If you read on, it says that after the transition period ends, all remaining customers who have not transitioned to the new service will be transitioned. And the only reference to a transition period says it is from August to October -- so it looks like these people have 2 weeks to find a real ISP after their former one sold out on them.
No, deja went out of business because they filled so much of the screen with ads that people refused to use the site, or only used it if they were able to simply ignore them all.
In their latest incarnation, the top half of the browser window was entirely ads except for deja's logo and a few navigational controls. The bottom half had ads on the left and right sides, leaving only about 1/4 of the total screen to actually display the article. And they'd even started selling links attached to specific words in articles. They had so many ads that even the ordinary Joes would have to learn to ignore them or wouldn't be able to use the site.
Google seems to be doing OK surviving on Yahoo's rental of search services (yes, Yahoo offers a search through the Usenet archive) and the few targeted ads that show up at the top of searches if you search on the right word(s). And they don't overwhelm you with so many ads that you can't find the articles.
The linked-to IRS document says it's a tax credit, so no, you don't necessarily have to have income to claim it. But there may be limits buried somewhere in the part of the document that exceeded my attention span.
More importantly, it seemed to say it was for software developed primarily for a taxpayer's own use, and that it had to accomplish some task for which there is not readily available or purchasable software to do the job. One or both of these would seem to rule out most open source projects.
Some of the one-off stuff I put together (often in python) would seem more likely to meet the terms of this credit than most open source projects. But they probably don't accomplish significant enough tasks, and they're usually just for my own hobbies rather than any business purpose, so they probably wouldn't qualify either.
The Word bulleted/numbered list format is horribly broken.
It wasn't quite right in Word 95, and then MS stripped it out and replaced it with something totally different in Word 97... which was even more broken.
Some of the problems can be fixed with better software -- such as the way Word decides what paragraphs are part of what lists -- but some of the problems are deeper.
Word stores some of the settings for list paragraphs in the paragraph, and some of them in the list format object that the list is attached to, but some of the formatting appears both places, and Word uses some algorithm to decide which is correct -- which is one of the reasons lists sometimes get messed up in complex Word documents.
Many free web-based games have been using ads like this for some time.
I first saw such ads in Acrophobia 3 years ago, and since then, I've seen them in assorted other games. (The game was designed with certain intermissions. In the finals of each game, the top two contestants play while the others wait, then the others vote on their plays while they wait. During both of these waits, the waiting players get an ad that takes up the whole window. There are also periodically ads between rounds. When I first played Acrophobia, these were full-screen ads with sound that were the closest thing to a TV commercial I'd ever seen, and quite possibly still are -- only possibly surpassed by the embedded commercials in some RealVideo clips.)
Some of the games at Boxerjam do this, as do some of the games at Excite games.
They're doing that to try to compare it with the 16:9 movie/HDTV aspect ratio.
This means that 90% of the screen will be used if you display movie-ratio content on it, as opposed to 75% of the screen on a conventional 4:3 monitor.
If anybody was actually making any HDTV content available, I suppose you could use this as a pretty decent HDTV set, as well as a high-resolution computer monitor.
His biggest assumption seems to be that nobody can archive all the data coming from the random source.
However, data storage capacity has long been increasing exponentially with time, while (if the data rate from the source is constant) the total amount of random data to be stored increases only linearly with time. Eventually (and probably quickly), you will need faster and faster sources of random data for this assumption to be true.
Thank you for going in and finding the real link.
On Netscape 4.76, Realplayer 7, Linux I too kept getting the "you need a plugin" screen. (And when you follow the link, it says there are 0 plugins available.) Of course, I already had realplayer and it is set to use for all of the appropriate content types.
Once you get through the bogus javascript which breaks everything, and get to the actual video stream, it works just fine.
And the audio and video are nice and clear over DSL.
I don't know about Canada's laws, but Canada isn't "enforcing" anything here.
The story (better to read the earlier stories referenced in several comments) is about the DirecTV company sending out signals in their broadcast stream that mess with hacked receivers. They have done this several times, but shortly before the Super Bowl, they sent out a signal which was physically damaging to hacked receivers. The "smart cards" these systems use to decode the signals have a write-once area on them, and if this area contains certain coding, the card just won't work.
The current story is about the users of hacked systems finding a way to use some sort of emulation intermediate to make their otherwise damaged-broken-dead cards work anyway.
