Hell yeah I'm on XP, and it is working marvellously. Funny, sure, but it confirms what I have suspected about Vista -- it sucks.
Oh, and did I forget to mention how much Vista tries to sell stuff at you? Upgrade advisor ("get Ultimate now! it's so much better!!"), "friendly" remarks to buy antivirus software and/or install 60-day trials (blame this on Toshiba); offers to buy Microsoft Office; crapware installed everywhere (Toshiba's fault), etc. etc.
I seriously can't remember liking XP too much, either, but after Vista, XP is quite welcome.
It's summer and I have nothing better to do than to reformat my computers:D
In all seriousness, though, I love Macs (I have two at home, a Powerbook G4 and a G3; the place where I work uses Macs exclusively, and Parallels only when Windows is really needed), but I'm a student who is not so keen on spending large amounts of money. My laptop works (well, after I get it reformatted and have XP installed on it, dualbooted with Kubuntu).
You say "couple hundred". The place where I bought the laptop is running discounts right now -- over $300 discounts on many computers. My laptop has 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, an integrated GMA 945 (blah blah, it sucks), and a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor. It cost $899 after discount.
The cheapest MacBook there is $1199, discounted (Apple _refuses_ to give discounts more than $50), has 1GB of RAM (expandable to 2; my laptop goes to 4), has 80 GB HDD (mine has twice that); has a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz (yes that is better, but a number of reviews have pegged the Core 2 Duo's performance at only about 5-10 % faster than the Core Duo, hardly worth the extra $300).
Mac OS X Tiger blows Vista out of the water; I am using it presently and it is a real pleasure to use. However, paying $300 more for less memory & hard drive space, and a marginally better processor is not nearly worth the OS improvement. Sorry to put it so bluntly. The next laptop I get will be a MacBook Pro, for sure, but for now, this Toshiba is what I am going to use.
I never had Norton to begin with; Toshiba is (relative to Dell and HP) really nice about not putting useless sh*t on their computers. No; the network problems lie squarely with Vista, IMHO.
My router is very old (BEFSR41 from Linksys; hardware revision 2) -- it has been in my house almost since we got high speed internet 7+ years ago.
My new D-Link can do it (and it has wireless, and some rather fancy firmware options & features) but it has a bad habit of dying when large amounts of network traffic pass through (e.g. when using Bittorrent) -- that might be something in the configuration, but my Linksys has never given me problems (aside from a lack of functionality).
I do already have the router set to use 200 as the starting DHCP address (I don't think I will ever need 50+ DHCP'd devices in the near future), and I use.100+ as the static addresses.
Thanks for the tip. If I can figure out how to make the D-Link stop crashing under high load, I will certainly be using it:)
I got a new laptop about a week ago, a Toshiba A200-AH7 for the record. Nice system, I must add; rather inexpensive, and, to be brutally honest with the Mac fandom crowd, a hell of a lot more inexpensive than the Macbook (2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Core Duo 2.0GHz, etc. etc.).
Of course, like any new laptop, it comes with Windows Vista. Despite my misgivings about Vista, I decided to keep it for a few days before nuking it (and the 20GB of recovery partitions that Toshiba stuck on there).
Put simply, it is slow and inefficient, broken in a number of ways and seriously crash-prone. I booted it up; ran the first-time wizard; started Vista up and watched Explorer crash (and come up with the "Report to Microsoft" dialog). So, I rebooted the computer, thinking that maybe the Toshiba recovery needed a reboot to get things working. Explorer didn't crash after reboot, so I assumed everything was OK.
Later, I'm attempting to edit my network config for the static IP (DHCP is disabled on my router as I run a server, and the router lacks the "static DHCP" option). UAC comes up (about 6 times throughout this process), but on one instance manages to permanently hang the network settings window, requiring that I kill the process.
