So we're going to get some DoJ PHB looking over the coder's shoulders, saying "Hrm, y'know, I really liked that paper clip thing. I turned him into a doggie and kept him jumping around all day long. He ever wrote all my memos for me. I-- I mean the DoJ-- really mandates that he be put back."
That having been said, I personally consider the television itself to be an utter waste of time (or a "lockdown" if you will) but do I post messages on Slashdot about it? No.
The pre-determined time might be part of the rules laid out by Guiness.
If you wish to try something that hasn't been done before or have already attempted a potential record then we'll need to pass your suggestion on to our research department first. They'll decide if it's something that we're interested in establishing as a new record category. If we are, they'll draw up the necessary guidelines and send them to you. If not, we can always suggest other records that you may wish to attempt.
Mozilla hasn't published the exact guidelines they were given, but there are some hints in their FAQ
What does Mozilla have to provide Guinness to validate the record?
We will provide the following: Signed statements of authentication from our judges showing that we've followed the rules and confirming our numbers.
And to address other posters who were mentioning the whole HTTP thing, it's in the rules, too:
What is Mozilla doing to make sure the record attempt is valid?
Mozilla will only count downloads that are fully and completely transmitted, not partial or complete updates. We will also discard duplicate downloads with the help of a cookie system. We will be logging our downloads using Apache and these logs will be made available for audit to Guinness World Records(TM), as well as two judges - Corey Shields and Paul Vixie.
If a ball's thrown at 5km/h, and you run away from it at 5km/h, it won't hit you. Light always moves at the speed of light. It hits you at c if you stand still, and hits you at c if you run away from it. That's the theory of relativity.
If you can fall at a planet, but move forward fast enough so you'll keep missing it, you're in orbit.
You don't go to a URL anymore than you phone "Bob". You look up Bob's phone number and call that. DNS looks up an URL's number, and then you call than number.
The waves inside a microwave keep attracting, then repelling, water molecules. This makes them shake back and forth really fast. Moving molecules = heat. That's how your ramen gets hot.
Tell him that since you'll be sending out Enterprise Level Email (rather than the End User/Small Business Level Email you've been using so far), it'll require upgrading to Enterprise Level stamps. Tell him you'll need an assistant to help you lick those 10,000 stamps.
For those of us who make our living behind a keyboard in IT, it's hard to imagine a more time-tested vulnerability than the end-user. Armed with network access, these IT viruses wreak havoc nearly everywhere you look -- havoc borne of tech idiocy.
Of course, not all computer users live to cause mayhem, sowing the seeds of destruction in our metaverse, merely by clicking every last Storm worm variant that appears in their inboxes. In fact, sometimes the worst offenses spring from our own ranks, hatched by individuals whose stated mission is to help technology work better: the IT admin.
For the most part, we IT folks toil away unsung in often miserable conditions just to make workplaces more efficient, secure, and supportive of end-user needs. But then, a few of us -- well, we can be caught doing some really dumb things.
So having kicked the user to the brain-dead curb in "Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories" and "More stupider user tricks: IT horror stories redux," it's only fair that we turn the spotlight inward to expose a few legendary IT brain farts committed by those who are paid to know better.
Preconfiguring PCs with stone-age malware
Incident: Toward the end of 2006, several high-profile consumer electronics companies -- both makers and retailers -- ended up with egg on their faces when reports surfaced that they were shipping to consumers devices infected with malware. Apple's Video iPod and several models of digital photo frames were found to be infecting the computers of unsuspecting users the first time they were plugged in. The risk associated with those infections was significant. In the end, however, the damage was limited.
A year later, though, that wasn't the case. In September 2007, German computer maker Medion announced that as many as 100,000 laptop computers sold through Aldi superstores in Germany and Denmark came preinstalled with Windows Vista, the Bullguard anti-virus program -- and a virus.
The case could have been devastating for the privacy or information security of anyone who bought one of the laptops. Modern malware, highly adept at stealing information such as bank account log-ins or credit card numbers, poses a real risk to consumers and companies alike.
Only, it wasn't, because the virus, Stoned.Angelina, dates back to 1994, a full year prior to the launch of Windows 95, let alone the advent of widespread Internet access or online commerce.
