Therein lies the problem. People forget that Joe Public putting his holiday videos etc on his web site is just as much, and in some ways more important, a content provider as the TV stations and MPAA members. The HTML standard should be accessible for anyone, not just commercial content providers, to create web pages including multimedia.
Why can the GPU interfaces not be standard? For a long time they were, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond were all standardised and whether your card was made by Matrox, S3, Tseng, etc., the software register interface was the same.
They are on so that the customer can call in once a month and say "charge the number in my account for last month's bill."
That does not require the CC number to be displayed. The backend system has the number stored (otherwise it could not be retrieved and displayed to the agent), so in the payment entry screen there should be "buttons" for 'charge to stored bank account', 'charge to stored Credit/Debit Card' and 'Enter the card details to be charged'.
In the French TV programme linked from the blog entry, we see a no-pin transaction being undertaken in a Cambridge store. The banks letter states that these transactions would not work in practice as they would be detected. This raises the question of whether they only learnt that this transaction was a 'no-pin' when it was aired on TV or whether they had detected it on their own beforehand.
It's not quite that easy to issue an APB of a stolen checkbook, don't accept these checks
True, but it does not have to be an APB. Only the issuing bank has to have the information so that during the clearing process it can tell the bank presenting it that it is stolen, fraudulent or there are insufficient funds to cover it, Then it will not clear. The problem here is that the victim checked that it had cleared, by which time, IMHO, it should be too late for the bank to reverse the transaction.
It is interesting that even now we are still using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. With spam, phishing etc, maybe it is time to replace SMTP by either a plain Mail Transfer Protocol or even a Complex Mail Transfer Protocol.
I wouldn't blindly trust someone making that claim. That could mean just about anything. "Out of our hands" could also mean that their corporate mandate is to make as much money as possible, and the bandwidth you're using (and, I assume, contractually allowed to use) could be more profitably allocated to other customers. Therefore, they regret that they're going to have to break their contract and shut you down. could be out of their hands. Until you know for certain, though, exactly where the decision was made and exactly why, I wouldn't discount any possibility.
But then they have to consider whether the extra they could earn from breaking the contract and selling the bandwidth to other customers will offset the costs (both the cost of the lawyers and any award made by the courts) of defending 'breach of contract' suits brought by those contracts they have broken? Also of the negative effect on their reputation as a company who does not honour its contracts.
As it is, IPv6 must be run in dual-stack mode, which means that even if you've got an IPv6 address, you must also have an IPv4 address.
That is not necessarily true. Any IPv4 address can be expressed in IPv6 and there are gateways which given an IPv4in6 destination address will make the connection to the IPv4 only server. While this is of no use to customers who host systems, many if not most domestic ISP contracts prohibit the running of servers so customers only make outgoing connections. The ISP would need IPv4 addresses (for the gateways and business customers) but could provide only IPv6 addresses to its domestic customers. This would cut down on the number of IPv4 blocks that the ISPs would need and therefore alleviate the shortage.
Another problem with DAB in the UK is that, like with Digital TV, there are too many stations/channels on each MUX. If they did not have so many channels (why do we need so many +1 channels on Freeview Terrestrial Digital TV?) then they could use higher bitrates and therefore better quality. DAB has the capability to offer higher (audio) quality than FM but because they squeeze in so many stations, the quality of most (if not all) is lower than a good FM setup.
At one time, unless they self-published, all recording artists started out as live performers who were "discovered" by a talent scout and offered a recording contract.
Will Dell let you buy a laptop or even desktop PC without operating system? I know that the servers can be purchased without an OS, but thought all the 'end user' systems came with OS.
There was a time when if you asked for a DOS machine at work, you would have had to be working in the technological vanguard to get it. Because HERE we use mainframes kid, not this new fangled dos/windows 1.0 stuff. that is kid stuff, for hobbyists.
I was working as a systems programmer in a mainframe environment in the 1980s and strangely we were the first to get PCs (XTs if memory serves me correctly) as we could use the IBM 3270 and ICL C03 emulator boards and software to have just one box on our desk to provide access to both mainframe systems.
Are modern day blogs not much closer to the 'press' at the time the US first amendment was passed than are today's corporate media conglomerates? So is taking down a site containing so many blogs not interfering with the freedom of the press - which is something the US constitution prohibits their government from doing?
