Or without the TMC antenna, and using an internet connected over bluetooth (eg GPRS, GSM dialup, etc). In the UK, the TMC antenna is a non-functioning piece of junk (the antenna is the wrong length for the frequency range it tries to pick up, and the channel transmitting the required RDS information, Classic FM, often isn't on powerful enough transmitters for it to work properly). On a typical 4 hour motorway run from Cheltenham to Newcastle, I got about 40 minutes of TMC coverage.
The maps have also had some form of speed information in them for ages (eg on a 70mph motorway it will assume 60mph etc, on some it knows there are usually "temporary" 50mph limits in force and warns you), and you can plan a route based on whether it is shortest, fastest etc. It will also calculate estimated time of arrival based on this.
Your original post would be more applicable to closed source software than open source. If a hole is reported in open source software you CAN do something about it immediately if you want.
So the malware now targets the browser and changes the behavior for yourbank.com-html.129381E07271B84121G34121.omgpwn3 d.com.br so that it looks legitimate.
Education is the best line of defense against this type of attack. Too bad one of my credit cards (MNBA) insist on sending me HTML emails with "click here to service your account" to confuse matters (while my other banks tell me to never click a link in an email to do such a thing). The worst bit is they don't seem to care - when I questioned the practice 18 months ago I got nowhere:(
Not strictly true. If you play two frequencies, say 28000hz and 28500hz together, they will beat and you will hear that. Sure, you can't hear the frequencies but you can hear the effect. This could be why mediums that apply a hard filter appear dull at times.
Modern digital equipment sounds far better than it should because of the tricks employed in the converters. Oversampling and noise dithering has a massive effect on the sound, and you aren't really hearing the true digital signal but a smoothed one. Before such techniques were used, digital equipment got huge criticism for being clinical sounding (quite rightly). Vinyl and other analogue systems don't have this problem obviously, but bring loads of others to the table (wear and tear, damage, static, etc).
For some material, 16bit is definitely not enough. It's fine for a lot of modern chart material, where the mastering has multiband compressed it to hell and back to make it sound louder than the competition, but those tracks don't need the dynamic range of a Chopin valse, or a Beethoven symphony. The quiet bits on 16 bit recordings definitely lose a lot compared to 24bit (side by side comparison using old and new gear) - but I think it is really the recording and production stages that need 24bit or more, not necessarily replay because of the tricks that can now be applied.
Anyway, what does it matter? It's the material played that is ultimately important, not the method of reproduction.
Those of us who use a single or dual headed 18" displays? (either because we can't afford a 30" display, or our IT services depts wont upgrade because our 18" panels still have a number of years left on the block?)
But you forget that, generally, the people of the UK are trying to abolish the licence fee, and thus the income for the BBC. I can't bring myself to think what will happen to the BBC once that happens, which it will if the idiotic masses get their way.
I've yet to subscribe to Sky - Freeview seems to have most of the decent programming these days that I want to watch in my little spare time (maybe I don't know what I'm missing). How do people find time to watch any more than say 30 minutes, 60 at a push, of TV each day to fit all these shows in anyway?
Someone at CEAS2006 did exactly this, with great results. The Spamalot system was great fun, and I think they had something like a 19 email chain going on before the scammers gave up. http://www.ceas.cc/2006/5.pdf (pdf notes only)
I live in the UK and work as a developer/architect and I think I'm the only person I know, even considering my colleagues, with a home server. My parents certainly don't either. Unless you count wireless routers as servers, or the Windows trojans sharing their files to the world?;-)
Apart from the odd person running WoW or some other game, I don't know anyone that actually uses wine other than me (and I only use it for Internet Exploder for those sites that don't work in anything else, and the occasional iTunes download). Is WINE really that practical or popular?
BT used this years ago in a credit card sized device (albeit a bit thicker) for access control. Certainly I saw such a device in the late 80's (the Father of a university friend worked in a senior position at BT).
