Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?
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Transmeta Up For Sale
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Uhh, far as I know, this hasn't really been a stock-market scandal. It's been a mortgage industry scandal. Stocks have fallen as a result, but as far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with the stock markets themselves.
Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?
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Transmeta Up For Sale
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you want to sell a company at Auction, there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Seriously, how is selling a company at auction an interesting experiment? They've been doing it for hundreds of years.
To write an Outlook Mobile for Android app and put it on the Android Market. Microsoft, likely, will not do that unless Android become *the* dominant player in the market, which it currently is far from.
In the meantime, Android *is* Microsoft compatible to the extent that you can enable IMAP or POP3, and SMTP with Exchange, and the mail client uses those IETF *standardized* protocols. I mean, really, why blame Google for implementing the *real* standards instead of Microsoft's non-standards?
Ok, I'm not sure if that's entirely the right expression, but courts will often refuse to enforce clauses in contracts which are a dramatic expansion of the intended purposes of contract law.
I think in California, non-compete agreements which prevent people from working for any other employer in the same industry were struck down under this principal, and I would imagine that a clause which restricts you from even sharing with other parties that your app was rejected, and under what terms, would be in the same boat.
Non-disclosure agreements are intended to protect true secrets, like the formula or means of production for a product. The knowledge that an application was rejected, man, I can't see *how* that is really a company secret, other than Apple just wanting to silence criticism, which courts do not look favorably upon.
Now, I could potentially see the *why* of the rejection being covered by an NDA, *if and only if* the reason for rejection was a technical reason which would require the disclosure of a technical secret in order to explain. Still, anything that an app developer is doing for a platform shouldn't be a 'secret'.
Anyhow, I for one have started looking at the Android platform, and it's certainly interesting. Still feels a bit immature in terms of lacking some things, but I imagine a lot of the 'missing' stuff will be added with future releases. I'm hoping for, among other things, VOiP support when I'm on a WiFi network (that might, hopefully, come through third-party apps, but I think I saw a quote somewhere that Google has done something to try to prevent Apps from implementing VoIP, but not sure), and Ogg Vorbis & Theora support in the media player component (I've encoded much of my pre-Internet CD collection to Ogg).
Well, I've tended to have that feeling for quite a while too, but I'll say this. . .
I can see why some people might want a camera, PDA, and web browser built into their phone. It's 1 small gadget to haul around instead of 2 or 3. Nobody is looking to do professional level photographic work with such a picture, but sometimes those grainy, low-res, slight motion blurred pics from a phone are enough. Sometimes they are better than nothing.
My big gripe with camera phones, one that's already been stated by numerous other posters but it irks me too. . . the stupid phone companies won't sell you a phone where you can easily download the images straight to your computer, unless you buy a $500 top-of-the-line model, maybe. They want to nickel and dime you for every damn thing. They want to control what you do with your own camera/phone/mp3 player. Well SCREW THEM. My phone, I dictate what I do with it. So, last time I renewed my phone contract, I got a phone that *really* truly is *just a phone*. You can get them, believe it or not. It also happened to be the only phone from Verizon, at the time, where I didn't have to pay a dime for the phone - almost all the other models you at least had to pay $20 or $50 even with the two year contract.
Although, I suppose they are honestly laughing all the way to the bank, because even though I got locked into the two year contract, all they had to do was give me a phone which probably cost them $10. Still, I've not payed for any MMS, or $3 ringtones, or any of that nonsense that people with more dollars than sense buy, so I figure I come out ahead of what I would have been spending, anyhow.
As the data which is stored on those servers. Don't you think the financial data for tens of thousands of customers is worth something? Also, physical facilities, HVAC, network infrastructure, etc. Also, a lot of the value of a data center, I suppose (I'm no expert in this field) might be less about the hardware itself, as the engineering that went into building up the data center as a cohesive, integrated system.
While I tend to agree with the final conclusion, I would like to point one thing out - this doesn't appear to be about preventing the already occured terrorist attack, obviously, but about trying to get some way for law enforcement officials to try to track the sender of the email. Find the sender of the email, and you might be able to covertly spy on him, and figure out who he's working with. Honestly, I don't know if they'll ever really be able to track the emails back to a source anyhow - I'm not sure that making open wi-fi illegal will matter much - there must be a million ways around that. . .