This particular thread points out that a large number of the hackers using hacked receivers/cards to get DirecTV are in Canada, where Canadian laws (probably the "Canadian content" laws) prohibit DirecTV from selling the service. The signal reaches into parts of Canada near the border, but DirecTV is prohibited from providing legit systems for decoding and viewing it. So these people are taking things into their own hand, and we have a bit of a hack war.
Rice U. has a tradition of pranks on campus, but only on occasion do they approach the magnitude of the well-known MIT pranks.
Many of the pranks often involve "Willy's Statue", a large seated statue of William Marsh Rice, the university's founder, atop a large granite cube which is actually his tomb. Most recently, the statue was covered up by a 10-foot-tall chess rook which was apparently an advertisement for a campus chess club.
The best known, and perhaps largest engineering achievement, happened in 1988 when several students built a frame capable of supporting the weight of the statue, and one night went out and turned the statue 180 degrees, so that instead of facing the 2-story-high arch in the main administrative building which forms the ceremonial front entrance of the university, he had his back to the front entrance.
The university apparently didn't trust the students to turn the statue back around, so they hired an engineering firm who damaged the statue in the process of turning it back to its normal position. (The students' turning did not damage the statue.)
But, this means that the next new version of Windows will not have a JVM. Users will only be able to run java applets in IE if they download one from Sun...
Sun may actually be able to make some money by selling some copies of their JVM in stores, to people who don't want to have to download (much as MS sells update disks for Windows). {Complete your Windows 2002 installation with Sun JVM...:-) }
And of course, then these users will see what the rest of us have seen all along: how badly Microsoft messed up Java. How many of the java applets on the web won't run on standard-conforming JVMs because they were made with MS's non-standard-conforming Java compilers.
When I read the story, I was wondering how Prodigy could have ever become the country's largest consumer DSL provider. Now it's clear -- they're really talking about the parent company, Southwestern Bell, being the largest DSL provider.
Of course, that SW Bell could become the largest US DSL provider is a huge irony, as they were the slowest of the "baby Bells" to roll out DSL to their customers -- they got to that position by buying up other Bells that were doing it right (Pacific Bell, Ameritech).
Of course, there aren't any more "baby Bells" now. Is there anything left besides SBC and Verizon?
The reason we have the electoral college is that at some levels, each state has the same amount of power. The senate has two members from each state, and constitutional amendments must be ratified by a percentage of the states. The smaller states 200+ years ago wouldn't have agreed to the union without this; similarly, the bigger states wouldn't have agreed without some form of representation proportional to the population (so we have this in the House of Representatives, for example).
The office of President was seen as such an important one that they wanted a system that combined both of these aspects, and also, originally, the system was intended to provide for an "educated" group to actually elect the president, in times when it wasn't practical for a president to travel everywhere and communicate with the populace as a whole. In any case, the system was written into the constitution, and since small states have greater power than in any sort of system based on a single popular vote count (whether that is one man, one vote, or approval voting, or any of the other various voting systems), an amendment to change to such a system will never pass.
Note that residents of states with smaller populations have greater power in the presidential election in two ways: First, they have more electoral votes per person (the number of votes is based on the number of members of the house + senate combined, or 2 + a number proportional to the population) -- one per 160,000 in Wyoming, but about 1 per 540,000 in California. Second, they have a greater chance of their one vote (or, say, the votes of a small group of like-minded friends) swaying their state's total.
As far as complicated ballots, the one and only reason is that the form of ballots to use is left up to individual states, counties, or cities to decide. Very often, the choice is to continue using whatever they have been using, so many places are using whatever system of ballots was decided upon 50 years ago, simply because the government hasn't seen a sufficient reason to change.
The "butterfly ballot" punch-card system used in some of the disputed counties in Florida has been the subject of numerous problems in the past like the ones in this election, and it has suffered a tremendous decline because places where it has caused problems in the past have chosen to use other systems. Apparently, ballots like the only ones I have ever voted with (in Texas and Massachusetts: ones where you fill in a bubble or box or some similar space next to the name of the candidate, and the resulting ballot is read optically by a computer) are the most common in the US today. However, at least where I voted in Texas, no computer reads the ballot at the time you cast your vote; instead, you just slide it in a slot in a locked box and the stack of ballots is processed later. Where I vote now, a computer does read the ballot when I hand it in; I don't know if it will give me a chance to fix my mistake if I mess up, only because I haven't seen it happen.
