a user moving from pirate windows to legitimate windows is a gain for MS (obviously) a user moving from pirate windows to linux is a loss for MS (because it helps the mindshare of linux which in turn helps it into places that DO pay for the propietry software they use)
clamping down on piracy is obviously going to do both to some degree, which is more significant in a particular case is very hard to calculate.
the problem with tightning up the rules on.com is what to do with all the existing names, if you kill them then you will leave the web in a very broken state and lots of information will probablly be rendered virtually inaccessible forever. If you grandfather them then you put newcomers at a major disadvantage.
also how do you define a company? not all commercial operations are ltd or plc and at least in the uk there is no requirement to register for sole traders or partnerships.
I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. If you know a way to transliterate between arbitaty scripts thats universally accepted,highly predicatable and where arbitary multi step translations have the same effect as going in a single step please tell us about it because thats what would be needed to build a consistant system arround that idea..
I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. you can! Many tlds do! verisign (controllers of.com and.net) don't most likely because they are greedy bastards that icann doesn't have the balls to control.
attackers can only get in through code that processes untrusted data. Assuming the admin knows what they are doing most of the OS should not be processing untrusted data so the attacker would have to find a flaw in an exposed service to get their foot in the door.
of course once they do get in the design of the OS can help in damage control but they have to be in first.
but in this case you have to ask was he expecting a bonus that big for it and if so would have have released it if it hadn't of been. If not then all the excessively sized bonus would do is cost the company both the money and probablly the employee too.
the trouble is most people make the choice that they think is best for them assuming that other voters do roughly what they did last time
and that generally means voting for the less bad of the candidates (or parties)who took the two top places last time.
people who think this way will only vote for a third candidate if they think the two leaders are equally bad, most people will think one of the top two is less bad than the other and hence the top two will remain the top two.
a quick and dirty soloution could be to get a monitor with two inputs. then you can either have both your monitors on your main PC or one on your main PC and one on your old PC.
margins in the PC market are pretty thin, dell and the like only make the money they do because they shift huge volume. Having to pay retail or even white box oem (low end white box vendors make up for thier higher windows licensing costs by shipping whatever hardware is cheapest at the time regardless of how well it works together) prices for windows would force dell to either take a loss on each PC or price themselves out of the market.
But no matter what, you have to put pre-shared keys somewhere on the chip. Therefore, it is a matter of putting the chip in acid and looking under a scanning electron microscope until you find the right memory area: Game over, MAFIAA loses. so you store the code in battery backed ram and then put lots of trips on the package to cut the power on tampering.
all the manufacturers seem to go through bad phases, maybe IBMs deathstars were one of the worst though.
trouble is you can't tell if a manufacturer is in a bad phase or not when buying a new drive, you can only tell if they were in a bad phase several years before which is NOT the same thing.
if you care about reliability then the best option is probablly raid 1 with mixed brands.
its coming to the end of an evening using firefox for me and its using up arround 250 megabytes. I consider that pretty excessive for a web browser. Its also burning over 50% cpu.
This is what i find really depressing about the desktop computing world today resource usage of common applications has gone through the roof while the increase in usefull functionality seems small at best.
Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio. wake me up when we have a time machine so we can implement a perfect filter.
anti-aliasing and recontstuction filters can never be perfect, this means that some higher frequencies will get aliased down into the audio spectrum and equally some frequencies near the nyquist point will be lost.
you can improve theese to the point they are below the noise floor but how many systems actually do? Interestingly one of the best ways to improve them is to use higher sampling rates at the conversion stage and then convert to/from CD sample rate using DSP techniques.
Actually, the max. frequency that can be sampled is 22kHz, not 22.050kHz - what the Nyquist theorem states is that in order to construct a signal accuately, you need to sample at twice the maximum frequency + a little more, because then you can also deduct the phase of the original signal. Hmm, interesting ugly case but it seems to only apply when a signal is right on the nyquist point.
The bad news is to acheive nyquist performance you need perfect brick wall filters and perfect brick wall filters can't exist (a nasty property of the fourier transform is that if filter is bounded in the frequency domain its impulse response won't be bounded in either the positive or negative time domain). In order to make sure you cut all signals beyond the nyquist point to negligable levels you have to cut some signals before the nyquist point as well. You can improve your bandwidth by oversampling and making the anti-aliasing filter digital but you get into a game of diminishing returns.
The crummy old GIF format is still quite useful for generating small files of simplistic graphical content. PNG files of similar content are frequently significantly larger. yes there are some bad png encoders out there and authors who don't know what they are doing (think not understanding color depth and metadata chunks) but I've never seen any evidence of a gif encoder beating a good png encoder on realistic content with the same color depth and level of metadata. care to provide some examples?
theese governments are seeing a lot of money going to the US to buy copies of MS software. They can't just destroy the copyright because they know there would be serious reperations for doing so. OSS provides them with a way out of the MS license fees without breaking any treaties.