* Check into a hotel with WiFi access, pay with cash, register under a fake identity
* Have someone send the email from another country
* break into a business or residence with Internet access and physically plug in to a network which does not require username/pass
* Kidnap someone and beat their username/password out of them with a rubber hose
Can't heat radiate directly into space? I dunno if there are any materials that currently do this efficiently.
Could the heat be recycled somehow? Seems to me if you are dumping heat out of the system, you are dumping *energy* out of the system?
Take some of the excess heat and use it for environmental heating of human dwellings/workspaces, hot water for showers (could a shower be invented which works well on the moon? dunno), cooking, etc? (Granted, there's probably more 'waste heat' than you would need for heating, cooking, and making coffee, but you could at least use some of it for that).
It might, at first glance, seem surprising for an organization like Scientology to support a site that regularly covers them fairly negatively, or for said site to accept their ads, but. . . the slashdot editors, I believe, do not control advertising, I think SourceForge.net does, and most businesses will take just about anyone's money. As for the scientologists, it gives them an opportunity to provide their talking points to slashdot viewers.
Coming next: the scientology internet AstroTurf campaign in the comments of/. and other communities and blogs.
I don't have comcast, as I'm in the Cincinnati, OH region and they aren't the local incumbent but. . .
The main reasons people would still use Comcast might be that they are the only Cable internet provider in their region, there might not be any access to DSL (rural areas, small towns, etc), or any alternatives to Comcast (e.g. Satellite ISPs) might be significantly more expensive.
Seriously, in most places in the US, at least, if you want broadband Internet, you have basically two choices - the local Cable monopoly, or the local telephone monopoly. Sometimes they compete against each other and provide better service and prices, but as often as not, the very limited competition of a duopoly doesn't provide sufficient market incentives to give better service or lower prices.
In particular, with a relatively obscure policy like this P2P bandwidth throttling/blocking, most of the population doesn't know about the issue at all and doesn't care, a small part of the population only partly understands it, but thinks that this is just affecting 'them illegal pirates, so it don't affect me', and a tiny, tiny percentage of the population knows and cares enough to switch providers. I think comcast will just laugh at the tiny percentage of the population that Slashdotters represent, until something bigger forces them to care. That something bigger might be the FCC or other organ of the US government, or it might be that the tiny fraction of the population who cares enough also happens to be the same people that all their relatives and friends ask "can you help me setup my internet", and that the tiny, literate fraction of the population could *eventually* 'move the needle' by switching enough customers to a different provider, that they could get some notice, eventually, from the monopoly like Comcast.
"You can sell the domain and also make a deal with them to have all your mail redirect to your new domain address."
Ugh. So you're gonna have all your email routed through a mail server controlled by a third party in a different country? How does that sound like a good idea again?
As I recall, in the early days of mozilla, when it was pretty stripped down, it was exceptionally fast too. I could be wrong, but I suspect Google Chrome's history will proceed something like this:
* It's fast, it's stable, it's. . . unable to use flash, Java, move networks video player, embedded Windows Media Player, etc. It doesn't support Firefox add-ons.
* As it grows a user-base, said user-base will complain about the above limitations.
* In response, Google will start re-architecting Chrome to support such features, and as a result, will, like Firefox, still be a great browser, and quite fast, but not OMG ZOOMZ LOLZ!!!!11! fast anymore.
Seriously, I have absolutely no complaint about the speed of rendering of any browser, nowadays. Computers are pretty fast, pretty much all the browsers are pretty fast. The bottleneck is most websites which take 10-30 seconds to finish sending me some crappy banner-ad or something before the rest of the page can render, or are just so bogged down they take 30 seconds to respond *at all*.
I really, *really* don't see the point in Google creating yet another browser instead of just contributing to Mozilla or Webkit, and maybe skinning one of those (actually, someone posted the User Agent string for Chrome, which looked like it was probably just a modded Webkit after all, so maybe they aren't re-inventing the wheel).
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.
I don't get it. This disagreemail feature (using the word feature in the media/journalism sense here) has been run like 2 or 3 times, at least, now. If you know you don't like it, just don't read it. I tend to agree it's not all that great a feature as far as that goes, but people reading and responding to something they know they don't like just makes no sense to me.