Thankfully, Stoned.Angelina isn't a particularly dangerous virus, at least not to anything more recent than DOS. It's a boot-sector virus that replicates itself by copying itself to floppy disks. Remember those? The Medion laptops didn't even have floppy drives.
Medion never said exactly how this historic malware relic ended up in the default image on so many laptops. In the case of the iPod and photo-frame infections, the malware came from an infected machine in the factory in China that assembled the final products and installed the software onto the devices' internal storage.
When you consider just how difficult it must be to load Stoned.Angelina onto a modern computer, you get a sense at how boneheaded the IT guy would need to be in order to infect a drive image used in tens of thousands of hard drives.
Fallout: With no way to spread and no effect whatsoever on Windows Vista, Stoned.Angelina took its toll mainly on Medion, making the company a laughingstock. The punch line: Even though the machine came preloaded with an anti-virus app, the anti-virus engine couldn't clean the system. Bullguard later released a repair program that cleaned out the boot sector, just in case you, someday, somehow, found a floppy drive that worked with the laptop and inserted a disk.
Moral: One, don't let the guy running an old copy of DOS on his computer build your drive images. And two, if you're going to deliberately infect thousands of computers, pick malware that's actually going to do something.
Logically, of course, it's a weak argument -- RealPlayer is universally available whether Google distributes it or not -- but rhetorically the argument is golden.
The "in progress" should be taken into consideration on a case-by-case method. If a company is legitimately in the process of producing their product, but are running into actual, provable and unavoidable delays, they should be able to get an extension to their patent.
But it MUST be a case-by-case, and not an overarching rule. That way if Drug Company X-opharm learns that their FDA approval tests will take 5 years, they can get an extension. They can easily prove this with their internal documentation, and maybe even a standard form letter from FDA ("Comany X-opharm submitted their request for approval on day xxx, and our review will begin on yyy, lasting zzz...").
On the same hand, if Patent Troll R'Us is just sitting on the Awesome-o-Phone, their patent will expire real quick. They won't be able to show that they're actually trying to develop it, won't have investors, won't have provable in-progress reports. Instead, they'll try to fire a shotgun of cowcrap hoping to bury the officer into submission. But the patent office will be used to dealing with streamlined "extension, plz" cases, and will know BS when they're buried in it. EXTENSION DENIED
Heck, I'm worried about something far more mundane than nukes and bio-engineering. All what it would take to set the US off on a parnoia-driven Rights-smashing fest is six guys with automatic weapons and a truck. Drive into the middle of a busy business district. Everyone hops out armed with a machine gun, lots of extra clips, and some Kevlar armor. Spread out and open fire. Follow the crowd into the buildings. Even if it takes 2 minutes for enough police to show up to take out the attackers, can you imagine the amount of death they'd cause? Throw in a bandoleer of hand grenades for each and they can cause significant structural damage to a few shops, too.
A few hundred Wall Street folks gunned down at noon? Tell me that wouldn't set the country off. And short of turning the entire area into a military protected check-point system, how would you stop it from happening? Or happening again? Or from their successors from driving out a rural city like Des Moines? Or to Las Vegas in the middle of the night?
Play a tune on piano keys (sound off for more security).
Hell, combine music and color. Hook this bad boy up to a wireless Guitar Hero controller. Want in the house? Blast off a chorus from Jordan on Expert. (Be prepared to sleep on the lawn).
It includes some tools that help make sure your fore and background colors are sufficiently contrasty, even on a monochrome or black and white screen, or to a colorblind viewer
I hope they put these kill switches on trains, too, because otherwise what would happed, god forbid, if someone were to,crash a train into the White House?
I learned dvorak with gtypist. There's a few others free, and probably some commercial ones for roughly $20 or so.
Oh, I hear you on that. I've been trying to get him to learn for years now. Maybe if I rigged the system so that he had to pass a level of Touch Type before WoW loaded, I'd get him to actually learn. =)
I don't know if WoW has a windowed mode out of the box, but it shouldn't be too hard to pull off.
Not sure, though it would seem counter-productive to use a projector if you're going to shrink the window to 19". Hehe.
Worth mentioning: You can get monitors with HDMI inputs, or cheap HDMI->DVI adapters.
