33 billion RFID tags huh? TFA indicates the vast majority of these will be used in warehouse tracking and similar tasks in a few technologically aware industries. 33 billion ~= 6 tags for every man woman and child on this planet, 80% of whom will never come within 10^6 times scanning distance of one in their entire life. This is Global News? In a week when James Lovelock is warning us that Gaia is ready to cough up those industries that make and use RFID tags, along with the 4 billion innocent non-users...
Oh, and this was filed in the U.S. but approved by a European patent office so I don't think it's fair for this judge to bash only us Yanks.
Unfortunately the EPO and its Board of Appeal have been making up their own rules and approving patents on IP which should not be patentable according to the law establishing the EPO. Last night (EST) Groklaw carried this story about the European Parliament's recent rejection of the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive. The essay has many quotes from a British judge criticising the EPO for exceeding its brief, and from software industry sources as little as 12 years ago observing that software patents would be counter-productive. Open source advocate lobbying had little to do with the CII directive being thrown out. It was Microsoft and friends' sudden fright when they realised the European parliament was serious about enforcing the existing law as distinct from the existing practice of the EPO. Note that the bureaucrats of the European Commission were the ones who were lobbied by industry, and the ones who lost to the democratically elected members of parliament.
Just to show its fairness the Commission is now revisiting the whole field of industrial patents, including the possibility of software patents.
how can something in the technology world be dead if there is nothing replacing it?
Because it's time is up? Do the math: 78rpm phenol discs 60 yrs; vinyl 30 yrs; CD 20yrs; mp3 ??. 16mm film 60yrs; VHS 30yrs; DVD 10yrs; ???
[Flag Paranoid Conspiracy] Notice the logarithmic scales in a number of technologies all seem to hit the wall at the Singularity, 2012. You won't be needing your DVDs after that...
No, just moribund. It's two and a half years since I recorded anything to VHS. As a major university we have to support a lot of obsolete formats, but it's a difficult job telling some academics that backwards compatability doesn't mean business as usual.
However I confess I have never been a fan of the DVD format. Every hour or program, whether from DV tape, or direct to hard disk, takes ~2 hours to compress mp2, and then there's the obtuse but compulsory menu structure. I have found it quicker and easier to compress mp4 and store on hard disk, or as.mov on a data DVD. Sure, there are miniDVcams about now that record direct to DVD. Ever tried to edit mp2? or put a 3.5" disc into a slot loader?
... that already (untested, but according to the blurb) operates 37 brands of TV, 43 brands of VCR, 58 brands of... well you get the picture;-) So I open my morning paper and there's Uncle Bill on the Warpath at CES, "unveiling" Vista, and announcing his iTunes Killer, his Google killer, his iPod killer, his TiVo killer... I've got a 10 spot here says my Universal Remote won't work on any of his junk, nor on Brother Steve's either.
What is it with these people? I want my music from ITMS to play on my WinMCE, my.wmvs to play on my iPod, and I certainly detest having to sit the equivalent of an airline pilot's type certification every time I pick up a different remote:-(
What I would love to see is really a detailed classification.
Posters on Groklaw asked for this too, but a simple taxonomy may not identify the important window of opportunity on any given vulnerability. eg. one of the Mac OS-X entries in CERT's list was for a Security Update (patch) covering 20 different items, six with 2004 CAN numbers. Do you split those into their individual items, discarding all the last year's ones? And how do you factor in the comment "No known exploit exists for these vulnerabilities"? ie. even if a user has not patched they won't be shot in the street for it. Many OS-X "vulnerabilities" are responsibly disclosed to Apple by white hats, and the first public knowledge is when the patch is released. Window of Opportunity = 0
Contrast this with the Windows case where almost every problem was exploited, or caused users grief, before it was acknowledged by MS, and before it was patched. Well known to the public, in use by blackhats, patched much later. Window of Opportunity = Big Bad Number
Hardly, there's an ovenful more in the kitchen than what's on the menu.
It took Apple to persuade them to dip a little toe into the Internet waters. ABC took the first plunge, offering iPod owners five shows' worth of archives for a perfectly pitched price of $2 each - and no commercials. NBC came next with a broader menu of shows. The concept was a hit, the floodgates have opened, and the era of downloadable, reasonably priced, lightly copy-protected TV episodes is finally upon us.