P.S. (Offtopic - is anyone else seeing a problem today with the comment boxes on the Post a Comment page only being like 15 characters wide? Hmm, might have something to do with the NoScript FF add-on, I suppose. ..)
It is definitely mostly a novelty item, but per your statement that a computer is useless without a keyboard and monitor - it depends on what you use the computer for. Obviously, you need a keyboard and monitor to initially set any system up. But there are plenty of computer devices which are useful without a mouse and keyboard attached, once they are running, e.g. router/firewall, network server (admittedly, with only 64MB of flash ram, most of that probably used by the OS, the usefulness of this as a server is rather limited, but still), as a 'media' device - by which I mean, something you could stick next to a stereo or TV to stream audio or video from your main computer to your living room/den/basement/whatever (although, again, given the low-end specs of this thing, it definitely wouldn't be useful for HD video, but maybe for playing audio streams).
The biggest problem with this thing is that they want 1500 Lbs-Sterling, which using current exchange rages converts to almost $2800. That's a lot of money to pay for a computer with specs from 1998.
Ok, the error message for self-signed certs is a bit overly-alarmist, but I like one thing FF3 does that previous versions didn't - local certificate caching. So, if I've accepted the cert once, it never has to retrieve the cert again, so there is only one opportunity for a MITM, not an opportunity every time I visit the site. If I got the right cert the first time, then I'm secured from that point forward, and never see the nag message again.
I thought of something recently, which I'm not sure if it is a tremendously stupid idea, or has some merit, and I've been wondering - why couldn't DNS possibly be used as an additional way to verify SSL? Here's what I mean - right now, when you connect to a given server, you use DNS to lookup the server's IP, then connect to the server, which sends you back a certificate with the public key of the server. Unfortunately, you have no way to verify that the public key you are purportedly receiving from 'the server' really came from 'the server', or belongs to the owner of that DNS record. What if the owner of the server has uploaded the certificate into DNS, which the browser could also download a copy (or maybe a hash, instead of the full cert) of the certificate from the DNS record for that server, to try to check if they match?
Now, there's at least one main problem I can think of with this - right now, DNS itself may not be trustworthy enough for this to work, as it is currently implemented. But, it seems to me we already need a more secure DNS system, because DNS is way too important to not be as secure as we can make it. If we're upgrading our DNS infrastructure, it would be an opportune time to add new features like this. I don't claim to be a security expert, so I don't know exactly how you would go about securing DNS, but as a start I would suggest this - most PKI systems are intended to avoid having a user need to receive and manually load a key from an off-the-net source. That's fine, as you don't want users to have to constantly have to do that for every new server they visit.
But, would it be that onerous to have users enter or import a key, once, for their ISP's DNS server, which would act as a "Strong Link" in the web-of-trust - one very strongly verified key that can be used as the link with which you can 'complete' the chain of verified identities? Once the connection between a user and their ISP's DNS server is strongly verified, the ISP's can basically do the same thing with whoever their 'upstream' DNS provider is, be that a root tld server, or a higher-level 'backbone ISP'. All connections between DNS servers would be encrypted using these 'strongly verified' public keys.
Now, I realize that for a given server, e.g. www.example.com, the 'root' servers don't know the IP address for the server 'www' in that domain - just the address for the 'example.com' DNS Server - but the root servers could then send either a fingerprint, or the public cert, back to your ISP's DNS server, so that when your DNS server contacts the example.com DNS Server, to retrieve the domain and cert info for the 'www.example.com' server, it can verify the identity of the example.com domain server.
One 'convenience' related problem I can think of, at least, is users who move from one network to another - e.g. someone with a laptop or other wireless, mobile device who is using another network - at work, at a coffee shop, hotel, airport, etc. That could potentially be resolved by always using the same DNS server regardless of which network you are on, instead of the local network's DNS server. That is, regardless of which network you are on, you always get DNS from your ISP. This means taking DNS out of DHCP (that is, going back to statically assigned IP addresses for DNS), or, maybe, you use the local DNS server once, to lookup your ISP's DNS server (oh, but I hear you saying - if you use a different DNS server even once, just to try to lookup your home DNS server, there is an opportunity for an attack; my answer is, I think, not really - remember, your computer has locally stored the cert for your home DNS server, which you strongly verified, setting us that 'strong link' I mentioned earlier - any attempt at an attack would likely fail to authenticate against the locally stored certificate, wouldn't it, which could then cause your OS to trigger some sort of DNS verification error).
