While details are hard to come by I think this may run deeper than pdf.
The whole idea of "opening a file in a way determined by the OS for that type of file" is poor from a security point of view. Opening a file can mean anything from viewing an image in an image viewer (safe unless there is a bug in the image viewer) through opening something like an office document (may or may not be safe depending on office security settings) though to running an executable (unsafe by design).
On windows afaict the normal way to open a file or to load a url in the default browser is to pass the name of the file to "shellexecute" but that api has no provisions for checking if the file in question is dangerous.
Sadly i'm not sure there are any better alternatives so for now we seem stuck with papering over the cracks with warning dialogs.
These are the people who don't care if they are disqualified from driving, don't pay fines and have (recent example) over 50 prior drink driving convictions!! Ultimately the only way to deal with people like that is to remove them from society and lock them up.
The cluster guys won't be impacted much more than they were already by sony removing the feature from new models since those machines probablly aren't ever booted into the game OS anyway. So the only way it will impact them is they will no longer be able to buy secondhand fat PS3s and add them to thier cluster (but I doubt those kinds of users buy much secodhand anyway).
The people this will impact most are those who use the machine both as a computer and as a games console (firmware updates are forced if you want to use playstation network or play newer games)
That statementt is half true and rather misleading. IE (at least IE6) supported 256 color pngs with a transparent color (e.g. what you will get when you convert your gifs to pngs).
It didn't support alpha channel transparency and I don't think it supported truecolor pngs with a single transparent color but unless you count some dirty hacks with gif (that didn't work very well and I don't think I ever saw in practice) it didn't support either of those things with any other format either.
we should be seeing planes take-off and landing My understanding is that many airliners now have autoland systems because they can land in conditions where a human can't.
Afaict we still have pilots on our planes for a few reasons 1: noone wants to be the person being investigated over the first crash of an automated plane. 2: there are things human pilots can do that the computers can't. E.G. landing visually on a runway with no infrastructure (or in a pinch landing anywhere that looks flat enough). 3: (related to 2) computers are good at following plans and rules but not so good at making difficult descisions. What should a computer do if the plane is in a state where no suitable airports are reachable. 4: ATC still uses voice as it's primary means of communication (and voice recognition and natural language interpretation on computers still isn't good enough to rely on).
Which is why we have a problem. Mozilla refuse to support h.264 because they cannot license it in a way that they believe is compatible with opensouce principles. Apple and nokia (maybe others too) refuse to implement theora claiming it's a submarine patent risk (personally I suspect the real reason is they have a vested interest in h.264).
The HTML 5 guys have no real power to fix this impasse since there is no law or contract requiring anyone to follow thier standard. All they can do is document the fact that the browser vendors couldn't agree and leave websites with the choice of either encoding everything twice or only supporting a subset of users.
If you dont believe that this is true, then explain why so many notebooks and netbooks are sold with SSD's in them, right now. Are they? Netbooks intially shipped with tiny slow SSDs but virtually every one on the market now has a hard drive. As for full sized laptops hardly any of them come with SSDs.
As far as normal people having office.. umm.. no.. normal people do not have office. Normal people have Word. Maybe this varies with location but I don't think i've ever seen a standalone copy of word (I have seen "works suite" on occasion which had word but not the rest of office but only as an OEM bundle). People either have whatever shit was bundled with their machine, have office or have openoffice. Of course some of them may only use the word processor part of it...
We shall see how this pans out but I still think a vendor who ships a machine with a drive this small is setting themselves up for a world of hurt when customers see their brand new machine (with win7, office trial, antvirus trial and all the other stuff in a standard OEM image) is already over half full.
That one was more a methodology issue than a fraud issue. Energy star only set standards for when the TV was in regular standby and when it was running, not for when it was "in standby but trying to update the EPG and so the tuner is on". Furthermore it turned out that some TVs could spend a LOT of time in this state.
Well the article claims that they just accept the manufacturers test data. It's fine for a certification agency to accept testing from trusted labs but they should still be both inspecting/testing those labs procedures AND verifying that results really come from the lab they claim to come from. If they don't it renders the agencies badges far less trustworthy.
Pretty well afaict, afaict there are far more enemies dying than there are people dying on our side.
The real problem in iraq was not winning the war itself, it's dealing with the mess left behind afterwards. That costs more lives than many of us westerners are willing to stomach for a war we see as having little direct affect on us (but still not very many compared to other wars).
I remember in GTA4 you could just smash through the barrier and not pay the toll. Of course doing so would set the cops on you but a one star is easy enough to lose.
mmm, the GTA 3 gen games did that too though perhaps not to such an extreme extent. It was really annoying when you were looking for particular car models for side missions.
