Unfortunately, CAPTCHAs are hindering much of that progress."
No, spammers are. The root problem of this "solution" is the spammers, who do not care our personal feelings of privacy. They don't care that their messages cause everyone else's costs to rise.
I have to agree, right now I am running a small website which is showing a horrendous spam problem: 300-500 messages per day despite almost no real traffic (& no Google presence). I spend almost an hour a night cleaning up the days crap. This weeks project is coding to blacklist every IP address that submits a comment with a blacklisted domain name as a src or href. We'll see how that works.
If I sue, do you think the Judge will let me break their kneecaps as a remedy? I haven't lost any money, but I have lost a lot of enjoyment. I figure a few whacks with a bat would be quite enjoyable. That's equitable, right?
The Chinese government has a well-documented history of utter ruthlessness, and will happily steal and duplicate every technological edge it can get.
When I was working w/ a company that made security Holograms for UL, one of our R&D people went to Bejing, where they happily showed him the R&D Hologram lab, where they were trying to duplicate our security Hologram. They also were more than happy to show him samples of a dozen or so other holograms they had already cloned.
From his description, they were rather proud to be making such good forgeries.
And that is exactly the kind of conflict that will bring it to the Supremes. The Feds will try to get information without a warrant and the conflict will ensue.
Not really, State & Federal courts really move in different circles. The Feds will get info without the warrant & none of the proceeds will be usable for any ancillary state charges, but it won't affect the federal case.
The interesting thing to me is that the court ruled that the problem was with the type of seupona used. Per the article, the cops went & got one from a judge, but the court ruled that they needed to go to a grand jury instead. That seems a bit odd to me, it was my understanding that the GJ was usually brought in after most of the investigation was done, not at the beginning.
Raid arrays increase access time - from 10-50% depending on the type of array.
However, for streaming data, yes a properly formatted striped array will produce significantly higher throughput. The problem is, for most games/database work, the seek times are actually more important than the throughput. A review of RAID 0 in games showed that while the load time of the game was decreased, there was no significant change to the playability of the game - due to the number of small files loaded during usage - and a better graphics card or more memory were recommended as better investments.
Given the nature of the beast, high end gaming would actually be well suited for 16GB SS/PCI Ram drives - as most games would fit well within that constraint. The problem being transfer rates between the permanent storage of the HD & the running storage of the SSD. If the game folder was tarballed, then a mirrored array would actually improve the load times (assuming the processor can handle untaring the folder as/faster than the array can pass in the data). Either way, it's an even worse pricebreak - $31+/GB for RAMdrives & about 21/GB for SSDs.
What the problems are with the current proposed standard (other than MS came up with it). I mean, is there something in it that isn't open, or makes software not designed by MS less usable?
Size - there are 6000+ pages to the documentation - poorly layed out & poorly indexed
There are internal inconsistencies - references to at least 1 tag point to 2 separate descriptions - which are different
as an ISO standard, it ignores several ISO standards regarding dates & formats
There are over 2000 open problems with the standard - problems that were supposed to be resolved @ the BRM but were not able to be addressed due to the sheer volume.
The patent - no-sue agreement that MS offered with OOXML is valid only for the version submitted, and is worded to be incompatible with the all versions of the GPL & BSD licenses - which make up almost 90% of the OSS market.
The patent - no-sue agreement doesn't cover any 'extensions' MS puts into O2007 - meaning if you actually make your implementation useful, you're outside the agreement.
Why should people should jump up and down and protest this action. Is there some specific point we should worry about?
Because a standard is supposed to be a standard - implementations are supposed to be on an equal footing & interchangeable. SAE wrenches work with SAE bolts/nuts because they both follow the SAE standard. It doesn't matter if you buy the wrench from Snap-On & the bolt from Lowes, they work together. A standard with tags such as [formatlikeword95] with no definition for it, is not implementable by anyone except the one company that knows how to [formatlikeword95], Microsoft.
It's a corruption of the system: The entire committee that works on formats has ground to a halt, because any vote requires a majority of responses from people eligible to vote, MS persuaded over 30 new members to join, most of whom haven't voted on anything other than the OOXML standard. Additionally, there has been evidence presented in several instances where large 'marketing assistance' or 'support contract' offers were provided to these new members - who overwhelmingly voted to approve.
What impact will this have on us?