That's an annoyance, sure, especially as it is a new system with no additional software (except Toshiba's stuff). I eventually get the networking going good (though Vista still refuses to see the SMB shares on my Powerbook G4, even though it sees my PC's shares just fine, and my PC [running XP] sees my Powerbook's shares just fine). So, I go on the Internet and obtain Firefox (what, you think I was going to use IE7? You must be joking.), which installs smoothly and works flawlessly on Vista. I'm quite happy about this.
Later, I'm playing Warcraft over LAN with some friends over, and, in the middle of a game, Vista's firewall decides that it should start blocking Warcraft's communication. Keep in mind that I've been playing for, oh, 4 hours at this point, and Vista has given me no trouble. Suddenly, the firewall dialog appears in the middle of my screen, and requests that I block/unblock the program. Of course, I choose Unblock, and a minute later, Warcraft crashes (some kind of network failure in CNet.cpp I think). Odd, of course, as it had been working fine for 4+ hours, so I reboot Warcraft, and half an hour later, the same thing happens (firewall dialog, Warcraft crash, etc.). Evidently, Vista has forgotten that I wanted the program to be unblocked.
Frustrated, I go to edit the settings for the firewall, but Warcraft is already listed as unblocked. We play some more, for maybe 2 hours, and it happens again. Annoying, sure, but I can't do anything about it anymore.
Well, OK, that might be the fault of Warcraft (III) not being updated for Vista or something.
There are other problems: Vista will not go to sleep when I close the lid (probably Toshiba's fault, but XP, which I recently installed, seems to handle that just fine); Vista randomly loses an Internet connection sometimes on a wired Ethernet link; Vista's window manager takes up a lot of RAM (300+MB private bytes) and a constant 3% CPU usage on both cores (on a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor); etc. etc. Even my old Sony VAIO (whose harddrive suffered a major crash after 3 years of service) with XP SP2 worked better and had fewer random bugs/crashes.
Summary: I am extremely displeased with Vista. Microsoft had 5 full years to improve their operating system, and instead, they have something that's less usable, less stable and more bloated (7+ GB for a fresh installation?) than their aging Windows XP system.
Personally, I'm almost inclined to think that Microsoft is trying to drive continued sales of XP from Vista. True, I haven't given Vista much time -- there are some things nice about it, like the revised Start Menu -- but in that short time it has utterly failed to please me.
There are *far* more than 13 mainstream dialects of spoken Chinese. For the most part, you need to know Mandarin, and if you want to live in Hong Kong, Cantonese would be an asset.
However, there are close to 30 mainstream dialects of Chinese (more, even, by some counts) -- one for each province. Better yet, counting regional dialects (which are different enough to be counted as dialects and not accents), there may be well over 100 dialects of Chinese.
Learning Mandarin, though, gives you the ability to converse with about 95% of the mainland Chinese population more-or-less fluently.
Tonality in Chinese is probably the hardest thing to learn. Grammar in Chinese is quite simple, as parent noted.
Plus, how exactly would a code-injection exploit work unless it's something like the GDI+ vulnerability that occurred with WMF files? (If a rogue guard is injecting evil code into the machine, the government had waaay more scary problems ahead than with some 'sploiting a passport reader).
As TFA mentions, this is a buffer overflow problem. Most buffer overflows can be exploited easily unless additional OS safeguards are in place -- StackGuard, Address Space Randomization, etc., and even then, a determined hacker may still find his way in.
There are a few existingexamples of buffer overflows against JPEG2000, and they can be exploited much in the same way the WMF exploit is -- malformed file is read into reader, causes buffer overflow in JPEG2000 library, causing the execution of arbitrary code. Next up: the reader (and system in general) gets compromised to do the hacker's bidding.
TFA suggests that OCR would be quite difficult, as the pages are, in places, partly obscured by the hand which holds them, and is being taken from a rather low-resolution camera.
If ODF becomes a standard and OOXML does not, Microsoft will do one of two things (or both).
