Very few movies I watch I feel are worth buying. But if I do decide it's worth it, I want full commercial DVD quality and often times buy the movie.
However the bits get onto the DVD (stamped at a factory and shrinkwrapped, or downloaded from somewhere and burned to disk), is irrelevent for what each person determines is worth keeping in their collection. It's probably very few people who do not buy a legitimate copy or make/obtain an illegal copy of a movie they truly enjoy. If you've gone through the effort of downloading off the net a movie you really like, you'll very likely burn it to DVD rather than delete it and have to download it again weeks or months later.
The rest is either rented and returned, or downloaded and deleted and for each person is a matter of personal preference whether to keep or not.
But in terms of broadband killing DVD, I think is like saying the car kills off the sale of shoes. Just because you don't need shoes to ride in a car, doesn't mean the sale of shoes will decline because of the availability of cars.
The only problem with doing away with CDs is the lack of quality....
at 2 bytes(16 bits) * 2 channels (stereo)* 44100 samples per second * an average 5 minute song, who wants to download a 53 Mb file for a single song? Nobody. So you get things equivalent to mp3 that compress it to a very poor quality that given a half decent stereo, sounds pretty awful.
I listen to MP3s if it's background noise. If I'm listening to the music for it's own sake, CD quality is barely acceptable.
In college a friend would frequently hook up a speaker to a function generator and ramp the frequency down from 25000 hz. I was always the first one to notice (and it was around 21000 hz). I notice the hissing and poor audio quality added to mp3s and the like due to the audio compression.
I will sorely miss CDs if and when they ever get killed unless it gets replaced by something better (uncompressed 48000 samples per second on DVD perhaps).
I don't mind subsidies to farmers who, beyond their control, can lose an entire crop due to drought or other such bad weather. There are many good reasons why subsidies should remain in place.
What I object to is to have hydro companies give million dollar raises to their executives and then add a 'debt retirement' charge to our bill. I don't like paying 5 or 10 cents more for CD media because someone decided I should pay for the illegal activities of someone else.
It's one thing to subsidize an industry, it's another to do the same because it's easier than to make the population more lawful.
What I also object to is to have a gov't who fails to realize the difference.
Canada just recinded a 3 or 4 year old blank cd media tax.
Up here, lobbyists pressured the gov't to tax blank CD media which would then be handed over to the music industry. Their reason: people will steal music no matter what, so let's just obfuscate the the music industry's perceived profits by making people pay for it one way or another.
A few years back ontario deregulated the hydro and within the first year, some people were paying 50 cents per kilowatthour (average is about 6 cents) and their hydro bills were astronomical at the peak of the summer. Later, the ontario gov't put a cap of 4.7 cents but the balance was paid for by our taxes. It was a kick in the balls and a pat on the head move and is not going to be the last.
Whatever happened to the days where companies stood or fell on their own terms, and not propped up by the handouts of some third party such as the gov't?
As a democracy, I say we all rise up and quell any further stupid shit that spews forth from our parliament/congress/whatever. I say we bring back the gillotine.
Maybe I'm just getting old (I'm only 36), but I'm not at all impressed with the crap that passes as music these days.
That stupid 'everybody needs a hero' that accompanied the ending credits of the spiderman movie a few years back is an example of some boyband wanna-be that has no talent making or singing. The first time I heard it, I wanted to rupture my eardrums with icepicks. They think it's cool to 'make music' by starting every bar with the same note. Where will that band be in 10 years?
Maybe the decline in CDs is not the fact that more people illegally download music but because there is less of a selection of good music worth buying. My CD collection now contains about 90% of music that's at least 10 years old (led zeppelin, queen, van halen, metallica, ozzy, aerosmith, etc). What I think is good stuff is something I find worth paying regular CD prices for.
I'm more inclined toward heavy metal for most of my listening, but depending on my mood, I'll go for all kinds even some easy listening stuff. For example, I find metallica's "call of ktulu" becomes repetitive, but the transitions between styles, the harmonies and other aspects to be very enjoyable. All the crap that's out nowadays sounds about the same on fast forward (you can't tell what part of the song you're at because it all sounds the same throughout the entire song, and the harmonies etc, suck).
Thanks for the numbers. That should fool the computers, but I doubt that would ever get past any criminal trying to use it.
There is no legitimate credit card to my knowledge that has that many repeating digits.
The whole point was to have these bad guys think they got away with getting 'my' credit card number, then when they go to use it somewhere, big flashing red lights drop from the ceiling and nasty sirens start blaring the instant the card is swiped.
Any sane (or perhaps insane) person would see that 54730000000000007 is suspect at best.
