They say the FCC doesn't have the right, but they won't stop it because the "wrong people" brought the suit? AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!
If the court would just have stopped the imposition of the July deadline we could at least have found the right people to bring this suit. As is, I'm afraid that once "broadcast flag enabled" hardware goes on sale it will be hard to change.
If you look on the Microsoft Genuine Advantage site, the focus isn't nerds stealing single copies; would you validate your Windows if you were the one that hacked it? It's the chop shops and small sellers that are cheating their customers by loading illegal copies of MS software but still charging the user as if it's legal. A non-techie consumer that got ripped off was the victim of a crime by the business that sold them the computer and misrepresented the installed software.
PHP is seductive because it does let relatively inexperienced users generate dynamic content without too much of a learning curve. But from the description you give I think you are part of a very small minority of PHP developers at the other end of the spectrum.
My own PHP experience is more like this. Perhaps that's because I had come from Perl, and as this comparison makes clear the two certainly don't have the same ideas about how builtin functions should be designed.
As it evolves, PHP isn't solving the higher-level problems. It is merely reinventing functions, object models, and syntax. Zend's focus on things that real users don't care about may reflect that as well.
For example, PHP makes it trivially easy to insert dynamic content here and there into a page. If you want to separate business logic from presentation, which is almost manditory on a large site, you will want some sort of templating package. You will have to write your own. This is a common need, why shouldn't the core language address it? Because they are too busy reinventing object oriented programming?
"total capacity for RAID 0, 50% of total capacity for RAID 0+1, 75% of total capacity for RAID 5, 50% of total capacity for RAID 5+spare"
So their 2TB setup is more like 1 or 1.5TB if you want any kind of data safety. It also must be using the bleeding-edge Hitachi 500GB drives, which haven't proven themselves yet--I don't think they're even shipping.
"Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?"
Why not look and see which right is guaranteed by the Constitution? Hmmm, nothing about trade secrets there, but I do see something about free speech and freedom of the press in the First Amendment. So I would pick door number two.
Verisign charges $400 for a code signing certificate. It doesn't appear they do anywhere near $400 worth of work at the moment. Even if it's true that catching scam names in advance is hard, revoking them should be easy. The "Click YES to continue" cert is still valid, and I can assure you that Verisign is quite aware of it.
My name is Roomba I live on the second floor I live upstairs from you Yes I think you've heard me before If you track in a lot of mud, Accumulate debris, dust or crud Please don't call me anymore.
They are not disabling a feature. They are discontinuing a service. The software on your drive, bit for bit, is the same as before. However, if you try to connect to Quicken the program will not be able to access the BillPay service.
How is this any different from Microsoft withdrawing Windows Update for older versions of Windows? At some point it becomes uneconomical to support people with years-old versions of the product.
Identity theft was ALL offline 10 years ago. So are we supposed to ignore the phishing problem until it reaches 50 percent? The rate of growth in the crime is no doubt much higher online, the same way that the growth in Internet ecommerce was much higher the past holiday season.
Plus, there are some sorts of identity theft that really only make sense online, such as eBay and PayPal scams.
Take a look at FindSpot for another example of click fraud. This site is taking AdWords copy and making it look like search engine output. When someone clicks on it, FindSpots launders the click through a redirect and the advertiser pays. At least that is what happened with our AdWords ad.
Windows 9x apps could drop files anywhere they pleased, and they did: the Windows directories, app directories, the root of the drive, you name it. Windows NT/2K/XP solved this issue with the "Documents and Settings" area, and that's supposed to be where apps put their temp files, logs, databases, and other data. But most 2000 and XP systems loosen security to make old apps work. (How could apps write.INI files in the Windows directory otherwise?)
Since old apps don't break, developers are tempted to follow bad examples or old habits. It seems like the only way this would change is if Microsoft shipped XP as secure by default--the default user would not be an admin, and NTFS security was set to prevent writes to Program and Windows dirs. That would cause a massive support headache.
