So, what they are basically admitting is that they are unwilling to hire staff capable of knowing a) what's going on in their own stores, and b) remembering the faces and histories of their top customers. That sounds pretty cheap to me. A preferred customer in a high end store is going to be much impressed by being served by the same person each time they shop, who already knows their tastes and needs, and can provide what used to be known as that 'personal touch. What you get with this is new face staring a screen each time you enter a store which screams 'clueless' and 'newly hired' rather than exceptional service.
While on the surface this might seem pretty clever, I can hardly imagine a more hare-brained scheme to implement in the midst of the Cold War. You are introducing technology that can induce massive catastrophic failure unpredictably in your enemy's infrastructure (and possibly weapons), without even telling those on your own side who monitor for unusual activity. That borders on begging for someone to start pushing the wrong buttons. The number one rule in a deadly stand-off is not to act unpredictably!
QuickTime can do live broadcasts, with the aptly named QuickTime Broadcaster product, which you get with MacOS X Server (or download from Apple). It would have been crazy if all those mac fanatics had to use a third-party client when they tune in to the latest reality-distortion field test by Steve Jobs.
The beauty of The Office is in the fact that the people are barely acting at all..... The humour's in a glance, or a facial expression, or a moment of dead silence, rather than some familiar character running onto the set and uttering their catchphrase for the three thousandth time like you get in most sitcoms.
I think you are missing the point. It may look like they are barely acting at all, but trust me they are. Its being able to do this is what seperates great acting from the adequate. Perhaps you are watching too many American sitcoms?
I doubt they bought them at full standard retail price. Apple is one of few companies that still offer a meaningful educational discount to students and academics. When the say VT didn't get any special discounts, I believe it reflects the fact that they paid the standard academic price despite the size of the order. That is normally around 10-15% savings in itself. Try getting that from Dell! Last time I bought from them the 'discounted' system came back to normal price when I add back in the bits they had taken out (like the optical drive!!
Code that has been optimized for the G5 by simple re-compilation will run without penalty on a G4. If you have done more in-depth, G5-specific tuning (levels 1, 2 and 3) then you will in all likelihood want to provide a separate binary. In extreme cases, you may decide that you need only offer one version of your software that runs on Power Mac G5 computers only. However, you'll probably want to support most or all of the Macintosh product line, which means that you need to decide how best to deliver the right code to each of your customers. There are several ways to achieve this; the first is:
Create different versions of your software for each processor that you support. This requires that you maintain three parallel code bases, something you may not want to do.
It is possible for your software to query the computer on which it is running to see which processor-related features are available. You can design your software to isolate processor-dependent code and call the appropriate version as needed. This leads to two additional strategies for packaging your application:
For every function that calls processor-dependent binary code, have your code call the appropriate version. If such functions are needed frequently, using this approach may decrease execution speed and make your source code (cluttered with if...then constructs) less readable.
Isolate processor-specific functions into frameworks or shared libraries, then have your software load the appropriate version when it starts up. This enables you to write your main code without wrapping function calls in if...then constructs."
This looks like decent, but I keep seeing the missing link in projects like these is the assumption that you are already running, or have time to install, *nix on the box you want to use for this. If you have a spare box sitting in a corner, it would be much more tempting to use it as an 'appliance' with software like this, if it came bundled with its own mini-distribution: upgrade the harddrive and then just pop in the CD and boot it up like you do with Knoppix or floppy distributions.
The trial is in first class, which seems like a sensible choice if your aim is to test the system in a subset of the train where passengers are likely to have laptops which can be connected.
Normally I can firewall my machine to block attacks, but I can't firewall off DHCP and still use the network
DHCP is only an enabling device in this attack. The real attack comes from the LDAP or Netinfo server's creation of rouge mounts, which can be blocked.
The comparison with VHS vs Beta is meaningless. In that format war the media was physically different. In this case, both media types strive to create written media which is compatible with a third, universal, standard, namely DVD. As long as they both produce DVD compliant discs, what difference does it make (apart from making sure you pick up the right blank media)? The answer is: none. This is a non-issue.
So, where are the open-source alternatives ? I would have thought that there we enough open-source contributors and security experts worried enough about these closed-source products to start an open-source project to do the same thing. An enterprising touch-screen systems intergrator could take this to the market as fully independently audited by the community, and probably undercut Diebold etc in the credibility stakes.
This seems to me to be no more than an incredibly stupid and environmentally wasteful way of achieving what is already done in the rest of the world with 'rechargable' pa-as-you-go phones. ie. low-end phones with SIMs carring calling credit that can be topped-up by buying phone cards in grocery stores etc. The only thing you pollute the environment with here is the piece of paper with the top up code.
"I think nothing of leaving apps and files open for days or even weeks on the Linux machine."
Funny you should mention that. What struck me when reading this statement was that it reflects exactly how I work on my MacOSX machine, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other Mac users do too.
I also note how Mac laptop users tend to come in with just their computer and wake it up from sleep mode, whereas PC users usually come in trailing bags and leads, and almost always have to boot up their computer before using it.
