I think now might be a good time to buy some put options on SCOX. Doh! No options for SCOX. Oh well, I guess I'll just take the plunge and sell short.
They're at their highest price since 2000. Their EPS estimates for this year were 88 cents. For next year, the estimates are -20 cents. The 1 year target estimate on share prices is $6/share (they're currently at $15.75 as I write this).
Can someone say "Sure Thing!" I don't know about you, but I'm willing to take that kind of risk.
I love how all the positives sound almost the same. It's as if maybe 2 or 3 people (the people involved in ESV?) wrote all the positive comments. The negative comments speak for themselves.
Everyone's up in arms about DRM. Why? They talk about it like it's something that's going to be unhackable. Someone please show me an example of the music or movie industry producing unhackable formats of anything.
Sorry, but as soon as they get their DRM stuff in, someone's going to hack it. End of story.
I found it all pretty hard to follow. 20 years mandatory for this, double it if they did this, add 50% if they this, double it again if they did this. Man, pretty soon, you're talking real jail time.
Maybe you ought to inform the guys that run Web Developers Journal. Tag line: Tips on Web Page Design, HTML, Graphics... Or maybe the guys at Hoover Web Design have no idea what they're talking about either with this:
DEFINITION: A Web developer, strictly speaking, builds and maintains websites. However, a lot of people who create a site from start to finish -- designing graphics and webpages, figuring out the site map, then producing the site -- call themselves Web developers, so it's a confusing term. People who conceptualize and plan out the site are actually Web designers. Developers are the people who use some form of HTML to build the actual pages. A Web developer's other responsibilities could include optimizing graphics for the Web and producing rich media such as Flash, streaming media, or online audio.
I mean, I'm not a web developer (or maybe I am, depending on who's right) so I wouldn't know.
"When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is blind, his interface with computers is audio-based...
I live in Southern Mexico on the coast. About 5 years ago Hurrican Mitch, a category 5 hurricane, was sitting out at sea not too far away. For nearly a week it hardly moved, just hanging out in the middle of the ocean building up strength. The whole time, the NOAA/NHC was predicting it would hit us dead on in 3 days. Yet the hurricane just stayed there.
Suddenly, the hurricane turned south and hit Honduras. Where it again stalled and hung out for 3 days. In the end, about 11,000 Hondurans died, primarily from massive mudslides that consumed enitre villages.
I really hope they improve the models significantly so that things like this don't have to happen. If hurricanes could be predicted with more accuracy, to the point that people and countries could trust the predictions, these areas could be evacuated.
Unfortunately, with the level of accuracy, there's such a wide area in the predicted path that it's impossible to evacuate everyone that could potentially be in the path in time to save them.
When I first moved down here, I though, "Gee, I'd like to see what a hurricane is like." Then Mitch showed up. When you have a category 5 hurricane on your doorstep, you start to re-evaluate your life a bit. The town I live in would have been leveled. I would have been one of the lucky ones. I had a car and would have simply driven inland to avoid it. A lot of people couldn't have afforded to do that.
With more accurate predictions, the government could sponsor the evacuations and save a lot of lives.
I didn't know I had Kazaa on my machine. A hacker must have put it there and used my machine for file sharing. Prove it was me and not a hacker. I run Windows.
I mean, really, it's windows. I could find plenty of windows machines out there to hijack and use for file sharing if I wanted to. Any script kiddie could. How improbable is the defense? Well, given Microsoft's security record, I think it's plausible enough that the RIAA couldn't stand up to it. Just my own thoughts, though.
MicroTemps was great. I don't think they're around anymore. And really, I shouldn't speak for the entire company. The guy who handled finding me work was concerned about good matches for both the job seekers and the companies.
At the time I dealt with about 10 other companies and this guy at MicroTemps was the only one that wasn't a total sleazebag. In fact, after he had placed me, about 2 months later, he called me at work and said, "I'm going to be near your office in a couple of days. Want to have lunch?" We had lunch. He asked me how work was going, if I was happy, etc... Nice guy.