1) Use their existing leverage in the market to push their own format anyway, possibly by providing a crappy bug-ridden conversion utility. This way, if people try to jump off the "sinking Microsoft format ship" then they will not be able to do so perfectly (i.e. loss of formatting/limbs/life)
2) Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (as one poster noted with Java). They will use the committees that they have already loaded with Microsoft business partners to pass many "updates" or revisions to the standard, probably to the point where it's less like ODF and more like OOXML. Maybe they'll even shove VML into ODF, because they can't be arsed to support SVG in Word.
Of course they can. However, in this wonderful special case, Word documents from later versions will not open in earlier versions, due to massive shifts in the way the document format works.
Of course, the most obvious is OOXML, since that's a recent product of Microsoft. Also, the old Word for Mac and Word for Windows formats are completely different in structure.
"Modern" binary Office documents have a layout which resembles a file system. This isn't too unnatural when you consider it, but the older formats are simply binary-translated RTF (e.g. where the RTF formatting codes are replaced with codes representing the formatting, much like what UTF-8 does with ASCII). Hence, the formats are totally different (but may still carry the.doc extension).
It should also be noted that, due to feature-bloat in newer versions of Office, that older versions capable of reading the basic format will likely be unable to read a lot of the data.
Step back, though, and think for a minute about the "house of cards" upon which that Word document rests.
It rests on 1) Physical storage medium -- whether this is Flash, Hard Drive, Optical Medium, [NV]RAM, etc., all these technologies may be very difficult to retrieve data from, especially if the level of technology happens to go down in the future (say, global thermonuclear war). Even if data is retrieved, there's no guarantee that it's intact after 1000 years (the dyes in CDs will have decomposed by that time; the Flash drives will have leaked all charge; the hard drives will have randomly demagnetized over that period of time, etc.). 2) 8 bits per byte, 32 bits for most integers in the file, IEEE specification for floating point numbers, ASCII, Unicode, GB2312, etc. -- encodings for our numbers, letters and even bit-packing of binary data will affect retrievability. It would be difficult, I imagine, for some futuristic person to wander along (with possibly a different language) and attempt to interpret all of that. 3) File format -- the MSOffice OLE2 format is incredibly complex, perhaps overly so. An OLE2 file takes the form of a miniature filesystem, with a Fragment Allocation Table, 512-4096 (variable) sized blocks, a master Double-Indirection FAT, sub-block allocation, etc. Fragments within the OLE2 container are assembled into "files" or streams in this file system and then parsed. Sure, it makes for wickedly fast saving times (since you can write to changed portions only and add fragments as needed, like a real file system), but it also makes it damn hard to parse, compared to plain text formats like XML or RTF.
There are many more layers to this system, but that's a basic overview of what a researcher (or someone else) 1000 years from now will have to contend with.
Sure, if you're looking at just extracting text, you can skip the last layer by simply going in the file and pulling as much out as possible, much like I used to do with corrupted Word documents. However, if you're looking to retrieve images, videos, archival audio, etc. then your job is much harder.
To be precise, it's "OS X" (Apple dropped the Mac prefix on the iPhone according to the crash logs (http://daringfireball.net/misc/2007/06/MobileMail -2007-06-29-204206.crash)
Hmm, the article you linked to says that Slashdot runs PHP -- I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. In any case, the majority of the sites mentioned are using Lighttpd for static content only.
That's basically damage correction, a feature that OpenGL-based systems (see: Mac OS X) have had for a looong time. It's nothing new, and in fact, it's something that Windows should have had years ago.
Vista is much slower than XP. I have had a number of friends decide to uninstall Vista due to the speed hit that their systems took.
On a system that's even capable of using the new interface, XP beats Vista in terms of raw speed, especially XP's classic interface.
An "ultrathin hypervisor" as some call it is a very tiny OS wrapper. The wrapper does indeed have negligible effect on the system - about as much effect as, say, running a small background process.
All virtualizations technologies on x86 based systems have a measurable overhead. Wrong -- "measurable" in this sense may not be so measurable. The clever malware could fool the system timer to be a little bit off (say, 0.1%), so that it hides its tiny footprint in the timer. Thus, any attempt to query the timer would just return the expected result.
I would actually be interested in having something like this, *if* it weren't from Microsoft, because I will bet you that it will be far too helpful for my tastes.