That was definitely a criterion in the monitor purchase. I think he ended up with the BenQ FW222-WH with the HDMI and DVI inputs. Then we got him a ATI 9600 XT that has the dual DVI-outs. One goes off to the monitor, the other goes off to the receiver that all the other AV things are plugged into.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a first life!
When the student is ready, the master will appear
So we're going to get some DoJ PHB looking over the coder's shoulders, saying "Hrm, y'know, I really liked that paper clip thing. I turned him into a doggie and kept him jumping around all day long. He ever wrote all my memos for me. I-- I mean the DoJ-- really mandates that he be put back."
You just killed my cat, you insensitive clod.
- Schroedinger
Hey, you! Join DARPA!
That's a mighty nice service for your company to provide to their visitors.
Human? None of those at Microsoft.
Would that MP3 be Chocolate Rain?
- http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/member/faqs.aspx
Mozilla hasn't published the exact guidelines they were given, but there are some hints in their FAQ
And to address other posters who were mentioning the whole HTTP thing, it's in the rules, too:
It made me laugh. I'd share my +5 if I could. How about you just take half the karma bonus I got?
If a ball's thrown at 5km/h, and you run away from it at 5km/h, it won't hit you. Light always moves at the speed of light. It hits you at c if you stand still, and hits you at c if you run away from it. That's the theory of relativity.
If you can fall at a planet, but move forward fast enough so you'll keep missing it, you're in orbit.
You don't go to a URL anymore than you phone "Bob". You look up Bob's phone number and call that. DNS looks up an URL's number, and then you call than number.
The waves inside a microwave keep attracting, then repelling, water molecules. This makes them shake back and forth really fast. Moving molecules = heat. That's how your ramen gets hot.
Can we get Bruce Willis?
Very informative. And, for the record:
FTW. 100% FTW
Tell him that since you'll be sending out Enterprise Level Email (rather than the End User/Small Business Level Email you've been using so far), it'll require upgrading to Enterprise Level stamps. Tell him you'll need an assistant to help you lick those 10,000 stamps.
Plain Old Text, no ads:
For those of us who make our living behind a keyboard in IT, it's hard to imagine a more time-tested vulnerability than the end-user. Armed with network access, these IT viruses wreak havoc nearly everywhere you look -- havoc borne of tech idiocy.
Of course, not all computer users live to cause mayhem, sowing the seeds of destruction in our metaverse, merely by clicking every last Storm worm variant that appears in their inboxes. In fact, sometimes the worst offenses spring from our own ranks, hatched by individuals whose stated mission is to help technology work better: the IT admin.
For the most part, we IT folks toil away unsung in often miserable conditions just to make workplaces more efficient, secure, and supportive of end-user needs. But then, a few of us -- well, we can be caught doing some really dumb things.
So having kicked the user to the brain-dead curb in "Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories" and "More stupider user tricks: IT horror stories redux," it's only fair that we turn the spotlight inward to expose a few legendary IT brain farts committed by those who are paid to know better.
Preconfiguring PCs with stone-age malware
Incident: Toward the end of 2006, several high-profile consumer electronics companies -- both makers and retailers -- ended up with egg on their faces when reports surfaced that they were shipping to consumers devices infected with malware. Apple's Video iPod and several models of digital photo frames were found to be infecting the computers of unsuspecting users the first time they were plugged in. The risk associated with those infections was significant. In the end, however, the damage was limited.
A year later, though, that wasn't the case. In September 2007, German computer maker Medion announced that as many as 100,000 laptop computers sold through Aldi superstores in Germany and Denmark came preinstalled with Windows Vista, the Bullguard anti-virus program -- and a virus.
The case could have been devastating for the privacy or information security of anyone who bought one of the laptops. Modern malware, highly adept at stealing information such as bank account log-ins or credit card numbers, poses a real risk to consumers and companies alike.
Only, it wasn't, because the virus, Stoned.Angelina, dates back to 1994, a full year prior to the launch of Windows 95, let alone the advent of widespread Internet access or online commerce.
Thankfully, Stoned.Angelina isn't a particularly dangerous virus, at least not to anything more recent than DOS. It's a boot-sector virus that replicates itself by copying itself to floppy disks. Remember those? The Medion laptops didn't even have floppy drives.
