and where do you think the "recovered" money comes from? afaict it is generally from the retailers who were deceived into accepting the fraudulant payments. To cover those costs retailers have to raise their prices and possiblly even get out of certain lines of buisness altogether or implement onerous restrictions on their legitimate customers (why do you think it's often a PITA to get stuff delivered to anywhere other than your main residence where your card is registered? because there is less risk for the merchant that way").
In any case, it's an example of "shoot first, ask questions later"
And that is one of the big problems with the way the internet has been developing in recently years. People are becoming ever more reliant on services that they don't pay for (and hence don't have any contract with) and which only manage to be financially viable by having virtually no human contact with their users. In particular they are using them as major "communication identities" in their lives.
Or they may still have an early wrist strap. The initial wiimote wrist straps were clearly based on a camera wrist strap and the cord that attaches the strap to the wiimote was not strong enough to provide protection against accidental throwing. A second generation of wrist strap with a much thicker attatchment cord was produced and Nintendo offered a replacement program but many people may not be aware of it.
There now seems to be a third version of the wrist strap which in addition to the thicker attatchement cord has a lever to lock the strap aduster (presumablly to reduce the risk of the strap slipping off).
Why? What use it that? Current desktop systems will suffice, plan for three years of use. Why do you NEED to know what else is coming?
I'd say it's more about knowing what is going away. Over the life of an installation you are likely to need to add or replace some systems and you want to be sure of having something appropriate to replace them with?.
First it was the xserve, now it's the macbook and the optical drive in the mini. Can you really reccomend apple knowing that the products you have built your system arround could either be dropped completely or have important features dropped at any time with little warning?
Afaict the silicon processes that make good high speed logic do not make good EEprom/flash and vice-versa. So high end processors and FPGAs tend to have little to no programable areas on the chip and rely on reading their code from a seperate device.
Most current images probably do not have the resolution for that; but give it a year or two.
My understanding is that while megapixel counts are still increasing those extra megapixels are generally wasted because the optics aren't up to capturing any more information and sensors with smaller pixels are also noisier.
The problem I see with deniable encryption is that while they can't prove there is more to see you can't prove that there isn't. So if they think the keys you have given them are decoys they will just keep tortuting you until you either reveal further keys or die.
The problem with that idea IMO is that not all HDTVs make decent monitors*, some do but other than asking for the model number and hoping someone has done a decent review of it I don't see any way to determine that in advance. Also even if the TV did make a reasonable monitor wouldn't using two monitors of radially differen DPI be really weird?
* to be a decent monitor a device must be able to do a 1:1 mapping of incoming pixels to displayed pixels without imposing any noticable blurring.
Unreal Tournament: length of a single "game" is less than ten minutes
A round may be less than 10 minuites (though IIRC other than assault all the rounds in the "tournament" are limited by score not time) playing through the "tournament" takes a LOT longer than that.
And besides, how would you have known, 20 years ago, that FAT and UFS would still be in-force? Maybe you thought some other OS was going to survive in the long-haul. Okay, well it didn't, nothing else knows the filesystem, and even if it ran on x86, your ancient OS doesn't have USB support
As long as you can get it to run in some sort of emulator the lack of USB support probablly doesn't matter much since your emulator can take the USB drive (or an image of it) and present it to the guest OS as an IDE or SCSI device.
But in general you are right, while hard drives have fared better than most removable media there is still a need to keep on top of your backups if you want to keep them viable over a period of decades. Keeping on top of them involves both checking for failed copies to maintain redundancy and checking if migrations are needed due to obsolete hardware or software.
For offline archival I would avoid raid, it's just another thing to potentially go wrong when you try and hook the drives back up and retrieve the data.
To protect against corruption and drive failures either just keep multiple copies and checksums so you can tell which copy is good (simpler but less efficient in terms of the protection you get relative to the storage space you use) or use something like parchive. Maybe combine the two with two sets of drives in different locations holding the data and then parchive in case the same drive becomes failed/corrupt in both sets.
Whatever you do with offline hard drives make sure you do tests once in a while. so you can see when drives are failed/failing and replace them before the situation becomes critical. You should also keep an eye out for drives using obsolete interfaces and migrate the data to more modern drives.
KISS should be your guiding principle. If you can't retrive your data with nothing more than the raw drives, a standard PC, a linux livecd and common FOSS tools then you are doing it wrong.
I thought it was mostly Windows XP without some SP's with also do not support activation and thus have no IE7 or IE8.
Retail and system builder (small OEM) copies of XP require activation
volume license versions of XP don't require activation
Big brand OEM versions of XP don't require activation if appropriate BIOS keys are present but will demand activation if those BIOS keys are not present.
All of the above applies regardless of service pack. What did change in XP's lifecycle was that MS introduced key blacklisting and WGA to try and root out those that were using volume license versions with leaked or generated keys. The easiest way for a pirate to minimise the risk that their customers run afoul of this stuff is to disable automatic updates.