Anyway, this would probably help the average user navigate the sometimes-confusing options for servers.
What you are suggesting sounds a lot like a standard cookie, beefed up a bit by extra security.
In usual practice, a cookie cannot be read by a member of another domain (unless Cross-Site-Scripting is used, which is a real possibility with [some] phishing emails)
I would suppose that a browser could have its cookie function even more secure, but that probably won't stop the phishers (who will inevitably find ways around this).
There's really nothing that people can do to completely kill phishing aside from either personally going to the bank, giving them ID and performing a transaction or being so incredibly paranoid of any e-mail sent to you.
That said, I'm sure there's a lot of things we can do to protect ourselves.
I would have liked if this author used some reference to the Betamax vs. VHS format war--it's a very good example of history, though the author's point about the current technology being enough is a good one.
I would like to see one of these format moving to the mainstream, because I'm really anxious to get effective backups. However, holographic storage is also very promising.
First of all, Quantum Encryption is better known as Quantum Cryptography (QC).
I've heard a lot of nonsense and/or misinformation about QC on this newspost already.
QC is a method of exchanging secure and random key data (usually a one time pad (OTP)). Following the key exchange, the data to be sent is encrypted with the key and transmitted over any non-secure channel.
Scientific American ran an excellent article about this about a year ago:
SciAm Article
I also did a full semester's worth of study on this topic, so I hope that I am well informed.
There are two basic ways to carry out QC:
Using entangled photon pairs
Using OTP negotiation
Both methods are completely secure from interception attacks.
The first method uses entangled photon pairs which are randomly generated from some secured source in the middle. The photons are then read at either end. As long as the source is not compromised, the method is secure. Even if the source is compromised, the attacker cannot triplicate the entangled photons, and also cannot read out the photons without compromising their entangled state. Thus, fake non-entangled photons would have to be sent out, possibly alerting the communicating parties.
The other method, OTP negotiation, is much more developed and stable as of today. Alice (the sender) and Bob (the receiver) begin by establishing a one-time key for use with a cipher (such as an XOR cipher). Alice starts by choosing an orientation (orthagonal or diagonal) and then choosing a value (1 or 0).
For example, Orthagonal values are '-' for 1 and '|' for 0, while Diagonal values are '/' for 1 and '\' for 0.
Alice sends one of these 4 possible polarized photons to Bob, who chooses either the Orthagonal filter or Diagonal filter.
The Orthagonal filter is a polarized filter in the '-' direction. '-' photons pass through and register 1, while '|' photons are blocked and register a 0. However, Diagonal photons have a 50/50 chance by quantum mechanics to twist into the filter, so the readout of a Diagonal photon is unreliable.
Similarly, Diagonal filters cannot read Orthagonal photons accurately.
Quantum mechanics ensures that nobody can read both orientation schemes at once accurately, and because the photon may twist through the wrong filter, a measurement can only be taken once correctly.
After the photon reaches Bob and he has measured it, Alice tells Bob which orientation she used (Orthagonal or Diagonal). Bob then tells Alice whether or not he used the right filter. If he used the right one, they keep the bit, otherwise it is discarded.
This process repeats for the entire length of the message.
If Eve is intercepting the line, however, she will have to choose a filter and risk twisting the photon.
For example: Alice chooses '\'. Eve intercepts and reads using Orthagonal, and the photon twists into '-'. Bob then reads using Diagonal, giving the twisted value '/' (1). Since Alice and Bob both chose the same orientation, the bit is retained. However, the bit is incorrect, leading to errors in encryption.
To detect problems or an interceptor, Alice and Bob perform a keycheck when they finish the negotiation. Alice selects several values at random and sends their values and positions to Bob, who checks them and reports back. If any discrepancies are noted, the entire key is invalidated and the process starts over on a new channel. Otherwise, the check bits are discarded and encryption can proceed.