Have I missed something stupid, or is there a reason a more secure DNS couldn't be built, and used as a trusted means of verifying DNS certs for other servers?
If the "Great Disaster" happens, it most certainly would not be capable of wiping out religion. It *might* wipe out large, cenrtalized religious institutions like the Catholic Church (I suspect it wouldn't even completely destroy the Catholic church - just inhibit it's ability to communicate with / control Catholic dioceses on other continents) , and the many protestant demoninations. But it certainly wouldn't wipe out Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other school of religious thought. There will still be priests, and rabbis, imams and gurus and monks.
This next thought, I don't claim any originality to - others have posted this, and I just repeat it here for the sake of the rest of my argument - the reason for this disc is not to preserve religious thought. It is to preserve knowledge of language - so that future academics and learn 'lost' languages. The thought seems to be that the Genesis story is well known, and because of it's religious nature would be more likely to be still *be known* in the future, than most other possible texts.
Once you've learned the lost languages (or at least 'enough' of the lost language so that you can begin reading other extant texts in those languages and learn *more* of those languages over time) then you can begin reading and learning all sorts of stuff, like mathematics, science, and engineering.
The thing about langauge is that the hardest part of it is *getting started*. Learning the first basics of a new languages like its alphabet or ideograms, grammatical structures, and a basic vocabulary. Once you have the basics of a language, you can learn much more about the language from reading other texts in that language. But you need a starting point somewhere.
I had almost the exact same reaction - if the chip needs an external device, wth is the chip actually doing that couldn't just be in the external device.
Also, If I kidnap some rich kid, the first thing I'm doing is tossing his cell phone, mp3 player, gameboy, and any other electronics that might secretly be tracking me, into the nearest garbabe can, or hell, just dump it on the sidewalk or street.
I'm gonna guess that at least some portion of Macbook Air users probably plugin a USB or Firewire DVD drive. DVD drives (which of course, still read and if the drive is a burner, record, CDs) certainly still have a place in modern computing - watching movies, backups, OS reload.
While I think there are probably certainly some advantages to higher-quality materials used in manufacturing CDs, generally speaking, "enhanced audio quality" would not be one of them. We are talking about digital data here. It's true that if there are flaws in the material, the CD reader/player might have difficulty correctly reading the digital data, so it, I suppose, could cause 'pops' or 'skips' in the audio if there is a section that cannot be read - but that improves the *durability* of the disc. Any disc, if it's readable, would have the same audio quality if they have the same data on it, and the data is fed to the same DAC.
I'm all for making discs more scratch resistant, but this SHM-CD sounds suspiciously similar to 'audiophile grade digital cables' from the likes of Monster Cable, et. al, where the manufacturers are dramatically increasing profit margins on something which, for most users, is only marginally, or possibly not even noticeably, better.
You would think that is the case, but even in areas where there is broadband connectivity, that doesn't always make for a good gaming experience. I pretty routinely play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on public internet servers. I can tell you from experience that even servers that I have a pretty decent connection to (average ping 50ms), I get a lot of 'spikeyness' - which is to say the ping might suddenly jump up to 100 or 200 briefly here and there - even if that lag spike lasts less than a second, it can really badly impact the game for you.
I'd love to play ET at a LAN party someday, and see what the experience is like.
"Since you're inviting a busload of people to your residence, you need to worry about more than simple theft. You need to worry about liability issues."
I don't think the person who Asked Slashdot mentioned anything about where this was being held. Since he/she is aiming for 60 people, I *highly doubt* it's going to be in their residence. Where are you going to setup that many computers in the average house or apartment?
So, that probably means some sort of public meeting hall (in a civic center, hotel, library, etc). In that case, the liability is pretty much all carried by the hall, and not by the organizer personally.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, far as I know, this hasn't really been a stock-market scandal. It's been a mortgage industry scandal. Stocks have fallen as a result, but as far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with the stock markets themselves.