Afaict most low end office workers only use MS software for three reasons. One is because everyone else does and it smoothes document exchange to all do the same thing. The second is because its all they've ever used and all IT has ever installed. The third is internal systems that were built to rely on it. Yes office does have some nice features but hardly anyone uses most of them.
So yes there will be a cost to getting off MS. OOO is more bloated than older versions of office. There will be retraining costs and probablly some lost formatting as documents are converted and there will be costs in reengineering internal systems. However staying on MS is not exactly free either. They love to break compatibility subtuly to gently pressure people into upgrading and each upgrade has a non-trivial cost.
Patents exist so investition in research and development can be reimbused no they exist (at least under the american system) primerally to discourage trade secrets. You give your invention to the public in exchange for getting a time limited (and unlike copyrights patent time limits havn't exactly spiraled out of control) monopoly on the invention. Whether your idea is the result of years of R&D or a stroke of genius isn't really relavent.
sadly the system has been abused in a number of ways 1: obviousness: many patents give soloutions that would be obvious when presented with the problem. This means that next time someone runs into that problem they either have to pay the patent holder a license fee (if the patent holder will even accept one), take the legal risk of ignoring the patent or try and find a less obvious (and possiblly less efficiant) soloution to the same problem. 2: prior art: again the system has been very poor at recognising prior art leading to people getting and keeping patents for things that are already public. 3: areas patentable: a number of new areas (software, buisness methods) were made patentable by court descisions bypassing the normal procedures of governement. Now other countries are being pressured into making those things patentable as well. The lack of patented prior art (which is all the PTO seems to care about) means theese areas suffer from 1 and 2 far more than other areas.
here in the uk if you want broadband you pretty much have to either go with a provider using BT lines (i'm sure i heared some rumors about them starting to offer ADSL without phone but i don't know of any easy way to actually get it) or if you are lucky enough to live in a cabled street virgin media (who right now do seem to be offering broadband seperately at a reasonable price but in the past the cablecos that became them were not generally known for doing so, also thier phone service includes free basic cable TV).
Its really not in a telcos interests to sell you DSL without phone. It doesn't take up any more physical lines to your house to give you DSL and phone than to give you just DSL or just phone and i very much doubt putting dialtone on a line costs much.
How many books, periodicals, journals, etc. have you seen published in either of those sizes? most magazines i see have each page A4 (so a double page spread is A3). Books tend to be a bit smaller but techical books and things like atlas's and heavilly illustrated books (for example the michal palin books) very often have pages above A4 size.
newspapers tend to be larger still. even the tabloids are more than A4 and as for the broadsheets well they have that name for a reason.
putting them in vacum raises a number of issues 1: EVA doesn't suit tight spaces or fiddly tasks, that means you have to make everything MUCH bigger to allow it to be maintained by EVA than to allow it to be maintained in a habitable atnosphere. 2: EVA is slow, putting on the suits takes a long time and all work done in them is much slower than that same work would be in a habitable atonosphere. 3: EVA is considered risky. Not as risky as takeoff or landing but certainly not something to be done without great care and a lot of planning. 4: vacum is unfriendly to many types of electronic assemblies (though this can be avoided by carefull choice of materials). Its also unfriendly to any pipes carrying liquids or gasses for several reasons including the fact that (assuming the pipes ultimately serve stuff inside the space station) that the relative pressure between inside and outside the pipes will be much higher. 5: vacum-non vacum boundries are a bitch to take wiring through (think a large metal lump with carefully machined brass pins individually incased in glass for insulation embedded in it).
I tend to really not care too much about the extra features in IM clients (decent file transfer support would be nice but isn't a deal breaker) but my experiance of trying to get people off the closed networks or at least onto multiple such networks (avoiding relying on any one of them) is that there are a hell of a lot of people who refuse to run more than one client and also refuse to take the feature hit that a multiprotocol client (or worse jabber with gateways) entails.
I get the distinct impression that those of us (i'm one and from your post i guess you are too) who use multiprotocol clients with buddy lists of people who are scattered both network wise and geographcially are the exception not the rule. Most people just use what the local de-facto standard is. Here in the UK thats MSN.
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a user moving from pirate windows to legitimate windows is a gain for MS (obviously)
a user moving from pirate windows to linux is a loss for MS (because it helps the mindshare of linux which in turn helps it into places that DO pay for the propietry software they use)
clamping down on piracy is obviously going to do both to some degree, which is more significant in a particular case is very hard to calculate.
its insanely expensive in NZ
the problem with tightning up the rules on .com is what to do with all the existing names, if you kill them then you will leave the web in a very broken state and lots of information will probablly be rendered virtually inaccessible forever. If you grandfather them then you put newcomers at a major disadvantage.