More recently, I've dealt with Robert Half Technology. In the future, I'd avoid them like the plague. After dealing with them, I realized I didn't want to go through spending another 6 months looking for a decent recruiter again and gave up on them altogether. Self employments is suiting me much better.
How so? I've never had ANYTHING lost by US Mail. Nor am I aware of any of my mail EVER being tampered with. Probably because it's a federal offense to do so. Since I'm out of the country, my vote would go via FedEx anyway. I've never had a problem with Fed-Ex
What do you base your problems with snail mail on? Other than being slow, what's so insecure about it? I mean, you say it like there's some common knowledge that snail mail is insecure, but I'm not aware of this common knowledge.
In the US, if you get busted with an ounce of grass, it's not serious. In Mexico, they might take it, or they might just take you out back and shoot you.
I hope you meant that as an exaggeration. I've never heard of anyone getting "shot" for smoking pot. On the other hand, it is a serious crime in this country, just as it is in the States.
And the reason they take it so seriously is because the U.S. for many years gave the Mexican government a great deal of shit about lax drug policies and threatened to make trade more difficult for them if they didn't toughen up. So if you want to complain about Mexico's tough stance on drugs, you might want to start by sending a letter to your representatives in congress about it.
True. But, what's to prevent voters from intentionally throwing the comparison by voting one way by mail and another way electronically?
I'm sure some statistical analysis can account for the few people that do that. But I don't think you'd see a general trend in that direction. I mean, what purpose would it serve? I know there are the few that would do it just to screw with the system, but I doubt that would be a serious trend.
I live abroad and frankly, I'm just not quite prepared to trust my vote to the internet. I'll be sending my vote by mail and would encourage other expats to do the same.
I certainly don't trust Verisign. I think the first few elections using this technology should be limited to say, a few thousand votes so as not to have a significant impact on the results (of course, given what happened in Florida, a few thousand votes might have a significant impact). Maybe it would be even better to run the electronic voting at the same time, requiring mail-in ballots and compare the results and not count the electronic voting until it's proven itself. Mail-in ballots aren't anonymous votes, so it should be easy enough to compare.
Even then, I don't know that that would work. I'd eventually like to see secure internet voting, but I'm just not sure the implementations are there yet.
You had a job offer in Mexico. Now, get this, most of those Illegal Immigrants are in the US because they can't get jobs in Mexico! That makes you special or priviliged, did you even bother to check your salary against the national average?
I'm sure, just as my salary in the States, my salary in Mexico is well above teh National average. I'm getting paid no more than my Mexican co-workers, however. So that makes me no more "special or privilideged" than my Mexican co-workers.
You could argue that anyone with a job in the U.S. is "special or priviledged" given the level of unemployment.
I'm not arguing that Mexico is in better shape financially. But, I will mention this. At a per-capita level, at least in the state that I'm in, there are probably more Americans working here illegally then illegal Mexicans in any given state. Per capita. That is to say, in Quintana Roo, Mexico, the ratio illegal U.S. workers to Mexican population is higher than the ration of illegal Mexican works to U.S. population in any given state, even California or Texas.
Now, I can't back this up with facts, because the illegal American workers are a bit reluctant to stand up to be counted. And Mexicans don't tend to spend a lot of time getting official counts of things like that.
You wonder why Mexicans are coming to the States to get jobs, maybe it's because of all of us Americans coming down here and stealing their jobs!
please dont vote - dont push your little out of the country opinions on the rest of us that actually have to live with your decisions
So, what, you think I should exercise my constitutional right to vote simply because I choose to live abroad or because you don't agree with the things I've said while exercising my constitutional right to free speech?
Do you not like the Constitution United States or do you just not understand it?
I'll tell you what, though. If you can convince the IRS that because I live outside of the country, I shouldn't have to pay any taxes, I'll be more than happy to withdraw my vote! But since I'm paying for it, I'm going to exercise my right to vote.
You might want to get out and see some of the rest of the world before you make a statement like that. While I won't deny that America has its appeal to a number of foreigners, there are plenty of people who are more than happy in their own countries. I know a number of foreigners who are leaving the U.S. simply because they have to go through so much BS with immigration now that it's just not worth it.