I too learnt databases from Date's excellent book. I believe (though I have not actually seen them) that the later editions have dropped most of the material on 'historic' systems and cover relational databases almost exclusively.
Maybe the reasoning behind referring to "apps" is to distinguish between "Application programs" and "System programs". In a long past life, my job title was "systems programmer".
For serving bulk (ie large) or streaming content, which is what CDNs are used for, then latency does not really matter. As long as the TCP window is large enough and there are not too many dropped packets (resulting in re-transmission) then a high latency link can delivery a high throughput. For streaming you also want low jitter (ie a reasonably constant RTT), but this is not related to latency. It is only for interactive connections, such as VOIP, ssh, and gaming, for which CDN are not used, that you need low latency.
But why should a patent be necessary for that? Open Source software, by definition, puts the invention on public record - in considerably more detail and without the obfuscation present in patent claims. Patents are supposed to be for the benefit of 'practitioners in the art', but are in practice written by lawyers in a language foreign to the engineers and inventors. The publishing of the source should satisfy the requirements of 'prior art' so would block anyone from subsequently patenting it. So publishing as open source should provide all of the benefits of a patent without the expense and legal rigmarole of obtaining one.
If people can receive BBC signals via their aerials they are likely residing in the UK, and thus, more than likely pay a TV license.
I think that you will find that the BBC signals are receivable by aerial throughout most, if not all, of the Netherlands and in many places in Northern France.
Even if the ISP is not rolling out IPv6 connectivity, their customers could be affected if the customer is using a 6to4 tunnel to get a 2002:: IPv6 block based on his IPv4 address.
It's actually worse than that. Currently many people have routers at home that send out v6 router advertisements despite not actually having IPv6 connectivity.
What are these home routers which advertise IPv6? The only ADSL routers I know of which support IPv6 are by Cisco, which are not exactly common home routers.
I think we have finally reached the point where new hardware supports IPv6, almost universally. So now we are just waiting until the older hardware is replaced.
That may be true of ISP and carrier level hardware, but consumer level routers do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada? Has songwriters? Name one!
I will name two. Sarah McLachlan, Loreena McKennitt
Therein lies the problem. People forget that Joe Public putting his holiday videos etc on his web site is just as much, and in some ways more important, a content provider as the TV stations and MPAA members. The HTML standard should be accessible for anyone, not just commercial content providers, to create web pages including multimedia.
Why can the GPU interfaces not be standard? For a long time they were, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond were all standardised and whether your card was made by Matrox, S3, Tseng, etc., the software register interface was the same.
They are on so that the customer can call in once a month and say "charge the number in my account for last month's bill."
That does not require the CC number to be displayed. The backend system has the number stored (otherwise it could not be retrieved and displayed to the agent), so in the payment entry screen there should be "buttons" for 'charge to stored bank account', 'charge to stored Credit/Debit Card' and 'Enter the card details to be charged'.
In the French TV programme linked from the blog entry, we see a no-pin transaction being undertaken in a Cambridge store. The banks letter states that these transactions would not work in practice as they would be detected. This raises the question of whether they only learnt that this transaction was a 'no-pin' when it was aired on TV or whether they had detected it on their own beforehand.
It's not quite that easy to issue an APB of a stolen checkbook, don't accept these checks
True, but it does not have to be an APB. Only the issuing bank has to have the information so that during the clearing process it can tell the bank presenting it that it is stolen, fraudulent or there are insufficient funds to cover it, Then it will not clear. The problem here is that the victim checked that it had cleared, by which time, IMHO, it should be too late for the bank to reverse the transaction.
It is interesting that even now we are still using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. With spam, phishing etc, maybe it is time to replace SMTP by either a plain Mail Transfer Protocol or even a Complex Mail Transfer Protocol.
I wouldn't blindly trust someone making that claim. That could mean just about anything. "Out of our hands" could also mean that their corporate mandate is to make as much money as possible, and the bandwidth you're using (and, I assume, contractually allowed to use) could be more profitably allocated to other customers. Therefore, they regret that they're going to have to break their contract and shut you down. could be out of their hands. Until you know for certain, though, exactly where the decision was made and exactly why, I wouldn't discount any possibility.
But then they have to consider whether the extra they could earn from breaking the contract and selling the bandwidth to other customers will offset the costs (both the cost of the lawyers and any award made by the courts) of defending 'breach of contract' suits brought by those contracts they have broken? Also of the negative effect on their reputation as a company who does not honour its contracts.