.com and .net) don't most likely because they are greedy bastards that icann doesn't have the balls to control.
also how do you define a company? not all commercial operations are ltd or plc and at least in the uk there is no requirement to register for sole traders or partnerships.
I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no.
If you know a way to transliterate between arbitaty scripts thats universally accepted,highly predicatable and where arbitary multi step translations have the same effect as going in a single step please tell us about it because thats what would be needed to build a consistant system arround that idea..
I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases.
you can! Many tlds do! verisign (controllers of
attackers can only get in through code that processes untrusted data. Assuming the admin knows what they are doing most of the OS should not be processing untrusted data so the attacker would have to find a flaw in an exposed service to get their foot in the door.
of course once they do get in the design of the OS can help in damage control but they have to be in first.
replace "if not" with "if he didn't need the huge bonus to find and release the information on the issue"
i'm sure small bonuses can be a good motivator
but in this case you have to ask was he expecting a bonus that big for it and if so would have have released it if it hadn't of been. If not then all the excessively sized bonus would do is cost the company both the money and probablly the employee too.
the trouble is most people make the choice that they think is best for them assuming that other voters do roughly what they did last time
and that generally means voting for the less bad of the candidates (or parties)who took the two top places last time.
people who think this way will only vote for a third candidate if they think the two leaders are equally bad, most people will think one of the top two is less bad than the other and hence the top two will remain the top two.
a quick and dirty soloution could be to get a monitor with two inputs. then you can either have both your monitors on your main PC or one on your main PC and one on your old PC.
margins in the PC market are pretty thin, dell and the like only make the money they do because they shift huge volume. Having to pay retail or even white box oem (low end white box vendors make up for thier higher windows licensing costs by shipping whatever hardware is cheapest at the time regardless of how well it works together) prices for windows would force dell to either take a loss on each PC or price themselves out of the market.
But no matter what, you have to put pre-shared keys somewhere on the chip. Therefore, it is a matter of putting the chip in acid and looking under a scanning electron microscope until you find the right memory area: Game over, MAFIAA loses.
so you store the code in battery backed ram and then put lots of trips on the package to cut the power on tampering.
all the manufacturers seem to go through bad phases, maybe IBMs deathstars were one of the worst though.
trouble is you can't tell if a manufacturer is in a bad phase or not when buying a new drive, you can only tell if they were in a bad phase several years before which is NOT the same thing.
if you care about reliability then the best option is probablly raid 1 with mixed brands.
There was no sniper on the grassy knoll. ;) that sniper was JFK himself.
sure there was it was shown on the BBC
its coming to the end of an evening using firefox for me and its using up arround 250 megabytes. I consider that pretty excessive for a web browser. Its also burning over 50% cpu.
This is what i find really depressing about the desktop computing world today resource usage of common applications has gone through the roof while the increase in usefull functionality seems small at best.
i've always preffered black background especially under low light conditions. I'd rather not be staring into a light source any more than nessacery.
black on white is a result of the wysiwyg revoloution afaict.
Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
wake me up when we have a time machine so we can implement a perfect filter.
anti-aliasing and recontstuction filters can never be perfect, this means that some higher frequencies will get aliased down into the audio spectrum and equally some frequencies near the nyquist point will be lost.
you can improve theese to the point they are below the noise floor but how many systems actually do? Interestingly one of the best ways to improve them is to use higher sampling rates at the conversion stage and then convert to/from CD sample rate using DSP techniques.
Actually, the max. frequency that can be sampled is 22kHz, not 22.050kHz - what the Nyquist theorem states is that in order to construct a signal accuately, you need to sample at twice the maximum frequency + a little more, because then you can also deduct the phase of the original signal.
Hmm, interesting ugly case but it seems to only apply when a signal is right on the nyquist point.
The bad news is to acheive nyquist performance you need perfect brick wall filters and perfect brick wall filters can't exist (a nasty property of the fourier transform is that if filter is bounded in the frequency domain its impulse response won't be bounded in either the positive or negative time domain). In order to make sure you cut all signals beyond the nyquist point to negligable levels you have to cut some signals before the nyquist point as well. You can improve your bandwidth by oversampling and making the anti-aliasing filter digital but you get into a game of diminishing returns.