If you want to sell a company at Auction, there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Seriously, how is selling a company at auction an interesting experiment? They've been doing it for hundreds of years.
To write an Outlook Mobile for Android app and put it on the Android Market. Microsoft, likely, will not do that unless Android become *the* dominant player in the market, which it currently is far from.
In the meantime, Android *is* Microsoft compatible to the extent that you can enable IMAP or POP3, and SMTP with Exchange, and the mail client uses those IETF *standardized* protocols. I mean, really, why blame Google for implementing the *real* standards instead of Microsoft's non-standards?
Ok, I'm not sure if that's entirely the right expression, but courts will often refuse to enforce clauses in contracts which are a dramatic expansion of the intended purposes of contract law.
I think in California, non-compete agreements which prevent people from working for any other employer in the same industry were struck down under this principal, and I would imagine that a clause which restricts you from even sharing with other parties that your app was rejected, and under what terms, would be in the same boat.
Non-disclosure agreements are intended to protect true secrets, like the formula or means of production for a product. The knowledge that an application was rejected, man, I can't see *how* that is really a company secret, other than Apple just wanting to silence criticism, which courts do not look favorably upon.
Now, I could potentially see the *why* of the rejection being covered by an NDA, *if and only if* the reason for rejection was a technical reason which would require the disclosure of a technical secret in order to explain. Still, anything that an app developer is doing for a platform shouldn't be a 'secret'.
Anyhow, I for one have started looking at the Android platform, and it's certainly interesting. Still feels a bit immature in terms of lacking some things, but I imagine a lot of the 'missing' stuff will be added with future releases. I'm hoping for, among other things, VOiP support when I'm on a WiFi network (that might, hopefully, come through third-party apps, but I think I saw a quote somewhere that Google has done something to try to prevent Apps from implementing VoIP, but not sure), and Ogg Vorbis & Theora support in the media player component (I've encoded much of my pre-Internet CD collection to Ogg).
Well, I've tended to have that feeling for quite a while too, but I'll say this. . .
I can see why some people might want a camera, PDA, and web browser built into their phone. It's 1 small gadget to haul around instead of 2 or 3. Nobody is looking to do professional level photographic work with such a picture, but sometimes those grainy, low-res, slight motion blurred pics from a phone are enough. Sometimes they are better than nothing.
My big gripe with camera phones, one that's already been stated by numerous other posters but it irks me too. . . the stupid phone companies won't sell you a phone where you can easily download the images straight to your computer, unless you buy a $500 top-of-the-line model, maybe. They want to nickel and dime you for every damn thing. They want to control what you do with your own camera/phone/mp3 player. Well SCREW THEM. My phone, I dictate what I do with it. So, last time I renewed my phone contract, I got a phone that *really* truly is *just a phone*. You can get them, believe it or not. It also happened to be the only phone from Verizon, at the time, where I didn't have to pay a dime for the phone - almost all the other models you at least had to pay $20 or $50 even with the two year contract.
Although, I suppose they are honestly laughing all the way to the bank, because even though I got locked into the two year contract, all they had to do was give me a phone which probably cost them $10. Still, I've not payed for any MMS, or $3 ringtones, or any of that nonsense that people with more dollars than sense buy, so I figure I come out ahead of what I would have been spending, anyhow.
(N/T)
Is that the same Chris Taylor that was heading up Gas Powered Games (Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander), and previous created Total Annihilation?
I suppose Chris Taylor is probably a common enough name that it's likely two separate people, but thought I'd ask, in case anyone can confirm or deny?
As the data which is stored on those servers. Don't you think the financial data for tens of thousands of customers is worth something? Also, physical facilities, HVAC, network infrastructure, etc. Also, a lot of the value of a data center, I suppose (I'm no expert in this field) might be less about the hardware itself, as the engineering that went into building up the data center as a cohesive, integrated system.
While I tend to agree with the final conclusion, I would like to point one thing out - this doesn't appear to be about preventing the already occured terrorist attack, obviously, but about trying to get some way for law enforcement officials to try to track the sender of the email. Find the sender of the email, and you might be able to covertly spy on him, and figure out who he's working with. Honestly, I don't know if they'll ever really be able to track the emails back to a source anyhow - I'm not sure that making open wi-fi illegal will matter much - there must be a million ways around that. . .