I don't see this as new - although it is somewhat unusual for anything involving finance to actually care about security... take this email I receive regularly for example (spot the number of "click here" links (MNBA rock, every bank should model themselves on this lame company):
Just writing to give you a heads up that your latest Virgin Credit Card statement is winging its way to your letterbox, so you can try and grab it before the dog does. But don't forget, if you want a quicker look at all of last month's transactions, just log on to Online service. Click here to Log in
There's loads of other stuff you can do online too, like: Transfer balances from other cards Pay your bills Bump up your credit limit Get a PIN reminder Update your personal info
Plus you can check out all of our newly posted money saving offers exclusive to Virgin Card holders. Check out My offers at www.virginmoney.com/savetime Remember, Online service is free, totally secure and dead easy to use. So tell Lassie to take a walk and login here or visit www.virginmoney.com/savetime Things get more exciting when you say yes
Click here to Log in
Kind regards Trevor Field Trevor Field Marketing Director
My mother is a senior teacher at a British primary school, and my father is now a lab technician in a comprehensive secondary school (after a long career in electronics). Both of them experience the same things you describe, even now. However, rather than teachers battling with these things, many bigger schools have their own IT technicians and smaller schools buy in support - not cheap, but it is cheaper than the teachers time usually.
Many schools still rely on Windows 98 machines for some programs, especially primary schools, as the software will only run on old versions of Windows. Some schools still make use of Acorn Archimedes computers because the software was that good. New computers are expensive, and schools in the UK simply do not have the budget to spend on luxuries such as Vista or XP. Schools, certainly in my county, do not get the advantages of Microsoft discounts because the educational authority appears to be sleeping with computer giants such as RM Nimbus or Viglen. The school is only allowed to buy its computers through these suppliers, and do not get a very good deal. The same companies also provide (well, resell I guess) broadband internet access - at an extortionate rate.
There is a third case with software - some software is written by ex-teachers that are very good programmers. Sherston software (http://www.sherston.com/) is one example of quality educational software that does things this way.
For a corporation I agree, but most software isn't written for corporations - it is written for use by much smaller outfits. Think of all the simple MS Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, VB applications etc. that Joe from accounts coded up in his spare time. That software usually increases productivity in those companies by orders of magnitude, even if it is full of bugs.
Define working...
There is now an experimental backend in the SANE CVS tree, but I've not had chance to try it here yet. Debian packages appear to have this backend too, so it is possible it will work. There are sources around for standalone utilities now too, so it hopefully wont be long before it does.
Maybe you could donate some time to the project, or offer your beers (or cash?) to the main developer of the experimental backend?
http://www.sane-project.org/unsupported/canon-3200 f.html
Way back in the day (1996-7) when CDRs were still expensive, before burnproof I used my 200MHz Pentium to burn a CD while playing Quake at a sensible resolution, but still to the point of using up all the CPU (well, you are doing that essentially unless it hit the FPS cap easily anyway).
While I can see your point, I don't think it really applies now. Times have changed and there are now thousands of times more programmers in the world because thousands more businesses need (or want) software to help them.
I think that 99.9% of business software does not need any of the things you talked about - it just needs to be written in the first place, even if it is a nightmare to maintain. Lots of this code will be written, out of necessity and the shortage of "good" programmers, by people that have no idea about assembly language programming or the underlying computer hardware - but it really doesn't matter.
And yes, the world needs a society of half-baked, semi-literate coders. They can come up with the VBA / MS Word Macros, the Excel spreadsheets and the websites that keep the world running, while the good ones can go and write the software that this stuff runs in/on.
Oh come on - how crazy do you have to be to think this is true? Everyone knows there were no dinosaurs! Fossils are merely artifacts put there by God to test our faith. Don't you "scientist" types know *anything*?
With some software my Pentium-M 1.86GHz, P4-2.8GHz and AMD 3500+ all do this, and I'm sure a modern processor would do the same too. I blame the coders - Open Source freaks can't code to save their lives!;-)
Well, you are lucky that you don't need to do anything particularly taxing on your machine, or at least require that anything taxing happens quicky. Some people have to work in environments that require quick feedback - waiting 3-4 seconds for something to update gets really annoying if you have to do it several hundred times per day, whereas you dont notice it if it is subsecond.
re: the cheap machines with no moving parts - we've been there several times over the last few decades. Technology comes and goes in phases, and for some things this kind of solution is great. If you *need* lots of local storage for performance reasons, it is never going to be great. Similarly, if you have lots of clients that need moderate network bandwidth just because of the amount of loading they do (thinking remote boot OS etc here), it is not going to be great. For terminal serving Office or some other relatively dumb app, BONZA, it's going to be ideal though - at least for the next couple of years until the approache changes again.
Slashdot Mirror
Or without the TMC antenna, and using an internet connected over bluetooth (eg GPRS, GSM dialup, etc). In the UK, the TMC antenna is a non-functioning piece of junk (the antenna is the wrong length for the frequency range it tries to pick up, and the channel transmitting the required RDS information, Classic FM, often isn't on powerful enough transmitters for it to work properly). On a typical 4 hour motorway run from Cheltenham to Newcastle, I got about 40 minutes of TMC coverage.
