacher in middle school who thought Billy Maddison was an educational film, you name it. I attended a private Catholic school until fifth grade, and while I wouldn't have wanted to study Biology there, I was about two years' worth of curriculum ahead of my classmates when I transferred into public school.
Now, I did have a handful of good teachers. Namely, two good middle school science teachers, my sociology teacher, 20th Century History teacher, CAD teacher, art teacher (I made a bong mug), and good elementary teachers (until public school. Although they were about as friendly as Catholic school nuns are widely supposed to be). That's it. And, those teachers were the ones always getting into it with the administration. The most wildly incompetent teachers were the ones in the administration's best graces. My sociology teacher couldn't get textbooks for his class, for example.
A large part of the problem is the incompetent teachers. They have no interest in emphasizing retention. Starting College Algebra, but don't remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions? No problem, the first month of the class will be spent reviewing it! It is very much the case that the further you progress through the curriculum, the less you are expected to remember. Instead of booting the kids who can't handle fractions out of the College Algebra course and sending them back to a more appropriate course, the curriculum is dumbed-down to fit them (I once had to make up a test in College Algebra, along with a classmate a year ahead of me who was about to graduate valedictorian. We were sitting out in the hall, and I was breezing through the test, while my classmate looked quite perplexed, stuck on the first problem. Finally, she turned to me and asked "What does perimeter mean?" God I hate this country...). As a result, your average and above-average students not only don't learn the material they should, but they often lose confidence and interest in school in particular, and learning in general (luckily I still enjoy learning, I just chose to learn out of the state-sponsored daycare/prison).
Bricking a Wii with homebrew is easy. Very easy. Bricking a Wii with the Homebrew Channel, alone and unaided is, so far as I have seen, impossible. HBC doesn't brick Wiis, but it allows you to run code that potentially could. There's homebrew code designed to change your Wii's region, there's code designed to allow you to download and install specific updates and packages from Nintendo's servers, and the checking is on the user. You decide to patch your NTSC Wii with PAL updates, you could brick it. Screw up a region swap (the Wiis of each region differ solely on software, the hardware is identical, with the notable exception of Korean Wiis), you could brick it. Plenty of ways to do it. There's been a bit of a "scene war" between Tweezers (the guys who brought you HBC and the Twilight Princess hack) and Waninkoko (although honestly, most of the friction seems to come from Marcan and Waninkoko). Basically, Waninkoko releases an app for the Wii that allows you to do some cool things, but in doing so, makes a brick a much more likely possibility. Tweezers points this out, and gets really mad that he's using their work as a basis for his, and it's a constant childish back-and-forth between them. But the general consensus is, Waninkoko's apps run a higher risk of bricks. It boils down to, do you really know what you're doing?
I've got a few things to cover here. First of all, we're not talking about a "firmware" mod here. HBC is installed as a Wii channel. For those who are unfamiliar with the Wii's architecture, a brief overview. The Wii uses a three-stage loading system. First, it boots from Boot1, which is hard coded in ROM, can never be modified (I think it's contained in the Starlett core, but with wiibrew.org apparently having been /.'d, I can't double-check now). Boot1 then verifies the signature on Boot2, which is contained in NAND, and as such can be updated and modified. Boot2 then proceeds to verify the signature of the installed System Menu, and verifies and loads whichever IOS version the installed System Menu requires. That's the Wii's boot process, and HBC doesn't interfere with it in any way. HBC relies on a bug in various IOS versions to allow HBC to be fakesigned as a legitimate channel to install itself (original IOS and Boot1/2 versions checked signatures using a strcmp() function which terminated successfully after reading a null byte, so a faked sig just needs to start with a null byte). HBC itself is essentially brick-proof. These guys went out of their way to make sure HBC doesn't brick any Wiis. Now, you can use HBC to load less stable code which could potentially brick your Wii. It's stored in NAND just like any other installable channel, and simply does not take part in the boot process (of course, Team Tweezers' Boot2 replacement, BootMii, will change all that, but that's another mod for another time)
So, Nintendo saying that installing HBC makes for a costlier repair would be a bit like Dell saying it needed to charge more for repairs because a bittorrent client was installed. It doesn't make any sense, since they generally have to blank the NAND before sending it back anyway. Plus, as one of the commenters on the hackmii page pointed out, this creates a stupid situation where a physically damaged out of warranty Wii is actually less expensive to repair than a softmoded Wii. So, if you have a modded Wii go bad, your best option is to destroy the NAND chip to the point of unreadability and send it back, and pay for a normal OoW repair instead of a more expensive repair.
