nasa do put out a lot of imagary for free. For example a lot of thier sattalite imagary can be viewed using a program they supply called nasa world wind which automatically downloads higher res imagary as you zoom in on a part of the globe.
Afaict the main stuff google earth buy is the aerial photography which is much more detailed than the satalite images.
Again, that way you are effectively removing CO2 from the air and putting it underground. True, but putting it underground and keeping it underground long term are rather different things.
And if you aren't carefully that carbon may come out as CH4 which is iirc a considerablly worse greenhouse gas than CO2
These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that. If you are running a rackfull of windows servers I would have thought you would have been in some form of MS volume licensing program. Volume licenses for windows come with generous downgrade rights (all the way to windows 95 iirc).
I do find it odd that ASUS doesn't offer the machines with a vista buisness license pre-downgraded to XP pro (as big brand OEMs are now allowed to do) though.
The EEEPC series runs XP just fine, the XP GUI is perfectly usable on a 1024x600 screen (the only time I have had to go into top/bottom scroll mode was the settings dialog in iTunes) and should be pretty usable even on the smaller screen (I would imagine third party apps will be more of an issue than windows itself). and MS has agreed to let vendors of such machines keep shipping XP on them for the forseeable future.
Fact is apple has a niche of people who either happen to fit thier very narrow hardware selection or are prepared to put up with apples hardware selection to get OS-X legally.
Linux is doing fairly well in the market for smaller than laptop devices which people don't expect to be able to run thier normal apps on.
MS still dominates the market for ordinary desktops and laptops and I don't see any evidence that will change anytime soon.
It's two thousand fucking eight already, why should I have to carry cash with me to buy small items? because afaict the card companies won't make thier terms for small buisnesses micropayment friendly.
telephone number: not so hard to forge with current voip providers and as another reply has said in many cases the phone number will just be a copy shop anyway stationary: just scan or photocopy it signature: just scan or photocopy it
It is easy to tell the difference between a signed original on official stationary and a photocopy of the signature and stationary. It is relatively difficult to tell the difference between a photocopy of the signature and stationary and a photocopy of a photocopy of a signalture and stationary. It is easy to tell the difference between plain paper and tipex. It is pretty much impossible (depending on the copier settings it may actually be impossible) to tell the difference between a photocopy of plain paper and a photocopy of tipex.
A fax machine is basically just a low quality photocopier with the two ends in different places.
The principle of faxing has been arround since the 19th centuary but modern faxes as you say came in during the 70's.
Email in some form has been arround since 1965 but the modern SMTP/MIME email system that allows easy attaching of files has only been standardised since the early 90s (and was first proposed in the mid 80s)
That is true but provided you are sensible windows isn't all that expensive.
Per thier support lifecycle policy MS says they will offer security updates for at least 7 years after the release of the next version.
What that means is as long as you buy the latest version OEM (you can use downgrade rights if you don't want to run the new version yet) the PC will almost certainly have been retired before the version of windows it shipped with
Some companies end up paying a bit more (exactly how much more is hard to tell because details of volume license prices don't seem easy to find online) for windows because they want the extra flexibility volume licensing gives them (yes there are reimage rights but they are relatively restricted) but even then windows will be a pretty small proportion of the TCO of the machine.
All that is required to be legally binding is an offer and acceptance. This can even happen orally. It can but good luck convining a court that the agreement exists when it's you and your mates word against your supposed partner and thier mates.
Afaict that is the point of a signed written contract, it is evidence that someone agreed to something should they ever claim that they did not do so.
Afaict at least in the US this has been fakeable for those with decent connections to the phone network for quite some time (possiblly since it's introduction) and afaict it is even more easailly fakeable in the voip era.
Additionally a fax normally has an independent audit trail via 3rd party phone records (at least in theory). That proves that an attempt was made to call the number for some reason but I can't see it proving whether a fax was actually sent or anything about the context of said fax.
Even in the corporate world, users are ready to get off the upgrade treadmill at Windows XP. Precisely for the reason you mention "It works just fine for what these users need to do." Nobody needs the next version of Windows, nobody really cares, and Vista really isn't that great.Thing is at least if they want support for new hardware and security updates (and in our ever more networked world I would not want my main desktop OS to be one that was no longer getting security updates) they can't stay on XP forever.
Moving to linux isn't a cure for the upgrade treadmill. Look at ubuntu, the most popular desktop linux distro. They strugle to provide a 3 years of support on releases made every two years (that is only a single year of overlap). This makes the MS upgrade treadmill look postively gentle. I can't seem to easilly find information about rhel or OS-X but I don't think thier support lifecycles are anywhere near as long as micorsofts either.
btw the unofficial msn-pecan plugin is much better, messages still bounce with an error from time to time but they nearly always go through with just one retry (unlike the standard pidgin msn plugin where you often had to close and reopen the window to make your message go through).