The maps have also had some form of speed information in them for ages (eg on a 70mph motorway it will assume 60mph etc, on some it knows there are usually "temporary" 50mph limits in force and warns you), and you can plan a route based on whether it is shortest, fastest etc. It will also calculate estimated time of arrival based on this.
Your original post would be more applicable to closed source software than open source. If a hole is reported in open source software you CAN do something about it immediately if you want.
So the malware now targets the browser and changes the behavior for yourbank.com-html.129381E07271B84121G34121.omgpwn3 d.com.br so that it looks legitimate.
:(
Education is the best line of defense against this type of attack. Too bad one of my credit cards (MNBA) insist on sending me HTML emails with "click here to service your account" to confuse matters (while my other banks tell me to never click a link in an email to do such a thing). The worst bit is they don't seem to care - when I questioned the practice 18 months ago I got nowhere
And someone modded that funny? Sigh.
Not strictly true. If you play two frequencies, say 28000hz and 28500hz together, they will beat and you will hear that. Sure, you can't hear the frequencies but you can hear the effect. This could be why mediums that apply a hard filter appear dull at times.
Modern digital equipment sounds far better than it should because of the tricks employed in the converters. Oversampling and noise dithering has a massive effect on the sound, and you aren't really hearing the true digital signal but a smoothed one. Before such techniques were used, digital equipment got huge criticism for being clinical sounding (quite rightly). Vinyl and other analogue systems don't have this problem obviously, but bring loads of others to the table (wear and tear, damage, static, etc).
For some material, 16bit is definitely not enough. It's fine for a lot of modern chart material, where the mastering has multiband compressed it to hell and back to make it sound louder than the competition, but those tracks don't need the dynamic range of a Chopin valse, or a Beethoven symphony. The quiet bits on 16 bit recordings definitely lose a lot compared to 24bit (side by side comparison using old and new gear) - but I think it is really the recording and production stages that need 24bit or more, not necessarily replay because of the tricks that can now be applied.
Anyway, what does it matter? It's the material played that is ultimately important, not the method of reproduction.
Those of us who use a single or dual headed 18" displays? (either because we can't afford a 30" display, or our IT services depts wont upgrade because our 18" panels still have a number of years left on the block?)
But you forget that, generally, the people of the UK are trying to abolish the licence fee, and thus the income for the BBC. I can't bring myself to think what will happen to the BBC once that happens, which it will if the idiotic masses get their way.
I've yet to subscribe to Sky - Freeview seems to have most of the decent programming these days that I want to watch in my little spare time (maybe I don't know what I'm missing). How do people find time to watch any more than say 30 minutes, 60 at a push, of TV each day to fit all these shows in anyway?
Someone at CEAS2006 did exactly this, with great results. The Spamalot system was great fun, and I think they had something like a 19 email chain going on before the scammers gave up. http://www.ceas.cc/2006/5.pdf (pdf notes only)
I live in the UK and work as a developer/architect and I think I'm the only person I know, even considering my colleagues, with a home server. My parents certainly don't either. Unless you count wireless routers as servers, or the Windows trojans sharing their files to the world? ;-)
Apart from the odd person running WoW or some other game, I don't know anyone that actually uses wine other than me (and I only use it for Internet Exploder for those sites that don't work in anything else, and the occasional iTunes download). Is WINE really that practical or popular?
Well they would if the consumer line wasn't now more powerful than the quadro line :-)
BT used this years ago in a credit card sized device (albeit a bit thicker) for access control. Certainly I saw such a device in the late 80's (the Father of a university friend worked in a senior position at BT).
I don't see this as new - although it is somewhat unusual for anything involving finance to actually care about security... take this email I receive regularly for example (spot the number of "click here" links (MNBA rock, every bank should model themselves on this lame company):
Just writing to give you a heads up that your latest Virgin Credit Card statement is winging its way to your letterbox, so you can try and grab it before the dog does.
But don't forget, if you want a quicker look at all of last month's transactions, just log on to Online service.
