One misconception is that encryption in Vista is turned on "by default." Actually, it is not. In fact, it is not even available in most versions of Vista. Vista is available in five SKUs, only two of which support encryption (a feature known as "BitLocker", or "BitLocker Drive Encryption" - BDE). Vista Home Basic, Media Edition, and Business *do not* support BDE. Vista Enterprise and Ultimate - the two more expensive editions - do support BDE.
Also, encryption is not turned on by default. An important step during encryption involves defining the encryption and decryption keys. This cannot be done by default by someone other than the owner of the system. If it could, then that someone else would be able to gain access to the secure data - exactly what is trying to be controlled.
Two things: In the current political climate, such a bill would not get much traction as there is a minority government who desperately wants to become a majority next election. Bills such as the one described don't get you votes as it doesn't benefit the majority of voters.
Second, it's my understanding that the current state of copyright in Canada is that it is not the form in which a copyrighted work is held (ie DVD, CD, mp3, avi), but the manner in which it is used. So, you can have a zillion mp3s for personal use, but you cannot use them in a publication, or broadcast them without the express consent of the copyright holders.
In my mind, it would be very hard to change current law in such a way so as to preserve the status quo, such as libraries.
Plus, they already tax removable media to compensate the rights-holders of all major video and audio media(while screwing independants... which is another topic for another day), so you'd think that they would either have to remove that levy, or all people to continue doing what they are doing.
I came across Dirk Riehle's excellent article: "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives" while reading the April issue of Computer on the train this morning. Thankfully, he's also put it online.
While there's certainly some truth in the example of how loyalties are shifting - and individuals might stay loyal to a project (or set of projects) across employers, just as IT professionals have always carried skillsets, language preferences, etc. across employers - I don't think this necessarily means more movement in this direction, for a few reasons:
1. Developers get involved in multiple projects. Core open source folks might start as contributors and become committers on a single project, but that is more a reflection of their interest in being involved than it is of their interest in that specific project - if the employment environment (quick Optaros plug here?) is explicitly supportive of that engagement across projects developers might discover new loyalty.
2. If the employer can uncover enough opportunities for developers to get paid to use their favorite project - for example, keep a developer busy working on Drupal based applications - they might accept the variety of new projects as compensation for the single employer. The joys of systems integration and consulting work is that if you change client projects frequently enough that it can be like changing jobs without all the paperwork.
3. How much of the whole "employees becoming 'free agents'" thing is really voluntary to begin with, at least on the IT side? Maybe a better way to look at this is to say that Open Source increases the level of portability of the knowledge an IT worker gains over time with any single employer, or decreases the barriers to leveraging that existing knowledge in a new firm.
Regardless it's a very good read for business stakeholders who struggle to understand why anyone wants to open source an in-house project or contribute to an existing open source project.
Man, that is just great. Horrible thing to have happened to that lady, but what a great prank/revenge.
I put up forsale signs on my girlfriend's car (which she loves way too much) and put a really cheap price on there along with her cell phone number. Then I had my friend call her up and "make an offer"... she had no idea what was going on and started to panic when she realized this guy was getting mad at not being able to buy her car.
One of my better April Fool's jokes... she went months without knowing it was me (used someone else's handwriting).
Just look at his predictions from 2006: http://www.egrandslam.com/SeasonPredictions2006.ht ml for example: he had Tigers 4th in AL Central (74-88 vs actual WC 95-67), Cubs 1st in NL Central (90-72 vs actually 6th and 66-96), Red Sox getting WC (99-63 vs 3rd 86-76).
I predict Red Sox will win 161-1 (that 1 being the opening day loss to the Royals. The fact that I am a physicist makes my predictions newsworthy!)
On page B4 of the WSJ today they say that if it goes north of $2 billion MSFT will drop out. They also mention that TimeWarner is interested as doubleclick has a healthy partnership with AOL that they want to protect. Yahoo is also mentioned as a suitor in the article. They all no-commented when asked, except for the statement that it was going to be sorted out in the next few days...
I think Google can benefit from buying DoubleClick. It seems a logical extension for them to get into the brokerage of the ads and take a larger share of online ad spending.
