In highschool I was a technician in the theater, and I can tell you from experience Gaff Tape is a FAR superior medium for wallet creation. (And clothing too!)
"4% of 71989 would be 2879 virus for the Mac. So at 40 OSX IS REMARKABLE."
Yes, and first let me say I'm not sure of either of those virus counts, i'm just taking the parents numbers for granted. I imagine the symantec count is hugely artifically inflated, given that they count every minor change to a virus as a new virus, often times having hundreds of derivations for a given virus.
That being said, there are of course many fewer virus threats for OSX. There are a couple obvious reasons for this.... First, if only 4% of computer users are on OSX, there aren't going to be many "hackers" who have had access to the OS to learn to make virii, and it's also fair to say that most of the 4% of OSX users are in very non-technical fields, and far less likely to be capable of the technical mischief. Yet another point would be that there is little motivation to write a OSX virus as you would be targetting a minority, and there are very few large networks of OSX systems, such as large corporations using Windows, which are breeding grounds for virii
I suppose the point I'm making, is that it seems there is a bit of 'security by obscurity' in place, that is falsly assumed to be actual security. It's not a bad thing, as it is very true that you are likely safe from this sort of harm if you are using OSX, regardless of the reasons for the safety. But People should also be aware that IF someone wanted to target their OSX machine, it would probably be possible... Just a bit harder than targetting a Windows machine i'm sure.
When you remember that ~94% of O/S usage is Windows, and ~96% is PC in general, With the remaining ~4% being primarily MacOS usage, you will realize that 40 vs. 71989 doesn't really seem as remarkable.
OffTopic:
You know I see your sig almost every day. Best I can tell it's some anti-bush sentiment. I thought it would be interesting to point out though, that it is indeed true. In fact, more people died last year from alchohol related deaths (including drunk driving), than have been killed in all US military conflicts since AND INCLUDING vietnam. Vietnam making up the largest number of lives lost at ~50,000 american deaths (from wikipedia), while ~85,000 deaths last year were attributed to alcohol.
And for what it's worth, I don't consider it a bug, or a failure, or anything else like that. It's a feature that was implemented in the format. You should always be careful when running formats that can contain executable code, just as you would with a.exe or.scr file.
From MSDN:
A metafile contains records that describe a sequence of application programming interface (API) calls. Metafiles can be recorded (constructed) and played back (displayed).
A metafile is not a 'graphics format' exactly. It is rather a macro of API calls. Obviously one would suspect that such a thing could be used to execute malicious code.
Re:Grammar Police to the rescue
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 1
For the millionth time, = is for assignment, == checks for equality.
Becuase energy is insanely abundant. We may not know all the best ways to get at it yet, but there sure is plenty of it. What's that equation again? I know theres something.... Oh Yeah.... E=MC^2.... C^2 is a big number btw... Hence the abundance of energy.
Looks like you got a few small flames, but I want to say that I find your comment very insightful and mature. I must admit that I find myself in the mindset you describe periodically, and must catch myself.
When I went to video.google.com the videos for sale seemed clearly marked and seperate from the free videos. Also the interface seemed very nice and clean, worked in multiple browsers, and utilized AJAX for a warm-and-fuzzy feeling.
It seems quite nice to me, I think the fact that it is more simplistic than other online stores is a good thing.
Not to mention it's a beta, so they are likely still changing things.
This is just stupid. Of course its not an intentional 'back door'. Having written WMF parsers, generators, and converters, I'm pretty familier with what the code looks like to utilize a WMF.
This guy ought to explain why, if its some secret back-door and not a design flaw, that WINE has implemented it as well while creating their code entirely from scratch?
This is nothing special, nothing beyond an insecure design. People that work with WMF code have known for a long time that this sort of flaw existed. No one has been worried becuase it's a frickin WMF file! Do you really think microsoft is going to send out a huge pile of WMF files that people will inadvertently view, so they can attack your system? This microsoft paranoia is just getting dumb as shit.
That's a very good point, and I don't mind saying that I'm somewhat unsure of what the proper solution is.
I do feel like it's something that should be taken care of in the technology if possible, as opposed to legislation. Maybe email technology could solve the problem somehow? I know that there is already a general consensus that some work needs to be done to add modern functionality into the protocols we now use for email, perhaps this is something that could be solved there.
In my opinion any spam that a person recieves is largely their own responsibility. You should be careful who you give an email address to, if you do not want to recieve spam. Just as you would be cautious about posting your phone number and address in a public place.