The only problem I see is that if I can clear certain attributes (writable, thus making it read only), or set certain permissions for certain users to not be able to write it, then a virus writer simply needs to find one of the many windows vulnerabilities that elevate their privileges, set the attribute flag to writable, change permissions if necessary then they can do their dirty work. Any steps I take to prevent them from doing that, they can undo.
Faking the web site on the local PC involves a web server and a copy of the website to be transmitted to each PC which is pretty hard to hide.
I was thinking it would be just simply easier for the bad guys to have web servers in a country where the legality is not quite so clearly defined and to protect themselves by simply moving their operation every day or so.
I think spammers/phishers deseerve a special place in hell. I got an email supposedly from first ebay then a different one from paypal and yet another from washington mutual bank(?) concerning my account information. Since I've never set up an account with any of these, I knew instantly it was a phishing scam.
Not only that but when I hover the mouse on the link, it shows the target URL at the bottom and resolved to a fixed IP address (e.g. http://219.44.99.123/ as an example. I just made this address up) rather than point to their respective DNS names.
So (this is the sick and sadistic part comes in), I figured I'd fill out their forms with my "personal" information which is entirely made up. Everything on the form was invented. The name, the address, everything, including the credit card number. After doing that, I sent a copy to abuse@ebay.com, etc.
On one occasion, I got a response email stating there was a problem with my credit card information and I needed to reenter it.
The probem here was that I use the first 4 legitimate digits for visa, but the other 12 digits were entirely fictional and the checksum digit did not match.
I've been toying with the idea of using a credit card number generator and getting past that specific problem, but what if the number that the cc generator picks happens to be a legitimate credit card number and some poor shmuck gets charged? I'm not quite that sadistic.
I wonder if my bank would be gracious enough to issue me a defunct credit card that I could use specifically for this purpose. Failing that, what we need is a list of banned credit card numbers, so when these scammers try to use them, there's a trail that leads the authorities right to their door to haul them away and give them what they deserve.
The way I see it, they took the time to write me for my information which they'd use to screw me, and the least I should do is to return the favor and give them just enough to make them think they got away with it but in fact they expose themselves to getting caught.
Suppose through spyware/malware/trojans/virus/whatever, a virus writer were to scan your web browser history, find out what bank in particular you visit, then simply modify the local HOSTS file buried under the system32 directory to point to a specific IP address.
They could then design a login page that doesn't even have to be encrypted (I'm sure most people wouldn't bother to notice) which mimics the real bank's login page. They give one or two "failed" login attempts before redirecting the browser to the real site.
Instead of hijacking dns in some weird way, it simply instructs the local computer to resolve certain DNS entries to something defined locally. After the user thinks they got their password wrong, the phisher's web server redirects the user to the real bank's login page.
This would be something that is entirely possible (virus spread by active x, email, whatnot) and monitors the web browser history for recent activity for a list of known banks, and once that user does their online banking, spoofs the local machine to go elsewhere for subsequent banking. The user doesn't know what happened, and in the meantime types in their banking information that would reveal bank accounts, etc.
Once successfully mined, the bad guys might send an 'abort' sequence to remove all evidence of what happened and move on to the next guy, thus making it hard to track what really happened. Since that entry would be removed from the HOSTS file when that happens, most people would assume they got a string of bad luck for a few login attempts and all seems to be well again (only it's not, since that personal information is now made not quite so personal anymore).
Just suppose this virus created keeps a low enough profile for long enough, even having a firewall antispyware and virus scanner might not help you out.And DNS wildcards are totally sidestepped.
I hear they're working on their next generation of bloatware.... Hopefully when it finally does come out, intel and AMD will have quad core processors.
Twice the bloat and a quarter the performance for the same cost. That's why you'd want longhorn. You'll feel like you got penetrated by a long horn.
If the entire fs is turned into a database by using indexes, what exactly is indexed? The file names only?
While it might make searching for your files reasonably fast, what extra advantage is there? You can't really index the contents of the files themselves, that would require as much if not more disk storage for the index than for the contents of the files themselves.
So if it's only indexing the names of the files, would the benefit of constantly maintaining the hash tables for all them files and dragging the entire system down just a tiny bit for every file create outweigh the benefit of the faster searches? Is it necessary to include temporary web browser cache files in that index? Would microsoft even bother to allow the browser to turn off the indexing for the temporary cache? What if you're browsing the net and the multitude of tiny little files created in the cache slows your web surfing experience down just 1%? If my web surfing ratio is 100x that of searching for files, then that 1% slowdown just to maintain the index files can add up to the extra time spent on the occasion I search for files on the harddrive.