The crummy old GIF format is still quite useful for generating small files of simplistic graphical content. PNG files of similar content are frequently significantly larger.
yes there are some bad png encoders out there and authors who don't know what they are doing (think not understanding color depth and metadata chunks) but I've never seen any evidence of a gif encoder beating a good png encoder on realistic content with the same color depth and level of metadata. care to provide some examples?
iirc they have some (dubious) patents on the long filename extentions which are still current though.
living without long filenames on the dominant media format would be pretty damn painfull.
theese governments are seeing a lot of money going to the US to buy copies of MS software. They can't just destroy the copyright because they know there would be serious reperations for doing so. OSS provides them with a way out of the MS license fees without breaking any treaties.
Afaict most low end office workers only use MS software for three reasons. One is because everyone else does and it smoothes document exchange to all do the same thing. The second is because its all they've ever used and all IT has ever installed. The third is internal systems that were built to rely on it. Yes office does have some nice features but hardly anyone uses most of them.
So yes there will be a cost to getting off MS. OOO is more bloated than older versions of office. There will be retraining costs and probablly some lost formatting as documents are converted and there will be costs in reengineering internal systems. However staying on MS is not exactly free either. They love to break compatibility subtuly to gently pressure people into upgrading and each upgrade has a non-trivial cost.
Patents exist so investition in research and development can be reimbused
no they exist (at least under the american system) primerally to discourage trade secrets. You give your invention to the public in exchange for getting a time limited (and unlike copyrights patent time limits havn't exactly spiraled out of control) monopoly on the invention. Whether your idea is the result of years of R&D or a stroke of genius isn't really relavent.
sadly the system has been abused in a number of ways
1: obviousness: many patents give soloutions that would be obvious when presented with the problem. This means that next time someone runs into that problem they either have to pay the patent holder a license fee (if the patent holder will even accept one), take the legal risk of ignoring the patent or try and find a less obvious (and possiblly less efficiant) soloution to the same problem.
2: prior art: again the system has been very poor at recognising prior art leading to people getting and keeping patents for things that are already public.
3: areas patentable: a number of new areas (software, buisness methods) were made patentable by court descisions bypassing the normal procedures of governement. Now other countries are being pressured into making those things patentable as well. The lack of patented prior art (which is all the PTO seems to care about) means theese areas suffer from 1 and 2 far more than other areas.
here in the uk if you want broadband you pretty much have to either go with a provider using BT lines (i'm sure i heared some rumors about them starting to offer ADSL without phone but i don't know of any easy way to actually get it) or if you are lucky enough to live in a cabled street virgin media (who right now do seem to be offering broadband seperately at a reasonable price but in the past the cablecos that became them were not generally known for doing so, also thier phone service includes free basic cable TV).
Its really not in a telcos interests to sell you DSL without phone. It doesn't take up any more physical lines to your house to give you DSL and phone than to give you just DSL or just phone and i very much doubt putting dialtone on a line costs much.
but what about a fire in the middle of a tornado?
presumablly someone has to decide where the safest place to go is and act accordingly.#
How many books, periodicals, journals, etc. have you seen published in either of those sizes?
most magazines i see have each page A4 (so a double page spread is A3). Books tend to be a bit smaller but techical books and things like atlas's and heavilly illustrated books (for example the michal palin books) very often have pages above A4 size.
newspapers tend to be larger still. even the tabloids are more than A4 and as for the broadsheets well they have that name for a reason.
putting them in vacum raises a number of issues
1: EVA doesn't suit tight spaces or fiddly tasks, that means you have to make everything MUCH bigger to allow it to be maintained by EVA than to allow it to be maintained in a habitable atnosphere.
2: EVA is slow, putting on the suits takes a long time and all work done in them is much slower than that same work would be in a habitable atonosphere.
3: EVA is considered risky. Not as risky as takeoff or landing but certainly not something to be done without great care and a lot of planning.
4: vacum is unfriendly to many types of electronic assemblies (though this can be avoided by carefull choice of materials). Its also unfriendly to any pipes carrying liquids or gasses for several reasons including the fact that (assuming the pipes ultimately serve stuff inside the space station) that the relative pressure between inside and outside the pipes will be much higher.
5: vacum-non vacum boundries are a bitch to take wiring through (think a large metal lump with carefully machined brass pins individually incased in glass for insulation embedded in it).
I tend to really not care too much about the extra features in IM clients (decent file transfer support would be nice but isn't a deal breaker) but my experiance of trying to get people off the closed networks or at least onto multiple such networks (avoiding relying on any one of them) is that there are a hell of a lot of people who refuse to run more than one client and also refuse to take the feature hit that a multiprotocol client (or worse jabber with gateways) entails.
I get the distinct impression that those of us (i'm one and from your post i guess you are too) who use multiprotocol clients with buddy lists of people who are scattered both network wise and geographcially are the exception not the rule. Most people just use what the local de-facto standard is. Here in the UK thats MSN.