Documents created under this standard will have 0 software packages capable of reproducing it, MS has stated it has no intention of revising O2007 to match the standard. Yet because of the wording, they still will be permitted to claim O2007 is standard compliant - with proprietary extensions. (read incomprehensible to anyone else)
As an archival system (the main purpose), it is worthless. No document stored in this format by O2007 is recoverable by any software written to the spec, because the spec permits the storage of data as unspecified binary blobs embedded in OOXML tags. As a result, once MS determines that it needs a cash infusion & updates away from this format, or the binary blob format, all documentation stored in it will be required to be updated & transcribed to the new format.
That is the purely technical list of reasons, there are others such as the fact that MS claims that there are a large number of MS patents involved in the implementation of the spec, however, it refuses to divulge the specific patents. It's supposed no-sue offer falls substantially short of being an acceptable business risk. While it covers the OOXML implementation, it unsurprisingly doesn't cover actually making it work with O2007 formats.
In short, it's a piece of shit that was ramrodded through ISO by what appears to be 'questionable means' for the sole purpose of allowing MS to claim O2007 is compliant with an international standard without actually having to do anything about being standards compliant.
As for you missing the big picture, well I suppose it depends on if you think that 'profit at any cost' = good. Personally, I find it repugnant that a company can toss around money and a few vague threats and get a 'standard' passed that's overwhelmingly rejected by academic and technical groups.
RAID should no longer be considered "advanced". Drive space is cheap and it's just sensible to install a RAID mirror in even consumer products as a "just in case" factor.
OK, I'll bite. I have an ASUS MB that has an intigrated controller capable of supporting 2 SATA dirves in raid 0 || 1. I still use the IDE bus.Why? Because 1, I had the drives on hand, and 2, setting up a raid was more trouble than it was worth. (all 7 or 8 clicks in the BIOS)
It's pointless to install a raid 1 system on the average joe 6pack computer 'just in case' because most of them aren't going to know what to do with it when 'case' happens. 95% of the time people are going to delete a file they need, not have a HD crash. For them, using that 2nd HD to run an incrimental backup is much more useful than mirroring the drive.
Dual-head graphics cards are definitely not advanced. Nearly any new card you buy (with the exception of the sub-$50 bargain cards in a bin at Fry's) has dual-head support. Nearly all laptops have built-in dual-head as well! How can this be advanced?
How many people do you know that actually use 2 monitors? I had a system running with 4 - just because I could - it was more anoying to figure out which screen to look at than to change desktops in Linux. I work with 2 people who use a double setup, and I know about 6 GAs who use the double monitor. I don't know anyone who is an average home user who runs 2 monitors. So, I would say yes, multi monitor setups are advanced because they are definitely not the norm.
And improvements in magnetic confinement could easily bring fusion power down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour...and advances in the production of antimatter could yield power too cheap to meter
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future plants can improve efficiency - through improved design/scale - to drop the price to between 6 & 8 cents.
What's more, the city made this change illegally. If they set the duration of the yellow light below the legal limit, and you've run a red light right as the light changed to red, I would imagine you'd have a pretty good case in court. Assuming the cop actually shows up to court, and your case isn't just thrown out because he's not there.
Where do you live? Here in MA you have to show up 3 times with the cop as a noshow before they toss it. Worse, they don't always require the cop who wrote the ticket to show up --- any cop will do, as long as he has the ticket book w/ the notes.
I get snail mail advertisements all the time; to me they are spam. What's the difference between unsolicited snail-mail marketing and unsolicited email 'spam'?
Truth in advertising laws apply to junk mail - including that the actual letter has to actually identify who it's from. Failure to do so is a Federal crime -- with actual jail time associated with it. The CAN_SPAM act was partially an attempt to bring the e-mail & s-mail rules closer together.
(instead of giving everyone root / local admin rights)
The problem is that a lot of programs require this for updates. I have 2 programs that users have to have administrator rights to run because the first thing the software does is look for updates & then try to save information in the registry about when it updated.
Worse, the proper solution according to MS, setting it to run as another account w/ administrative rights, doesn't work.
Actually, if we get enough cores as CPU, when do we start to need less GPU?
When CPU's get better at churning out FP math solutions. The whole purpose of the GPU is it's a massive net of FPUs. I think Cell style technology is going to be more similar to the type of chip we see in 10 years than an Intel C Core w/ 100 Pentium type cores in it. Ideally, I think you are looking at a processor 'office' for each thread - 1 supervisor core, multiple FPUs, a couple of CPU cores, perhaps 1 or 2 GPUs & a few FGP units, and a 'Tasking Core' to govern all of the 'offices'.