It's possible that the BIOS payload wouldn't need to have the entire program. All you would need is for a simple downloader to survive a hard drive wipe, which could run with root privileges to download and run a malware installer once the OS was up and running. That way, the malware author can always be ensured a current installation, and can use smaller code to download different packages for different operating systems. Really quite elegant, and would require a hardware programmer to wipe clean with current motherboard implementations.
Quick bit of research and I can probably tell you exactly why the dll wouldn't work. It was probably amtlib.dll, which is involved in activation, and either he's running 64 bit Photoshop, and he used the 32 bit hacked dll, or vice versa.
That wasn't worth posting, and definitely isn't front page material. Screens, links, more than two paragraphs, any evidence or information at all? Clearly just an "Oh, shiny!" headline to catch the eye, but no substance.
The problem with your reasoning is that you assume "public good" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) is the single motivating factor behind political action. To put it simply, while new legislation, training, and infrastructure seem to a reasonable person to be expensive downsides, to a politician, it's gravy. They get more authority and political power, more funding now, and more funding in the long term. Whereas with private enterprise, a savvy employee will attempt to minimize costs, and produce the most efficient solution to a given problem, it's in the interest of politicians to get as much money as they can, and the power that comes with it. Essentially, government eliminates most of the incentives towards efficiency (the so-called "tragedy of the commons").
Okay, so we've got most of the "you can run Vista with 4GB?!" jokes out of the way (hopefully). Here's my take on the situation.
...). With your configuration, that's when you'd start to crash.
I have Vista x64 running in a machine with 8GB physical memory, and no page file. I can do this because I'm never running enough memory-hungry processes that I will exceed 8GB allocated memory. So, while the OS may be good at deciding what gets swapped to the hard disk, in my case, there's simply no need, as everything I'm running can be contained entirely within physical memory (and for the curious, I've been running like this for a year and a half, haven't run out of memory yet).
However, if you don't have enough physical memory to store all the processes you might be running at once, then at some point the OS will need to swap to the hard drive, or it will simply run out of memory. I'm honestly not sure exactly how Vista handles things when it runs out of memory (never been a problem, never looked into it), but it wouldn't be good (probably BSoD, crash crash crash). I can tell you from personal experience that I regularly exceed 4GB memory usage (transcoding a DVD while playing a BluRay movie while
Long story short, with just 4GB, I would leave the swap file as is. Really, you should only disable the swap file if you know based on careful observation that your memory usage never exceeds the size of your installed physical memory. If you're comfortable with the risks involved, and you know your system and usage habits well, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it be.
Products that use RAM as the storage media have been around for years. They're exactly what you're describing: a few standard DDR DIMMS and a battery on a PCI card, usually. However, no one in an enterprise environment would actually trust data to such a device, and they never really took off. Home users don't generally have the power and data backup capacity to safely use such a device (and not even the most hardened masochist wants to reinstall or restore everything whenever a breaker goes), and enterprise users can't tolerate the risk level. Sure, you can have backup power, but the risk of losing data and downtime restoring it just isn't tolerable in most enterprise environments.
I would have liked to have seen them test this drive in a much more powerful system. I mean, a P4 with 1GB RAM, and a fairly dated chipset (955x) as the SATA controller? No one is going to put a drive like this in a system that old. I'd guess that we might see different results on a more powerful system. At some point in those tests, other components of this fairly slow (by today's standards) machine. Throw some serious power behind it, and you can be sure that you're not bottlenecked, and the full power of the drive shows. Can't say for sure if this is actually the case, as I don't have a drive to test, but it's a definite possibility. Hopefully someone else does a similar review with a more powerful testbed.
Consider the Great Northern Railroad. Built under the administration of James J. Hill, the railroad was noted for being built by purchasing property rights, where other railroads would simply run native Americans and farmers off their land. And, it did it without federal subsidies (admittedly, some of the lines it purchased were originally built on subsidies, but it is telling that GNR could keep those lines profitable, when the federal grant recipients failed to do so). Without government-subsidized transcontinental boondoggles being unquestionably and unendingly funded by tax dollars, in an environment where other railroads were forced to compete based on efficiency and consumer satisfaction, the GNR would likely have been more successful, for reasons stated in my previous post (government sponsorship promotes inefficiency and misallocation of resources, and prolongs the existence of otherwise unprofitable companies). It did work once for railroads, and could work fine for paved roads.