The one particular ballot causing all the problems was further complicated by the fact that there were too many candidates running for president to fit all their names and the vice-presidential candidates names on one page, as is usual, without making the names too small. They instead chose this system where the names appear on both sides of the row of punch-holes, and while most of the voters could follow the arrows to the correct hole, a small fraction of the voters either were in too much of a rush or were genuinely confused, and the election is so close that the votes of these few rushing/confused voters can sway the result. When the election is won by 500,000 votes, nobody cares much if 1000 voters' votes may be counted inaccurately, but when the election is won by 300 votes, suddenly it matters a great deal.
You're on a NAT, so when you send packets out to the rest of the world, instead of looking like you come from the private-network 10.* address your computer believes you have, it looks like you come from one common address Charter Cable uses in your area, which is mapped to your town, or maybe to the major city nearby. I doubt they're doing NAT on a larger scale than this, because besides being a routing bottleneck, they only have so many ports from the NAT address that they can dynamically reassign to ports of connections from your machine and those of all of your neighbors.
It displays on an old-style TV, at 320x240 for each of those 60 frames per
second! A 320x240, 24-bit color frame takes 225KB of memory. So you've got
another megabyte of memory to store extra frames, textures, or whatever...
Of course, I think it's strange they would put so little memory in a new
game machine today, considering what effort they put into the other
components, but still, this argument seems pointless. I guess the PS2
will never do HDTV, but will any of the other current games boxes?
There are several "alternative floppies" available now, but I don't think any of them use drives as inexpensive as you are looking for. The CD-RW mentioned in the original story seems to be the most popular. Drives run under $200, and almost every computer has a CD-ROM drive that can read the discs even if it can't write them, and the media are actually as cheap as floppies, roughly, per disk (under $1/disk for RW, cheaper still for CD-R). Reliability is probably better than floppy for people who care for their CDs (not magnetic), but worse than floppies for the careless.
I don't know what they're using, but when I opened the link in the story to thestandard.com,
IE5 informed me that the page (at thestandard.com) attempted to use an ActiveX control marked as unsafe, and because my security settings prevent this control from running, the page may not display as intended. (My job requires I use Windows NT and MS Outlook, IE, etc., and in response to the security problems, virus/worm attacks, etc. of the past, I have adopted paranoid security settings up to the limit that still allows me to do my work.)
Anybody know what they're doing on their pages?
It seems to be all of their pages that are affected.
I did that for a while when I was in college, too.
I guess this was around 1994-1995. For about two years, every couple months I switched phone companies between AT&T, MCI, and Sprint. I didn't even make a whole lot of long distance calls. Between the introductory plans and the checks paying me to switch, I made money off the long distance companies during this time.
I only stopped because I stopped getting the offers. I wonder why?;-)
You have your conversion factor backward.
£1 is worth about $1.5, not the other way around. So that £75 is worth about $113. Still the original poster's point is valid -- either somebody already raided most of these accounts, or most of the people don't trust the system. Most likely there is an order-of-magnitude error in the article, and they either manage 20 million accounts (with an average of about $1100 in them) or the accounts add up to £150bn.
Slashdot Mirror
And since I was away for the first 2 hours after this story was posted, when I get to read it, it is slashdotted.
Sigh...
If you read on, it says that after the transition period ends, all remaining customers who have not transitioned to the new service will be transitioned. And the only reference to a transition period says it is from August to October -- so it looks like these people have 2 weeks to find a real ISP after their former one sold out on them.
Yadda, yadda, security checklist, whatever. This is about as bad as the Windows 98 version that ships with file and print sharing enabled.
In their latest incarnation, the top half of the browser window was entirely ads except for deja's logo and a few navigational controls. The bottom half had ads on the left and right sides, leaving only about 1/4 of the total screen to actually display the article. And they'd even started selling links attached to specific words in articles. They had so many ads that even the ordinary Joes would have to learn to ignore them or wouldn't be able to use the site.
Google seems to be doing OK surviving on Yahoo's rental of search services (yes, Yahoo offers a search through the Usenet archive) and the few targeted ads that show up at the top of searches if you search on the right word(s). And they don't overwhelm you with so many ads that you can't find the articles.
More importantly, it seemed to say it was for software developed primarily for a taxpayer's own use, and that it had to accomplish some task for which there is not readily available or purchasable software to do the job. One or both of these would seem to rule out most open source projects.