The Windows Installer docs have some guidelines on where things should go for best compatiblity, but of course a lot of people use other installers and those may not try to enforce any rules. This doesn't seem to be an issue that Microsoft is crusading about, but maybe they should.
Try that in the IT department of WalMart. You'd be booted back to Dogpatch USA when they found out you blocked all the Chinese domains, cutting them off from every one of their suppliers!
Yes, there is already a well-tested priority scheme for this, driven by money. If you want a good table at the Vegas show, tip the guy 20 bucks at the door. So perhaps this will motivate the ISPs to provide tiered pricing, so that users who don't need 10ms ping--probably 80 percent of their users--won't have to pay for it. I sure know I don't want to pay more for lower ping times, I don't play online games and I'm happy with the performance as it is.
Every adware/spyware company complains about their competitors. Each company always claims they are legitimate and that users love their software. It's always the "other guy" that is a sleazeball and giving the "contextual advertising" business a bad name.
Windows has all the message plumbing in place to deal with power failures. It was originally put there to handle notebooks and their batteries going dead, but the plumbing is used by some UPS software hooked up via USB or serial port. There's even a UPS service and a Control Panel applet where you can configure settings. Apps even have a way to receive notifications about power changes via WM_POWERBROADCAST.
I would really like to see PC makers take advantage of this plumbing by including some sort of emergency battery (a big-ass capacitor might even do) in the power supply that would provide enough power for an orderly shutdown, no more than a minute or so.
Warez yes, but pr0n not really. At least, not a pay pr0n site or a free site whose goal is to convert you to a paying customer. They already have a business model, selling you durty pictyers. You're more likely to see spyware in a P2P download that claims to be the full version of Adobe Photoshop.
That's because Intel still acts as if the world will wait for it to deliver innovations at the pace that maximizes Intel revenue.
I have to agree with Intel that 64-bit desktops don't make a lot of sense right now. I would prefer systems that are quiet enough to be in the same room with a TV, for example. Still, this is Intel getting some of its own medicine. It didn't make sense to compare processors strictly by MHz alone, but Intel was happy to do that as long it was to their advantage. That's where I see AMD now, basically pushing the 64-bit advantage hard because it makes marketing sense.
I've found that lyrics sites are very common offenders. Just Google some lyrics from a popular singer and you will quickly find an infinitesourceofspywareandadware. Now, they have ads for many different ineffective spyware removers on those sites as well, so they are doing their best to screw their visitors twice.
You already have one that fits, why not just fix it? The chokes and transformer are unlikely to have gone bad. That leaves a few switching transistors, resistors, and caps. My bet would be on some of the caps going bad, there was a scandal a while back about them.
If a non-root user runs an exe file they get from P2P, a web site, or email, it can be saved in a directory where the user (not root) has execute permission. It can be automatically launched in several ways on user login such as a Startup folder shortcut. The spyware can run in the background and monitor or report the user's activity. So tell me how lack of root/admin prevents spyware?
Look, it's one thing to be a guru of a programmer when you spend 18 straight hours a day doing nothing but programming. It's another to run a business, meet with clients to sell them things, manage staff, handle budgets, AND write code in your "spare time". Even a good programmer who's got to handle a variety of business chores might be beat by a mediocre programmer who spends all day doing it.
I actually recall that Gates did a PR programming stunt to promote Basic years ago...ah, here's a link:
What was the funniest experience you've ever had related to programming?
I almost beat Bill Gates in a programming contest. Back in 1985, several high-tech editors and writers were invited up to Redmond by Microsoft's PR firm to participate in a "Storm the Gates" contest. Each of us could choose our own programming language, and Bill would use BASICA. Someone had written up several programming challenges on little quarter-sheets of paper and folded them up in a fishbowl. One of the PR women pulled a sheet from the bowl, copied it out for each of us on a copier, and we were off and running to implement the little programming problem the sheet described. It was an idiotic spec, including stuff like drawing concentric circles.