APNIC doesn't have any more IPv4 addresses to give them.
Web browsing isn't really a concern since it gets along fine with NAT. The applications that need to be concerned about IPv4 exhaustion are those that rely on accepting incoming connections from the internet on domestic connections (primerally P2P networks).
It is the equilivent of turning down Windows XP for Windows 3.0 when it was new. That would have been ludcrious. Today, this is common sense and mainstream. Is it the recession?
No IMO it's a sign of maturity.
In the decade leading up to 2K we got plug and play (which made it much easier for users to add hardware), USB (which relied on plug and play), a proper kernel (with premptive multitasking memory protection and security), the taskbar which made it easy to see what was running and switch between them. 2K was where all these important features came together in a single release. XP was a minor update to 2K which added a crippled version for home users and a few other bits and peices.
While yes there have been improvements since then there aren't any that I see as being anywhere near as fundamentaly important to the user experiance as those mentioned above. Further due to the long delay and then flop of vista many of the new features that did come out in the decade after it's release got backported.
Installing a pirate version of windows has never been hard (you could integrate the key with XP too). The problem is keeping it up to date without the risk of running into WGA and/or activation. So while machines sold with legitimate windows strongly encourage (in the first run setup) users to turn on automatic updates machines sold with pirate windows (which probablly won't bother with the first run setup) are likely to have them disabled.
Fees for using using the 3G as a hotspot (tethering): this is a fee your CARRIER imposes and has nothing to do with the phone (or its jailbrokenness).
AIUI most phones prior to the iphone just allowed tethering (at least when running their generic firmware rather than a carrier customised version). The iphone didn't allow it at all initially and then later only allowed it if the carrier explicitly enabled it (which afaict some did for free, some charged for and some didn't do at all).
Contributions to a project like linux can be divided into two main sets.
1: Contributions that improve the quality of the project as a whole 2: Contributions that add a niche feature that the contributor wants.
The second type of contribution needs to be treated with great care if a project is to remain maintainable. Afaict the large number of changesets were caused not because MS was trying to contribute a lot but because MS was made to put a lot of effort into cleaning up their code before it was considered acceptable for merging.
If you don't reply you are letting their BS stand where innocent people might believe it and be harmed by it. If you do reply then you are giving them a reaction they want.
The way to deal with posters like this on a forum is to either delete them or lock them with an explanation from a mod that they are bullshit and if the poster is persistent attempt to apply a ban (though bans are generally difficult to enforce on the internet). However/. for whatever reason doesn't do that, posts can be modded up and down by users with mod points but that is a far cry from what mods on most forums can do.
Any high speed interplanetary connection is going to either have to put up with occasional data loss (how occasional can be influenced to some extent by forward error correction but that comes at a price in bandwidth and still doesn't really provide a soloution for block outages) or have lots of storage for retransmissions.
TCP is not appropriate, it was designed to deal with connections of relatively low latency and unknown bandwidth by slow-starting. On a high latency connection of known bandwidth that is just plain stupid. Also with such high ping times keeping the retransmit data in a ram buffer rather than on cheaper disk or flash is also crazy.
Afaict we have 10 gigabit (maybe more now) through a single optical transciver and we can combine multiple such links on a single fiber through WDM and a typical cable contains many fibers.
The big issue with end user connections is not technical it's financial, upgrading all the connections to end users is very expensive and most users probablly aren't prepared to pay all that much more for a faster connection. So the incentive for providers to upgrade is low. Further any sensible last mile communications provider knows that the longer they hold off upgrading the better the technology they upgrade to will be.
The thing with Ethernet is it has been built on gradual change and a high degree of backwards compatibility. Yes the majority of links on a modern network are likely to be full duplex (no CSMA/CD needed) and run a 100 megabit or more. However current switches still support 10BASE-T links with CSMA/CD and therefore can still be linked to old Ethernet gear with nothing more than a transceiver (for gear with an AUI port) or media converter/hub (for gear with a built in 10BASE2 transceiver)
BTW you have to be careful about forcing full duplex modes because forcing a mode often disables autonegotion. So if you force 10 megabit full duplex on your computer and connect it to an unmanaged switch (or a managed switch in autonegotiation mode) you are very likely to end up with a duplex mismatch (since in the absense of autonegotiation information the unamanged switch will assume half duplex)
Duplex mismatches in ethernet result in a line that sorta works but with appalling performance.
Slashdot Mirror
and where do you think the "recovered" money comes from? afaict it is generally from the retailers who were deceived into accepting the fraudulant payments. To cover those costs retailers have to raise their prices and possiblly even get out of certain lines of buisness altogether or implement onerous restrictions on their legitimate customers (why do you think it's often a PITA to get stuff delivered to anywhere other than your main residence where your card is registered? because there is less risk for the merchant that way").