As noted, this is a lot of work for a simple encryption, considering that modern ciphers such as RSA-4096 are unbreakable by modern computers. However, quantum computers (capable of breaking RSA in nanoseconds) will eventually present a danger to these ciphers.
Thus, QC is not yet practical, unless you believe the NSA can break RSA, but it has already proven to be mathematically and practically unbreakable.
The word
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yeah I'm on XP, and it is working marvellously. Funny, sure, but it confirms what I have suspected about Vista -- it sucks.
Oh, and did I forget to mention how much Vista tries to sell stuff at you? Upgrade advisor ("get Ultimate now! it's so much better!!"), "friendly" remarks to buy antivirus software and/or install 60-day trials (blame this on Toshiba); offers to buy Microsoft Office; crapware installed everywhere (Toshiba's fault), etc. etc.
I seriously can't remember liking XP too much, either, but after Vista, XP is quite welcome.
It's summer and I have nothing better to do than to reformat my computers :D
In all seriousness, though, I love Macs (I have two at home, a Powerbook G4 and a G3; the place where I work uses Macs exclusively, and Parallels only when Windows is really needed), but I'm a student who is not so keen on spending large amounts of money. My laptop works (well, after I get it reformatted and have XP installed on it, dualbooted with Kubuntu).
You say "couple hundred". The place where I bought the laptop is running discounts right now -- over $300 discounts on many computers. My laptop has 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, an integrated GMA 945 (blah blah, it sucks), and a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor. It cost $899 after discount.
The cheapest MacBook there is $1199, discounted (Apple _refuses_ to give discounts more than $50), has 1GB of RAM (expandable to 2; my laptop goes to 4), has 80 GB HDD (mine has twice that); has a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz (yes that is better, but a number of reviews have pegged the Core 2 Duo's performance at only about 5-10 % faster than the Core Duo, hardly worth the extra $300).
Mac OS X Tiger blows Vista out of the water; I am using it presently and it is a real pleasure to use. However, paying $300 more for less memory & hard drive space, and a marginally better processor is not nearly worth the OS improvement. Sorry to put it so bluntly. The next laptop I get will be a MacBook Pro, for sure, but for now, this Toshiba is what I am going to use.
I never had Norton to begin with; Toshiba is (relative to Dell and HP) really nice about not putting useless sh*t on their computers. No; the network problems lie squarely with Vista, IMHO.
My router is very old (BEFSR41 from Linksys; hardware revision 2) -- it has been in my house almost since we got high speed internet 7+ years ago. My new D-Link can do it (and it has wireless, and some rather fancy firmware options & features) but it has a bad habit of dying when large amounts of network traffic pass through (e.g. when using Bittorrent) -- that might be something in the configuration, but my Linksys has never given me problems (aside from a lack of functionality). I do already have the router set to use 200 as the starting DHCP address (I don't think I will ever need 50+ DHCP'd devices in the near future), and I use .100+ as the static addresses.
Thanks for the tip. If I can figure out how to make the D-Link stop crashing under high load, I will certainly be using it :)
Of course, like any new laptop, it comes with Windows Vista. Despite my misgivings about Vista, I decided to keep it for a few days before nuking it (and the 20GB of recovery partitions that Toshiba stuck on there).
Put simply, it is slow and inefficient, broken in a number of ways and seriously crash-prone. I booted it up; ran the first-time wizard; started Vista up and watched Explorer crash (and come up with the "Report to Microsoft" dialog). So, I rebooted the computer, thinking that maybe the Toshiba recovery needed a reboot to get things working. Explorer didn't crash after reboot, so I assumed everything was OK.
Later, I'm attempting to edit my network config for the static IP (DHCP is disabled on my router as I run a server, and the router lacks the "static DHCP" option). UAC comes up (about 6 times throughout this process), but on one instance manages to permanently hang the network settings window, requiring that I kill the process.
That's an annoyance, sure, especially as it is a new system with no additional software (except Toshiba's stuff). I eventually get the networking going good (though Vista still refuses to see the SMB shares on my Powerbook G4, even though it sees my PC's shares just fine, and my PC [running XP] sees my Powerbook's shares just fine). So, I go on the Internet and obtain Firefox (what, you think I was going to use IE7? You must be joking.), which installs smoothly and works flawlessly on Vista. I'm quite happy about this.