When she said "Go!" we all got to work. It was a total snap in Turbo Pascal 3.0-except that we had to read a character from the keyboard buffer "on the fly" rather than wait for it, and although I knew Turbo Pascal could do that, I also knew that it took an INT call, and I couldn't recall the details. Pascal, for the most part, doesn't work that way. So although I finished everything else first, I couldn't crack that one.
The punch line, of course, is that there's a standard function in BASICA that could do just that-in fact, there were standard functions in BASICA for every part of the challenge spec. So Gates merrily cranked along, stringing together standard functions in BASICA, and finished the spec before everybody else, though Charles Petzold got real close...in text mode! (Charles faked the concentric circles by displaying various characters at the same screen position, including a degree symbol, lower-case O, and upper case O.)
It was funny in part because the specs were cooked to match the capabilities of BASICA-and doubly funny because none of us saw it coming. It was triply funny because Bill Gates obviously didn't especially enjoy the effort-clearly his PR staff had cooked up the stunt and twisted his arm to participate. He didn't stop to hang out with us much, and looked miserable throughout, even though he'd won. Now, recall that that was before Microsoft went public, and Gates was far from the world's richest man. But it was great fun to finally understand that somebody had made him do something he didn't really want to do. I wonder sometimes if that was the last time it ever happened.
Not to make excuses for it; basically, your average worm or spyware program will be able to propagate and do bad things as a Limited User, but it won't be able to persist on the system. Reboot and it will be gone.
Newer spyware and viruses work just fine as limited users. Remember that their job isn't usually to take over or destroy the system, it's to monitor users and/or send mail. They don't need to be root to do that. Even as limited users they can install in an XP user's Application Data directory and start themselves at boot time by something as simple as a Startup folder entry.
In the past two elections, we've seen the effect of having states use a "winner take all" approach. The candidates wear out the highways in the swing states like Ohio but completely ignore states where they either have a lock or know they have absolutely no chance.
If states went to making their electors proportional to the popular vote in the state, all states would be "in play" and candidates couldn't take any state for granted. This is something each state can do without federal approval or interference. Colorado has a referendum to do this in November. Maine and Nebraska already do.
Here's where third party candidates come in. Lets say that you get a situation where it's nearly split between two candidates, with a small number of electoral votes to candidates like Nader and Badnarik. Those electors are not committed by law to their candidates (barring state law that says otherwise), and could swing to one of the likely victors in return for various concessions such as policy changes.
This would have the potential to eliminate the headlock the two major parties have on the process. Now every person's vote could have a lot more weight, even a Republican in New York or a Democrat in Wyoming. Voting for a third party candidate wouldn't be "throwing away your vote" because they could bargain with the major candidates to get concessions.
Slashdot Mirror
They say the FCC doesn't have the right, but they won't stop it because the "wrong people" brought the suit? AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!
If the court would just have stopped the imposition of the July deadline we could at least have found the right people to bring this suit. As is, I'm afraid that once "broadcast flag enabled" hardware goes on sale it will be hard to change.
If you look on the Microsoft Genuine Advantage site, the focus isn't nerds stealing single copies; would you validate your Windows if you were the one that hacked it? It's the chop shops and small sellers that are cheating their customers by loading illegal copies of MS software but still charging the user as if it's legal. A non-techie consumer that got ripped off was the victim of a crime by the business that sold them the computer and misrepresented the installed software.
PHP is seductive because it does let relatively inexperienced users generate dynamic content without too much of a learning curve. But from the description you give I think you are part of a very small minority of PHP developers at the other end of the spectrum.
My own PHP experience is more like this. Perhaps that's because I had come from Perl, and as this comparison makes clear the two certainly don't have the same ideas about how builtin functions should be designed.