* Check into a hotel with WiFi access, pay with cash, register under a fake identity
* Have someone send the email from another country
* break into a business or residence with Internet access and physically plug in to a network which does not require username/pass
* Kidnap someone and beat their username/password out of them with a rubber hose
Can't heat radiate directly into space? I dunno if there are any materials that currently do this efficiently.
Could the heat be recycled somehow? Seems to me if you are dumping heat out of the system, you are dumping *energy* out of the system?
Take some of the excess heat and use it for environmental heating of human dwellings/workspaces, hot water for showers (could a shower be invented which works well on the moon? dunno), cooking, etc? (Granted, there's probably more 'waste heat' than you would need for heating, cooking, and making coffee, but you could at least use some of it for that).
It might, at first glance, seem surprising for an organization like Scientology to support a site that regularly covers them fairly negatively, or for said site to accept their ads, but. . . the slashdot editors, I believe, do not control advertising, I think SourceForge.net does, and most businesses will take just about anyone's money. As for the scientologists, it gives them an opportunity to provide their talking points to slashdot viewers.
Coming next: the scientology internet AstroTurf campaign in the comments of /. and other communities and blogs.
I don't have comcast, as I'm in the Cincinnati, OH region and they aren't the local incumbent but. . .
The main reasons people would still use Comcast might be that they are the only Cable internet provider in their region, there might not be any access to DSL (rural areas, small towns, etc), or any alternatives to Comcast (e.g. Satellite ISPs) might be significantly more expensive.
Seriously, in most places in the US, at least, if you want broadband Internet, you have basically two choices - the local Cable monopoly, or the local telephone monopoly. Sometimes they compete against each other and provide better service and prices, but as often as not, the very limited competition of a duopoly doesn't provide sufficient market incentives to give better service or lower prices.
In particular, with a relatively obscure policy like this P2P bandwidth throttling/blocking, most of the population doesn't know about the issue at all and doesn't care, a small part of the population only partly understands it, but thinks that this is just affecting 'them illegal pirates, so it don't affect me', and a tiny, tiny percentage of the population knows and cares enough to switch providers. I think comcast will just laugh at the tiny percentage of the population that Slashdotters represent, until something bigger forces them to care. That something bigger might be the FCC or other organ of the US government, or it might be that the tiny fraction of the population who cares enough also happens to be the same people that all their relatives and friends ask "can you help me setup my internet", and that the tiny, literate fraction of the population could *eventually* 'move the needle' by switching enough customers to a different provider, that they could get some notice, eventually, from the monopoly like Comcast.
"You can sell the domain and also make a deal with them to have all your mail redirect to your new domain address."
Ugh. So you're gonna have all your email routed through a mail server controlled by a third party in a different country? How does that sound like a good idea again?
As I recall, in the early days of mozilla, when it was pretty stripped down, it was exceptionally fast too. I could be wrong, but I suspect Google Chrome's history will proceed something like this:
* It's fast, it's stable, it's. . . unable to use flash, Java, move networks video player, embedded Windows Media Player, etc. It doesn't support Firefox add-ons.
* As it grows a user-base, said user-base will complain about the above limitations.
* In response, Google will start re-architecting Chrome to support such features, and as a result, will, like Firefox, still be a great browser, and quite fast, but not OMG ZOOMZ LOLZ!!!!11! fast anymore.
Seriously, I have absolutely no complaint about the speed of rendering of any browser, nowadays. Computers are pretty fast, pretty much all the browsers are pretty fast. The bottleneck is most websites which take 10-30 seconds to finish sending me some crappy banner-ad or something before the rest of the page can render, or are just so bogged down they take 30 seconds to respond *at all*.
I really, *really* don't see the point in Google creating yet another browser instead of just contributing to Mozilla or Webkit, and maybe skinning one of those (actually, someone posted the User Agent string for Chrome, which looked like it was probably just a modded Webkit after all, so maybe they aren't re-inventing the wheel).
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.