Think about it, if you have some FGP units in the 'office' you can purpose each 'office' for specific tasks that currently work best with secondary chips - AES encryption, HD video decryption, voice & video processing, etc. They might not be as fast as a custom burned chip, but w/ 90% of the speed combined with infinite flexibility it's a whole lot cheaper than trying to cram 10-20 custom chips into the system. Need to do voice recognition with that system, the software requests a thread & passes in the FGP structure. The Tasking core passes it to an unused 'Office supervisor' which passes it to a FGP unit. Now all the requests for voice recognition pass through the tasking core to the 'VR office'. If the queue builds, the 'office supervisor' passes the FGP setup to another FGP unit under it's control & starts running multiple threads of it's own.
If elements are built with thread safe API's there's not a lot of reasons that this can't work.
The only thing that slightly worries me about this: if the EULA is what is causing MS to pay the tax, then in paying the tax, MS can clearly say that the EULA is valid (in India at least) as the government has demanded legal taxes based on it.
Not really. What it says is that MS doesn't believe what it's trying to tell the Indian court. Whether the EULA is legitimate or not, MS operates as if it is - as such, they are stating the software is licensed not sold.
Courts - in the US & most western countries - tend to rule on very narrow topics. In this case the EULA is an official public document published by MS stating it's stance on the type of sale being conducted. Given that it is a direct contradiction to what the MS legal team was telling the court, the court ruled that the truth was what MS was telling the entire rest of the world & not what they were telling the court. This doesn't mean that the court ruled that the EULA was a valid license, just that the MS was licensing not selling Windows. The validity of the EULA is an entirely separate question - a matter of contract law not tax law.
According to some digging, it seems that SUSE has tweaked some XEN code to properly work with the MS Hypervisor. The patch isn't well accepted in the Xen-dev group & may not make it to the reference build.
So, anyone using the SuSE patch can run under this, but at the cost of loosing their supplied kernel.
I see the same problem using Pandora. It appears to be a Flash problem not a FF problem. The current FF garbage collection doesn't catch self referential objects & therefore never cleans them up. The new GC system is supposed to catch more of them.
We swapped to firefox for our internal web app over 5 months ago. I still have people who are amazed by tabs at least twice a week.
Worse, today I had someone call me because refreshing the frameset (in use for over 2 years) takes her back to the start page.
People do not want to learn, they are happier to have 30 window instances & step through them all rather than have 3 open with 10 tabs all neatly organized.
There's a centralized database of media (music files, video, etc.), and that is distributed to local media players. There is something that verifies that the player has permission to play that media.
My god they patented warez sites!
FTP server - check
UN/PW verifying permission - check
computers to play the media - check
Hmm, seems every password protected media site falls under their auspice now - does that tv site know that? They better sign up for this patent license before they protect their data streams.
It was not until Version 4 that the Itunes store was added allowing distribution of music in 2003.
If this is the segment that they are basing their complaint on, it never should have been granted. Online CC sales predate '99, including software sales - I still have some shareware licenses hanging around from prior to 94.
The combination of patentable elements into a new invention does not qualify for a new patent unless there are creative elements involved - ie. bolting an ACME Flamethrower onto the front of your snowplow doesn't get you a patent for an exothermic snow removal device. In general you also can't get a patent on a subset - IE patent online sales of jazz when online sales of music in general is prior art.
From the look of one of these claims, they just received a patent on all online sales.
Actually a bunch of lawyers from the E TX area just filed suit against the owner of the patenttroll website - including the son of one of the judges who started the whole - 'sue em here' trend.
The missing element to your analysis is that the CD sales increase follows the p2p increase, not 'is synchronized with'. A pre-release CD on the p2p networks generally doesn't make a statistical spike (I am sure there have been exceptions) - therefor a sales rise in CDs should be synchronized with or preceed the rise in p2p traffic.
I think a better understanding could be developed if you looked at traffic vs singles downloads vs CD sales & had the capability to track release spikes on the CD & singles sales. But the basic rule appears to be that increases in traffic don't appear to negatively effect sales - and yes, that does include the semester starts when all those college freshmen get access to big fat pipes.