Now when (if?:-( the MPAA finally get this clue, it will be a development worth writing up.
Good news: Google seem to have pulled that link, but
Bad news: the file offered for download is dsi_ckp5.exe which is not likely to run on your Mac.
The site is infested with the usual warez crop of pr0n & gambling camp followers. I went there using Safari on a Mac, and collected a cookie from fuck-access.com, and exhibitionist.ws, which will both be valid for 15 years;-) I had my access counted by ads.clicksor.com, banner.paypopup.com, counter.yadro.ru, gfx.passwordbyphone.com, popunder.paypopup.com, t0.extreme-dm.com, and that's without any malware...
Of course fwiw crackz.ws is one of the anchor sites for this exploit as listed by F-Secure, and it's still up at the time of this posting:-(
If people don't like the standard, they can ignore it.
Ah, the free market at work. Where I come from standards are recognised as the right way to do things. In some areas of public safety the law requires the standard to be used. Our standards setting bodies are sufficiently educated that their standards don't need ignoring or circumventing until they become obsolete.
Of course the corollary to Moore's Law driving technology forward at exponential rates of progress might mean that standards in some areas are now impossible to set or observe...
This is an interesting article, and one that shows how multiple standards committees are actually better for consumers than just one.
Indeed, so long as a consensus results in a useful standard that all can comply with. But there are more than one problem here:
TFA says WiMedia hope the IEEE will back off UWB standard setting
ECMA has rubberstamped one company's technology, to the possible exclusion of other worthy efforts
ECMA's fast track to ISO means international standards may mandate technology protected by US patent law
A similarargumentis raging over Microsoft's attempt to use ECMA to steamroller its Office document formats over the OASIS ODF. There's a difference between a free market where I am free to buy off the legislators, and a free and open market where all are free to compete to openly agreed standards.
Lots of web scripts have database login information hardcoded (probably assigned to a variable at the begining). Go to hotscripts.com and you will see that for small sized web apps, it is pretty much standard.
If it's written in a script it's editable. I've used only a couple of php-mysql apps, and I must have picked the better ones. Both needed hand editing the script, right near the top, to change admin username and password. Right there was a comment: #Set owner & permissions root:wheel 400. Both had a check for the default account at login, if found the script would stop.
For a newbie the harder part is wading thru the MySQL manual to find out how to change that default. Then just as important IMHO as a tight password is closing that damn port 3306 that MySQL insists on opening to the world:-(
Sorry, must be you. Follow the suggestions for deleting Prefs, and at last resort, Delete Prefs, do a search for any lingering caches, Delete the app and reinstall.
I had already sneaked a couple of the developer releases of 0.8.4 and found them rock steady and pulling a few extra tricks over 0.8.1, and with OS 10.4.3 on my unsupported hardware.
is that it is Region 0 out of the box. Apple's DVD player allows you to set(change) a fixed region 4 times before resorting to some hack to start again. I assume if MS abides by the MPAA rule then WMP behaves similarly. Meanwhile VLC just plays any DVD I chuck at it, never asks what Region.
Sure is. A University close to here with similar problems to the headline, has a newspaper print ad series running now (not on their online edition, blame the paper for that:-( and on their website. Listed are Bachelors degrees in
Business and Information Management
Commerce: Information Systems or Operations and Supply Chain Management
Science: Computer Science
Science: Information Systems, Logic and Computation, Electronics and Computing or Bioinformatics
Technology: Information Technology
Commerce/Science Conjoint
Engineering: Software Engineering or Computer Systems Engineering
Immediately the bleat went out "Why weren't we included?" from Arts and Fine Arts for Media Production Systems, and yes, for Gaming.
Some years ago our "IT" systems were restructured by a bright eyed and bushy tailed consultant who decreed that all our audio-visual systems were IT, and we would be subject to the same management regime. He came to look at what we actually did, found nothing ran MS Windows, and there weren't even many keyboards or mice. He went away and left us alone...
We believe that content producers must take steps to compete with the piracy as an alternative
Remember the outcry when photocopiers became commonplace? Print On Demand is cheaper than photocopy, and those authors and publishers savvy enough to embrace POD now enjoy the advantages of reduced distribution and inventory costs.