In any case, it's an example of "shoot first, ask questions later"
And that is one of the big problems with the way the internet has been developing in recently years. People are becoming ever more reliant on services that they don't pay for (and hence don't have any contract with) and which only manage to be financially viable by having virtually no human contact with their users. In particular they are using them as major "communication identities" in their lives.
tend to forget to attach the wrist strap.
Or they may still have an early wrist strap. The initial wiimote wrist straps were clearly based on a camera wrist strap and the cord that attaches the strap to the wiimote was not strong enough to provide protection against accidental throwing. A second generation of wrist strap with a much thicker attatchment cord was produced and Nintendo offered a replacement program but many people may not be aware of it.
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/strapreplace.jsp
There now seems to be a third version of the wrist strap which in addition to the thicker attatchement cord has a lever to lock the strap aduster (presumablly to reduce the risk of the strap slipping off).
If losing contact causes a train to disappear from the control display then the system is broken by design.
Why? What use it that? Current desktop systems will suffice, plan for three years of use. Why do you NEED to know what else is coming?
I'd say it's more about knowing what is going away. Over the life of an installation you are likely to need to add or replace some systems and you want to be sure of having something appropriate to replace them with?.
First it was the xserve, now it's the macbook and the optical drive in the mini. Can you really reccomend apple knowing that the products you have built your system arround could either be dropped completely or have important features dropped at any time with little warning?
Afaict the silicon processes that make good high speed logic do not make good EEprom/flash and vice-versa. So high end processors and FPGAs tend to have little to no programable areas on the chip and rely on reading their code from a seperate device.
Most current images probably do not have the resolution for that; but give it a year or two.
My understanding is that while megapixel counts are still increasing those extra megapixels are generally wasted because the optics aren't up to capturing any more information and sensors with smaller pixels are also noisier.
The problem I see with deniable encryption is that while they can't prove there is more to see you can't prove that there isn't. So if they think the keys you have given them are decoys they will just keep tortuting you until you either reveal further keys or die.
It really all depends on the device that you want the serial port for. Some get on fine with USB to serial converters, others don't.
The problem with that idea IMO is that not all HDTVs make decent monitors*, some do but other than asking for the model number and hoping someone has done a decent review of it I don't see any way to determine that in advance. Also even if the TV did make a reasonable monitor wouldn't using two monitors of radially differen DPI be really weird?
* to be a decent monitor a device must be able to do a 1:1 mapping of incoming pixels to displayed pixels without imposing any noticable blurring.
Unreal Tournament: length of a single "game" is less than ten minutes
A round may be less than 10 minuites (though IIRC other than assault all the rounds in the "tournament" are limited by score not time) playing through the "tournament" takes a LOT longer than that.
And besides, how would you have known, 20 years ago, that FAT and UFS would still be in-force? Maybe you thought some other OS was going to survive in the long-haul. Okay, well it didn't, nothing else knows the filesystem, and even if it ran on x86, your ancient OS doesn't have USB support
As long as you can get it to run in some sort of emulator the lack of USB support probablly doesn't matter much since your emulator can take the USB drive (or an image of it) and present it to the guest OS as an IDE or SCSI device.
But in general you are right, while hard drives have fared better than most removable media there is still a need to keep on top of your backups if you want to keep them viable over a period of decades. Keeping on top of them involves both checking for failed copies to maintain redundancy and checking if migrations are needed due to obsolete hardware or software.
For offline archival I would avoid raid, it's just another thing to potentially go wrong when you try and hook the drives back up and retrieve the data.
To protect against corruption and drive failures either just keep multiple copies and checksums so you can tell which copy is good (simpler but less efficient in terms of the protection you get relative to the storage space you use) or use something like parchive. Maybe combine the two with two sets of drives in different locations holding the data and then parchive in case the same drive becomes failed/corrupt in both sets.
Whatever you do with offline hard drives make sure you do tests once in a while. so you can see when drives are failed/failing and replace them before the situation becomes critical. You should also keep an eye out for drives using obsolete interfaces and migrate the data to more modern drives.
KISS should be your guiding principle. If you can't retrive your data with nothing more than the raw drives, a standard PC, a linux livecd and common FOSS tools then you are doing it wrong.
I thought it was mostly Windows XP without some SP's with also do not support activation and thus have no IE7 or IE8.
Retail and system builder (small OEM) copies of XP require activation
volume license versions of XP don't require activation
Big brand OEM versions of XP don't require activation if appropriate BIOS keys are present but will demand activation if those BIOS keys are not present.
All of the above applies regardless of service pack. What did change in XP's lifecycle was that MS introduced key blacklisting and WGA to try and root out those that were using volume license versions with leaked or generated keys. The easiest way for a pirate to minimise the risk that their customers run afoul of this stuff is to disable automatic updates.
since IE6 is the one major browser left that doesn't support the new protocol.