I don't get it. This disagreemail feature (using the word feature in the media/journalism sense here) has been run like 2 or 3 times, at least, now. If you know you don't like it, just don't read it. I tend to agree it's not all that great a feature as far as that goes, but people reading and responding to something they know they don't like just makes no sense to me.
P.S. (Offtopic - is anyone else seeing a problem today with the comment boxes on the Post a Comment page only being like 15 characters wide? Hmm, might have something to do with the NoScript FF add-on, I suppose. . .)
It is definitely mostly a novelty item, but per your statement that a computer is useless without a keyboard and monitor - it depends on what you use the computer for. Obviously, you need a keyboard and monitor to initially set any system up. But there are plenty of computer devices which are useful without a mouse and keyboard attached, once they are running, e.g. router/firewall, network server (admittedly, with only 64MB of flash ram, most of that probably used by the OS, the usefulness of this as a server is rather limited, but still), as a 'media' device - by which I mean, something you could stick next to a stereo or TV to stream audio or video from your main computer to your living room/den/basement/whatever (although, again, given the low-end specs of this thing, it definitely wouldn't be useful for HD video, but maybe for playing audio streams).
The biggest problem with this thing is that they want 1500 Lbs-Sterling, which using current exchange rages converts to almost $2800. That's a lot of money to pay for a computer with specs from 1998.
Ok, the error message for self-signed certs is a bit overly-alarmist, but I like one thing FF3 does that previous versions didn't - local certificate caching. So, if I've accepted the cert once, it never has to retrieve the cert again, so there is only one opportunity for a MITM, not an opportunity every time I visit the site. If I got the right cert the first time, then I'm secured from that point forward, and never see the nag message again.
I thought of something recently, which I'm not sure if it is a tremendously stupid idea, or has some merit, and I've been wondering - why couldn't DNS possibly be used as an additional way to verify SSL? Here's what I mean - right now, when you connect to a given server, you use DNS to lookup the server's IP, then connect to the server, which sends you back a certificate with the public key of the server. Unfortunately, you have no way to verify that the public key you are purportedly receiving from 'the server' really came from 'the server', or belongs to the owner of that DNS record. What if the owner of the server has uploaded the certificate into DNS, which the browser could also download a copy (or maybe a hash, instead of the full cert) of the certificate from the DNS record for that server, to try to check if they match?
Now, there's at least one main problem I can think of with this - right now, DNS itself may not be trustworthy enough for this to work, as it is currently implemented. But, it seems to me we already need a more secure DNS system, because DNS is way too important to not be as secure as we can make it. If we're upgrading our DNS infrastructure, it would be an opportune time to add new features like this. I don't claim to be a security expert, so I don't know exactly how you would go about securing DNS, but as a start I would suggest this - most PKI systems are intended to avoid having a user need to receive and manually load a key from an off-the-net source. That's fine, as you don't want users to have to constantly have to do that for every new server they visit.
But, would it be that onerous to have users enter or import a key, once, for their ISP's DNS server, which would act as a "Strong Link" in the web-of-trust - one very strongly verified key that can be used as the link with which you can 'complete' the chain of verified identities? Once the connection between a user and their ISP's DNS server is strongly verified, the ISP's can basically do the same thing with whoever their 'upstream' DNS provider is, be that a root tld server, or a higher-level 'backbone ISP'. All connections between DNS servers would be encrypted using these 'strongly verified' public keys.
Now, I realize that for a given server, e.g. www.example.com, the 'root' servers don't know the IP address for the server 'www' in that domain - just the address for the 'example.com' DNS Server - but the root servers could then send either a fingerprint, or the public cert, back to your ISP's DNS server, so that when your DNS server contacts the example.com DNS Server, to retrieve the domain and cert info for the 'www.example.com' server, it can verify the identity of the example.com domain server.
One 'convenience' related problem I can think of, at least, is users who move from one network to another - e.g. someone with a laptop or other wireless, mobile device who is using another network - at work, at a coffee shop, hotel, airport, etc. That could potentially be resolved by always using the same DNS server regardless of which network you are on, instead of the local network's DNS server. That is, regardless of which network you are on, you always get DNS from your ISP. This means taking DNS out of DHCP (that is, going back to statically assigned IP addresses for DNS), or, maybe, you use the local DNS server once, to lookup your ISP's DNS server (oh, but I hear you saying - if you use a different DNS server even once, just to try to lookup your home DNS server, there is an opportunity for an attack; my answer is, I think, not really - remember, your computer has locally stored the cert for your home DNS server, which you strongly verified, setting us that 'strong link' I mentioned earlier - any attempt at an attack would likely fail to authenticate against the locally stored certificate, wouldn't it, which could then cause your OS to trigger some sort of DNS verification error).