As it evolves, PHP isn't solving the higher-level problems. It is merely reinventing functions, object models, and syntax. Zend's focus on things that real users don't care about may reflect that as well.
For example, PHP makes it trivially easy to insert dynamic content here and there into a page. If you want to separate business logic from presentation, which is almost manditory on a large site, you will want some sort of templating package. You will have to write your own. This is a common need, why shouldn't the core language address it? Because they are too busy reinventing object oriented programming?
From the LaCie site:
"total capacity for RAID 0, 50% of total capacity for RAID 0+1, 75% of total capacity for RAID 5, 50% of total capacity for RAID 5+spare"
So their 2TB setup is more like 1 or 1.5TB if you want any kind of data safety. It also must be using the bleeding-edge Hitachi 500GB drives, which haven't proven themselves yet--I don't think they're even shipping.
"Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?"
Why not look and see which right is guaranteed by the Constitution? Hmmm, nothing about trade secrets there, but I do see something about free speech and freedom of the press in the First Amendment. So I would pick door number two.
Verisign charges $400 for a code signing certificate. It doesn't appear they do anywhere near $400 worth of work at the moment. Even if it's true that catching scam names in advance is hard, revoking them should be easy. The "Click YES to continue" cert is still valid, and I can assure you that Verisign is quite aware of it.
Google for "Quicktime Alternative".
With apologies to Suzanne Vega...
My name is Roomba
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you've heard me before
If you track in a lot of mud,
Accumulate debris, dust or crud
Please don't call me anymore.
"...purposefully disabling features..."
They are not disabling a feature. They are discontinuing a service. The software on your drive, bit for bit, is the same as before. However, if you try to connect to Quicken the program will not be able to access the BillPay service.
How is this any different from Microsoft withdrawing Windows Update for older versions of Windows? At some point it becomes uneconomical to support people with years-old versions of the product.
Identity theft was ALL offline 10 years ago. So are we supposed to ignore the phishing problem until it reaches 50 percent? The rate of growth in the crime is no doubt much higher online, the same way that the growth in Internet ecommerce was much higher the past holiday season.
Plus, there are some sorts of identity theft that really only make sense online, such as eBay and PayPal scams.
Take a look at FindSpot for another example of click fraud. This site is taking AdWords copy and making it look like search engine output. When someone clicks on it, FindSpots launders the click through a redirect and the advertiser pays. At least that is what happened with our AdWords ad.
Windows 9x apps could drop files anywhere they pleased, and they did: the Windows directories, app directories, the root of the drive, you name it. Windows NT/2K/XP solved this issue with the "Documents and Settings" area, and that's supposed to be where apps put their temp files, logs, databases, and other data. But most 2000 and XP systems loosen security to make old apps work. (How could apps write .INI files in the Windows directory otherwise?)
Since old apps don't break, developers are tempted to follow bad examples or old habits. It seems like the only way this would change is if Microsoft shipped XP as secure by default--the default user would not be an admin, and NTFS security was set to prevent writes to Program and Windows dirs. That would cause a massive support headache.
The Windows Installer docs have some guidelines on where things should go for best compatiblity, but of course a lot of people use other installers and those may not try to enforce any rules. This doesn't seem to be an issue that Microsoft is crusading about, but maybe they should.
Try that in the IT department of WalMart. You'd be booted back to Dogpatch USA when they found out you blocked all the Chinese domains, cutting them off from every one of their suppliers!
Yes, there is already a well-tested priority scheme for this, driven by money. If you want a good table at the Vegas show, tip the guy 20 bucks at the door. So perhaps this will motivate the ISPs to provide tiered pricing, so that users who don't need 10ms ping--probably 80 percent of their users--won't have to pay for it. I sure know I don't want to pay more for lower ping times, I don't play online games and I'm happy with the performance as it is.
Every adware/spyware company complains about their competitors. Each company always claims they are legitimate and that users love their software. It's always the "other guy" that is a sleazeball and giving the "contextual advertising" business a bad name.