Click here to Log in
There's loads of other stuff you can do online too, like:
Transfer balances from other cards
Pay your bills
Bump up your credit limit
Get a PIN reminder
Update your personal info
Plus you can check out all of our newly posted money saving offers exclusive to Virgin Card holders. Check out My offers at www.virginmoney.com/savetime
Remember, Online service is free, totally secure and dead easy to use. So tell Lassie to take a walk and login here or visit www.virginmoney.com/savetime
Things get more exciting when you say yes
Click here to Log in
Kind regards
Trevor Field
Trevor Field
Marketing Director
It depends. Do you say "a FAQ" (fack) or "an F A Q" (eff ahy cue)?
AOL sucked way before they bought out Time Warner...
Sounds an awful lot like Intel's PlaceLab to me.
So send them on an ECDL course (or whatever the US equivalent is) then.
My mother is a senior teacher at a British primary school, and my father is now a lab technician in a comprehensive secondary school (after a long career in electronics). Both of them experience the same things you describe, even now. However, rather than teachers battling with these things, many bigger schools have their own IT technicians and smaller schools buy in support - not cheap, but it is cheaper than the teachers time usually.
Many schools still rely on Windows 98 machines for some programs, especially primary schools, as the software will only run on old versions of Windows. Some schools still make use of Acorn Archimedes computers because the software was that good. New computers are expensive, and schools in the UK simply do not have the budget to spend on luxuries such as Vista or XP. Schools, certainly in my county, do not get the advantages of Microsoft discounts because the educational authority appears to be sleeping with computer giants such as RM Nimbus or Viglen. The school is only allowed to buy its computers through these suppliers, and do not get a very good deal. The same companies also provide (well, resell I guess) broadband internet access - at an extortionate rate.
There is a third case with software - some software is written by ex-teachers that are very good programmers. Sherston software (http://www.sherston.com/) is one example of quality educational software that does things this way.
For a corporation I agree, but most software isn't written for corporations - it is written for use by much smaller outfits. Think of all the simple MS Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, VB applications etc. that Joe from accounts coded up in his spare time. That software usually increases productivity in those companies by orders of magnitude, even if it is full of bugs.
Define working... There is now an experimental backend in the SANE CVS tree, but I've not had chance to try it here yet. Debian packages appear to have this backend too, so it is possible it will work. There are sources around for standalone utilities now too, so it hopefully wont be long before it does. Maybe you could donate some time to the project, or offer your beers (or cash?) to the main developer of the experimental backend? http://www.sane-project.org/unsupported/canon-3200 f.html
Way back in the day (1996-7) when CDRs were still expensive, before burnproof I used my 200MHz Pentium to burn a CD while playing Quake at a sensible resolution, but still to the point of using up all the CPU (well, you are doing that essentially unless it hit the FPS cap easily anyway).
Without getting a coaster.
I used Windows (NT).
While I can see your point, I don't think it really applies now. Times have changed and there are now thousands of times more programmers in the world because thousands more businesses need (or want) software to help them.
I think that 99.9% of business software does not need any of the things you talked about - it just needs to be written in the first place, even if it is a nightmare to maintain. Lots of this code will be written, out of necessity and the shortage of "good" programmers, by people that have no idea about assembly language programming or the underlying computer hardware - but it really doesn't matter.
And yes, the world needs a society of half-baked, semi-literate coders. They can come up with the VBA / MS Word Macros, the Excel spreadsheets and the websites that keep the world running, while the good ones can go and write the software that this stuff runs in/on.
Oh come on - how crazy do you have to be to think this is true? Everyone knows there were no dinosaurs! Fossils are merely artifacts put there by God to test our faith. Don't you "scientist" types know *anything*?
Xen?
With some software my Pentium-M 1.86GHz, P4-2.8GHz and AMD 3500+ all do this, and I'm sure a modern processor would do the same too. I blame the coders - Open Source freaks can't code to save their lives! ;-)
Well, you are lucky that you don't need to do anything particularly taxing on your machine, or at least require that anything taxing happens quicky. Some people have to work in environments that require quick feedback - waiting 3-4 seconds for something to update gets really annoying if you have to do it several hundred times per day, whereas you dont notice it if it is subsecond.
re: the cheap machines with no moving parts - we've been there several times over the last few decades. Technology comes and goes in phases, and for some things this kind of solution is great. If you *need* lots of local storage for performance reasons, it is never going to be great. Similarly, if you have lots of clients that need moderate network bandwidth just because of the amount of loading they do (thinking remote boot OS etc here), it is not going to be great. For terminal serving Office or some other relatively dumb app, BONZA, it's going to be ideal though - at least for the next couple of years until the approache changes again.