Some of the one-off stuff I put together (often in python) would seem more likely to meet the terms of this credit than most open source projects. But they probably don't accomplish significant enough tasks, and they're usually just for my own hobbies rather than any business purpose, so they probably wouldn't qualify either.
Some of the problems can be fixed with better software -- such as the way Word decides what paragraphs are part of what lists -- but some of the problems are deeper.
Word stores some of the settings for list paragraphs in the paragraph, and some of them in the list format object that the list is attached to, but some of the formatting appears both places, and Word uses some algorithm to decide which is correct -- which is one of the reasons lists sometimes get messed up in complex Word documents.
I first saw such ads in Acrophobia 3 years ago, and since then, I've seen them in assorted other games. (The game was designed with certain intermissions. In the finals of each game, the top two contestants play while the others wait, then the others vote on their plays while they wait. During both of these waits, the waiting players get an ad that takes up the whole window. There are also periodically ads between rounds. When I first played Acrophobia, these were full-screen ads with sound that were the closest thing to a TV commercial I'd ever seen, and quite possibly still are -- only possibly surpassed by the embedded commercials in some RealVideo clips.) Some of the games at Boxerjam do this, as do some of the games at Excite games.
This means that 90% of the screen will be used if you display movie-ratio content on it, as opposed to 75% of the screen on a conventional 4:3 monitor.
If anybody was actually making any HDTV content available, I suppose you could use this as a pretty decent HDTV set, as well as a high-resolution computer monitor.
His biggest assumption seems to be that nobody can archive all the data coming from the random source. However, data storage capacity has long been increasing exponentially with time, while (if the data rate from the source is constant) the total amount of random data to be stored increases only linearly with time. Eventually (and probably quickly), you will need faster and faster sources of random data for this assumption to be true.
Once you get through the bogus javascript which breaks everything, and get to the actual video stream, it works just fine.
And the audio and video are nice and clear over DSL.
Not many predictions for April; most people seem to be deluded into thinking it's really coming down on the current schedule.
The story (better to read the earlier stories referenced in several comments) is about the DirecTV company sending out signals in their broadcast stream that mess with hacked receivers. They have done this several times, but shortly before the Super Bowl, they sent out a signal which was physically damaging to hacked receivers. The "smart cards" these systems use to decode the signals have a write-once area on them, and if this area contains certain coding, the card just won't work.
The current story is about the users of hacked systems finding a way to use some sort of emulation intermediate to make their otherwise damaged-broken-dead cards work anyway.
This particular thread points out that a large number of the hackers using hacked receivers/cards to get DirecTV are in Canada, where Canadian laws (probably the "Canadian content" laws) prohibit DirecTV from selling the service. The signal reaches into parts of Canada near the border, but DirecTV is prohibited from providing legit systems for decoding and viewing it. So these people are taking things into their own hand, and we have a bit of a hack war.
On paper all that headline text is expensive to print, but online, it costs them nothing! (except readers)
Many of the pranks often involve "Willy's Statue", a large seated statue of William Marsh Rice, the university's founder, atop a large granite cube which is actually his tomb. Most recently, the statue was covered up by a 10-foot-tall chess rook which was apparently an advertisement for a campus chess club.
The best known, and perhaps largest engineering achievement, happened in 1988 when several students built a frame capable of supporting the weight of the statue, and one night went out and turned the statue 180 degrees, so that instead of facing the 2-story-high arch in the main administrative building which forms the ceremonial front entrance of the university, he had his back to the front entrance.
The university apparently didn't trust the students to turn the statue back around, so they hired an engineering firm who damaged the statue in the process of turning it back to its normal position. (The students' turning did not damage the statue.)
Sun may actually be able to make some money by selling some copies of their JVM in stores, to people who don't want to have to download (much as MS sells update disks for Windows). {Complete your Windows 2002 installation with Sun JVM... :-) }
And of course, then these users will see what the rest of us have seen all along: how badly Microsoft messed up Java. How many of the java applets on the web won't run on standard-conforming JVMs because they were made with MS's non-standard-conforming Java compilers.
Not only is there a street road there, but there's an East and West street road. Hope this mile-long Yahoo Maps URL works.
When I read the story, I was wondering how Prodigy could have ever become the country's largest consumer DSL provider. Now it's clear -- they're really talking about the parent company, Southwestern Bell, being the largest DSL provider.