Instead of a link, try google: "americans moving canada". Then just pick one.
As for Mexico, I'm not the rich elite. Came down here with nothing but a job offer. I found it easier to find good programming work in Mexico than in the States. Go figure.
And it is a great place to live. I'm 4 blocks from the beach and have DSL which I couldn't even get in the area I lived in the States.
Go ahead and make your judgements about Mexico. You guys can bash it all you want. But I'll tell you, for all it's faults, it has a lot of things going for it that the U.S. has lost. Not least of which is a sense of community and a sense of pride. Those are hard things to come by in the States.
Have you ever seen such resolve and support on a single issue in the U.S.? I mean, after 9/11 politicians and government agencies weren't moving this quickly.
I guess that's what happens when an entire nation faces down an association with no lobbying skills. Now if we could just be this effective on a few of the slightly more important issues like civil rights, pre-emptive wars, and so forth.
Many Americans are leaving the U.S. for Canada because of what's happening. In fact, for the first time in history, more Americans are moving to Canada than vice versa. I personally moved to Mexico, not really because of what's going on with the rights of citizens under the guise of "patriotism", but it certainly wasn't an incentive for me to stay in the States.
The sad truth is that the U.S. is quickly turning into a country that people don't want to live in. And it's happening in a single presidential administration. People aren't as afraid of more terrorist acts as they are of what's happening to their rights. At least the educated people aren't.
I'm definitely still going to vote in the next election though, 'cause I may want to return to the States someday, and I'd really hate to see the Mexico bordered by a police state.
I don't see how these are incompatible, particularly with languages with introspection, as someone else mentioned. Using a template based class generator that generates my classes from my database, and reflection in C#, I have a pretty seemless way of moving my classes to and from the database. And the really cool thing is I don't have to keep ALL THOSE OBJECTS IN MEMORY!
Once again, someone is scraping together a Linux distro, trying to make it look like Windows, and giving us absolutely jack in terms of innovation, *better* usability, or creativity.
Actually, that's precisely what Linux needs. If it doesn't look like and work like what people are used to, they're not going to use it. I agree some innovation would be nice, but I'd settle for something that works like Windows for the most part.
The Linux community has tried time and again to do new, fresh, creative things with the desktop, and it repeatedly fails to gain favor with end users for one simple reason. They don't understand it becuase it doesn't work like what they're used to.
Sun is on the right track. Once you start getting the mainstream users over, then the innovations will come, little by little.
I have two neighbors who have their XP boxes so customized in terms of UI that I can barely find my way around. That's frustrating as hell, especially when it's me that needs to fix something on them.
The first time I used a windowing environment under Linux, it was set for the right mouse button to do what I expected the left mouse button to do. I could never get used to it.
The target here is your Joe Average computer user, and this is what you want to do to get companies to buy it for Joe Average
Forget innovation for now. Marketshare is what you want. I truely want to see Linux succeed, but I've seen the hype for years and the problem has always been the failure to follow the paradigm that users are used to. People don't like change. I don't mean geeks, I mean people. Mr "Joe Average" mentioned above. They want simplicity and comfort. They want to be able to get on with their work without having to relearn how to do everything that they already know how to do in Windows. And that's what company IT departments are looking to satisfy.
This is of particular interest to me as I am returning to live in Mexico again on Thursday and will again have to contend with the CD Eating Fungus which wiped out a good portion of my CD collection last time (at least now I know some ways of protecting them).
I had hoped that those protections would extend to CD-Rs, but that won't be sufficient. Tape backups are expensive, per megabyte, as well as more difficult to manage for the average (and even above-average) user in a personal computer environment, than CD-Rs.
What's a good alternative for those of us that need long term (like 5-10 years) backups of data. I have things, such as writings, and pictures, that I would like to keep stored long term on a medium that won't be unsupported or easily damaged or susceptible to deterioration?
I wouldn't mind having to re-backup to new media every 5 to 10 years to keep up with technology, but I mind having to backup every 18 months just to avoid deterioratin of media.