There is another study that correlates p2p network spikes with CD sales numbers. If p2p is really causing a drop in CD sales, there should be a corresponding drop in CD sales. Not only isn't there a drop, there appears to be a slight rise in CD sales following p2p spikes.
While there is no doubt that p2p has trimmed off some CD sales, it doesn't appear to be anywhere close to the order of magnitude the RIAA quotes it as.
Don't put it out of the realm of possibility.... 2 vp's in my company had me put an orgasm scream on the owners phone as all of his ring tones - it rang the first time while his wife was in the office.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree, right now I am running a small website which is showing a horrendous spam problem: 300-500 messages per day despite almost no real traffic (& no Google presence). I spend almost an hour a night cleaning up the days crap. This weeks project is coding to blacklist every IP address that submits a comment with a blacklisted domain name as a src or href. We'll see how that works.
If I sue, do you think the Judge will let me break their kneecaps as a remedy? I haven't lost any money, but I have lost a lot of enjoyment. I figure a few whacks with a bat would be quite enjoyable. That's equitable, right?
Sincerely,
B.L. Zebub
You could try politicians & lobbyists, but I think the BS content is probably too high for a healthy diet.
When I was working w/ a company that made security Holograms for UL, one of our R&D people went to Bejing, where they happily showed him the R&D Hologram lab, where they were trying to duplicate our security Hologram. They also were more than happy to show him samples of a dozen or so other holograms they had already cloned.
From his description, they were rather proud to be making such good forgeries.
Not really, State & Federal courts really move in different circles. The Feds will get info without the warrant & none of the proceeds will be usable for any ancillary state charges, but it won't affect the federal case.
The interesting thing to me is that the court ruled that the problem was with the type of seupona used. Per the article, the cops went & got one from a judge, but the court ruled that they needed to go to a grand jury instead. That seems a bit odd to me, it was my understanding that the GJ was usually brought in after most of the investigation was done, not at the beginning.
Raid arrays increase access time - from 10-50% depending on the type of array.
However, for streaming data, yes a properly formatted striped array will produce significantly higher throughput. The problem is, for most games/database work, the seek times are actually more important than the throughput. A review of RAID 0 in games showed that while the load time of the game was decreased, there was no significant change to the playability of the game - due to the number of small files loaded during usage - and a better graphics card or more memory were recommended as better investments.
Given the nature of the beast, high end gaming would actually be well suited for 16GB SS/PCI Ram drives - as most games would fit well within that constraint. The problem being transfer rates between the permanent storage of the HD & the running storage of the SSD. If the game folder was tarballed, then a mirrored array would actually improve the load times (assuming the processor can handle untaring the folder as/faster than the array can pass in the data). Either way, it's an even worse pricebreak - $31+/GB for RAMdrives & about 21/GB for SSDs.
That is the purely technical list of reasons, there are others such as the fact that MS claims that there are a large number of MS patents involved in the implementation of the spec, however, it refuses to divulge the specific patents. It's supposed no-sue offer falls substantially short of being an acceptable business risk. While it covers the OOXML implementation, it unsurprisingly doesn't cover actually making it work with O2007 formats.
In short, it's a piece of shit that was ramrodded through ISO by what appears to be 'questionable means' for the sole purpose of allowing MS to claim O2007 is compliant with an international standard without actually having to do anything about being standards compliant.
As for you missing the big picture, well I suppose it depends on if you think that 'profit at any cost' = good. Personally, I find it repugnant that a company can toss around money and a few vague threats and get a 'standard' passed that's overwhelmingly rejected by academic and technical groups.
It's pointless to install a raid 1 system on the average joe 6pack computer 'just in case' because most of them aren't going to know what to do with it when 'case' happens. 95% of the time people are going to delete a file they need, not have a HD crash. For them, using that 2nd HD to run an incrimental backup is much more useful than mirroring the drive.
How many people do you know that actually use 2 monitors? I had a system running with 4 - just because I could - it was more anoying to figure out which screen to look at than to change desktops in Linux. I work with 2 people who use a double setup, and I know about 6 GAs who use the double monitor. I don't know anyone who is an average home user who runs 2 monitors. So, I would say yes, multi monitor setups are advanced because they are definitely not the norm.
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future plants can improve efficiency - through improved design/scale - to drop the price to between 6 & 8 cents.
The problem is that a lot of programs require this for updates. I have 2 programs that users have to have administrator rights to run because the first thing the software does is look for updates & then try to save information in the registry about when it updated. Worse, the proper solution according to MS, setting it to run as another account w/ administrative rights, doesn't work.