Encryption is of limited utility if you aren't sure who your encrypted session is with. Since manual key exchange has practical problems browsers went for the
Unfortunately the major browser vendors have put WAY too many CAs on the trust list meaning that pretty much any significant governement in the world can ask/order someone to generate them a cert for any domain. Some criminals probablly can too.
IMO the proper way to do it would be to have a chain of trust system as part of DNS so the only people who can vouch for you are the operators of the registry containing your domain. I think dnssec may be trying to do this but it will have an uphill battle to replace the current broken system.
True, OTOH we brits at least get a lot of american and austrilian TV (a lot of soaps seem to be australian, not sure why) so we learn the little americanisms pretty easilly. Is it not like that in other english speaking countries?
True, the modern GTA games are very different from the old ones though. The 3D GTA games are focused arround completing missions that tell a story, afaict while there were missions in the 2D GTA games there was no concept of completing a story (the levels were won by scoring sufficiant points)
Indeed, they are damned if they do damned if they don't. Any game that people want to play (that means the player must to some extent at least succeed in the storyline and people must be able to replay failed missions) and that is set with the player as a criminal gang member will be seen as glorifying gang life.
But its not extra cost Bullshit have you looked at the price of drives arround the 320-500GB mark (which seems to be what you mostly see in off the shelf PCs at the moment), it's less than $50
Plus I think 40GB is a bit on the small side even for basic users, how big is an install of windows 7, whatever the latest version of office is and whatever crap either the OEM or corporate IT want to load on the machine?
I think with GTA it's not just about the violence it's about the portrayal of gang culture in a rather glorified way along with the relative lack of consequences. Your character can never actually be killed only "wasted" and wake up outside a hospotial.
Though I have to say GTA 4 if you played all of it had a far more negative ending than most of the previous games, I doubt the complainers got that far though.
Apple seems to be really into the two product lockin model. First with the ipod and itunes music store that one got broken by the music industry dropping DRM). Now they are doing it even harder with the appstore (this one doesn't look like it will get broken any time soon.
It's like a car vendor not only voiding your warranty for installing third party performance parts but also going out of thier way to make it virtually impossible to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
While details are hard to come by I think this may run deeper than pdf.
The whole idea of "opening a file in a way determined by the OS for that type of file" is poor from a security point of view. Opening a file can mean anything from viewing an image in an image viewer (safe unless there is a bug in the image viewer) through opening something like an office document (may or may not be safe depending on office security settings) though to running an executable (unsafe by design).
On windows afaict the normal way to open a file or to load a url in the default browser is to pass the name of the file to "shellexecute" but that api has no provisions for checking if the file in question is dangerous.
Sadly i'm not sure there are any better alternatives so for now we seem stuck with papering over the cracks with warning dialogs.
These are the people who don't care if they are disqualified from driving, don't pay fines and have (recent example) over 50 prior drink driving convictions!!
Ultimately the only way to deal with people like that is to remove them from society and lock them up.
They do actually have one seat in the european parliment. I've no idea what the european parliments rules on such things are though.
OTOH with a sufficiantly big dish you can get the BBC pretty much anywhere in france.
Map at http://www.sam-radford.me.uk/astra2d.htm
The cluster guys won't be impacted much more than they were already by sony removing the feature from new models since those machines probablly aren't ever booted into the game OS anyway. So the only way it will impact them is they will no longer be able to buy secondhand fat PS3s and add them to thier cluster (but I doubt those kinds of users buy much secodhand anyway).
The people this will impact most are those who use the machine both as a computer and as a games console (firmware updates are forced if you want to use playstation network or play newer games)
That statementt is half true and rather misleading. IE (at least IE6) supported 256 color pngs with a transparent color (e.g. what you will get when you convert your gifs to pngs).
It didn't support alpha channel transparency and I don't think it supported truecolor pngs with a single transparent color but unless you count some dirty hacks with gif (that didn't work very well and I don't think I ever saw in practice) it didn't support either of those things with any other format either.
we should be seeing planes take-off and landing
My understanding is that many airliners now have autoland systems because they can land in conditions where a human can't.
Afaict we still have pilots on our planes for a few reasons
1: noone wants to be the person being investigated over the first crash of an automated plane.
2: there are things human pilots can do that the computers can't. E.G. landing visually on a runway with no infrastructure (or in a pinch landing anywhere that looks flat enough).
3: (related to 2) computers are good at following plans and rules but not so good at making difficult descisions. What should a computer do if the plane is in a state where no suitable airports are reachable.
4: ATC still uses voice as it's primary means of communication (and voice recognition and natural language interpretation on computers still isn't good enough to rely on).
Which is why we have a problem. Mozilla refuse to support h.264 because they cannot license it in a way that they believe is compatible with opensouce principles. Apple and nokia (maybe others too) refuse to implement theora claiming it's a submarine patent risk (personally I suspect the real reason is they have a vested interest in h.264).