It has been rumored though that Google has been developing a system similar to DoubleClick that they are supposed to be launching this year. If that is the case, I don't see how the high price would be justified. I think Google needs to be a little more careful when making these billion dollar purchases.
People aren't coming back to the Lower 9th, or any areas severly hit (Lakeview, Central City), because of a) the Road Home and insurance (receiving insurance money...) burearcratic mess, b) they can't afford to get their house up to new code, even though that coding isn't being enforced, due to lack of Road Home funding, c) because Nagin has a lot more to gain by sitting around playing the "I'm doing everything I can but nobody else wants to play ball" game than attempting to be effective and failing, and d) because they have lives elsewehere now. A-C are significant deterrents to coming back to a place when they have set up shop elsewhere. (Texas, that is not your cue to whine, Katrina 'fugees are there, get over it).
This isn't even getting into the public housing debacle, which is really the issue of why people aren't coming back to New Orleans. You think all the people that wound up in the Astrodome or any of the various and sundry places they did OWNED their own houses, or had mortgates? HANO and HUD have effectively, and to my mind with blatant racism, shut out people from returning to their homes (or even getting their belongings) from structurally sound, livable high-density housing units. Google "St. Bernard Projects" to see what I mean. Their current posture is to build mixed-income neighborhoods- and I don't know how to feel about that. I really don't know if that'll be a positive or a negative.
Please, spare us from the ignoramuses telling stories about how their friends bought power tools and fixed up their homes. Their homes were obviously not in decimated areas. They would have needed to haul a bulldozer down with them. And I think I'm going to take the word of a businessman who did a study determining feasability of opening a CONSTUCTION company in New Orleans as to the state of the CONSTRUCTION industry there.
What Al needs is to re-negotiate himself out of digital distribution with his label. leave them to handle the physical CD's and hire a 15 year old kid to handle his online presense. That way he wont be losing his poodle hat to online purchases. That and he wont have to deal with the work and maintenance online and can concentrate on making music like he should.
I've used both the Hydrocool EX200 and the COOL systems in the past to cool PC's. The Hydrocool EX200 was fantastic at keeping my unlocked 2500+ under 42 degrees when clocking the hell out of it and it's now on a friends PC giving ultra quiet cooling in his bedroom.
It seems they are also getting easier to install.
Hydrocool was a bit fiddly with the COOL system a little easier. This looks like its going to be as easy as fitting a CPU cooler
This is more than likely going to be available as the blocks for the COOL system are available for GPU's and Chipsets and have been available for quite a while now.
The Sony PS3 seems a good development kit alternative for open source programmers, low-budget laboratories or even startup companies. It will carry a Cell with a powerful graphic chipset, a hard drive, a good deal of ports, and a Linux distribution.
The problem I see, however, is that it is restricted to 256 MB of RAM. This is very small in comparison with the data processing capabilities of the Cell. Also, it is too little for modern OSes which usually starts working decently over 512 MB. Virtual memory helps, but the PS3 will use 2'5 inch hard drives, which are quite slow.
My sugestion is that Sony could make a limited edition PS3 with bigger memory for developing, like 512 or 1 GB. After all, if they agreed to open Cell to the industry, why not help with technology's adoption selling cheap development kits?
It would be nice if IBM could back this idea, and convince Sony to make it a reality, don't you think?
It's a shame no-one has thought of including a list of child porn related keywords to help prevent file sharing of images and movies that exploit children.
But I guess there is no money in stopping child porn.
These improvements sound good. But can I make a further suggestion?
Like many people, I have a few sites that I want complete assurance about, such as my personal banking sites. I don't want to simply trust a third-part CA to vet them, even if it is capable of providing high-assurance. As well as concerns about the business model for that CA, it still will sign a very large number of web-site certificates. If any of those web sites were compromised or the CA was tricked into signing a certificate, it opens an opportunity for the browser to say "highly trusted" when it isn't - and may even be a different web site if DNS could be compromised. And I expect it would take a long time, if possible at all, to persuade all sites to get the signed by one of the "blessed" CAs.
I much prefer the model used by the Petnames extension of Firefox (http://www.waterken.com/user/PetnameTool/), which allows me to register the server digital certificate thumbprint, and to give the site a nick-name ("My bank"). If the certificate changes in any way, I'll get warned and can do the appropriate checks. Effectively I'm managing my own white-list of a handful of sites, so don't need to trust someone else's whitelist of tens of thousands; or even worse a blacklist of far more.