Later, I'm playing Warcraft over LAN with some friends over, and, in the middle of a game, Vista's firewall decides that it should start blocking Warcraft's communication. Keep in mind that I've been playing for, oh, 4 hours at this point, and Vista has given me no trouble. Suddenly, the firewall dialog appears in the middle of my screen, and requests that I block/unblock the program. Of course, I choose Unblock, and a minute later, Warcraft crashes (some kind of network failure in CNet.cpp I think). Odd, of course, as it had been working fine for 4+ hours, so I reboot Warcraft, and half an hour later, the same thing happens (firewall dialog, Warcraft crash, etc.). Evidently, Vista has forgotten that I wanted the program to be unblocked.
Frustrated, I go to edit the settings for the firewall, but Warcraft is already listed as unblocked. We play some more, for maybe 2 hours, and it happens again. Annoying, sure, but I can't do anything about it anymore.
Well, OK, that might be the fault of Warcraft (III) not being updated for Vista or something.
There are other problems: Vista will not go to sleep when I close the lid (probably Toshiba's fault, but XP, which I recently installed, seems to handle that just fine); Vista randomly loses an Internet connection sometimes on a wired Ethernet link; Vista's window manager takes up a lot of RAM (300+MB private bytes) and a constant 3% CPU usage on both cores (on a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor); etc. etc. Even my old Sony VAIO (whose harddrive suffered a major crash after 3 years of service) with XP SP2 worked better and had fewer random bugs/crashes.
Summary: I am extremely displeased with Vista. Microsoft had 5 full years to improve their operating system, and instead, they have something that's less usable, less stable and more bloated (7+ GB for a fresh installation?) than their aging Windows XP system.
Personally, I'm almost inclined to think that Microsoft is trying to drive continued sales of XP from Vista. True, I haven't given Vista much time -- there are some things nice about it, like the revised Start Menu -- but in that short time it has utterly failed to please me.
- An unhappy Vista user, for the record.
There are *far* more than 13 mainstream dialects of spoken Chinese. For the most part, you need to know Mandarin, and if you want to live in Hong Kong, Cantonese would be an asset. However, there are close to 30 mainstream dialects of Chinese (more, even, by some counts) -- one for each province. Better yet, counting regional dialects (which are different enough to be counted as dialects and not accents), there may be well over 100 dialects of Chinese. Learning Mandarin, though, gives you the ability to converse with about 95% of the mainland Chinese population more-or-less fluently. Tonality in Chinese is probably the hardest thing to learn. Grammar in Chinese is quite simple, as parent noted.
As TFA mentions, this is a buffer overflow problem. Most buffer overflows can be exploited easily unless additional OS safeguards are in place -- StackGuard, Address Space Randomization, etc., and even then, a determined hacker may still find his way in.
There are a few existing examples of buffer overflows against JPEG2000, and they can be exploited much in the same way the WMF exploit is -- malformed file is read into reader, causes buffer overflow in JPEG2000 library, causing the execution of arbitrary code. Next up: the reader (and system in general) gets compromised to do the hacker's bidding.
Unpalatable. You can't stack crap, unless it's boxes of Vista.
TFA suggests that OCR would be quite difficult, as the pages are, in places, partly obscured by the hand which holds them, and is being taken from a rather low-resolution camera.
If you want a book, buy it.
If ODF becomes a standard and OOXML does not, Microsoft will do one of two things (or both).
1) Use their existing leverage in the market to push their own format anyway, possibly by providing a crappy bug-ridden conversion utility. This way, if people try to jump off the "sinking Microsoft format ship" then they will not be able to do so perfectly (i.e. loss of formatting/limbs/life)
2) Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (as one poster noted with Java). They will use the committees that they have already loaded with Microsoft business partners to pass many "updates" or revisions to the standard, probably to the point where it's less like ODF and more like OOXML. Maybe they'll even shove VML into ODF, because they can't be arsed to support SVG in Word.