The irony is that you need to find another computer to read up on how to fix the issue.
Or boot from a live CD/DVD such as systemrescuecd.
As it is, IPv6 must be run in dual-stack mode, which means that even if you've got an IPv6 address, you must also have an IPv4 address.
That is not necessarily true. Any IPv4 address can be expressed in IPv6 and there are gateways which given an IPv4in6 destination address will make the connection to the IPv4 only server. While this is of no use to customers who host systems, many if not most domestic ISP contracts prohibit the running of servers so customers only make outgoing connections. The ISP would need IPv4 addresses (for the gateways and business customers) but could provide only IPv6 addresses to its domestic customers. This would cut down on the number of IPv4 blocks that the ISPs would need and therefore alleviate the shortage.
Another problem with DAB in the UK is that, like with Digital TV, there are too many stations/channels on each MUX. If they did not have so many channels (why do we need so many +1 channels on Freeview Terrestrial Digital TV?) then they could use higher bitrates and therefore better quality. DAB has the capability to offer higher (audio) quality than FM but because they squeeze in so many stations, the quality of most (if not all) is lower than a good FM setup.
At one time, unless they self-published, all recording artists started out as live performers who were "discovered" by a talent scout and offered a recording contract.
Will Dell let you buy a laptop or even desktop PC without operating system? I know that the servers can be purchased without an OS, but thought all the 'end user' systems came with OS.
There was a time when if you asked for a DOS machine at work, you would have had to be working in the technological vanguard to get it. Because HERE we use mainframes kid, not this new fangled dos/windows 1.0 stuff. that is kid stuff, for hobbyists.
I was working as a systems programmer in a mainframe environment in the 1980s and strangely we were the first to get PCs (XTs if memory serves me correctly) as we could use the IBM 3270 and ICL C03 emulator boards and software to have just one box on our desk to provide access to both mainframe systems.
Are modern day blogs not much closer to the 'press' at the time the US first amendment was passed than are today's corporate media conglomerates? So is taking down a site containing so many blogs not interfering with the freedom of the press - which is something the US constitution prohibits their government from doing?
I too learnt databases from Date's excellent book. I believe (though I have not actually seen them) that the later editions have dropped most of the material on 'historic' systems and cover relational databases almost exclusively.
Maybe the reasoning behind referring to "apps" is to distinguish between "Application programs" and "System programs". In a long past life, my job title was "systems programmer".
For serving bulk (ie large) or streaming content, which is what CDNs are used for, then latency does not really matter. As long as the TCP window is large enough and there are not too many dropped packets (resulting in re-transmission) then a high latency link can delivery a high throughput. For streaming you also want low jitter (ie a reasonably constant RTT), but this is not related to latency. It is only for interactive connections, such as VOIP, ssh, and gaming, for which CDN are not used, that you need low latency.
But why should a patent be necessary for that? Open Source software, by definition, puts the invention on public record - in considerably more detail and without the obfuscation present in patent claims. Patents are supposed to be for the benefit of 'practitioners in the art', but are in practice written by lawyers in a language foreign to the engineers and inventors. The publishing of the source should satisfy the requirements of 'prior art' so would block anyone from subsequently patenting it. So publishing as open source should provide all of the benefits of a patent without the expense and legal rigmarole of obtaining one.
If people can receive BBC signals via their aerials they are likely residing in the UK, and thus, more than likely pay a TV license.
I think that you will find that the BBC signals are receivable by aerial throughout most, if not all, of the Netherlands and in many places in Northern France.
Amongst others the right to include (small) quotes of the work as part of critical analysis or commentary.
But it is equally wrong to only enforce the producer's rights, especially if doing so infringes the consumer's rights.
Even if the ISP is not rolling out IPv6 connectivity, their customers could be affected if the customer is using a 6to4 tunnel to get a 2002:: IPv6 block based on his IPv4 address.
It's actually worse than that. Currently many people have routers at home that send out v6 router advertisements despite not actually having IPv6 connectivity.
What are these home routers which advertise IPv6? The only ADSL routers I know of which support IPv6 are by Cisco, which are not exactly common home routers.
I think we have finally reached the point where new hardware supports IPv6, almost universally. So now we are just waiting until the older hardware is replaced.
That may be true of ISP and carrier level hardware, but consumer level routers do not.