Not so. If you remember a few years ago, a judge ruled against Blizzard using spyware in their software even though all it was doing was helping them to squash bugs and prevent cheating
I'm a software developer in Mexico and I'm putting exactly this technology in my software. There are no Mexican laws against this (or if there are, I couldn't find any here or here. I could care less what U.S. laws say about it. Just because an American buys it doesn't bind me to U.S. law in this regard.
Slightly offtopic, I'm curious, are there any web sites in the States with all the federal and state laws? InfoJus is a great resource for Mexicans (and foreigners, like me, in Mexico).
It's a combination of frequency, bandwidth, and a few other factors. For example, when something is at 800mhz, that's the center frequency. It will have a bandwidth associated that may be a few khz or a few mhz, depending on the application.
Then you get a combination of different technologies. Someone else mentioned TDMA, CDMA, GSM, and some others. Some of these operate in the same bandwidth without significant interference because the way they operate is so different. CDMA for example, doesn't suffer from the same kind of interference that TDMA, GSM and a few others do.
There's a technology called Ultra Wide Band that may take off over the next decade. While it covers a very large bandwidth (as the name would imply) that would normally interfere with other technologies, because of the way it operates, there's little, if any interference. The nice thing about it is, you can operate a number of different devices, each paid of sender and receivers has a "code" that allows them to communicate. Nothing else will interfere and many devices with different codes can operate in proximity.
Most technologies operate on the basic principal of sending a signal via the actual radio wave. They do this by modulating some part of the wave, usually frequency or amplitude (hence FM and AM radio).
UWB doesn't do that. Instead, it sends pulses very quickly (in picosecond lengths) and the pattern created by the pulses (think binary, on and off), are what are used to create teh signal.
Another advantage of UWB is that it works at a lower power (given the same range). Also, unlike the higher frequency applicatons (particularly when you get up to 5+ ghz), it doesn't have the same issues penetrating walls and such. Nice technology. Hope it makes headway.
Slashdot Mirror
I think now might be a good time to buy some put options on SCOX. Doh! No options for SCOX. Oh well, I guess I'll just take the plunge and sell short.
They're at their highest price since 2000. Their EPS estimates for this year were 88 cents. For next year, the estimates are -20 cents. The 1 year target estimate on share prices is $6/share (they're currently at $15.75 as I write this).
Can someone say "Sure Thing!" I don't know about you, but I'm willing to take that kind of risk.
Has anyone read these comments?
I love how all the positives sound almost the same. It's as if maybe 2 or 3 people (the people involved in ESV?) wrote all the positive comments. The negative comments speak for themselves.
Everyone's up in arms about DRM. Why? They talk about it like it's something that's going to be unhackable. Someone please show me an example of the music or movie industry producing unhackable formats of anything.
Sorry, but as soon as they get their DRM stuff in, someone's going to hack it. End of story.
I found it all pretty hard to follow. 20 years mandatory for this, double it if they did this, add 50% if they this, double it again if they did this. Man, pretty soon, you're talking real jail time.
Maybe you ought to inform the guys that run Web Developers Journal. Tag line: Tips on Web Page Design, HTML, Graphics... Or maybe the guys at Hoover Web Design have no idea what they're talking about either with this:
DEFINITION: A Web developer, strictly speaking, builds and maintains websites. However, a lot of people who create a site from start to finish -- designing graphics and webpages, figuring out the site map, then producing the site -- call themselves Web developers, so it's a confusing term. People who conceptualize and plan out the site are actually Web designers. Developers are the people who use some form of HTML to build the actual pages. A Web developer's other responsibilities could include optimizing graphics for the Web and producing rich media such as Flash, streaming media, or online audio.
I mean, I'm not a web developer (or maybe I am, depending on who's right) so I wouldn't know.
"When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is blind, his interface with computers is audio-based...
Maybe you've seen his work like here or here
I live in Southern Mexico on the coast. About 5 years ago Hurrican Mitch, a category 5 hurricane, was sitting out at sea not too far away. For nearly a week it hardly moved, just hanging out in the middle of the ocean building up strength. The whole time, the NOAA/NHC was predicting it would hit us dead on in 3 days. Yet the hurricane just stayed there.