I'm not so sure this is a feature that has any realistic benefit.
Maybe they realized they bit off far too much more than they could chew with longhorn and so they're trying to backport any new features that would be in the next one by putting it into XP?
As I understand it, winfs is some fancy way of turning the entire file system into a database, is that right? The idea being that you can simply do some SQL query like request to find out what you want? I'd like to know why? what is the point? Is it because it's supposed to support indexing and to speed up searches? How will that index be maintained and what kind of nightmare will it be to keep it up to date? What's the overhead to the index tables in terms of disk space and access times? If there are no indexes, what does it matter if the data is stored in separate files or carved in soap or some form of database data file?
Is it possible they're losing face with the long delays in longhorn and the lack of "innovative features" so they're trying to make themselves look better by throwing these token features into XP?
Cell phones (particularly digital phones) operate at the gigahertz range. Microwaves are a natural frequency to travel through space with minimal loss or interference (one reason why seti@home looks at those frequencies). So do microwave ovens. The reason why microwaves work is because the energy they pump into the microwave get absorbed into and excite the water molecules, producing heat. My 600 watt microwave takes 2 minutes to heat up a cup of water to the boiling point, and that's in a space designed to trap and to preserve the entire microwave energy. A cell phone peaks at about 4 watts and radiates the energy in every direction, most of it not to return to the operator of that phone and if it all did, would take probably 5 hours to heat that same cup of water. Given that the average human body contains many many many more cups of water than what I put in my microwave, any extra heat produced by 4 watts of microwave energy is easily transformed and radiated away from the skin.
In order to damage DNA it usually requires far more energy as it means breaking the molecular bonds. UV-B on up to XRays for example have sufficient engery to penetrate the skin with the energy required to break those molecular bonds. UV-A is not sufficient to cause skin cancer, but UB-B is. If the entire electromagnetic spectrum is sufficient to cause cancer, we might as well live in a lead box, because we'd all be F**KED before we even got to puberty and the entire gene pool would be done for in a single generation.
Although I can't dismiss the possibility of microwaves giving someone cancer, it's far more likely to do nothing more than give you that warm fuzzy feeling of having one.
To say violent video games are the direct cause of increased violence and aggression is as bad saying there's no correlation or causality of any kind.
From the start of recorded history there were people with enough violent tendencies to commit murder. Since then, we have strived to become better and more civilized. 100 years ago, children were "taught" to respect their elders and to be nice.
I see the pot smoking hippies as parents as the the first openly outward sign that our society has begun to crumble. Now in 2005, the divorce rate is what? well beyond 50%? many single family homes and those homes that still have both parents are now dual income and parents are just simply too busy to raise a child, so the child rearing is deferred to television and the computer.
The kids today no longer have the threat of god looming over their heads and are being raised so permissively it's a wonder things aren't worse than they already are.
To make matters worse, there's the runtime clock and the CMOS clock. Both are technically independent of each other (on boot up the OS will reset the runtime clock to the CMOS clock, but after that they are independent).
The drift of the CMOS clock will certainly be different than that of the runtime clock.
This is not really much of a problem for people who turn off their computers every day when they don't use it because any drift from the OS run clock will be reset to that of the CMOS, but for someone like myself who leaves it on 24/7, the drift can get be pretty bad and different on both.
That's why I use an NTP utility to keep it accurate and once a week, the OS updates the CMOS clock whether it needs it or not.
paterson - has 'rights' to code, sues evans and time warner
Maybe jerry springer can do a show on frivolous lawsuits. I'd like to see the CEOs of each of the involved parties throw chairs at each other and punch each other silly.
I wonder if they'd get any brain damage. I wonder if some of them even have enough brains to get brain damage.
Then maury could do a show on CEOs that got brain damaged during a staged tv talk show.
At any event this is all (lawsuits included) about as productive as monkeys flinging feces at each other.
What we need is to have some kind of spam bot loaded on enough computers, when someone gets a spam they feed it through this bot that forwards a copy to microsoft preserving the original email header. When microsoft investigates (and if they get enough spam they will), those spams will hopefully track back to the originating IP addresses and they'll have enough clout to stick it to the spammers.
I wonder if I should start spamming people to buy vaseline, just so they're prepared for something large and painful where the sun don't shine.
Defendant:.....But your honor, my machine was infected with spam relay spyware. I removed it but it just keeps coming back.
Judge: Oh, so it wasn't your fault then? Case dismissed
narrator: If life were like that you wouldn't need lawyers.
Ridiculing a really bad OS: windows For everything else: linux
Seriously, I don't know if it's just me, but when I sit down at a windows computer and get the itch to do something I have a hard time figuring out all them pointy-clicky steps and I can feel my brain vibrating trying to figure it out.