MS claims otherwise
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2007/02/20/ipv6-uris-in-ie7.aspx
"Additionally, I should mention that although support for IPv6 URIs is new to IE7 and not available in IE6, IE6 does support DNS names backed by IPv6 addresses."
APNIC doesn't have any more IPv4 addresses to give them.
Web browsing isn't really a concern since it gets along fine with NAT. The applications that need to be concerned about IPv4 exhaustion are those that rely on accepting incoming connections from the internet on domestic connections (primerally P2P networks).
It is the equilivent of turning down Windows XP for Windows 3.0 when it was new. That would have been ludcrious. Today, this is common sense and mainstream. Is it the recession?
No IMO it's a sign of maturity.
In the decade leading up to 2K we got plug and play (which made it much easier for users to add hardware), USB (which relied on plug and play), a proper kernel (with premptive multitasking memory protection and security), the taskbar which made it easy to see what was running and switch between them. 2K was where all these important features came together in a single release. XP was a minor update to 2K which added a crippled version for home users and a few other bits and peices.
While yes there have been improvements since then there aren't any that I see as being anywhere near as fundamentaly important to the user experiance as those mentioned above. Further due to the long delay and then flop of vista many of the new features that did come out in the decade after it's release got backported.
Installing a pirate version of windows has never been hard (you could integrate the key with XP too). The problem is keeping it up to date without the risk of running into WGA and/or activation. So while machines sold with legitimate windows strongly encourage (in the first run setup) users to turn on automatic updates machines sold with pirate windows (which probablly won't bother with the first run setup) are likely to have them disabled.
Fees for using using the 3G as a hotspot (tethering): this is a fee your CARRIER imposes and has nothing to do with the phone (or its jailbrokenness).
AIUI most phones prior to the iphone just allowed tethering (at least when running their generic firmware rather than a carrier customised version). The iphone didn't allow it at all initially and then later only allowed it if the carrier explicitly enabled it (which afaict some did for free, some charged for and some didn't do at all).
Contributions to a project like linux can be divided into two main sets.
1: Contributions that improve the quality of the project as a whole
2: Contributions that add a niche feature that the contributor wants.
The second type of contribution needs to be treated with great care if a project is to remain maintainable. Afaict the large number of changesets were caused not because MS was trying to contribute a lot but because MS was made to put a lot of effort into cleaning up their code before it was considered acceptable for merging.
If you don't reply you are letting their BS stand where innocent people might believe it and be harmed by it. If you do reply then you are giving them a reaction they want.
The way to deal with posters like this on a forum is to either delete them or lock them with an explanation from a mod that they are bullshit and if the poster is persistent attempt to apply a ban (though bans are generally difficult to enforce on the internet). However /. for whatever reason doesn't do that, posts can be modded up and down by users with mod points but that is a far cry from what mods on most forums can do.
Any high speed interplanetary connection is going to either have to put up with occasional data loss (how occasional can be influenced to some extent by forward error correction but that comes at a price in bandwidth and still doesn't really provide a soloution for block outages) or have lots of storage for retransmissions.
TCP is not appropriate, it was designed to deal with connections of relatively low latency and unknown bandwidth by slow-starting. On a high latency connection of known bandwidth that is just plain stupid. Also with such high ping times keeping the retransmit data in a ram buffer rather than on cheaper disk or flash is also crazy.
Afaict we have 10 gigabit (maybe more now) through a single optical transciver and we can combine multiple such links on a single fiber through WDM and a typical cable contains many fibers.
The big issue with end user connections is not technical it's financial, upgrading all the connections to end users is very expensive and most users probablly aren't prepared to pay all that much more for a faster connection. So the incentive for providers to upgrade is low. Further any sensible last mile communications provider knows that the longer they hold off upgrading the better the technology they upgrade to will be.
The thing with Ethernet is it has been built on gradual change and a high degree of backwards compatibility. Yes the majority of links on a modern network are likely to be full duplex (no CSMA/CD needed) and run a 100 megabit or more. However current switches still support 10BASE-T links with CSMA/CD and therefore can still be linked to old Ethernet gear with nothing more than a transceiver (for gear with an AUI port) or media converter/hub (for gear with a built in 10BASE2 transceiver)
BTW you have to be careful about forcing full duplex modes because forcing a mode often disables autonegotion. So if you force 10 megabit full duplex on your computer and connect it to an unmanaged switch (or a managed switch in autonegotiation mode) you are very likely to end up with a duplex mismatch (since in the absense of autonegotiation information the unamanged switch will assume half duplex)
Duplex mismatches in ethernet result in a line that sorta works but with appalling performance.
However PATA is easy to find on expansion cards while floppy interface cards seem almost nonexistant.