Suddenly, the hurricane turned south and hit Honduras. Where it again stalled and hung out for 3 days. In the end, about 11,000 Hondurans died, primarily from massive mudslides that consumed enitre villages.
I really hope they improve the models significantly so that things like this don't have to happen. If hurricanes could be predicted with more accuracy, to the point that people and countries could trust the predictions, these areas could be evacuated.
Unfortunately, with the level of accuracy, there's such a wide area in the predicted path that it's impossible to evacuate everyone that could potentially be in the path in time to save them.
When I first moved down here, I though, "Gee, I'd like to see what a hurricane is like." Then Mitch showed up. When you have a category 5 hurricane on your doorstep, you start to re-evaluate your life a bit. The town I live in would have been leveled. I would have been one of the lucky ones. I had a car and would have simply driven inland to avoid it. A lot of people couldn't have afforded to do that.
With more accurate predictions, the government could sponsor the evacuations and save a lot of lives.
I didn't know I had Kazaa on my machine. A hacker must have put it there and used my machine for file sharing. Prove it was me and not a hacker. I run Windows.
I mean, really, it's windows. I could find plenty of windows machines out there to hijack and use for file sharing if I wanted to. Any script kiddie could. How improbable is the defense? Well, given Microsoft's security record, I think it's plausible enough that the RIAA couldn't stand up to it. Just my own thoughts, though.
MicroTemps was great. I don't think they're around anymore. And really, I shouldn't speak for the entire company. The guy who handled finding me work was concerned about good matches for both the job seekers and the companies.
At the time I dealt with about 10 other companies and this guy at MicroTemps was the only one that wasn't a total sleazebag. In fact, after he had placed me, about 2 months later, he called me at work and said, "I'm going to be near your office in a couple of days. Want to have lunch?" We had lunch. He asked me how work was going, if I was happy, etc... Nice guy.
More recently, I've dealt with Robert Half Technology. In the future, I'd avoid them like the plague. After dealing with them, I realized I didn't want to go through spending another 6 months looking for a decent recruiter again and gave up on them altogether. Self employments is suiting me much better.
How so? I've never had ANYTHING lost by US Mail. Nor am I aware of any of my mail EVER being tampered with. Probably because it's a federal offense to do so. Since I'm out of the country, my vote would go via FedEx anyway. I've never had a problem with Fed-Ex
What do you base your problems with snail mail on? Other than being slow, what's so insecure about it? I mean, you say it like there's some common knowledge that snail mail is insecure, but I'm not aware of this common knowledge.
In the US, if you get busted with an ounce of grass, it's not serious. In Mexico, they might take it, or they might just take you out back and shoot you.
I hope you meant that as an exaggeration. I've never heard of anyone getting "shot" for smoking pot. On the other hand, it is a serious crime in this country, just as it is in the States.
And the reason they take it so seriously is because the U.S. for many years gave the Mexican government a great deal of shit about lax drug policies and threatened to make trade more difficult for them if they didn't toughen up. So if you want to complain about Mexico's tough stance on drugs, you might want to start by sending a letter to your representatives in congress about it.
True. But, what's to prevent voters from intentionally throwing the comparison by voting one way by mail and another way electronically?
I'm sure some statistical analysis can account for the few people that do that. But I don't think you'd see a general trend in that direction. I mean, what purpose would it serve? I know there are the few that would do it just to screw with the system, but I doubt that would be a serious trend.
I live abroad and frankly, I'm just not quite prepared to trust my vote to the internet. I'll be sending my vote by mail and would encourage other expats to do the same.
I certainly don't trust Verisign. I think the first few elections using this technology should be limited to say, a few thousand votes so as not to have a significant impact on the results (of course, given what happened in Florida, a few thousand votes might have a significant impact). Maybe it would be even better to run the electronic voting at the same time, requiring mail-in ballots and compare the results and not count the electronic voting until it's proven itself. Mail-in ballots aren't anonymous votes, so it should be easy enough to compare.