The HTML 5 guys have no real power to fix this impasse since there is no law or contract requiring anyone to follow thier standard. All they can do is document the fact that the browser vendors couldn't agree and leave websites with the choice of either encoding everything twice or only supporting a subset of users.
If you dont believe that this is true, then explain why so many notebooks and netbooks are sold with SSD's in them, right now.
Are they? Netbooks intially shipped with tiny slow SSDs but virtually every one on the market now has a hard drive. As for full sized laptops hardly any of them come with SSDs.
As far as normal people having office.. umm.. no.. normal people do not have office. Normal people have Word.
Maybe this varies with location but I don't think i've ever seen a standalone copy of word (I have seen "works suite" on occasion which had word but not the rest of office but only as an OEM bundle). People either have whatever shit was bundled with their machine, have office or have openoffice. Of course some of them may only use the word processor part of it...
We shall see how this pans out but I still think a vendor who ships a machine with a drive this small is setting themselves up for a world of hurt when customers see their brand new machine (with win7, office trial, antvirus trial and all the other stuff in a standard OEM image) is already over half full.
That one was more a methodology issue than a fraud issue. Energy star only set standards for when the TV was in regular standby and when it was running, not for when it was "in standby but trying to update the EPG and so the tuner is on". Furthermore it turned out that some TVs could spend a LOT of time in this state.
Well the article claims that they just accept the manufacturers test data. It's fine for a certification agency to accept testing from trusted labs but they should still be both inspecting/testing those labs procedures AND verifying that results really come from the lab they claim to come from. If they don't it renders the agencies badges far less trustworthy.
Pretty well afaict, afaict there are far more enemies dying than there are people dying on our side.
The real problem in iraq was not winning the war itself, it's dealing with the mess left behind afterwards. That costs more lives than many of us westerners are willing to stomach for a war we see as having little direct affect on us (but still not very many compared to other wars).
I remember in GTA4 you could just smash through the barrier and not pay the toll. Of course doing so would set the cops on you but a one star is easy enough to lose.
Have they tightend things up in chinatown wars?
mmm, the GTA 3 gen games did that too though perhaps not to such an extreme extent. It was really annoying when you were looking for particular car models for side missions.
Encryption is of limited utility if you aren't sure who your encrypted session is with. Since manual key exchange has practical problems browsers went for the
Unfortunately the major browser vendors have put WAY too many CAs on the trust list meaning that pretty much any significant governement in the world can ask/order someone to generate them a cert for any domain. Some criminals probablly can too.
IMO the proper way to do it would be to have a chain of trust system as part of DNS so the only people who can vouch for you are the operators of the registry containing your domain. I think dnssec may be trying to do this but it will have an uphill battle to replace the current broken system.
The problem is they don't need to get the cooperation of the CA that is actually in use, only that of one of the long list that your browser trusts.
True, OTOH we brits at least get a lot of american and austrilian TV (a lot of soaps seem to be australian, not sure why) so we learn the little americanisms pretty easilly. Is it not like that in other english speaking countries?
True, the modern GTA games are very different from the old ones though. The 3D GTA games are focused arround completing missions that tell a story, afaict while there were missions in the 2D GTA games there was no concept of completing a story (the levels were won by scoring sufficiant points)
Indeed, they are damned if they do damned if they don't. Any game that people want to play (that means the player must to some extent at least succeed in the storyline and people must be able to replay failed missions) and that is set with the player as a criminal gang member will be seen as glorifying gang life.
But its not extra cost
Bullshit have you looked at the price of drives arround the 320-500GB mark (which seems to be what you mostly see in off the shelf PCs at the moment), it's less than $50
Plus I think 40GB is a bit on the small side even for basic users, how big is an install of windows 7, whatever the latest version of office is and whatever crap either the OEM or corporate IT want to load on the machine?
I think with GTA it's not just about the violence it's about the portrayal of gang culture in a rather glorified way along with the relative lack of consequences. Your character can never actually be killed only "wasted" and wake up outside a hospotial.
Though I have to say GTA 4 if you played all of it had a far more negative ending than most of the previous games, I doubt the complainers got that far though.
No, your cars in GTA are nearly all either stolen and/or repainted by dodgy spray shops so it wouldn't be you getting the congestion charge bill
Apple seems to be really into the two product lockin model. First with the ipod and itunes music store that one got broken by the music industry dropping DRM). Now they are doing it even harder with the appstore (this one doesn't look like it will get broken any time soon.
It's like a car vendor not only voiding your warranty for installing third party performance parts but also going out of thier way to make it virtually impossible to do so.
Has anyone actually tested this (surely there must be some way to make clean glucose and fructose and compare their impact to commercial HFCS.
proper pressed CDs do have a very long life. Unfortunately CDRs can't match it since they use dye layers instead of pits.