With linux which is where I've spent *MOST* of my time on the computer in the past 10 years, I instinctively seek out an xterm and type in the command to start said app. I like a lean mean WM and *STILL* use the original FVWM even now with KDE and Gnome out there as good as they are. The left mouse button brings up a floater menu a-la-start button in windows and I could easily strip it down to about 10 or 15 commonly used apps. The rest I type in manually as I see fit.
For example since I've been using tcsh for so long, it's second nature and if I want to play a quick round of freecell, I find a spare xterm and just type in "freecell". With auto-completion, it's pretty damn fast. In windows you need to make the conscious decision that if it hasn't been played recently enough, it won't show up on 'recently run' apps and you have to go hunt for it in the games menu or somewhere else. I've configure linux in such a way that I always launch an app the same way and after a while it becomes automatic. I could be just as happy daydreaming about all them pretty girls and somewhere, somehow my brain has automagically opened up freecell for me and I have to make the decision to actually play the game or exit and continue to daydream. I'm not used to that with windows and it makes my brain hurt just thinking about the steps needed to do anything.
Take away some people's IDE and they're pretty much useless. Me I have an xterm to compile and run the app I'm developing via some shell scripts, and I use emacs for editing. No fancy IDE to show me the inter-relationships between classes, etc. I need to find something, I make sure my TAGS file is up to date and then I do a tags-search.
If you do something enough, sooner or later you'll reach a productive plateau and any more or less beyond that will be at the whim of the environment you work in. It's hard to remain productive on say win98 when months go by after the OS install and apps get installed/deleted and suddenly you get a spool32 error and can't print which forces you to deal with that issue.
Given that windows has a tendency to defacate on itself, sooner or later something just 'simply stops working' or 'grinds to a crawl'. I can't remember a single instance where linux has hosed itself for no good reason or any reason at all other than my messing with it. As such, my productivity is dependent on my motivation, not the motivation of the OS.
Asking someone to define what makes them more productive is so subjective it's about as useful as asking what their favorite colour is. At best it can be classified as trivia.
It's odd how every time a 'linux is on the edge of total destruction' article appears, it tends to come from a source that shuns it.
I went to the downloads section and they have windows/mac/mobile sections.
Could it be that ZDNet is about as interested in linux as microsoft is in making a better product for the sake of making a better product regardless of their development cost?
My long time instinct is to say that ZDNet is so tightly focused on microsoft and mac they're pretty much against anything not 'mainstream'.
Also, if there is 'no question' as to linux patent violations, why did the judge in the SCO v.s. IBM case stop short of directly accusing SCO of a dog and pony show and dismissing SCOs charges?
Am I missing something, or is this another helping of FUD meant to feed the uninformed?
Instead of simply sending out request after request for a web page, never to be seen, what if someone wrote a screensaver that distributed lists of spam site web pages that contained forms and each screensaver would issue POSTs with bogus data?
The result is not a DDoS attack but it would bury the spammers in a mountain of bogus requests for information/product etc that they'd have to sift through to get the legit ones.
A computer's time is nothing.... A person's time is a huge deal. THAT would discourage the spammers a lot more effectively than this fiasco.
I think a better way to make spammers stop is not to waste their bandwidth with pseudo web page requests just to waste their bandwidth but to have a computer program scan your email, grab all the URL links found within, webcrawl those URLS looking for forms.
Once it has a list of web sites with target forms, it then allows you to pick any one of those web pages from the list, start your web browser configuring it to use the anti-spammer program as its proxy, let you fill in the form with bogus information and associate fields with a selection of possible responses, then until you tell it to stop will send out a post with that information or other similar information at random intervals.
This has the benefit of:
1) Since it takes user intervention to set up a sample form and that it is a response to a web form and that it would stop if the web site in question returns with an error code it could be argued it's not strictly a DoS attack 2) Gives the spamming victim some return satisfaction knowing that the spammer is him/herself now being spammed with bogus information in reponse to spam they sent out 3) Buries the "legitimate" responses to their spam in a mountain of bogus responses. 4) Keeps control of attacks in the hands of the user of this software, not the authors of the software keeping some arbitrary list of sites to attack 5) every so often if possible, post a legitimate fbi email address or other security type address in the hopes of enticing the spammer to spam them. If you're in the business of tracking down fraud or other questionable activity and someone comes up to you and tries to defraud you, you're not gonna just roll over.
Slashdot Mirror
Very few movies I watch I feel are worth buying. But if I do decide it's worth it, I want full commercial DVD quality and often times buy the movie.