Personally I receive little, if any, spam on my primary accounts, as I am very careful where I put those email addresses. I would expect that most lay-people who receive generous amounts of spam have entered their email address into forms to "Win a free IPod!" or some such thing. In these situations they have legally given permission to the sender to send them mail, so it is difficult to stop the problem.
That being said, there are people who use malicious means to gain access to email addresses, and spam them. This of course is rarely the fault of the victim.
This is absurd, if a school decided to implement an email system, then they should have looked into investing in a filtering system to go along with it.
It isn't the governments job to refine the processes and products of the private industry, which is essentially what they are doing. (more and more every day)
They have essentially said "This email thing would be alot better tool/product if we modified it like *this*". But wait! Email was never their technology in the first place! Why would we need them to aid/fix it?
We have all these politicians that are so devoted to their capitalism, yet they can't seem to understand the basic premise of it. If there is a wide demand for a product or change, somebody will supply it. The only thing that can stop the process from working is outside intervention such as this. Assuming this government solution works, they have just effectively halted research into new technologies and solutions to the problem in the private sector.
Common politicians, if you are going to be capitalist, then for FSM's sake could you allow capitalism to do it's thing!
Is this the only product that Apple makes? I thought they also made fairly nice laptops.
Well, they are about to release a fairly nice laptop, but for the past several years they have been selling dated and slow machines becuase they couldn't properly work their newer processor architecture into a laptop. The lack of an updated/modern laptop for sale certainly put some strain on the dedicated Apple user community.
McNealy has an iPod, McNealy says iPods will be as archaic as answering machines one day, McNealy seems to think that all Apple has are iPods.
Well, while Apple may bring in significant revenue from other sources, their profit is almost entirely based on IPod sales. Apple has seen nearly 600% increase in profit (from ~46million to ~290million in a year) from it's IPod sales.
We couldn't know the exact details of either companies current situation, but I wouldn't say that it is unreasonable for a company to fear investing in Apple when their revenue is mostly based on an mp3 player market share that cannot last forever. As wonderful as the iPod is, it has no technological advantages over other hardware, eventually the marketing campaign will wear off and people will begin to purchase other devices.
I've been playing since the game was released, and I can honestly say the biggest improvement was indeed the boob-bounce-physics. It seems the main character change was that all the female fighters recieved implants, and the boobs have an utterly realistic jiggle to them.
I found myself licking the screen inadvertently at times; begging for more milk.
The Labyrin3D which won the XBOX is actually a pretty darn cool idea! For those that didn't RTFA it is just like one of those little kids toy's where you must tilt the box around to roll a ball through the maze.
The cool factor comes from the fact that it utilizes the gyros (drop sensors) in the Apple laptop so that you play by tilting the laptop back and forth.
AFAIK, the only law against region free devices involves disabling region protection. The DMCA protects against breaking encryption systems, but it does not dictate what devices need what systems.
Well if that is the only restriction (which it likely is) then it seems pretty reasonable. If the dvd-player makers essentially entered into a deal with the media producers to largely abide by their region technology, then that is of course perfectly acceptable.
It is although another matter to discuss whether the DMCA is infringing on fair-use rights that are benefitial to the consumer and not-too-harmful to the profitability of the companies.
The timeframe doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. When you think that they are releasing a patch which will be automatically downloaded and installed on literally tens of millions of computers, most of which without any system administrator to aid in the process.
That is a daunting task, and I can imagine theres a very lengthy process a patch must go through.
To Microsofts credit, I can hardly remember a time that a patch was released which cuased any major problems, which in itself is a great achievement given the amazing variety of hardware and software the users may have. There was of course alot of hype over compatibility issues in SP2, but to the best of my knowledge any actual issues were understood ahead of time and due to compromises that were made intentionally for one reason or another.
I understand the logic, and it seems perfectly reasonable, given that it is their movie and they are welcome to sell it as they would like to.
The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players (somewhat) illegal? A company choosing to use regions for business purposes is a far cry from a legitimate federal law.
Anyone know of a court case where this was discussed? It seems to be complete garbage, a case of lawmakers issuing laws for the sole purpose of aiding in a specific business practice, which has no effect on any other broad-reaching benefits to our society.
You make an invalid point. These things are kept secret not to keep the government from being brought down, but to keep Americans from getting killed. Do you really think anyone just feels the need to spy for their own benefit? How does it benefit them? They are spying to try to keep people alive, not to benefit themselves.