Of course they can. However, in this wonderful special case, Word documents from later versions will not open in earlier versions, due to massive shifts in the way the document format works. Of course, the most obvious is OOXML, since that's a recent product of Microsoft. Also, the old Word for Mac and Word for Windows formats are completely different in structure. "Modern" binary Office documents have a layout which resembles a file system. This isn't too unnatural when you consider it, but the older formats are simply binary-translated RTF (e.g. where the RTF formatting codes are replaced with codes representing the formatting, much like what UTF-8 does with ASCII). Hence, the formats are totally different (but may still carry the .doc extension).
It should also be noted that, due to feature-bloat in newer versions of Office, that older versions capable of reading the basic format will likely be unable to read a lot of the data.
Step back, though, and think for a minute about the "house of cards" upon which that Word document rests.
It rests on
1) Physical storage medium -- whether this is Flash, Hard Drive, Optical Medium, [NV]RAM, etc., all these technologies may be very difficult to retrieve data from, especially if the level of technology happens to go down in the future (say, global thermonuclear war). Even if data is retrieved, there's no guarantee that it's intact after 1000 years (the dyes in CDs will have decomposed by that time; the Flash drives will have leaked all charge; the hard drives will have randomly demagnetized over that period of time, etc.).
2) 8 bits per byte, 32 bits for most integers in the file, IEEE specification for floating point numbers, ASCII, Unicode, GB2312, etc. -- encodings for our numbers, letters and even bit-packing of binary data will affect retrievability. It would be difficult, I imagine, for some futuristic person to wander along (with possibly a different language) and attempt to interpret all of that.
3) File format -- the MSOffice OLE2 format is incredibly complex, perhaps overly so. An OLE2 file takes the form of a miniature filesystem, with a Fragment Allocation Table, 512-4096 (variable) sized blocks, a master Double-Indirection FAT, sub-block allocation, etc. Fragments within the OLE2 container are assembled into "files" or streams in this file system and then parsed. Sure, it makes for wickedly fast saving times (since you can write to changed portions only and add fragments as needed, like a real file system), but it also makes it damn hard to parse, compared to plain text formats like XML or RTF.
There are many more layers to this system, but that's a basic overview of what a researcher (or someone else) 1000 years from now will have to contend with.
Sure, if you're looking at just extracting text, you can skip the last layer by simply going in the file and pulling as much out as possible, much like I used to do with corrupted Word documents. However, if you're looking to retrieve images, videos, archival audio, etc. then your job is much harder.
To be precise, it's "OS X" (Apple dropped the Mac prefix on the iPhone according to the crash logs (http://daringfireball.net/misc/2007/06/MobileMail -2007-06-29-204206.crash)
A better plan would be to look at the relative value of the stock (due to a stock split in 2000). Apple's stock is provided as reference. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=SNE&l=on&z=m& q=b&c=AAPL
Hmm, the article you linked to says that Slashdot runs PHP -- I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. In any case, the majority of the sites mentioned are using Lighttpd for static content only.
That's basically damage correction, a feature that OpenGL-based systems (see: Mac OS X) have had for a looong time. It's nothing new, and in fact, it's something that Windows should have had years ago. Vista is much slower than XP. I have had a number of friends decide to uninstall Vista due to the speed hit that their systems took. On a system that's even capable of using the new interface, XP beats Vista in terms of raw speed, especially XP's classic interface.
I would actually be interested in having something like this, *if* it weren't from Microsoft, because I will bet you that it will be far too helpful for my tastes. Anyway, this would probably help the average user navigate the sometimes-confusing options for servers.
What you are suggesting sounds a lot like a standard cookie, beefed up a bit by extra security. In usual practice, a cookie cannot be read by a member of another domain (unless Cross-Site-Scripting is used, which is a real possibility with [some] phishing emails) I would suppose that a browser could have its cookie function even more secure, but that probably won't stop the phishers (who will inevitably find ways around this). There's really nothing that people can do to completely kill phishing aside from either personally going to the bank, giving them ID and performing a transaction or being so incredibly paranoid of any e-mail sent to you. That said, I'm sure there's a lot of things we can do to protect ourselves.