As I see it, the second largest barrier to private roads is simply the misconception that only governments can provide roads. The evidence says that private organizations could build and maintain private roads, but the government barrier to market entry, combined with the public perception of private roads effectively prevents it from happening on any large scale.
Right, because in all of known history, no private entity has ever thought to themselves "You know, I bet I could transport things more efficiently on an even, paved surface, which could pay for itself after several years. Why, I bet I could even get people to pay for the right to use that same road and turn a profit because of it." Nope, not once. There are no private roads to be found anywhere at all in the US precisely because no one ever thought of it except government authorities.
There are private roads in this country. Precisely because someone did think of exactly the above scenario. The fact that the government spends huge volumes of other people's cash (without earning it through productive activities, of course) on highways provides a huge barrier to market entry. Sure, it makes sense to build my own private roads around my own facilities, but why build my own highway from point A to point B, since I'll still have to pay for upkeep of the government's highways (taxes), plus my own road? Plus, with the government running the show, you have the natural inefficiency of a large bureaucracy, with the typical budget overruns and unnecessary expenditures, not to mention lackluster maintenance. A private organization would have standards to maintain, and customers to keep happy, and they'd be doing it with their own money, providing incentive for efficiency and adherence to a budget. Plus, those who either don't drive at all, or who don't drive on that particular road, wouldn't be unjustly forced to pay for other people's transportation. You pay for what you use, not for what others use. If a branch of a government road is left largely unused, you still pay for it with your taxes, and the few people using that road reap the benefit at the expense of everyone else. If a private company has an under-utilized segment of road, it will increase the fees for the few using it, and if they're not willing to pay, they'll shut it down, allowing their customers to decide what's more valuable, a faster drive at greater expense, or a longer route at lower cost. Government intervention promotes misallocation of scarce resources, because they don't have to earn the money they spend, and they can always tax/inflate more.
The same can be said for virtually any of the government's activities. Private schools are less numerous and more expensive precisely because the government forces everyone to pay for their generally crappy schools. You don't have an option to opt-out and not pay those taxes if you don't use the "service". Government is a large barrier to competition generally.
I notice the article doesn't mention if any of the data on these computers was encrypted. It's one thing to hack into a Windows desktop. It's quite another to have to break a 1024-bit AES cipher to actually make use of the data you find. This should be (yet another) wakeup call that any data of any importance should be encrypted with a strong cipher. It's not like it's difficult to do, and it's not like the software is expensive (TrueCrypt, anyone?). I encrypt all my personal data, and if it was compromised, worst case scenario my identity might be stolen. These idiots (sorry, that's Representatives...) are storing personal information about political dissidents and refugees. If THAT data is compromised, worst case scenario people get killed, and entire political movements are quashed by force.
Could this have anything to do with this?
"We want to help you catalog your entire life on your hard drive. Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, we're going to use the contents of your hard drive to serve you contextual adds." <Jedi Mind Trick>This isn't the conflict of interests you're looking for.</Jedi Mind Trick>
I handle IT for a civil engineering firm, and we've been loading our new machines with Vista. For the curious, I've built all the machines myself in house, and we've had virtually no problems so far (aside from initially experimenting with 64 bit, our Autodesk programs wouldn't run properly in 64 bit). However, on the most recent machine, we decided to try SP1 to see how it worked with our software. I loaded the machine on the 10th, and KB937287 came out on the 12th. When we loaded the machine on the 10th, it worked perfectly, just like all the others we've loaded with Vista, with slight performance improvements in some areas (mostly file operations like copying and saving). However, after KB937287 installed, Autodesk Civil 3D 2008 would crash with unhandled exception fatal errors every time it started. I uninstalled all the new updates (wasn't sure which one it was at the time), uninstalled SP1, and all was well. Then, the update server reinstalled KB937287 (other non-SP1 Vista machines had installed it just fine, so I assumed it would work). The fatal errors started right back up. Apparently, the SP1 uninstall doesn't quite work as advertised, so now I have to come in over the weekend to reload the machine.
The funny thing is, I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate at home, and I already installed SP1 on it before installing KB937287, and it is working fine. Of course, I haven't tried C3D on it, but no problems for me so far.
Here's a good one: the product description page for the drive lists its approximate capacity for storing different media types. They specifically state that it can hold approximately: 500,000 songs (MP3) 800 hours of DVD quality video Then, in their list of restricted files, it states that you cannot share MP3 or VOB files. Seems to me that this borders on fraudulent advertising: "You can use this device to store and share as much data as 500,000 MP3 songs, but you can't actually share MP3 songs." Granted, they have a bullet-point which indicates that common media formats cannot be used, but then why are they using those same formats to illustrate the capacity of the drive?