Although there was a thing at Tesco a while back where they sold the ugly ones off cheap, making a point out of them being ugly but it not really mattering... Afaict most supermarkets have a value range where the aim is to provide the produce as cheaply as possible without worrying too much about what it looks like.
iirc the real problem is that the banana we know and love is made by a rare mutation of the natural banana plant. Unfortunately theese mutants are sterile.
This means you can't selectively breed bananas in the usual sense, you just have to wait until the natural banana plants produce a mutant offspring that has decent properties and then clone it like hell.
I don't think apple wants thier software to fit in on windows, they support windows to the extent they have to further thier other agendas (quicktime: wanting thier video format widely playable , itunes:ipod/itms , safari: testbed for web developers) but frankly they would much rather you bought a mac.
Microsoft should have made the default to not trust the file. Applications such as installers (with admin privileges) could easily mark files as trustworthy. But none of the existing ones would do that.
That would just result in pop-up hell which would cause users to ignore the message.
I know that doesn't apply to files downloaded with firefox on windows (at least the versions I have used). Any idea what the situation is with safari on windows?
the main flaw in https is in certificate creation. You are trusting the root CAs and anyone they delegate certificate creation power not to help your attacker. If the attacker can get a cert for your domain and can intercept the network traffic then they can do a mitm attack.
also iirc IE has a bug that makes mitm attacks pretty easy (iirc it defaults to assuming a cert that doesn't say otherwise can be used to sign other certs).
maybe it's a regional thing, most people I talk to seem to use the term laptop very generally covering everything from the tiny "subnotebooks" all the way up to the 17 inch "desktop replacement" monsters.
manufacturers avoid the term laptop nowadays because of the fact that using them on your lap is strongly discouraged due to heat related issues (both the possibility of a hot laptop burning you and the fact that being on a soft uneven surface can interfere with ventilation on some models)
imo most laptops fit into one of a few categories
* craptops: built with price and headline specs (cpu mainly) as the main design consideration theese are popular with first time laptop buyers. They come to regret it when they run into the reliability and build quality issues. I don't see theese going solid state any time soon. * ordinary decent laptops: (lattitudes, thinkpads macbooks) etc. Theese cost more than the craptops and that money mainly buys you better build quality. I see solid state being a build time option on theese in the near future but I don't see it being the default for cost reasons. * desktop replacements, high performance and big screens but heavy and bulky, * ultraportables: (smaller vaios, librettos, EEEPCs, OLPCs etc) many of theese are already using solid state drives.
not just performing a simple operation as they would be with integers or floats. I'm not sure I would call floating point math simple, sure PC cpus with thier high spec dedicated CPUs are fast at it but on embedded systems floating point is often the kiss of death to performance.
Returning structures is done through the use of pointers and is not difficult once you get used to it. I know I can use pointers to fill in a structure, I can also make macros that work on them (avoiding the ugly requirement to take the address all the tim) but they still feel like second class citizens compared to the built in types.
A good example is fixed point math, I could just use a big integer type directly but that would be extremely error prone, especially when converting existing code. So I make a structure containing a sufficantly big integer and write some macros to work on it, but using them is much more painfull than using the built in types.
Doing more complex stuff with c++'s operator overloading/constructure/destructor system is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it can make code far easier to follow and less prone to certain types of error. On the other hand it can certainly lead to code that looks simple but hides a lot of complex processing.
which I also don't like; you still need to recompile for different types, the syntax is ugly, and really your source editor can probably do a find and replace automatically Yuck, copy/paste coding is a terrible idea because when you find a bug there is a good chance you will miss some copies of the code.
but templates are certainly a mixed blessing because they can lead to the same code being compiled a huge number of times for no good reason.
My general feeling of C++ is that it is a good language but one that requires a well disciplined coder (C does too to some extent but C++ does so to a far greater extent). Templates and operator overloading in the right place reduce code duplication and make code easier to read. Misused they can lead to madness.
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nasa do put out a lot of imagary for free. For example a lot of thier sattalite imagary can be viewed using a program they supply called nasa world wind which automatically downloads higher res imagary as you zoom in on a part of the globe.
Afaict the main stuff google earth buy is the aerial photography which is much more detailed than the satalite images.
Again, that way you are effectively removing CO2 from the air and putting it underground.