Wheras MacOS makes the easy things easy, the hard things hard and the impossible things not possible.
Presumably you are refering to MacOS in the sense of 'MacOS Classic'. MacOS X makes the hard and impossible pretty much as easy (or difficult) as on any other Unix driven OS.
I find it remarkable how silent the mainstream media is on this issue. When even the New York Times fail to mention any of the controversy over Diebold in a recent article on voting machines you know this is going to be an uphill battle.
However, if these machines are already in use, the next step would surely be legal action? Someone with the right to vote in an election should demand the right to cast their vote by means where there is proof their vote will be counted.
Why are these monkeys still putting the ethernet port in top of two usb ports? Why would I ever unplug my computer from the network (unless I was moving it)? Why then allow the ethernet cable block my access to the USB ports, which I'm much more likely to want to unplug? This has got to be one of the most stupid aspects of the port layout in current designs, and I pains me to see it hasn't dawned on the designer how stupid it is.
We went with seperate networks and an authenticated gateway instead and have no regrets. Someone has mentioned reefedge, but there is a free software solution in nocat.net which we are quite happy with. The difference? No clients to install on the user end, no configuration required either. All our hardware remains useful too. Disadvantage? Users are not protected against themselves (have to be trained in using secure protocols). Network can only be used casually (ie. none of our staff are allowed to use it for offical purposes).
As you can see from the included quote the author wasn't claiming it to be 'the same as', but 'akin to' (which is not the same).
Is it reasonable to claim that stealing music (by copying it) is similar to stealing goods? I would say it depends on which dimension of the act you are focusing on and why. As you point out above, the physical aspect of the act is very different, and the outcome for the victims is relatively different, but from the perspective of whether it is wrong to do it, that doesn't really make any difference does it?
Btw. a book might make for good weekend reading; an article is something you read while on the toilet.
I wonder what they're doing about Macrovision with this feature. It would hardly be an improvement to copy a VHS casette to a DVD if there were messed up colours and wavy lines.
I doubt they do anything about Macrovision at all. Macrovision is applied to 'copy-protect' pre-recorded material which I suspect Tivo/panasonic have no interest in disabling with this feature. So, you will be fine with things you have recorded on tape yourself, but Macrovision will probably kick in with pre-recorded material. If you find it annoying, you should have thought about that when you handed over your cash for the copy protected tape in the first place!
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So, what they are basically admitting is that they are unwilling to hire staff capable of knowing a) what's going on in their own stores, and b) remembering the faces and histories of their top customers. That sounds pretty cheap to me. A preferred customer in a high end store is going to be much impressed by being served by the same person each time they shop, who already knows their tastes and needs, and can provide what used to be known as that 'personal touch. What you get with this is new face staring a screen each time you enter a store which screams 'clueless' and 'newly hired' rather than exceptional service.
While on the surface this might seem pretty clever, I can hardly imagine a more hare-brained scheme to implement in the midst of the Cold War. You are introducing technology that can induce massive catastrophic failure unpredictably in your enemy's infrastructure (and possibly weapons), without even telling those on your own side who monitor for unusual activity. That borders on begging for someone to start pushing the wrong buttons. The number one rule in a deadly stand-off is not to act unpredictably!
QuickTime can do live broadcasts, with the aptly named QuickTime Broadcaster product, which you get with MacOS X Server (or download from Apple). It would have been crazy if all those mac fanatics had to use a third-party client when they tune in to the latest reality-distortion field test by Steve Jobs.
I think you are missing the point. It may look like they are barely acting at all, but trust me they are. Its being able to do this is what seperates great acting from the adequate. Perhaps you are watching too many American sitcoms?
You should have called Apple back on Day 2. They would have sent you a box just like IBM and you would probably had it back on Day 4.
I doubt they bought them at full standard retail price. Apple is one of few companies that still offer a meaningful educational discount to students and academics. When the say VT didn't get any special discounts, I believe it reflects the fact that they paid the standard academic price despite the size of the order. That is normally around 10-15% savings in itself. Try getting that from Dell! Last time I bought from them the 'discounted' system came back to normal price when I add back in the bits they had taken out (like the optical drive!!
Code that has been optimized for the G5 by simple re-compilation will run without penalty on a G4. If you have done more in-depth, G5-specific tuning (levels 1, 2 and 3) then you will in all likelihood want to provide a separate binary. In extreme cases, you may decide that you need only offer one version of your software that runs on Power Mac G5 computers only. However, you'll probably want to support most or all of the Macintosh product line, which means that you need to decide how best to deliver the right code to each of your customers. There are several ways to achieve this; the first is:
Create different versions of your software for each processor that you support. This requires that you maintain three parallel code bases, something you may not want to do.
It is possible for your software to query the computer on which it is running to see which processor-related features are available. You can design your software to isolate processor-dependent code and call the appropriate version as needed. This leads to two additional strategies for packaging your application:
For every function that calls processor-dependent binary code, have your code call the appropriate version. If such functions are needed frequently, using this approach may decrease execution speed and make your source code (cluttered with if...then constructs) less readable.