Feel free to argue that their methods are flawed, as they very likely are, but it certainly is not done to protect the government in the way that Chinese censorship is, but rather the people.
I'm completely baffled by this American feeling that no government department should keep secrets from the general public. I guess our American media has started this sentiment. But/. readers of all people should understand that much of the general public is incapable of dealing with various types of information. And apart from that, you must remember that it's not possible to just share information with Americans, anything that we are told is also told to the entire rest of the world.
That seems pretty unlikely since the publisher is IUniverse, a self-publishing company. In otherwords, the author of the book simply paid this company to print it for him. They are in no way affiliated with the author, or the marketing/sales of his book, nor do they care.
They are simply a company with a printing press.
A friend of mine purchased a cheap laptop from your average privately owned computer store in town, and asked me to have a look at it, becuase it kept asking to activate.
After looking at it briefly, and seeing the tell-tale sign of a badly cracked copy of Windows (Tells you to activate, but then keeps saying you've already activated) I went to the Genuine Windows checker on the Microsoft site and confirmed it was a stolen copy.
It seems private companies selling computers with pirated microsoft software is becoming extremely common, as it allows them to easily increase their profit by many hundred dollars (if you include Office also).
I think you state it accurately, it was not a bug, becuase it was the intended behavior, it was instead a really stupid design idea probably caused by a lazy designer.
For those of you that wanted to actually see this, the CNET article seems to have made up the "section 113" information, as this is actually section 509, and reads as follows:
SEC. 509. PREVENTING CYBERSTALKING.
Section 2261A of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
.........
(3) in paragraph (2), in the matter following clause (iii) of subparagraph (B)--
(A) by inserting after `uses the mail' the following: `, any interactive computer service,'; and
(B) by inserting after `course of conduct that' the following: `causes substantial emotional harm to that person or'.
The bit about "any interactive computer service" is the concerning part. Of course to make sense of this you would have to go back to the original text, Section 2261A of title 18. They make their changes in this fashion as to make it very difficult for lawmakers to read/understand the bill before they vote.
There are actually some common uses of WMF on windows, but becuase it is a metafile of GDI calls, its not very portable (although it is easy to convert).
Since displaying a WMF is nothing more than enumerating the list into a 'select case' statement (not a very long one either) it is very easy and VERY fast to display on Windows. (Really no processing is required). For this reason, microsoft uses WMF for all the MS Office clipart, and you'll find many other very-microsoft centric applications using it as well.
Slashdot Mirror
In highschool I was a technician in the theater, and I can tell you from experience Gaff Tape is a FAR superior medium for wallet creation. (And clothing too!)
"4% of 71989 would be 2879 virus for the Mac. So at 40 OSX IS REMARKABLE."
Yes, and first let me say I'm not sure of either of those virus counts, i'm just taking the parents numbers for granted. I imagine the symantec count is hugely artifically inflated, given that they count every minor change to a virus as a new virus, often times having hundreds of derivations for a given virus.
That being said, there are of course many fewer virus threats for OSX. There are a couple obvious reasons for this.... First, if only 4% of computer users are on OSX, there aren't going to be many "hackers" who have had access to the OS to learn to make virii, and it's also fair to say that most of the 4% of OSX users are in very non-technical fields, and far less likely to be capable of the technical mischief. Yet another point would be that there is little motivation to write a OSX virus as you would be targetting a minority, and there are very few large networks of OSX systems, such as large corporations using Windows, which are breeding grounds for virii
I suppose the point I'm making, is that it seems there is a bit of 'security by obscurity' in place, that is falsly assumed to be actual security. It's not a bad thing, as it is very true that you are likely safe from this sort of harm if you are using OSX, regardless of the reasons for the safety. But People should also be aware that IF someone wanted to target their OSX machine, it would probably be possible... Just a bit harder than targetting a Windows machine i'm sure.
When you remember that ~94% of O/S usage is Windows, and ~96% is PC in general, With the remaining ~4% being primarily MacOS usage, you will realize that 40 vs. 71989 doesn't really seem as remarkable.
OffTopic:
You know I see your sig almost every day. Best I can tell it's some anti-bush sentiment. I thought it would be interesting to point out though, that it is indeed true. In fact, more people died last year from alchohol related deaths (including drunk driving), than have been killed in all US military conflicts since AND INCLUDING vietnam. Vietnam making up the largest number of lives lost at ~50,000 american deaths (from wikipedia), while ~85,000 deaths last year were attributed to alcohol.
Get over yourself.