True, but putting it underground and keeping it underground long term are rather different things.
And if you aren't carefully that carbon may come out as CH4 which is iirc a considerablly worse greenhouse gas than CO2
Sure it's possible but IIRC ordinary DVD-R blanks cannot contain CSS encryption and I don't think ordinary burners can burn the "authoring" blanks.
Also most commercial DVDs are dual layer even though with fairly moderate recompression they would fit on single layer.
The result of theese two facts is that the normal way to copy a dvd is to decrypt it first.
These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that.
If you are running a rackfull of windows servers I would have thought you would have been in some form of MS volume licensing program. Volume licenses for windows come with generous downgrade rights (all the way to windows 95 iirc).
I do find it odd that ASUS doesn't offer the machines with a vista buisness license pre-downgraded to XP pro (as big brand OEMs are now allowed to do) though.
ROFLMAO
The EEEPC series runs XP just fine, the XP GUI is perfectly usable on a 1024x600 screen (the only time I have had to go into top/bottom scroll mode was the settings dialog in iTunes) and should be pretty usable even on the smaller screen (I would imagine third party apps will be more of an issue than windows itself). and MS has agreed to let vendors of such machines keep shipping XP on them for the forseeable future.
Fact is apple has a niche of people who either happen to fit thier very narrow hardware selection or are prepared to put up with apples hardware selection to get OS-X legally.
Linux is doing fairly well in the market for smaller than laptop devices which people don't expect to be able to run thier normal apps on.
MS still dominates the market for ordinary desktops and laptops and I don't see any evidence that will change anytime soon.
It's two thousand fucking eight already, why should I have to carry cash with me to buy small items?
because afaict the card companies won't make thier terms for small buisnesses micropayment friendly.
Lets see
telephone number: not so hard to forge with current voip providers and as another reply has said in many cases the phone number will just be a copy shop anyway
stationary: just scan or photocopy it
signature: just scan or photocopy it
It is easy to tell the difference between a signed original on official stationary and a photocopy of the signature and stationary. It is relatively difficult to tell the difference between a photocopy of the signature and stationary and a photocopy of a photocopy of a signalture and stationary. It is easy to tell the difference between plain paper and tipex. It is pretty much impossible (depending on the copier settings it may actually be impossible) to tell the difference between a photocopy of plain paper and a photocopy of tipex.
A fax machine is basically just a low quality photocopier with the two ends in different places.
The principle of faxing has been arround since the 19th centuary but modern faxes as you say came in during the 70's.
Email in some form has been arround since 1965 but the modern SMTP/MIME email system that allows easy attaching of files has only been standardised since the early 90s (and was first proposed in the mid 80s)
That is true but provided you are sensible windows isn't all that expensive.
Per thier support lifecycle policy MS says they will offer security updates for at least 7 years after the release of the next version.
What that means is as long as you buy the latest version OEM (you can use downgrade rights if you don't want to run the new version yet) the PC will almost certainly have been retired before the version of windows it shipped with
Some companies end up paying a bit more (exactly how much more is hard to tell because details of volume license prices don't seem easy to find online) for windows because they want the extra flexibility volume licensing gives them (yes there are reimage rights but they are relatively restricted) but even then windows will be a pretty small proportion of the TCO of the machine.
All that is required to be legally binding is an offer and acceptance. This can even happen orally.
It can but good luck convining a court that the agreement exists when it's you and your mates word against your supposed partner and thier mates.
Afaict that is the point of a signed written contract, it is evidence that someone agreed to something should they ever claim that they did not do so.
Afaict at least in the US this has been fakeable for those with decent connections to the phone network for quite some time (possiblly since it's introduction) and afaict it is even more easailly fakeable in the voip era.
Additionally a fax normally has an independent audit trail via 3rd party phone records (at least in theory).
That proves that an attempt was made to call the number for some reason but I can't see it proving whether a fax was actually sent or anything about the context of said fax.
What would happen if you signed something, faxed it in and later denied doing so?
Would the fax be sufficiant evidence to prove that you had really signed that contract.
Even in the corporate world, users are ready to get off the upgrade treadmill at Windows XP. Precisely for the reason you mention "It works just fine for what these users need to do." Nobody needs the next version of Windows, nobody really cares, and Vista really isn't that great.Thing is at least if they want support for new hardware and security updates (and in our ever more networked world I would not want my main desktop OS to be one that was no longer getting security updates) they can't stay on XP forever.