Medion never said exactly how this historic malware relic ended up in the default image on so many laptops. In the case of the iPod and photo-frame infections, the malware came from an infected machine in the factory in China that assembled the final products and installed the software onto the devices' internal storage.
When you consider just how difficult it must be to load Stoned.Angelina onto a modern computer, you get a sense at how boneheaded the IT guy would need to be in order to infect a drive image used in tens of thousands of hard drives.
Fallout: With no way to spread and no effect whatsoever on Windows Vista, Stoned.Angelina took its toll mainly on Medion, making the company a laughingstock. The punch line: Even though the machine came preloaded with an anti-virus app, the anti-virus engine couldn't clean the system. Bullguard later released a repair program that cleaned out the boot sector, just in case you, someday, somehow, found a floppy drive that worked with the laptop and inserted a disk.
Moral: One, don't let the guy running an old copy of DOS on his computer build your drive images. And two, if you're going to deliberately infect thousands of computers, pick malware that's actually going to do something.
Oh, you wanted to recover those b
You're new around here, aren't you?
The "in progress" should be taken into consideration on a case-by-case method. If a company is legitimately in the process of producing their product, but are running into actual, provable and unavoidable delays, they should be able to get an extension to their patent.
But it MUST be a case-by-case, and not an overarching rule. That way if Drug Company X-opharm learns that their FDA approval tests will take 5 years, they can get an extension. They can easily prove this with their internal documentation, and maybe even a standard form letter from FDA ("Comany X-opharm submitted their request for approval on day xxx, and our review will begin on yyy, lasting zzz...").
On the same hand, if Patent Troll R'Us is just sitting on the Awesome-o-Phone, their patent will expire real quick. They won't be able to show that they're actually trying to develop it, won't have investors, won't have provable in-progress reports. Instead, they'll try to fire a shotgun of cowcrap hoping to bury the officer into submission. But the patent office will be used to dealing with streamlined "extension, plz" cases, and will know BS when they're buried in it. EXTENSION DENIED
Heck, I'm worried about something far more mundane than nukes and bio-engineering. All what it would take to set the US off on a parnoia-driven Rights-smashing fest is six guys with automatic weapons and a truck. Drive into the middle of a busy business district. Everyone hops out armed with a machine gun, lots of extra clips, and some Kevlar armor. Spread out and open fire. Follow the crowd into the buildings. Even if it takes 2 minutes for enough police to show up to take out the attackers, can you imagine the amount of death they'd cause? Throw in a bandoleer of hand grenades for each and they can cause significant structural damage to a few shops, too.
A few hundred Wall Street folks gunned down at noon? Tell me that wouldn't set the country off. And short of turning the entire area into a military protected check-point system, how would you stop it from happening? Or happening again? Or from their successors from driving out a rural city like Des Moines? Or to Las Vegas in the middle of the night?
Sell them for $1 each. Then buy 100 tacos for $100.
Play a tune on piano keys (sound off for more security).
Hell, combine music and color. Hook this bad boy up to a wireless Guitar Hero controller. Want in the house? Blast off a chorus from Jordan on Expert. (Be prepared to sleep on the lawn).
When doing some research for my Human-Computer Interface course, I came across a very useful tool for just this purpose:
Colour Contrast Analyser
It includes some tools that help make sure your fore and background colors are sufficiently contrasty, even on a monochrome or black and white screen, or to a colorblind viewer
Don't forget Mario Mario: The Recursive Door.
Well, that narrows it down to all of Utah...
I hope they put these kill switches on trains, too, because otherwise what would happed, god forbid, if someone were to ,crash a train into the White House?
Oh, I hear you on that. I've been trying to get him to learn for years now. Maybe if I rigged the system so that he had to pass a level of Touch Type before WoW loaded, I'd get him to actually learn. =)
Not sure, though it would seem counter-productive to use a projector if you're going to shrink the window to 19". Hehe.
That was definitely a criterion in the monitor purchase. I think he ended up with the BenQ FW222-WH with the HDMI and DVI inputs. Then we got him a ATI 9600 XT that has the dual DVI-outs. One goes off to the monitor, the other goes off to the receiver that all the other AV things are plugged into.