.exe or .scr file.
And for what it's worth, I don't consider it a bug, or a failure, or anything else like that. It's a feature that was implemented in the format. You should always be careful when running formats that can contain executable code, just as you would with a
From MSDN:
A metafile contains records that describe a sequence of application programming interface (API) calls. Metafiles can be recorded (constructed) and played back (displayed).
A metafile is not a 'graphics format' exactly. It is rather a macro of API calls. Obviously one would suspect that such a thing could be used to execute malicious code.
For the millionth time, = is for assignment, == checks for equality.
Becuase energy is insanely abundant. We may not know all the best ways to get at it yet, but there sure is plenty of it. What's that equation again? I know theres something.... Oh Yeah.... E=MC^2 .... C^2 is a big number btw... Hence the abundance of energy.
Looks like you got a few small flames, but I want to say that I find your comment very insightful and mature. I must admit that I find myself in the mindset you describe periodically, and must catch myself.
When I went to video.google.com the videos for sale seemed clearly marked and seperate from the free videos. Also the interface seemed very nice and clean, worked in multiple browsers, and utilized AJAX for a warm-and-fuzzy feeling.
It seems quite nice to me, I think the fact that it is more simplistic than other online stores is a good thing.
Not to mention it's a beta, so they are likely still changing things.
This is just stupid. Of course its not an intentional 'back door'. Having written WMF parsers, generators, and converters, I'm pretty familier with what the code looks like to utilize a WMF.
This guy ought to explain why, if its some secret back-door and not a design flaw, that WINE has implemented it as well while creating their code entirely from scratch?
This is nothing special, nothing beyond an insecure design. People that work with WMF code have known for a long time that this sort of flaw existed. No one has been worried becuase it's a frickin WMF file! Do you really think microsoft is going to send out a huge pile of WMF files that people will inadvertently view, so they can attack your system? This microsoft paranoia is just getting dumb as shit.
> apt-get update
That's a very good point, and I don't mind saying that I'm somewhat unsure of what the proper solution is.
I do feel like it's something that should be taken care of in the technology if possible, as opposed to legislation. Maybe email technology could solve the problem somehow? I know that there is already a general consensus that some work needs to be done to add modern functionality into the protocols we now use for email, perhaps this is something that could be solved there.
In my opinion any spam that a person recieves is largely their own responsibility. You should be careful who you give an email address to, if you do not want to recieve spam. Just as you would be cautious about posting your phone number and address in a public place.
Personally I receive little, if any, spam on my primary accounts, as I am very careful where I put those email addresses. I would expect that most lay-people who receive generous amounts of spam have entered their email address into forms to "Win a free IPod!" or some such thing. In these situations they have legally given permission to the sender to send them mail, so it is difficult to stop the problem.
That being said, there are people who use malicious means to gain access to email addresses, and spam them. This of course is rarely the fault of the victim.
This is absurd, if a school decided to implement an email system, then they should have looked into investing in a filtering system to go along with it.
It isn't the governments job to refine the processes and products of the private industry, which is essentially what they are doing. (more and more every day)
They have essentially said "This email thing would be alot better tool/product if we modified it like *this*". But wait! Email was never their technology in the first place! Why would we need them to aid/fix it?
We have all these politicians that are so devoted to their capitalism, yet they can't seem to understand the basic premise of it. If there is a wide demand for a product or change, somebody will supply it. The only thing that can stop the process from working is outside intervention such as this. Assuming this government solution works, they have just effectively halted research into new technologies and solutions to the problem in the private sector.
Common politicians, if you are going to be capitalist, then for FSM's sake could you allow capitalism to do it's thing!
Is this the only product that Apple makes? I thought they also made fairly nice laptops.
Well, they are about to release a fairly nice laptop, but for the past several years they have been selling dated and slow machines becuase they couldn't properly work their newer processor architecture into a laptop. The lack of an updated/modern laptop for sale certainly put some strain on the dedicated Apple user community.
McNealy has an iPod, McNealy says iPods will be as archaic as answering machines one day, McNealy seems to think that all Apple has are iPods.
Well, while Apple may bring in significant revenue from other sources, their profit is almost entirely based on IPod sales. Apple has seen nearly 600% increase in profit (from ~46million to ~290million in a year) from it's IPod sales.
We couldn't know the exact details of either companies current situation, but I wouldn't say that it is unreasonable for a company to fear investing in Apple when their revenue is mostly based on an mp3 player market share that cannot last forever. As wonderful as the iPod is, it has no technological advantages over other hardware, eventually the marketing campaign will wear off and people will begin to purchase other devices.