However the bits get onto the DVD (stamped at a factory and shrinkwrapped, or downloaded from somewhere and burned to disk), is irrelevent for what each person determines is worth keeping in their collection. It's probably very few people who do not buy a legitimate copy or make/obtain an illegal copy of a movie they truly enjoy. If you've gone through the effort of downloading off the net a movie you really like, you'll very likely burn it to DVD rather than delete it and have to download it again weeks or months later.
The rest is either rented and returned, or downloaded and deleted and for each person is a matter of personal preference whether to keep or not.
But in terms of broadband killing DVD, I think is like saying the car kills off the sale of shoes. Just because you don't need shoes to ride in a car, doesn't mean the sale of shoes will decline because of the availability of cars.
The only problem with doing away with CDs is the lack of quality....
at 2 bytes(16 bits) * 2 channels (stereo)* 44100 samples per second * an average 5 minute song, who wants to download a 53 Mb file for a single song? Nobody. So you get things equivalent to mp3 that compress it to a very poor quality that given a half decent stereo, sounds pretty awful.
I listen to MP3s if it's background noise. If I'm listening to the music for it's own sake, CD quality is barely acceptable.
In college a friend would frequently hook up a speaker to a function generator and ramp the frequency down from 25000 hz. I was always the first one to notice (and it was around 21000 hz). I notice the hissing and poor audio quality added to mp3s and the like due to the audio compression.
I will sorely miss CDs if and when they ever get killed unless it gets replaced by something better (uncompressed 48000 samples per second on DVD perhaps).
I thought they got rid of the levy.....
Oh well, seeing as how I'm still paying for music anyway, I guess I might as well start downloading.
I don't mind subsidies to farmers who, beyond their control, can lose an entire crop due to drought or other such bad weather. There are many good reasons why subsidies should remain in place.
What I object to is to have hydro companies give million dollar raises to their executives and then add a 'debt retirement' charge to our bill. I don't like paying 5 or 10 cents more for CD media because someone decided I should pay for the illegal activities of someone else.
It's one thing to subsidize an industry, it's another to do the same because it's easier than to make the population more lawful.
What I also object to is to have a gov't who fails to realize the difference.
Canada just recinded a 3 or 4 year old blank cd media tax.
Up here, lobbyists pressured the gov't to tax blank CD media which would then be handed over to the music industry. Their reason: people will steal music no matter what, so let's just obfuscate the the music industry's perceived profits by making people pay for it one way or another.
A few years back ontario deregulated the hydro and within the first year, some people were paying 50 cents per kilowatthour (average is about 6 cents) and their hydro bills were astronomical at the peak of the summer. Later, the ontario gov't put a cap of 4.7 cents but the balance was paid for by our taxes. It was a kick in the balls and a pat on the head move and is not going to be the last.
Whatever happened to the days where companies stood or fell on their own terms, and not propped up by the handouts of some third party such as the gov't?
As a democracy, I say we all rise up and quell any further stupid shit that spews forth from our parliament/congress/whatever. I say we bring back the gillotine.
Maybe I'm just getting old (I'm only 36), but I'm not at all impressed with the crap that passes as music these days.
That stupid 'everybody needs a hero' that accompanied the ending credits of the spiderman movie a few years back is an example of some boyband wanna-be that has no talent making or singing. The first time I heard it, I wanted to rupture my eardrums with icepicks. They think it's cool to 'make music' by starting every bar with the same note. Where will that band be in 10 years?
Maybe the decline in CDs is not the fact that more people illegally download music but because there is less of a selection of good music worth buying. My CD collection now contains about 90% of music that's at least 10 years old (led zeppelin, queen, van halen, metallica, ozzy, aerosmith, etc). What I think is good stuff is something I find worth paying regular CD prices for.
I'm more inclined toward heavy metal for most of my listening, but depending on my mood, I'll go for all kinds even some easy listening stuff. For example, I find metallica's "call of ktulu" becomes repetitive, but the transitions between styles, the harmonies and other aspects to be very enjoyable. All the crap that's out nowadays sounds about the same on fast forward (you can't tell what part of the song you're at because it all sounds the same throughout the entire song, and the harmonies etc, suck).
Thanks for the numbers. That should fool the computers, but I doubt that would ever get past any criminal trying to use it.
There is no legitimate credit card to my knowledge that has that many repeating digits.
The whole point was to have these bad guys think they got away with getting 'my' credit card number, then when they go to use it somewhere, big flashing red lights drop from the ceiling and nasty sirens start blaring the instant the card is swiped.
Any sane (or perhaps insane) person would see that 54730000000000007 is suspect at best.