Even then, I don't know that that would work. I'd eventually like to see secure internet voting, but I'm just not sure the implementations are there yet.
You had a job offer in Mexico. Now, get this, most of those Illegal Immigrants are in the US because they can't get jobs in Mexico! That makes you special or priviliged, did you even bother to check your salary against the national average?
I'm sure, just as my salary in the States, my salary in Mexico is well above teh National average. I'm getting paid no more than my Mexican co-workers, however. So that makes me no more "special or privilideged" than my Mexican co-workers.
You could argue that anyone with a job in the U.S. is "special or priviledged" given the level of unemployment.
I'm not arguing that Mexico is in better shape financially. But, I will mention this. At a per-capita level, at least in the state that I'm in, there are probably more Americans working here illegally then illegal Mexicans in any given state. Per capita. That is to say, in Quintana Roo, Mexico, the ratio illegal U.S. workers to Mexican population is higher than the ration of illegal Mexican works to U.S. population in any given state, even California or Texas.
Now, I can't back this up with facts, because the illegal American workers are a bit reluctant to stand up to be counted. And Mexicans don't tend to spend a lot of time getting official counts of things like that.
You wonder why Mexicans are coming to the States to get jobs, maybe it's because of all of us Americans coming down here and stealing their jobs!
please dont vote - dont push your little out of the country opinions on the rest of us that actually have to live with your decisions
So, what, you think I should exercise my constitutional right to vote simply because I choose to live abroad or because you don't agree with the things I've said while exercising my constitutional right to free speech?
Do you not like the Constitution United States or do you just not understand it?
I'll tell you what, though. If you can convince the IRS that because I live outside of the country, I shouldn't have to pay any taxes, I'll be more than happy to withdraw my vote! But since I'm paying for it, I'm going to exercise my right to vote.
You might want to get out and see some of the rest of the world before you make a statement like that. While I won't deny that America has its appeal to a number of foreigners, there are plenty of people who are more than happy in their own countries. I know a number of foreigners who are leaving the U.S. simply because they have to go through so much BS with immigration now that it's just not worth it.
Instead of a link, try google: "americans moving canada". Then just pick one.
As for Mexico, I'm not the rich elite. Came down here with nothing but a job offer. I found it easier to find good programming work in Mexico than in the States. Go figure.
And it is a great place to live. I'm 4 blocks from the beach and have DSL which I couldn't even get in the area I lived in the States.
Go ahead and make your judgements about Mexico. You guys can bash it all you want. But I'll tell you, for all it's faults, it has a lot of things going for it that the U.S. has lost. Not least of which is a sense of community and a sense of pride. Those are hard things to come by in the States.
Have you ever seen such resolve and support on a single issue in the U.S.? I mean, after 9/11 politicians and government agencies weren't moving this quickly.
I guess that's what happens when an entire nation faces down an association with no lobbying skills. Now if we could just be this effective on a few of the slightly more important issues like civil rights, pre-emptive wars, and so forth.
Many Americans are leaving the U.S. for Canada because of what's happening. In fact, for the first time in history, more Americans are moving to Canada than vice versa. I personally moved to Mexico, not really because of what's going on with the rights of citizens under the guise of "patriotism", but it certainly wasn't an incentive for me to stay in the States.
The sad truth is that the U.S. is quickly turning into a country that people don't want to live in. And it's happening in a single presidential administration. People aren't as afraid of more terrorist acts as they are of what's happening to their rights. At least the educated people aren't.
I'm definitely still going to vote in the next election though, 'cause I may want to return to the States someday, and I'd really hate to see the Mexico bordered by a police state.
I don't see how these are incompatible, particularly with languages with introspection, as someone else mentioned. Using a template based class generator that generates my classes from my database, and reflection in C#, I have a pretty seemless way of moving my classes to and from the database. And the really cool thing is I don't have to keep ALL THOSE OBJECTS IN MEMORY!
Once again, someone is scraping together a Linux distro, trying to make it look like Windows, and giving us absolutely jack in terms of innovation, *better* usability, or creativity.