I've been playing since the game was released, and I can honestly say the biggest improvement was indeed the boob-bounce-physics. It seems the main character change was that all the female fighters recieved implants, and the boobs have an utterly realistic jiggle to them.
I found myself licking the screen inadvertently at times; begging for more milk.
The Labyrin3D which won the XBOX is actually a pretty darn cool idea! For those that didn't RTFA it is just like one of those little kids toy's where you must tilt the box around to roll a ball through the maze.
The cool factor comes from the fact that it utilizes the gyros (drop sensors) in the Apple laptop so that you play by tilting the laptop back and forth.
Cool!
AFAIK, the only law against region free devices involves disabling region protection. The DMCA protects against breaking encryption systems, but it does not dictate what devices need what systems.
Well if that is the only restriction (which it likely is) then it seems pretty reasonable. If the dvd-player makers essentially entered into a deal with the media producers to largely abide by their region technology, then that is of course perfectly acceptable.
It is although another matter to discuss whether the DMCA is infringing on fair-use rights that are benefitial to the consumer and not-too-harmful to the profitability of the companies.
The timeframe doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. When you think that they are releasing a patch which will be automatically downloaded and installed on literally tens of millions of computers, most of which without any system administrator to aid in the process.
That is a daunting task, and I can imagine theres a very lengthy process a patch must go through.
To Microsofts credit, I can hardly remember a time that a patch was released which cuased any major problems, which in itself is a great achievement given the amazing variety of hardware and software the users may have. There was of course alot of hype over compatibility issues in SP2, but to the best of my knowledge any actual issues were understood ahead of time and due to compromises that were made intentionally for one reason or another.
I understand the logic, and it seems perfectly reasonable, given that it is their movie and they are welcome to sell it as they would like to.
The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players (somewhat) illegal? A company choosing to use regions for business purposes is a far cry from a legitimate federal law.
Anyone know of a court case where this was discussed? It seems to be complete garbage, a case of lawmakers issuing laws for the sole purpose of aiding in a specific business practice, which has no effect on any other broad-reaching benefits to our society.
You make an invalid point. These things are kept secret not to keep the government from being brought down, but to keep Americans from getting killed. Do you really think anyone just feels the need to spy for their own benefit? How does it benefit them? They are spying to try to keep people alive, not to benefit themselves.
/. readers of all people should understand that much of the general public is incapable of dealing with various types of information. And apart from that, you must remember that it's not possible to just share information with Americans, anything that we are told is also told to the entire rest of the world.
Feel free to argue that their methods are flawed, as they very likely are, but it certainly is not done to protect the government in the way that Chinese censorship is, but rather the people.
I'm completely baffled by this American feeling that no government department should keep secrets from the general public. I guess our American media has started this sentiment. But
That seems pretty unlikely since the publisher is IUniverse, a self-publishing company. In otherwords, the author of the book simply paid this company to print it for him. They are in no way affiliated with the author, or the marketing/sales of his book, nor do they care. They are simply a company with a printing press.
A friend of mine purchased a cheap laptop from your average privately owned computer store in town, and asked me to have a look at it, becuase it kept asking to activate.
After looking at it briefly, and seeing the tell-tale sign of a badly cracked copy of Windows (Tells you to activate, but then keeps saying you've already activated) I went to the Genuine Windows checker on the Microsoft site and confirmed it was a stolen copy.
It seems private companies selling computers with pirated microsoft software is becoming extremely common, as it allows them to easily increase their profit by many hundred dollars (if you include Office also).
I think you state it accurately, it was not a bug, becuase it was the intended behavior, it was instead a really stupid design idea probably caused by a lazy designer.
The bit about "any interactive computer service" is the concerning part. Of course to make sense of this you would have to go back to the original text, Section 2261A of title 18. They make their changes in this fashion as to make it very difficult for lawmakers to read/understand the bill before they vote.
To answer another question I keep seeing:
"Does anyone actually use WMF anyway?"
There are actually some common uses of WMF on windows, but becuase it is a metafile of GDI calls, its not very portable (although it is easy to convert).
Since displaying a WMF is nothing more than enumerating the list into a 'select case' statement (not a very long one either) it is very easy and VERY fast to display on Windows. (Really no processing is required). For this reason, microsoft uses WMF for all the MS Office clipart, and you'll find many other very-microsoft centric applications using it as well.