The only problem I see is that if I can clear certain attributes (writable, thus making it read only), or set certain permissions for certain users to not be able to write it, then a virus writer simply needs to find one of the many windows vulnerabilities that elevate their privileges, set the attribute flag to writable, change permissions if necessary then they can do their dirty work. Any steps I take to prevent them from doing that, they can undo.
Faking the web site on the local PC involves a web server and a copy of the website to be transmitted to each PC which is pretty hard to hide.
I was thinking it would be just simply easier for the bad guys to have web servers in a country where the legality is not quite so clearly defined and to protect themselves by simply moving their operation every day or so.
I think spammers/phishers deseerve a special place in hell. I got an email supposedly from first ebay then a different one from paypal and yet another from washington mutual bank(?) concerning my account information. Since I've never set up an account with any of these, I knew instantly it was a phishing scam.
Not only that but when I hover the mouse on the link, it shows the target URL at the bottom and resolved to a fixed IP address (e.g. http://219.44.99.123/ as an example. I just made this address up) rather than point to their respective DNS names.
So (this is the sick and sadistic part comes in), I figured I'd fill out their forms with my "personal" information which is entirely made up. Everything on the form was invented. The name, the address, everything, including the credit card number. After doing that, I sent a copy to abuse@ebay.com, etc.
On one occasion, I got a response email stating there was a problem with my credit card information and I needed to reenter it.
The probem here was that I use the first 4 legitimate digits for visa, but the other 12 digits were entirely fictional and the checksum digit did not match.
I've been toying with the idea of using a credit card number generator and getting past that specific problem, but what if the number that the cc generator picks happens to be a legitimate credit card number and some poor shmuck gets charged? I'm not quite that sadistic.
I wonder if my bank would be gracious enough to issue me a defunct credit card that I could use specifically for this purpose. Failing that, what we need is a list of banned credit card numbers, so when these scammers try to use them, there's a trail that leads the authorities right to their door to haul them away and give them what they deserve.
The way I see it, they took the time to write me for my information which they'd use to screw me, and the least I should do is to return the favor and give them just enough to make them think they got away with it but in fact they expose themselves to getting caught.
Suppose through spyware/malware/trojans/virus/whatever, a virus writer were to scan your web browser history, find out what bank in particular you visit, then simply modify the local HOSTS file buried under the system32 directory to point to a specific IP address.
They could then design a login page that doesn't even have to be encrypted (I'm sure most people wouldn't bother to notice) which mimics the real bank's login page. They give one or two "failed" login attempts before redirecting the browser to the real site.
Instead of hijacking dns in some weird way, it simply instructs the local computer to resolve certain DNS entries to something defined locally. After the user thinks they got their password wrong, the phisher's web server redirects the user to the real bank's login page.
This would be something that is entirely possible (virus spread by active x, email, whatnot) and monitors the web browser history for recent activity for a list of known banks, and once that user does their online banking, spoofs the local machine to go elsewhere for subsequent banking. The user doesn't know what happened, and in the meantime types in their banking information that would reveal bank accounts, etc.
Once successfully mined, the bad guys might send an 'abort' sequence to remove all evidence of what happened and move on to the next guy, thus making it hard to track what really happened. Since that entry would be removed from the HOSTS file when that happens, most people would assume they got a string of bad luck for a few login attempts and all seems to be well again (only it's not, since that personal information is now made not quite so personal anymore).
Just suppose this virus created keeps a low enough profile for long enough, even having a firewall antispyware and virus scanner might not help you out.And DNS wildcards are totally sidestepped.
I hear they're working on their next generation of bloatware.... Hopefully when it finally does come out, intel and AMD will have quad core processors.
Twice the bloat and a quarter the performance for the same cost. That's why you'd want longhorn. You'll feel like you got penetrated by a long horn.
If the entire fs is turned into a database by using indexes, what exactly is indexed? The file names only?
While it might make searching for your files reasonably fast, what extra advantage is there? You can't really index the contents of the files themselves, that would require as much if not more disk storage for the index than for the contents of the files themselves.
So if it's only indexing the names of the files, would the benefit of constantly maintaining the hash tables for all them files and dragging the entire system down just a tiny bit for every file create outweigh the benefit of the faster searches? Is it necessary to include temporary web browser cache files in that index? Would microsoft even bother to allow the browser to turn off the indexing for the temporary cache? What if you're browsing the net and the multitude of tiny little files created in the cache slows your web surfing experience down just 1%? If my web surfing ratio is 100x that of searching for files, then that 1% slowdown just to maintain the index files can add up to the extra time spent on the occasion I search for files on the harddrive.