Moving to linux isn't a cure for the upgrade treadmill. Look at ubuntu, the most popular desktop linux distro. They strugle to provide a 3 years of support on releases made every two years (that is only a single year of overlap). This makes the MS upgrade treadmill look postively gentle. I can't seem to easilly find information about rhel or OS-X but I don't think thier support lifecycles are anywhere near as long as micorsofts either.
btw the unofficial msn-pecan plugin is much better, messages still bounce with an error from time to time but they nearly always go through with just one retry (unlike the standard pidgin msn plugin where you often had to close and reopen the window to make your message go through).
Although there was a thing at Tesco a while back where they sold the ugly ones off cheap, making a point out of them being ugly but it not really mattering...
Afaict most supermarkets have a value range where the aim is to provide the produce as cheaply as possible without worrying too much about what it looks like.
iirc the real problem is that the banana we know and love is made by a rare mutation of the natural banana plant. Unfortunately theese mutants are sterile.
This means you can't selectively breed bananas in the usual sense, you just have to wait until the natural banana plants produce a mutant offspring that has decent properties and then clone it like hell.
That assumes that thier disorder doesn't affect thier speech too badly for speach recognition to work.
There are people who's only means of communication is using a blink movement or similar to select words as a computer scans a grid.
I don't think apple wants thier software to fit in on windows, they support windows to the extent they have to further thier other agendas (quicktime: wanting thier video format widely playable , itunes:ipod/itms , safari: testbed for web developers) but frankly they would much rather you bought a mac.
Afaict firefox has this problem in it's default configuration too.
Microsoft should have made the default to not trust the file. Applications such as installers (with admin privileges) could easily mark files as trustworthy.
But none of the existing ones would do that.
That would just result in pop-up hell which would cause users to ignore the message.
I know that doesn't apply to files downloaded with firefox on windows (at least the versions I have used). Any idea what the situation is with safari on windows?
the main flaw in https is in certificate creation. You are trusting the root CAs and anyone they delegate certificate creation power not to help your attacker. If the attacker can get a cert for your domain and can intercept the network traffic then they can do a mitm attack.
also iirc IE has a bug that makes mitm attacks pretty easy (iirc it defaults to assuming a cert that doesn't say otherwise can be used to sign other certs).
maybe it's a regional thing, most people I talk to seem to use the term laptop very generally covering everything from the tiny "subnotebooks" all the way up to the 17 inch "desktop replacement" monsters.
manufacturers avoid the term laptop nowadays because of the fact that using them on your lap is strongly discouraged due to heat related issues (both the possibility of a hot laptop burning you and the fact that being on a soft uneven surface can interfere with ventilation on some models)
imo most laptops fit into one of a few categories
* craptops: built with price and headline specs (cpu mainly) as the main design consideration theese are popular with first time laptop buyers. They come to regret it when they run into the reliability and build quality issues. I don't see theese going solid state any time soon.
* ordinary decent laptops: (lattitudes, thinkpads macbooks) etc. Theese cost more than the craptops and that money mainly buys you better build quality. I see solid state being a build time option on theese in the near future but I don't see it being the default for cost reasons.
* desktop replacements, high performance and big screens but heavy and bulky,
* ultraportables: (smaller vaios, librettos, EEEPCs, OLPCs etc) many of theese are already using solid state drives.
not just performing a simple operation as they would be with integers or floats.
I'm not sure I would call floating point math simple, sure PC cpus with thier high spec dedicated CPUs are fast at it but on embedded systems floating point is often the kiss of death to performance.
Returning structures is done through the use of pointers and is not difficult once you get used to it.
I know I can use pointers to fill in a structure, I can also make macros that work on them (avoiding the ugly requirement to take the address all the tim) but they still feel like second class citizens compared to the built in types.
A good example is fixed point math, I could just use a big integer type directly but that would be extremely error prone, especially when converting existing code. So I make a structure containing a sufficantly big integer and write some macros to work on it, but using them is much more painfull than using the built in types.
Doing more complex stuff with c++'s operator overloading/constructure/destructor system is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it can make code far easier to follow and less prone to certain types of error. On the other hand it can certainly lead to code that looks simple but hides a lot of complex processing.
which I also don't like; you still need to recompile for different types, the syntax is ugly, and really your source editor can probably do a find and replace automatically
Yuck, copy/paste coding is a terrible idea because when you find a bug there is a good chance you will miss some copies of the code.
but templates are certainly a mixed blessing because they can lead to the same code being compiled a huge number of times for no good reason.
My general feeling of C++ is that it is a good language but one that requires a well disciplined coder (C does too to some extent but C++ does so to a far greater extent). Templates and operator overloading in the right place reduce code duplication and make code easier to read. Misused they can lead to madness.