When desktop CD burners became commonplace there were tantalising rumors that we could go to our local record store and buy a custom compilation from tracks off the store's Master Discs. Sorry, I must live in the wrong hemisphere. I haven't seen one of those stores anywhere... Maybe the **AA will eventually get a clue, I just hope I'm still around to see it.
Then again, such things are usually put low on the list of priorities whenever possible, because "it won't happen to us".
No, there's often a value judgement made: "How much insurance can we afford for what we have to protect?"
I work in a University environment where sprinklers have deliberately not been used in some areas because of perceived dangers (electric, chemical), and not in some areas because people can be scared out with lights and loud noises, and the building itself would be better rebuilt. Interestingly the areas with greatest sprinkler protection are the libraries. Librarians I have spoken to view this as a mixed blessing, the great bulk of their collections could be easily replaced, rather than salvaging soggy pages...
All of these processes were started by OOo_Calc. I don't have MSOffice on this machine so no valid comparisons are possible. I observe that OOo is a slug to start from cold, but once up and running seems snappy enough opening, saving docs. I do notice on cow-orkers Macs that MSOffice is running away to talk to the printer every time it opens or saves a doc....
When I read TFA my first reaction was, another Apple idea stolen. But then I saw the Flash description, and it's another Apple idea stolen, turned inside out, and embellished so Apple would never want it back.
Then of course there's those lovely old machines with the ROM based OS, Atari ST1040, some models of Acorn,...
The only one with his feet on the ground, so to speak. At last somebody with the commonsense to see that a patentable process should require "the transformation of physical matter". All else is intangible...
are doomed to repeat it. This sounds very much like what 15 years ago we called ROM-rot, as it afflicted certain Casio brand musical keyboard synthesisers. I guess it's just part of the general trend of dumbing down manufacture. Penny pinch with plastic. By the time the suck^H^H^H^H our clients find out, we'll have some cheaper ceramic chips. Designed by computers, built by robots, not fixable by humans...
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33 billion RFID tags huh? TFA indicates the vast majority of these will be used in warehouse tracking and similar tasks in a few technologically aware industries. 33 billion ~= 6 tags for every man woman and child on this planet, 80% of whom will never come within 10^6 times scanning distance of one in their entire life. This is Global News? In a week when James Lovelock is warning us that Gaia is ready to cough up those industries that make and use RFID tags, along with the 4 billion innocent non-users...
Oh, and this was filed in the U.S. but approved by a European patent office so I don't think it's fair for this judge to bash only us Yanks.
Unfortunately the EPO and its Board of Appeal have been making up their own rules and approving patents on IP which should not be patentable according to the law establishing the EPO. Last night (EST) Groklaw carried this story about the European Parliament's recent rejection of the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive. The essay has many quotes from a British judge criticising the EPO for exceeding its brief, and from software industry sources as little as 12 years ago observing that software patents would be counter-productive. Open source advocate lobbying had little to do with the CII directive being thrown out. It was Microsoft and friends' sudden fright when they realised the European parliament was serious about enforcing the existing law as distinct from the existing practice of the EPO. Note that the bureaucrats of the European Commission were the ones who were lobbied by industry, and the ones who lost to the democratically elected members of parliament.
Just to show its fairness the Commission is now revisiting the whole field of industrial patents, including the possibility of software patents.
how can something in the technology world be dead if there is nothing replacing it?
Because it's time is up? Do the math: 78rpm phenol discs 60 yrs; vinyl 30 yrs; CD 20yrs; mp3 ??. 16mm film 60yrs; VHS 30yrs; DVD 10yrs; ???
[Flag Paranoid Conspiracy] Notice the logarithmic scales in a number of technologies all seem to hit the wall at the Singularity, 2012. You won't be needing your DVDs after that...
VHS isnt dead yet
.mov on a data DVD. Sure, there are miniDVcams about now that record direct to DVD. Ever tried to edit mp2? or put a 3.5" disc into a slot loader?
No, just moribund. It's two and a half years since I recorded anything to VHS. As a major university we have to support a lot of obsolete formats, but it's a difficult job telling some academics that backwards compatability doesn't mean business as usual.