This can co-exist with the proposals above; for example by allowing the user to store their trust relationship which then displays (say) a blue address bar. Other sites will go through the green / red / white display.
This is great technology but the author of the article used an incorrect title. Blurry photos are almost always caused by camera shake, not focusing on the wrong subject in a depth of field situation.
This technology doesn't do anything to prevent camera shake. Most modern cameras are extremely good at autofocusing on the correct subject in a short depth of field situation. The camera designed by the Stanford guys is an amazing invention and will revolutionize action, sport, and scientific photography (especially at the macro level) but it will do nothing special for the consumer who simply doesn't understand that the longer the exposure the more likely the blur from camera shake.
"However, McLellan said that just like in the old wiretap days, police investigators will have to get the approval of a judge before they can have access."
This article just scratches the surface of a story that is reminiscent of "Tucker" and how Pan Am (airlines) went after TWA. There are incredible connections between Rambus' adversaries, US Congressmen, the FTC and a whole cadre of politicans, judges, government officials and law firms working in concert against Rambus. It's the story of a $30 billion dollar industry of multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations out to steal the assets of and destroy a tiny 200-person startup. Rambus' legal bills fighting this mess have been a quarter-billion dollars, far more than their total annual revenue. Rambus has managed to fight this battle while prospering and remaining profitable the entire time, but it's a sad tale of corruption and power politics at their very worst.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of that near-field locater thingy they had in Aliens...
Hudson: This signal's weird...must be some interference or something. There's movement all over the place...
Hudson: Nine meters. Eight...!
Ripley: Can't be. That's inside the room!
Hudson: It's readin' right. Look!
Hicks: Well you're not reading it right!
One misconception is that encryption in Vista is turned on "by default." Actually, it is not. In fact, it is not even available in most versions of Vista. Vista is available in five SKUs, only two of which support encryption (a feature known as "BitLocker", or "BitLocker Drive Encryption" - BDE). Vista Home Basic, Media Edition, and Business *do not* support BDE. Vista Enterprise and Ultimate - the two more expensive editions - do support BDE. Also, encryption is not turned on by default. An important step during encryption involves defining the encryption and decryption keys. This cannot be done by default by someone other than the owner of the system. If it could, then that someone else would be able to gain access to the secure data - exactly what is trying to be controlled.
Two things: In the current political climate, such a bill would not get much traction as there is a minority government who desperately wants to become a majority next election. Bills such as the one described don't get you votes as it doesn't benefit the majority of voters.
Second, it's my understanding that the current state of copyright in Canada is that it is not the form in which a copyrighted work is held (ie DVD, CD, mp3, avi), but the manner in which it is used. So, you can have a zillion mp3s for personal use, but you cannot use them in a publication, or broadcast them without the express consent of the copyright holders.
In my mind, it would be very hard to change current law in such a way so as to preserve the status quo, such as libraries.
Plus, they already tax removable media to compensate the rights-holders of all major video and audio media(while screwing independants... which is another topic for another day), so you'd think that they would either have to remove that levy, or all people to continue doing what they are doing.
I came across Dirk Riehle's excellent article: "The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives" while reading the April issue of Computer on the train this morning. Thankfully, he's also put it online.
While there's certainly some truth in the example of how loyalties are shifting - and individuals might stay loyal to a project (or set of projects) across employers, just as IT professionals have always carried skillsets, language preferences, etc. across employers - I don't think this necessarily means more movement in this direction, for a few reasons:
1. Developers get involved in multiple projects. Core open source folks might start as contributors and become committers on a single project, but that is more a reflection of their interest in being involved than it is of their interest in that specific project - if the employment environment (quick Optaros plug here?) is explicitly supportive of that engagement across projects developers might discover new loyalty.
2. If the employer can uncover enough opportunities for developers to get paid to use their favorite project - for example, keep a developer busy working on Drupal based applications - they might accept the variety of new projects as compensation for the single employer. The joys of systems integration and consulting work is that if you change client projects frequently enough that it can be like changing jobs without all the paperwork.