Isolate processor-specific functions into frameworks or shared libraries, then have your software load the appropriate version when it starts up. This enables you to write your main code without wrapping function calls in if...then constructs."
(from G5 Optimization)
This looks like decent, but I keep seeing the missing link in projects like these is the assumption that you are already running, or have time to install, *nix on the box you want to use for this. If you have a spare box sitting in a corner, it would be much more tempting to use it as an 'appliance' with software like this, if it came bundled with its own mini-distribution: upgrade the harddrive and then just pop in the CD and boot it up like you do with Knoppix or floppy distributions.
The trial is in first class, which seems like a sensible choice if your aim is to test the system in a subset of the train where passengers are likely to have laptops which can be connected.
AFAIK even most Linux distributors trust the LAN implicitly by accepting DHCP servers values for IP, gateways and DNS when you first set them up.
Bah! If it doesn't support unicode, what's the point?
Normally I can firewall my machine to block attacks, but I can't firewall off DHCP and still use the network
DHCP is only an enabling device in this attack. The real attack comes from the LDAP or Netinfo server's creation of rouge mounts, which can be blocked.
It's: "Fog in the channel, Europe Cut Off"
The comparison with VHS vs Beta is meaningless. In that format war the media was physically different. In this case, both media types strive to create written media which is compatible with a third, universal, standard, namely DVD. As long as they both produce DVD compliant discs, what difference does it make (apart from making sure you pick up the right blank media)? The answer is: none. This is a non-issue.
With one machine for every 150 voters you've got to wonder what the point of machine voting is.
So, where are the open-source alternatives ? I would have thought that there we enough open-source contributors and security experts worried enough about these closed-source products to start an open-source project to do the same thing. An enterprising touch-screen systems intergrator could take this to the market as fully independently audited by the community, and probably undercut Diebold etc in the credibility stakes.
This seems to me to be no more than an incredibly stupid and environmentally wasteful way of achieving what is already done in the rest of the world with 'rechargable' pa-as-you-go phones. ie. low-end phones with SIMs carring calling credit that can be topped-up by buying phone cards in grocery stores etc. The only thing you pollute the environment with here is the piece of paper with the top up code.
"I think nothing of leaving apps and files open for days or even weeks on the Linux machine."
Funny you should mention that. What struck me when reading this statement was that it reflects exactly how I work on my MacOSX machine, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other Mac users do too.
I also note how Mac laptop users tend to come in with just their computer and wake it up from sleep mode, whereas PC users usually come in trailing bags and leads, and almost always have to boot up their computer before using it.
Wheras MacOS makes the easy things easy, the hard things hard and the impossible things not possible.
Presumably you are refering to MacOS in the sense of 'MacOS Classic'. MacOS X makes the hard and impossible pretty much as easy (or difficult) as on any other Unix driven OS.
I find it remarkable how silent the mainstream media is on this issue. When even the New York Times fail to mention any of the controversy over Diebold in a recent article on voting machines you know this is going to be an uphill battle.
However, if these machines are already in use, the next step would surely be legal action? Someone with the right to vote in an election should demand the right to cast their vote by means where there is proof their vote will be counted.
It's all well and good figuring out the context of the question, but that's nothing compared to figuring out the context of the answer!
Why are these monkeys still putting the ethernet port in top of two usb ports? Why would I ever unplug my computer from the network (unless I was moving it)? Why then allow the ethernet cable block my access to the USB ports, which I'm much more likely to want to unplug? This has got to be one of the most stupid aspects of the port layout in current designs, and I pains me to see it hasn't dawned on the designer how stupid it is.
We went with seperate networks and an authenticated gateway instead and have no regrets. Someone has mentioned reefedge, but there is a free software solution in nocat.net which we are quite happy with. The difference? No clients to install on the user end, no configuration required either. All our hardware remains useful too. Disadvantage? Users are not protected against themselves (have to be trained in using secure protocols). Network can only be used casually (ie. none of our staff are allowed to use it for offical purposes).
As you can see from the included quote the author wasn't claiming it to be 'the same as', but 'akin to' (which is not the same).
Is it reasonable to claim that stealing music (by copying it) is similar to stealing goods? I would say it depends on which dimension of the act you are focusing on and why. As you point out above, the physical aspect of the act is very different, and the outcome for the victims is relatively different, but from the perspective of whether it is wrong to do it, that doesn't really make any difference does it?
Btw. a book might make for good weekend reading; an article is something you read while on the toilet.
I wonder what they're doing about Macrovision with this feature. It would hardly be an improvement to copy a VHS casette to a DVD if there were messed up colours and wavy lines.
I doubt they do anything about Macrovision at all. Macrovision is applied to 'copy-protect' pre-recorded material which I suspect Tivo/panasonic have no interest in disabling with this feature. So, you will be fine with things you have recorded on tape yourself, but Macrovision will probably kick in with pre-recorded material. If you find it annoying, you should have thought about that when you handed over your cash for the copy protected tape in the first place!