However I confess I have never been a fan of the DVD format. Every hour or program, whether from DV tape, or direct to hard disk, takes ~2 hours to compress mp2, and then there's the obtuse but compulsory menu structure. I have found it quicker and easier to compress mp4 and store on hard disk, or as
... that already (untested, but according to the blurb) operates 37 brands of TV, 43 brands of VCR, 58 brands of... well you get the picture;-) So I open my morning paper and there's Uncle Bill on the Warpath at CES, "unveiling" Vista, and announcing his iTunes Killer, his Google killer, his iPod killer, his TiVo killer... I've got a 10 spot here says my Universal Remote won't work on any of his junk, nor on Brother Steve's either.
.wmvs to play on my iPod, and I certainly detest having to sit the equivalent of an airline pilot's type certification every time I pick up a different remote :-(
What is it with these people? I want my music from ITMS to play on my WinMCE, my
Who knows, with the mire in the USPTO. But what is it with Patent Offices in central Europe? Einstein from Bern, Droescher from Vienna...
psst, watch Steve next Tuesday morning
What I would love to see is really a detailed classification.
Posters on Groklaw asked for this too, but a simple taxonomy may not identify the important window of opportunity on any given vulnerability. eg. one of the Mac OS-X entries in CERT's list was for a Security Update (patch) covering 20 different items, six with 2004 CAN numbers. Do you split those into their individual items, discarding all the last year's ones? And how do you factor in the comment "No known exploit exists for these vulnerabilities"? ie. even if a user has not patched they won't be shot in the street for it. Many OS-X "vulnerabilities" are responsibly disclosed to Apple by white hats, and the first public knowledge is when the patch is released. Window of Opportunity = 0
Contrast this with the Windows case where almost every problem was exploited, or caused users grief, before it was acknowledged by MS, and before it was patched. Well known to the public, in use by blackhats, patched much later. Window of Opportunity = Big Bad Number
Good news: Google seem to have pulled that link, but
;-) I had my access counted by ads.clicksor.com, banner.paypopup.com, counter.yadro.ru, gfx.passwordbyphone.com, popunder.paypopup.com, t0.extreme-dm.com, and that's without any malware...
:-(
Bad news: the file offered for download is dsi_ckp5.exe which is not likely to run on your Mac.
The site is infested with the usual warez crop of pr0n & gambling camp followers. I went there using Safari on a Mac, and collected a cookie from fuck-access.com, and exhibitionist.ws, which will both be valid for 15 years
Of course fwiw crackz.ws is one of the anchor sites for this exploit as listed by F-Secure, and it's still up at the time of this posting
Next we will discover that video games don't make you kill others...
Might take a while for the popular press to pick up on that one
If people don't like the standard, they can ignore it.
Ah, the free market at work. Where I come from standards are recognised as the right way to do things. In some areas of public safety the law requires the standard to be used. Our standards setting bodies are sufficiently educated that their standards don't need ignoring or circumventing until they become obsolete.
Of course the corollary to Moore's Law driving technology forward at exponential rates of progress might mean that standards in some areas are now impossible to set or observe...
Indeed, so long as a consensus results in a useful standard that all can comply with. But there are more than one problem here:
A similar argument is raging over Microsoft's attempt to use ECMA to steamroller its Office document formats over the OASIS ODF. There's a difference between a free market where I am free to buy off the legislators, and a free and open market where all are free to compete to openly agreed standards.
Lots of web scripts have database login information hardcoded (probably assigned to a variable at the begining). Go to hotscripts.com and you will see that for small sized web apps, it is pretty much standard. :-(
If it's written in a script it's editable. I've used only a couple of php-mysql apps, and I must have picked the better ones. Both needed hand editing the script, right near the top, to change admin username and password. Right there was a comment: #Set owner & permissions root:wheel 400. Both had a check for the default account at login, if found the script would stop.
For a newbie the harder part is wading thru the MySQL manual to find out how to change that default. Then just as important IMHO as a tight password is closing that damn port 3306 that MySQL insists on opening to the world
Sorry, must be you. Follow the suggestions for deleting Prefs, and at last resort, Delete Prefs, do a search for any lingering caches, Delete the app and reinstall.