I'm not so sure this is a feature that has any realistic benefit.
Maybe they realized they bit off far too much more than they could chew with longhorn and so they're trying to backport any new features that would be in the next one by putting it into XP?
As I understand it, winfs is some fancy way of turning the entire file system into a database, is that right? The idea being that you can simply do some SQL query like request to find out what you want? I'd like to know why? what is the point? Is it because it's supposed to support indexing and to speed up searches? How will that index be maintained and what kind of nightmare will it be to keep it up to date? What's the overhead to the index tables in terms of disk space and access times? If there are no indexes, what does it matter if the data is stored in separate files or carved in soap or some form of database data file?
Is it possible they're losing face with the long delays in longhorn and the lack of "innovative features" so they're trying to make themselves look better by throwing these token features into XP?
Let's be realistic about this.
Cell phones (particularly digital phones) operate at the gigahertz range. Microwaves are a natural frequency to travel through space with minimal loss or interference (one reason why seti@home looks at those frequencies). So do microwave ovens. The reason why microwaves work is because the energy they pump into the microwave get absorbed into and excite the water molecules, producing heat. My 600 watt microwave takes 2 minutes to heat up a cup of water to the boiling point, and that's in a space designed to trap and to preserve the entire microwave energy. A cell phone peaks at about 4 watts and radiates the energy in every direction, most of it not to return to the operator of that phone and if it all did, would take probably 5 hours to heat that same cup of water. Given that the average human body contains many many many more cups of water than what I put in my microwave, any extra heat produced by 4 watts of microwave energy is easily transformed and radiated away from the skin.
In order to damage DNA it usually requires far more energy as it means breaking the molecular bonds. UV-B on up to XRays for example have sufficient engery to penetrate the skin with the energy required to break those molecular bonds. UV-A is not sufficient to cause skin cancer, but UB-B is. If the entire electromagnetic spectrum is sufficient to cause cancer, we might as well live in a lead box, because we'd all be F**KED before we even got to puberty and the entire gene pool would be done for in a single generation.
Although I can't dismiss the possibility of microwaves giving someone cancer, it's far more likely to do nothing more than give you that warm fuzzy feeling of having one.
To say violent video games are the direct cause of increased violence and aggression is as bad saying there's no correlation or causality of any kind.
From the start of recorded history there were people with enough violent tendencies to commit murder. Since then, we have strived to become better and more civilized. 100 years ago, children were "taught" to respect their elders and to be nice.
I see the pot smoking hippies as parents as the the first openly outward sign that our society has begun to crumble. Now in 2005, the divorce rate is what? well beyond 50%? many single family homes and those homes that still have both parents are now dual income and parents are just simply too busy to raise a child, so the child rearing is deferred to television and the computer.
The kids today no longer have the threat of god looming over their heads and are being raised so permissively it's a wonder things aren't worse than they already are.
To make matters worse, there's the runtime clock and the CMOS clock. Both are technically independent of each other (on boot up the OS will reset the runtime clock to the CMOS clock, but after that they are independent).
The drift of the CMOS clock will certainly be different than that of the runtime clock.
This is not really much of a problem for people who turn off their computers every day when they don't use it because any drift from the OS run clock will be reset to that of the CMOS, but for someone like myself who leaves it on 24/7, the drift can get be pretty bad and different on both.
That's why I use an NTP utility to keep it accurate and once a week, the OS updates the CMOS clock whether it needs it or not.
.....the RSA is using the time-stamp feature to determine how fast and how often people download porn
mcbride - has 'rights' to code, sues IBM
paterson - has 'rights' to code, sues evans and time warner
Maybe jerry springer can do a show on frivolous lawsuits. I'd like to see the CEOs of each of the involved parties throw chairs at each other and punch each other silly.
I wonder if they'd get any brain damage. I wonder if some of them even have enough brains to get brain damage.
Then maury could do a show on CEOs that got brain damaged during a staged tv talk show.
At any event this is all (lawsuits included) about as productive as monkeys flinging feces at each other.
What we need is to have some kind of spam bot loaded on enough computers, when someone gets a spam they feed it through this bot that forwards a copy to microsoft preserving the original email header. When microsoft investigates (and if they get enough spam they will), those spams will hopefully track back to the originating IP addresses and they'll have enough clout to stick it to the spammers.
.....But your honor, my machine was infected with spam relay spyware. I removed it but it just keeps coming back.
I wonder if I should start spamming people to buy vaseline, just so they're prepared for something large and painful where the sun don't shine.
Defendant:
Judge: Oh, so it wasn't your fault then? Case dismissed
narrator: If life were like that you wouldn't need lawyers.