3. How much of the whole "employees becoming 'free agents'" thing is really voluntary to begin with, at least on the IT side? Maybe a better way to look at this is to say that Open Source increases the level of portability of the knowledge an IT worker gains over time with any single employer, or decreases the barriers to leveraging that existing knowledge in a new firm.
Regardless it's a very good read for business stakeholders who struggle to understand why anyone wants to open source an in-house project or contribute to an existing open source project.
Man, that is just great. Horrible thing to have happened to that lady, but what a great prank/revenge.
I put up forsale signs on my girlfriend's car (which she loves way too much) and put a really cheap price on there along with her cell phone number. Then I had my friend call her up and "make an offer"... she had no idea what was going on and started to panic when she realized this guy was getting mad at not being able to buy her car.
One of my better April Fool's jokes... she went months without knowing it was me (used someone else's handwriting).
Just look at his predictions from 2006:t ml
http://www.egrandslam.com/SeasonPredictions2006.h
for example:
he had Tigers 4th in AL Central (74-88 vs actual WC 95-67), Cubs 1st in NL Central (90-72 vs actually 6th and 66-96), Red Sox getting WC (99-63 vs 3rd 86-76).
I predict Red Sox will win 161-1 (that 1 being the opening day loss to the Royals. The fact that I am a physicist makes my predictions newsworthy!)
SellaBand uses a 'DRM-free and ad supported downloads' business model for their music. You can read how it works http://www.sellaband.com/site/how-it-works.html">h ere (steps 6-7):
That together with their crowdfunding business model to fund the recording will be the future I think, or at least will play a big role in it.
On page B4 of the WSJ today they say that if it goes north of $2 billion MSFT will drop out. They also mention that TimeWarner is interested as doubleclick has a healthy partnership with AOL that they want to protect. Yahoo is also mentioned as a suitor in the article. They all no-commented when asked, except for the statement that it was going to be sorted out in the next few days...
I think Google can benefit from buying DoubleClick. It seems a logical extension for them to get into the brokerage of the ads and take a larger share of online ad spending.
It has been rumored though that Google has been developing a system similar to DoubleClick that they are supposed to be launching this year. If that is the case, I don't see how the high price would be justified. I think Google needs to be a little more careful when making these billion dollar purchases.
People aren't coming back to the Lower 9th, or any areas severly hit (Lakeview, Central City), because of a) the Road Home and insurance (receiving insurance money...) burearcratic mess, b) they can't afford to get their house up to new code, even though that coding isn't being enforced, due to lack of Road Home funding, c) because Nagin has a lot more to gain by sitting around playing the "I'm doing everything I can but nobody else wants to play ball" game than attempting to be effective and failing, and d) because they have lives elsewehere now. A-C are significant deterrents to coming back to a place when they have set up shop elsewhere. (Texas, that is not your cue to whine, Katrina 'fugees are there, get over it). This isn't even getting into the public housing debacle, which is really the issue of why people aren't coming back to New Orleans. You think all the people that wound up in the Astrodome or any of the various and sundry places they did OWNED their own houses, or had mortgates? HANO and HUD have effectively, and to my mind with blatant racism, shut out people from returning to their homes (or even getting their belongings) from structurally sound, livable high-density housing units. Google "St. Bernard Projects" to see what I mean. Their current posture is to build mixed-income neighborhoods- and I don't know how to feel about that. I really don't know if that'll be a positive or a negative. Please, spare us from the ignoramuses telling stories about how their friends bought power tools and fixed up their homes. Their homes were obviously not in decimated areas. They would have needed to haul a bulldozer down with them. And I think I'm going to take the word of a businessman who did a study determining feasability of opening a CONSTUCTION company in New Orleans as to the state of the CONSTRUCTION industry there.
What Al needs is to re-negotiate himself out of digital distribution with his label. leave them to handle the physical CD's and hire a 15 year old kid to handle his online presense. That way he wont be losing his poodle hat to online purchases. That and he wont have to deal with the work and maintenance online and can concentrate on making music like he should.
I've used both the Hydrocool EX200 and the COOL systems in the past to cool PC's. The Hydrocool EX200 was fantastic at keeping my unlocked 2500+ under 42 degrees when clocking the hell out of it and it's now on a friends PC giving ultra quiet cooling in his bedroom.