This is the logical position. However, if we were to actually adopt the logical position, there is no need for most of the laws on the books. Why have laws against hacking if it is already illegal to trespass on private property? A computer system is private property, so breaking into it is logically covered under existing trespassing laws. Why have laws against spamming when the problem could easily be handled under existing harassment law? An ideal legal system is one that extrapolates new precedents from existing laws, rather than a system that grows increasingly complex and unwieldy in the face of new technology.
Experience has shown me quite well that preemptively upgrading to IE7 may not be such a good idea. I have yet to determine exactly why, but upgrading to IE7 has caused numerous problems with several of my clients related to printing emails from Outlook (and, no, they are not interested in going to Thunderbird). For example, when printing HTML emails from specific domains, they are always shrunk to fit on a single page, with no option to change this, which means the resulting printout can only be read with a magnifying glass. Or another, certain emails (not specific to a certain domain or sender) will not print with headers, no matter what. There is a workaround to these problems, but it involves forwarding the email back to yourself then printing it, which, while easy, is ridiculous to have to perform every time. Reverting back to IE6 solves all these problems, and nothing else I've been able to find will. So while MS will certainly require IE7 to access certain features in the future, for now it just creates more problems than it solves. Every user I've spoken to who has upgraded to IE7 has hated it and had nothing but problems. Maybe these bugs are just a way to convince people to "upgrade" Outlook to 2007.
Skepticism is not the "lazy person's default position." Skepticism is the result of actually looking at the claims of global warming proponents and looking at simple, readily-available data and determining that the two are incompatible. If human CO2 emissions are the cause of climate change, then explain why global temperatures dropped from the mid 40s to the mid 70s. Or even better, explain why, according to statistics compiled by the same research group that compiled the statistics for the graph linked to above, there was no measurable increase in global temperatures from 1998 to 2005. There was no concurrent decrease in human CO2 emissions during either of those two time periods. In fact, CO2 emissions rose steadily during both. And yet global temperatures did not follow suit. This is not conjecture, this is fact, and this information is available to anyone who takes the time to look. But it is the lazy people who took the time to look. Sure.
As to the consensus amongst scientists, this is simply not true. There are plenty of respected researchers who disagree with the panicked conclusion that human CO2 emissions are about to destroy us all.
One final subject on which I'd like to touch, and that is how the proponents and skeptics of global warming relate to one another. Search for information on the views and opinions of the global warming skeptics, and you'll find that they (for the most part, there are always exceptions) deal in data. When they attempt to refute claims by the proponents, they use research, they use statistics, they use facts. The proponents, on the other hand, seemingly have no problem resorting to personal attacks and skirting the issues entirely. For example, Michael Mann (creator of the infamous hockey stick graph) versus McIntyre and McKitrick. For those unfamiliar (shame on you!) with the hockey stick graph and the controversy surrounding it, a brief primer. The hockey stick graph is the result of research by one Michael Mann, purporting to show historical global temperatures over the past 1000 years. The graph shows a stable, steady temperature until the beginning of the 20th century, when temperatures spike. This was the impetus behind the Kyoto Protocol. McIntyre and McKitrick performed research debunking this graph and the statistical methods used in its creation. They point out any number of flaws, such as the absence of the so-called "little ice age", and its general incompatibility with known historical temperatures. To debunk this bad science, they used facts, they used reality, and they did not resort to attacking Mann's character and credibility. Do a quick google search about their research, and you'll see that they stick to the science. Now, do a search about those who disagree with them. It's full of personal attacks, irrelevant statements, and some claims that border on libel. It should say something that the skeptics are sticking to the science, and their opponents are, in return, attacking them like this was a political campaign (which, in many ways, it has become). Hell, just read how Gore, the poster boy for the global warming crowd, characterizes the skeptics. Came right out and said that they are in the same category as people who think the moon landing was staged. Scientists don't need to attack the character of other scientists. They stick to research, and the facts.
Is global climate changing? Yes, of course it is. The history of this planet's climate is a history of dramatic changes, from i
Laws for sex offenders are out of control. Just recently, a 12 year old and a 13 year old were both convicted as sex offenders for having consensual sex with one another (admittedly too young, but...). And of course the registry will, for the rest of their lives, merely say that they raped a child, not noting the details. And now this...
Yes, because who wants to see widespread use of a technology that helps you shoot more accurately? Everyone's much better off if everyone shoots a bit more wildly than they have to, right?