Have I missed something stupid, or is there a reason a more secure DNS couldn't be built, and used as a trusted means of verifying DNS certs for other servers?
If the "Great Disaster" happens, it most certainly would not be capable of wiping out religion. It *might* wipe out large, cenrtalized religious institutions like the Catholic Church (I suspect it wouldn't even completely destroy the Catholic church - just inhibit it's ability to communicate with / control Catholic dioceses on other continents) , and the many protestant demoninations. But it certainly wouldn't wipe out Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other school of religious thought. There will still be priests, and rabbis, imams and gurus and monks.
This next thought, I don't claim any originality to - others have posted this, and I just repeat it here for the sake of the rest of my argument - the reason for this disc is not to preserve religious thought. It is to preserve knowledge of language - so that future academics and learn 'lost' languages. The thought seems to be that the Genesis story is well known, and because of it's religious nature would be more likely to be still *be known* in the future, than most other possible texts.
Once you've learned the lost languages (or at least 'enough' of the lost language so that you can begin reading other extant texts in those languages and learn *more* of those languages over time) then you can begin reading and learning all sorts of stuff, like mathematics, science, and engineering.
The thing about langauge is that the hardest part of it is *getting started*. Learning the first basics of a new languages like its alphabet or ideograms, grammatical structures, and a basic vocabulary. Once you have the basics of a language, you can learn much more about the language from reading other texts in that language. But you need a starting point somewhere.
I had almost the exact same reaction - if the chip needs an external device, wth is the chip actually doing that couldn't just be in the external device.
Also, If I kidnap some rich kid, the first thing I'm doing is tossing his cell phone, mp3 player, gameboy, and any other electronics that might secretly be tracking me, into the nearest garbabe can, or hell, just dump it on the sidewalk or street.
I'm gonna guess that at least some portion of Macbook Air users probably plugin a USB or Firewire DVD drive. DVD drives (which of course, still read and if the drive is a burner, record, CDs) certainly still have a place in modern computing - watching movies, backups, OS reload.
While I think there are probably certainly some advantages to higher-quality materials used in manufacturing CDs, generally speaking, "enhanced audio quality" would not be one of them. We are talking about digital data here. It's true that if there are flaws in the material, the CD reader/player might have difficulty correctly reading the digital data, so it, I suppose, could cause 'pops' or 'skips' in the audio if there is a section that cannot be read - but that improves the *durability* of the disc. Any disc, if it's readable, would have the same audio quality if they have the same data on it, and the data is fed to the same DAC.
I'm all for making discs more scratch resistant, but this SHM-CD sounds suspiciously similar to 'audiophile grade digital cables' from the likes of Monster Cable, et. al, where the manufacturers are dramatically increasing profit margins on something which, for most users, is only marginally, or possibly not even noticeably, better.
You would think that is the case, but even in areas where there is broadband connectivity, that doesn't always make for a good gaming experience. I pretty routinely play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on public internet servers. I can tell you from experience that even servers that I have a pretty decent connection to (average ping 50ms), I get a lot of 'spikeyness' - which is to say the ping might suddenly jump up to 100 or 200 briefly here and there - even if that lag spike lasts less than a second, it can really badly impact the game for you.
I'd love to play ET at a LAN party someday, and see what the experience is like.
"Since you're inviting a busload of people to your residence, you need to worry about more than simple theft. You need to worry about liability issues."
I don't think the person who Asked Slashdot mentioned anything about where this was being held. Since he/she is aiming for 60 people, I *highly doubt* it's going to be in their residence. Where are you going to setup that many computers in the average house or apartment?
So, that probably means some sort of public meeting hall (in a civic center, hotel, library, etc). In that case, the liability is pretty much all carried by the hall, and not by the organizer personally.