Windows has all the message plumbing in place to deal with power failures. It was originally put there to handle notebooks and their batteries going dead, but the plumbing is used by some UPS software hooked up via USB or serial port. There's even a UPS service and a Control Panel applet where you can configure settings. Apps even have a way to receive notifications about power changes via WM_POWERBROADCAST.
I would really like to see PC makers take advantage of this plumbing by including some sort of emergency battery (a big-ass capacitor might even do) in the power supply that would provide enough power for an orderly shutdown, no more than a minute or so.
Warez yes, but pr0n not really. At least, not a pay pr0n site or a free site whose goal is to convert you to a paying customer. They already have a business model, selling you durty pictyers. You're more likely to see spyware in a P2P download that claims to be the full version of Adobe Photoshop.
That's because Intel still acts as if the world will wait for it to deliver innovations at the pace that maximizes Intel revenue.
I have to agree with Intel that 64-bit desktops don't make a lot of sense right now. I would prefer systems that are quiet enough to be in the same room with a TV, for example. Still, this is Intel getting some of its own medicine. It didn't make sense to compare processors strictly by MHz alone, but Intel was happy to do that as long it was to their advantage. That's where I see AMD now, basically pushing the 64-bit advantage hard because it makes marketing sense.
I've found that lyrics sites are very common offenders. Just Google some lyrics from a popular singer and you will quickly find an infinite source of spyware and adware. Now, they have ads for many different ineffective spyware removers on those sites as well, so they are doing their best to screw their visitors twice.
You already have one that fits, why not just fix it? The chokes and transformer are unlikely to have gone bad. That leaves a few switching transistors, resistors, and caps. My bet would be on some of the caps going bad, there was a scandal a while back about them.
If a non-root user runs an exe file they get from P2P, a web site, or email, it can be saved in a directory where the user (not root) has execute permission. It can be automatically launched in several ways on user login such as a Startup folder shortcut. The spyware can run in the background and monitor or report the user's activity. So tell me how lack of root/admin prevents spyware?
Show me your proof that "in most cases the user has 'agreed' to allow these programs to run." I can certainly find proof to the contrary.
Take a look at these screen shots of the Bearshare install that includes WhenU and tell me it is reasonable to expect a user to press page-down 45 times to read the license.
Users are not aware they are running WhenU because the company works hard to keep them ignorant.
I actually recall that Gates did a PR programming stunt to promote Basic years ago...ah, here's a link:
Not to make excuses for it; basically, your average worm or spyware program will be able to propagate and do bad things as a Limited User, but it won't be able to persist on the system. Reboot and it will be gone.
Newer spyware and viruses work just fine as limited users. Remember that their job isn't usually to take over or destroy the system, it's to monitor users and/or send mail. They don't need to be root to do that. Even as limited users they can install in an XP user's Application Data directory and start themselves at boot time by something as simple as a Startup folder entry.
In the past two elections, we've seen the effect of having states use a "winner take all" approach. The candidates wear out the highways in the swing states like Ohio but completely ignore states where they either have a lock or know they have absolutely no chance.
If states went to making their electors proportional to the popular vote in the state, all states would be "in play" and candidates couldn't take any state for granted. This is something each state can do without federal approval or interference. Colorado has a referendum to do this in November. Maine and Nebraska already do.
Here's where third party candidates come in. Lets say that you get a situation where it's nearly split between two candidates, with a small number of electoral votes to candidates like Nader and Badnarik. Those electors are not committed by law to their candidates (barring state law that says otherwise), and could swing to one of the likely victors in return for various concessions such as policy changes.
This would have the potential to eliminate the headlock the two major parties have on the process. Now every person's vote could have a lot more weight, even a Republican in New York or a Democrat in Wyoming. Voting for a third party candidate wouldn't be "throwing away your vote" because they could bargain with the major candidates to get concessions.
BTW, good info on the Electoral College and reforms.