I had already sneaked a couple of the developer releases of 0.8.4 and found them rock steady and pulling a few extra tricks over 0.8.1, and with OS 10.4.3 on my unsupported hardware.
is that it is Region 0 out of the box. Apple's DVD player allows you to set(change) a fixed region 4 times before resorting to some hack to start again. I assume if MS abides by the MPAA rule then WMP behaves similarly. Meanwhile VLC just plays any DVD I chuck at it, never asks what Region.
Sure is. A University close to here with similar problems to the headline, has a newspaper print ad series running now (not on their online edition, blame the paper for that
Immediately the bleat went out "Why weren't we included?" from Arts and Fine Arts for Media Production Systems, and yes, for Gaming.
Some years ago our "IT" systems were restructured by a bright eyed and bushy tailed consultant who decreed that all our audio-visual systems were IT, and we would be subject to the same management regime. He came to look at what we actually did, found nothing ran MS Windows, and there weren't even many keyboards or mice. He went away and left us alone...
We believe that content producers must take steps to compete with the piracy as an alternative
Remember the outcry when photocopiers became commonplace? Print On Demand is cheaper than photocopy, and those authors and publishers savvy enough to embrace POD now enjoy the advantages of reduced distribution and inventory costs.
When desktop CD burners became commonplace there were tantalising rumors that we could go to our local record store and buy a custom compilation from tracks off the store's Master Discs. Sorry, I must live in the wrong hemisphere. I haven't seen one of those stores anywhere... Maybe the **AA will eventually get a clue, I just hope I'm still around to see it.
Then again, such things are usually put low on the list of priorities whenever possible, because "it won't happen to us".
No, there's often a value judgement made: "How much insurance can we afford for what we have to protect?"
I work in a University environment where sprinklers have deliberately not been used in some areas because of perceived dangers (electric, chemical), and not in some areas because people can be scared out with lights and loud noises, and the building itself would be better rebuilt. Interestingly the areas with greatest sprinkler protection are the libraries. Librarians I have spoken to view this as a mixed blessing, the great bulk of their collections could be easily replaced, rather than salvaging soggy pages...
Dig into the source package to: OpenOfficePluginLib/lib/ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.d
Look familiar? OK, the publishers say that, I would expect the presence of any GPL code, however "escape claused", might be another reason MS wants to keep its mouth shut about this...
MacOS 10.4.2 OpenOffice.org_2.0.0rc3_051016_MacosxPPC run Calc:
process real-mem. virtual-mem.
droplet 8.5M 36.5M
X11 0.8M 27.1M
Xquartz 21.8M 168.9M
quartz-wm 3.1M 107.6M
xterm 5.5M 26.9M
sh 0.7M 27.2M
tcsh 1.0M 31.1M
soffice.bin 73.4M 282.1M
All of these processes were started by OOo_Calc. I don't have MSOffice on this machine so no valid comparisons are possible. I observe that OOo is a slug to start from cold, but once up and running seems snappy enough opening, saving docs. I do notice on cow-orkers Macs that MSOffice is running away to talk to the printer every time it opens or saves a doc....
10.4 improved the BootCache performance. Speedcheck, beige G3 292mhz 448M ram, disks don't ask ;-)
...
Startup - 36sec
Login - 17sec
Shutdown - 15sec
When I read TFA my first reaction was, another Apple idea stolen. But then I saw the Flash description, and it's another Apple idea stolen, turned inside out, and embellished so Apple would never want it back.
Then of course there's those lovely old machines with the ROM based OS, Atari ST1040, some models of Acorn,
The only one with his feet on the ground, so to speak. At last somebody with the commonsense to see that a patentable process should require "the transformation of physical matter". All else is intangible...
are doomed to repeat it. This sounds very much like what 15 years ago we called ROM-rot, as it afflicted certain Casio brand musical keyboard synthesisers. I guess it's just part of the general trend of dumbing down manufacture. Penny pinch with plastic. By the time the suck^H^H^H^H our clients find out, we'll have some cheaper ceramic chips. Designed by computers, built by robots, not fixable by humans...
How do you put a noun in the past tense?
Say it with an American accent...