It seems they are also getting easier to install.
Hydrocool was a bit fiddly with the COOL system a little easier. This looks like its going to be as easy as fitting a CPU cooler
This is more than likely going to be available as the blocks for the COOL system are available for GPU's and Chipsets and have been available for quite a while now.
PS3 has 256 MB for the CPUs, and 256 MB for the graphic system.
As I said before, 256 MB for the OS is not enough.
Maybe you are thinking about the Xbox360 console, which has 512 MB of unified memory (it's an UMA).
The Sony PS3 seems a good development kit alternative for open source programmers, low-budget laboratories or even startup companies.
It will carry a Cell with a powerful graphic chipset, a hard drive, a good deal of ports, and a Linux distribution.
The problem I see, however, is that it is restricted to 256 MB of RAM.
This is very small in comparison with the data processing capabilities of the Cell. Also, it is too little for modern OSes which usually starts working decently over 512 MB.
Virtual memory helps, but the PS3 will use 2'5 inch hard drives, which are quite slow.
My sugestion is that Sony could make a limited edition PS3 with bigger memory for developing, like 512 or 1 GB. After all, if they agreed to open Cell to the industry, why not help with technology's adoption selling cheap development kits?
It would be nice if IBM could back this idea, and convince Sony to make it a reality, don't you think?
It's a shame no-one has thought of including a list of child porn related keywords to help prevent file sharing of images and movies that exploit children.
But I guess there is no money in stopping child porn.
These improvements sound good. But can I make a further suggestion?
Like many people, I have a few sites that I want complete assurance about, such as my personal banking sites. I don't want to simply trust a third-part CA to vet them, even if it is capable of providing high-assurance. As well as concerns about the business model for that CA, it still will sign a very large number of web-site certificates. If any of those web sites were compromised or the CA was tricked into signing a certificate, it opens an opportunity for the browser to say "highly trusted" when it isn't - and may even be a different web site if DNS could be compromised. And I expect it would take a long time, if possible at all, to persuade all sites to get the signed by one of the "blessed" CAs.
I much prefer the model used by the Petnames extension of Firefox (http://www.waterken.com/user/PetnameTool/), which allows me to register the server digital certificate thumbprint, and to give the site a nick-name ("My bank"). If the certificate changes in any way, I'll get warned and can do the appropriate checks. Effectively I'm managing my own white-list of a handful of sites, so don't need to trust someone else's whitelist of tens of thousands; or even worse a blacklist of far more.
This can co-exist with the proposals above; for example by allowing the user to store their trust relationship which then displays (say) a blue address bar. Other sites will go through the green / red / white display.
This is great technology but the author of the article used an incorrect title. Blurry photos are almost always caused by camera shake, not focusing on the wrong subject in a depth of field situation.
This technology doesn't do anything to prevent camera shake. Most modern cameras are extremely good at autofocusing on the correct subject in a short depth of field situation. The camera designed by the Stanford guys is an amazing invention and will revolutionize action, sport, and scientific photography (especially at the macro level) but it will do nothing special for the consumer who simply doesn't understand that the longer the exposure the more likely the blur from camera shake.
The press releases are spinning this as an update of the wiretap law.
5 /surveillance051114.html?ref=rss
For those of us who are not legal experts, can someone clarify the procedure to obtain a wiretap?
With respect to this bill, the CBC report at
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/11/1
says:
"However, McLellan said that just like in the old wiretap days, police investigators will have to get the approval of a judge before they can have access."
This sounds different from the article.
This article just scratches the surface of a story that is reminiscent of "Tucker" and how Pan Am (airlines) went after TWA. There are incredible connections between Rambus' adversaries, US Congressmen, the FTC and a whole cadre of politicans, judges, government officials and law firms working in concert against Rambus. It's the story of a $30 billion dollar industry of multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations out to steal the assets of and destroy a tiny 200-person startup. Rambus' legal bills fighting this mess have been a quarter-billion dollars, far more than their total annual revenue. Rambus has managed to fight this battle while prospering and remaining profitable the entire time, but it's a sad tale of corruption and power politics at their very worst.