Of course, that SW Bell could become the largest US DSL provider is a huge irony, as they were the slowest of the "baby Bells" to roll out DSL to their customers -- they got to that position by buying up other Bells that were doing it right (Pacific Bell, Ameritech).
Of course, there aren't any more "baby Bells" now. Is there anything left besides SBC and Verizon?
The office of President was seen as such an important one that they wanted a system that combined both of these aspects, and also, originally, the system was intended to provide for an "educated" group to actually elect the president, in times when it wasn't practical for a president to travel everywhere and communicate with the populace as a whole. In any case, the system was written into the constitution, and since small states have greater power than in any sort of system based on a single popular vote count (whether that is one man, one vote, or approval voting, or any of the other various voting systems), an amendment to change to such a system will never pass.
Note that residents of states with smaller populations have greater power in the presidential election in two ways: First, they have more electoral votes per person (the number of votes is based on the number of members of the house + senate combined, or 2 + a number proportional to the population) -- one per 160,000 in Wyoming, but about 1 per 540,000 in California. Second, they have a greater chance of their one vote (or, say, the votes of a small group of like-minded friends) swaying their state's total.
As far as complicated ballots, the one and only reason is that the form of ballots to use is left up to individual states, counties, or cities to decide. Very often, the choice is to continue using whatever they have been using, so many places are using whatever system of ballots was decided upon 50 years ago, simply because the government hasn't seen a sufficient reason to change.
The "butterfly ballot" punch-card system used in some of the disputed counties in Florida has been the subject of numerous problems in the past like the ones in this election, and it has suffered a tremendous decline because places where it has caused problems in the past have chosen to use other systems. Apparently, ballots like the only ones I have ever voted with (in Texas and Massachusetts: ones where you fill in a bubble or box or some similar space next to the name of the candidate, and the resulting ballot is read optically by a computer) are the most common in the US today. However, at least where I voted in Texas, no computer reads the ballot at the time you cast your vote; instead, you just slide it in a slot in a locked box and the stack of ballots is processed later. Where I vote now, a computer does read the ballot when I hand it in; I don't know if it will give me a chance to fix my mistake if I mess up, only because I haven't seen it happen.
The one particular ballot causing all the problems was further complicated by the fact that there were too many candidates running for president to fit all their names and the vice-presidential candidates names on one page, as is usual, without making the names too small. They instead chose this system where the names appear on both sides of the row of punch-holes, and while most of the voters could follow the arrows to the correct hole, a small fraction of the voters either were in too much of a rush or were genuinely confused, and the election is so close that the votes of these few rushing/confused voters can sway the result. When the election is won by 500,000 votes, nobody cares much if 1000 voters' votes may be counted inaccurately, but when the election is won by 300 votes, suddenly it matters a great deal.
Well, FWIW, the IDSA site is slashdotted too, so I can't even find out from their site what companies they are representing.
You're on a NAT, so when you send packets out to the rest of the world, instead of looking like you come from the private-network 10.* address your computer believes you have, it looks like you come from one common address Charter Cable uses in your area, which is mapped to your town, or maybe to the major city nearby. I doubt they're doing NAT on a larger scale than this, because besides being a routing bottleneck, they only have so many ports from the NAT address that they can dynamically reassign to ports of connections from your machine and those of all of your neighbors.
Of course, I think it's strange they would put so little memory in a new game machine today, considering what effort they put into the other components, but still, this argument seems pointless. I guess the PS2 will never do HDTV, but will any of the other current games boxes?
There are several "alternative floppies" available now, but I don't think any of them use drives as inexpensive as you are looking for. The CD-RW mentioned in the original story seems to be the most popular. Drives run under $200, and almost every computer has a CD-ROM drive that can read the discs even if it can't write them, and the media are actually as cheap as floppies, roughly, per disk (under $1/disk for RW, cheaper still for CD-R). Reliability is probably better than floppy for people who care for their CDs (not magnetic), but worse than floppies for the careless.
Anybody know what they're doing on their pages? It seems to be all of their pages that are affected.
I only stopped because I stopped getting the offers. I wonder why? ;-)
You have your conversion factor backward. £1 is worth about $1.5, not the other way around. So that £75 is worth about $113. Still the original poster's point is valid -- either somebody already raided most of these accounts, or most of the people don't trust the system. Most likely there is an order-of-magnitude error in the article, and they either manage 20 million accounts (with an average of about $1100 in them) or the accounts add up to £150bn.