Not nearly as much as they can make by enforcing a monopoly.
I work for a CLEC & we just went to the PUC regarding this kind of issue - they are literally selling residential service at below wholesale cost.
When CPU's get better at churning out FP math solutions. The whole purpose of the GPU is it's a massive net of FPUs. I think Cell style technology is going to be more similar to the type of chip we see in 10 years than an Intel C Core w/ 100 Pentium type cores in it. Ideally, I think you are looking at a processor 'office' for each thread - 1 supervisor core, multiple FPUs, a couple of CPU cores, perhaps 1 or 2 GPUs & a few FGP units, and a 'Tasking Core' to govern all of the 'offices'.
Think about it, if you have some FGP units in the 'office' you can purpose each 'office' for specific tasks that currently work best with secondary chips - AES encryption, HD video decryption, voice & video processing, etc. They might not be as fast as a custom burned chip, but w/ 90% of the speed combined with infinite flexibility it's a whole lot cheaper than trying to cram 10-20 custom chips into the system. Need to do voice recognition with that system, the software requests a thread & passes in the FGP structure. The Tasking core passes it to an unused 'Office supervisor' which passes it to a FGP unit. Now all the requests for voice recognition pass through the tasking core to the 'VR office'. If the queue builds, the 'office supervisor' passes the FGP setup to another FGP unit under it's control & starts running multiple threads of it's own.
If elements are built with thread safe API's there's not a lot of reasons that this can't work.
Not really. What it says is that MS doesn't believe what it's trying to tell the Indian court. Whether the EULA is legitimate or not, MS operates as if it is - as such, they are stating the software is licensed not sold.
Courts - in the US & most western countries - tend to rule on very narrow topics. In this case the EULA is an official public document published by MS stating it's stance on the type of sale being conducted. Given that it is a direct contradiction to what the MS legal team was telling the court, the court ruled that the truth was what MS was telling the entire rest of the world & not what they were telling the court. This doesn't mean that the court ruled that the EULA was a valid license, just that the MS was licensing not selling Windows. The validity of the EULA is an entirely separate question - a matter of contract law not tax law.
According to some digging, it seems that SUSE has tweaked some XEN code to properly work with the MS Hypervisor. The patch isn't well accepted in the Xen-dev group & may not make it to the reference build.
So, anyone using the SuSE patch can run under this, but at the cost of loosing their supplied kernel.
I see the same problem using Pandora. It appears to be a Flash problem not a FF problem. The current FF garbage collection doesn't catch self referential objects & therefore never cleans them up. The new GC system is supposed to catch more of them.
Worse, today I had someone call me because refreshing the frameset (in use for over 2 years) takes her back to the start page.
People do not want to learn, they are happier to have 30 window instances & step through them all rather than have 3 open with 10 tabs all neatly organized.
- FTP server - check
- UN/PW verifying permission - check
- computers to play the media - check
Hmm, seems every password protected media site falls under their auspice now - does that tv site know that? They better sign up for this patent license before they protect their data streams.Actually a bunch of lawyers from the E TX area just filed suit against the owner of the patenttroll website - including the son of one of the judges who started the whole - 'sue em here' trend.
The missing element to your analysis is that the CD sales increase follows the p2p increase, not 'is synchronized with'. A pre-release CD on the p2p networks generally doesn't make a statistical spike (I am sure there have been exceptions) - therefor a sales rise in CDs should be synchronized with or preceed the rise in p2p traffic. I think a better understanding could be developed if you looked at traffic vs singles downloads vs CD sales & had the capability to track release spikes on the CD & singles sales. But the basic rule appears to be that increases in traffic don't appear to negatively effect sales - and yes, that does include the semester starts when all those college freshmen get access to big fat pipes.
There is another study that correlates p2p network spikes with CD sales numbers. If p2p is really causing a drop in CD sales, there should be a corresponding drop in CD sales. Not only isn't there a drop, there appears to be a slight rise in CD sales following p2p spikes. While there is no doubt that p2p has trimmed off some CD sales, it doesn't appear to be anywhere close to the order of magnitude the RIAA quotes it as.
Don't put it out of the realm of possibility .... 2 vp's in my company had me put an orgasm scream on the owners phone as all of his ring tones - it rang the first time while his wife was in the office.