Actually, that's precisely what Linux needs. If it doesn't look like and work like what people are used to, they're not going to use it. I agree some innovation would be nice, but I'd settle for something that works like Windows for the most part.
The Linux community has tried time and again to do new, fresh, creative things with the desktop, and it repeatedly fails to gain favor with end users for one simple reason. They don't understand it becuase it doesn't work like what they're used to.
Sun is on the right track. Once you start getting the mainstream users over, then the innovations will come, little by little.
I have two neighbors who have their XP boxes so customized in terms of UI that I can barely find my way around. That's frustrating as hell, especially when it's me that needs to fix something on them.
The first time I used a windowing environment under Linux, it was set for the right mouse button to do what I expected the left mouse button to do. I could never get used to it.
The target here is your Joe Average computer user, and this is what you want to do to get companies to buy it for Joe Average
Forget innovation for now. Marketshare is what you want. I truely want to see Linux succeed, but I've seen the hype for years and the problem has always been the failure to follow the paradigm that users are used to. People don't like change. I don't mean geeks, I mean people. Mr "Joe Average" mentioned above. They want simplicity and comfort. They want to be able to get on with their work without having to relearn how to do everything that they already know how to do in Windows. And that's what company IT departments are looking to satisfy.
When doing vulnerability assessments of your companies or clients...
A.k.a your intended victims.
This is of particular interest to me as I am returning to live in Mexico again on Thursday and will again have to contend with the CD Eating Fungus which wiped out a good portion of my CD collection last time (at least now I know some ways of protecting them).
I had hoped that those protections would extend to CD-Rs, but that won't be sufficient. Tape backups are expensive, per megabyte, as well as more difficult to manage for the average (and even above-average) user in a personal computer environment, than CD-Rs.
What's a good alternative for those of us that need long term (like 5-10 years) backups of data. I have things, such as writings, and pictures, that I would like to keep stored long term on a medium that won't be unsupported or easily damaged or susceptible to deterioration?
I wouldn't mind having to re-backup to new media every 5 to 10 years to keep up with technology, but I mind having to backup every 18 months just to avoid deterioratin of media.
Not so. If you remember a few years ago, a judge ruled against Blizzard using spyware in their software even though all it was doing was helping them to squash bugs and prevent cheating
I'm a software developer in Mexico and I'm putting exactly this technology in my software. There are no Mexican laws against this (or if there are, I couldn't find any here or here. I could care less what U.S. laws say about it. Just because an American buys it doesn't bind me to U.S. law in this regard.
Slightly offtopic, I'm curious, are there any web sites in the States with all the federal and state laws? InfoJus is a great resource for Mexicans (and foreigners, like me, in Mexico).
It's a combination of frequency, bandwidth, and a few other factors. For example, when something is at 800mhz, that's the center frequency. It will have a bandwidth associated that may be a few khz or a few mhz, depending on the application.
Then you get a combination of different technologies. Someone else mentioned TDMA, CDMA, GSM, and some others. Some of these operate in the same bandwidth without significant interference because the way they operate is so different. CDMA for example, doesn't suffer from the same kind of interference that TDMA, GSM and a few others do.
There's a technology called Ultra Wide Band that may take off over the next decade. While it covers a very large bandwidth (as the name would imply) that would normally interfere with other technologies, because of the way it operates, there's little, if any interference. The nice thing about it is, you can operate a number of different devices, each paid of sender and receivers has a "code" that allows them to communicate. Nothing else will interfere and many devices with different codes can operate in proximity.
Most technologies operate on the basic principal of sending a signal via the actual radio wave. They do this by modulating some part of the wave, usually frequency or amplitude (hence FM and AM radio).
UWB doesn't do that. Instead, it sends pulses very quickly (in picosecond lengths) and the pattern created by the pulses (think binary, on and off), are what are used to create teh signal.
Another advantage of UWB is that it works at a lower power (given the same range). Also, unlike the higher frequency applicatons (particularly when you get up to 5+ ghz), it doesn't have the same issues penetrating walls and such. Nice technology. Hope it makes headway.