Ridiculing a really bad OS: windows
For everything else: linux
Seriously, I don't know if it's just me, but when I sit down at a windows computer and get the itch to do something I have a hard time figuring out all them pointy-clicky steps and I can feel my brain vibrating trying to figure it out.
With linux which is where I've spent *MOST* of my time on the computer in the past 10 years, I instinctively seek out an xterm and type in the command to start said app. I like a lean mean WM and *STILL* use the original FVWM even now with KDE and Gnome out there as good as they are. The left mouse button brings up a floater menu a-la-start button in windows and I could easily strip it down to about 10 or 15 commonly used apps. The rest I type in manually as I see fit.
For example since I've been using tcsh for so long, it's second nature and if I want to play a quick round of freecell, I find a spare xterm and just type in "freecell". With auto-completion, it's pretty damn fast. In windows you need to make the conscious decision that if it hasn't been played recently enough, it won't show up on 'recently run' apps and you have to go hunt for it in the games menu or somewhere else. I've configure linux in such a way that I always launch an app the same way and after a while it becomes automatic. I could be just as happy daydreaming about all them pretty girls and somewhere, somehow my brain has automagically opened up freecell for me and I have to make the decision to actually play the game or exit and continue to daydream. I'm not used to that with windows and it makes my brain hurt just thinking about the steps needed to do anything.
Take away some people's IDE and they're pretty much useless. Me I have an xterm to compile and run the app I'm developing via some shell scripts, and I use emacs for editing. No fancy IDE to show me the inter-relationships between classes, etc. I need to find something, I make sure my TAGS file is up to date and then I do a tags-search.
If you do something enough, sooner or later you'll reach a productive plateau and any more or less beyond that will be at the whim of the environment you work in. It's hard to remain productive on say win98 when months go by after the OS install and apps get installed/deleted and suddenly you get a spool32 error and can't print which forces you to deal with that issue.
Given that windows has a tendency to defacate on itself, sooner or later something just 'simply stops working' or 'grinds to a crawl'. I can't remember a single instance where linux has hosed itself for no good reason or any reason at all other than my messing with it. As such, my productivity is dependent on my motivation, not the motivation of the OS.
Asking someone to define what makes them more productive is so subjective it's about as useful as asking what their favorite colour is. At best it can be classified as trivia.
It's odd how every time a 'linux is on the edge of total destruction' article appears, it tends to come from a source that shuns it. I went to the downloads section and they have windows/mac/mobile sections. Could it be that ZDNet is about as interested in linux as microsoft is in making a better product for the sake of making a better product regardless of their development cost? My long time instinct is to say that ZDNet is so tightly focused on microsoft and mac they're pretty much against anything not 'mainstream'. Also, if there is 'no question' as to linux patent violations, why did the judge in the SCO v.s. IBM case stop short of directly accusing SCO of a dog and pony show and dismissing SCOs charges? Am I missing something, or is this another helping of FUD meant to feed the uninformed?
Instead of simply sending out request after request for a web page, never to be seen, what if someone wrote a screensaver that distributed lists of spam site web pages that contained forms and each screensaver would issue POSTs with bogus data? The result is not a DDoS attack but it would bury the spammers in a mountain of bogus requests for information/product etc that they'd have to sift through to get the legit ones. A computer's time is nothing.... A person's time is a huge deal. THAT would discourage the spammers a lot more effectively than this fiasco.
I think a better way to make spammers stop is not to waste their bandwidth with pseudo web page requests just to waste their bandwidth but to have a computer program scan your email, grab all the URL links found within, webcrawl those URLS looking for forms.
Once it has a list of web sites with target forms, it then allows you to pick any one of those web pages from the list, start your web browser configuring it to use the anti-spammer program as its proxy, let you fill in the form with bogus information and associate fields with a selection of possible responses, then until you tell it to stop will send out a post with that information or other similar information at random intervals.
This has the benefit of:
1) Since it takes user intervention to set up a sample form and that it is a response to a web form and that it would stop if the web site in question returns with an error code it could be argued it's not strictly a DoS attack
2) Gives the spamming victim some return satisfaction knowing that the spammer is him/herself now being spammed with bogus information in reponse to spam they sent out
3) Buries the "legitimate" responses to their spam in a mountain of bogus responses.
4) Keeps control of attacks in the hands of the user of this software, not the authors of the software keeping some arbitrary list of sites to attack
5) every so often if possible, post a legitimate fbi email address or other security type address in the hopes of enticing the spammer to spam them. If you're in the business of tracking down fraud or other questionable activity and someone comes up to you and tries to defraud you, you're not gonna just roll over.