I would have liked if this author used some reference to the Betamax vs. VHS format war--it's a very good example of history, though the author's point about the current technology being enough is a good one. I would like to see one of these format moving to the mainstream, because I'm really anxious to get effective backups. However, holographic storage is also very promising.
I'm in Canada, and I'm surprised that this isn't all over OUR media by now...maybe they're being kept quiet. I'll keep watching though.
If only Apple would release an iPod NanoL with Linux preinstalled...that would be sweet!
It's odd how this is being reported on MSNBC...I thought Microsoft hated Google?
I've heard a lot of nonsense and/or misinformation about QC on this newspost already.
QC is a method of exchanging secure and random key data (usually a one time pad (OTP)). Following the key exchange, the data to be sent is encrypted with the key and transmitted over any non-secure channel.
Scientific American ran an excellent article about this about a year ago: SciAm Article
I also did a full semester's worth of study on this topic, so I hope that I am well informed.
There are two basic ways to carry out QC:
Both methods are completely secure from interception attacks.
The first method uses entangled photon pairs which are randomly generated from some secured source in the middle. The photons are then read at either end. As long as the source is not compromised, the method is secure. Even if the source is compromised, the attacker cannot triplicate the entangled photons, and also cannot read out the photons without compromising their entangled state. Thus, fake non-entangled photons would have to be sent out, possibly alerting the communicating parties.
The other method, OTP negotiation, is much more developed and stable as of today. Alice (the sender) and Bob (the receiver) begin by establishing a one-time key for use with a cipher (such as an XOR cipher). Alice starts by choosing an orientation (orthagonal or diagonal) and then choosing a value (1 or 0).
For example, Orthagonal values are '-' for 1 and '|' for 0, while Diagonal values are '/' for 1 and '\' for 0.
Alice sends one of these 4 possible polarized photons to Bob, who chooses either the Orthagonal filter or Diagonal filter.
The Orthagonal filter is a polarized filter in the '-' direction. '-' photons pass through and register 1, while '|' photons are blocked and register a 0. However, Diagonal photons have a 50/50 chance by quantum mechanics to twist into the filter, so the readout of a Diagonal photon is unreliable.
Similarly, Diagonal filters cannot read Orthagonal photons accurately.
Quantum mechanics ensures that nobody can read both orientation schemes at once accurately, and because the photon may twist through the wrong filter, a measurement can only be taken once correctly.
After the photon reaches Bob and he has measured it, Alice tells Bob which orientation she used (Orthagonal or Diagonal). Bob then tells Alice whether or not he used the right filter. If he used the right one, they keep the bit, otherwise it is discarded.
This process repeats for the entire length of the message.
If Eve is intercepting the line, however, she will have to choose a filter and risk twisting the photon.
For example: Alice chooses '\'. Eve intercepts and reads using Orthagonal, and the photon twists into '-'. Bob then reads using Diagonal, giving the twisted value '/' (1). Since Alice and Bob both chose the same orientation, the bit is retained. However, the bit is incorrect, leading to errors in encryption.
To detect problems or an interceptor, Alice and Bob perform a keycheck when they finish the negotiation. Alice selects several values at random and sends their values and positions to Bob, who checks them and reports back. If any discrepancies are noted, the entire key is invalidated and the process starts over on a new channel. Otherwise, the check bits are discarded and encryption can proceed.
As noted, this is a lot of work for a simple encryption, considering that modern ciphers such as RSA-4096 are unbreakable by modern computers. However, quantum computers (capable of breaking RSA in nanoseconds) will eventually present a danger to these ciphers.
Thus, QC is not yet practical, unless you believe the NSA can break RSA, but it has already proven to be mathematically and practically unbreakable.
The word
Anybody read Digital Fortress?