Agreed. "To the left of the average member of Congress" is not a particularly strong indicator unless Congress itself is strongly leftist. It isn't, especially when you consider the presence of extreme right-wingers in there to tip the scales from the extremely centrist Democratic party. If they used median it's a little more valid, but "average" is synonymous with "mean" to most Americans.
Or if you want to support a company that releases specs for their hardware that enable open-source drivers. The proprietary-blob nVidia drivers are good on Linux, but the reverse-enginered OSS drivers are awful. ATI/AMD hardware has rapidly developing OSS drivers, although they're not yet better than nVidia's proprietary blobs.
C can be a 9 as well, which usually indicates a late-in-the-generation (A) variant that has a slightly better clock speed or something similar. Typically the ab90 will be cheaper than the (a+1)b70 or even (a+1)b50, but perform better than the (now slightly obsolete) ab70.
Newer generations aren't always about maximum performance, though. The 6bc0 series seems to be focused on efficiency, giving good but not revolutionary performance at lower power / heat production and generally good prices.
Thank you. I still think this patent is BS, but you're right that it's not the trivial thing people are assuming.
Ever done a search on Google and had the terms you searched for highlighted in the returned (Google Cache) pages? That's a personal modification of the original document to assist you in finding the terms you searched for, without needing to do a find-on-page operation.
That only works if the satellite is tracking you. Getting a better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiving end can be done a number of ways, including using a more highly directed antenna (this is what you get from a "larger dish.") However, that highly directed antenna now can only receive signals from a very small area.
One advantage of using geosync is usually that a ground installation with a directional antenna can hit it reliably - this is why you can get a better SNR off geosync than off some low Earth orbit birds - but that requires A) you don't move, and B) your antenna is perfectly stable (one degree of inclination will cause notable signal loss).
Another advantage of geosync is that you can cover the whole Earth with just a few satellites. It's expensive to get them into such a high orbit, but so is launching enough to provide good coverage from LEO (probably moreso, actually). However, this means each bird must do more. If that "more" is trying to track a great many signals using its own directional antenna... well, that's hard.
Just boosting sensitivity doesn't inherently help with SNR (since the noise becomes stronger too), though it may make the signal strong enough to pick it up with some signal processing.
You can usually get an external antenna for a satphone. The result is basically a throwback to the early cellular "car-phones" in many ways; they're big, heavy, low-quality, expensive, and don't work everywhere (blocked signals)... but they work in places where nothing else will, and while you probably leave it plugged in most of the time you can disconnect it and use the built-in antenna and battery.
Actually, battery life isn't that bad (compared to a cell phone). You'll want a charger if you plan to use it for more than a few hours, and you'll want spare batteries if you plan to be unplugged for more than a few days, but it's doable.
That said, you're very correct about the power cost (although satellites can use mildly directional antennas to partially alleviate the problem). The reason you can get battery life comparable to a cell phone is because a satphone's battery is the size of an entire cell phone (including its battery) or larger. That (and the antenna) is a big part of why satphones are still pretty bulky. Of course, early analog cell phones had the same problem for the same reason, and didn't have the excuse of needing a 500-mile radio range, but that's the wonder of the Li-ion battery and digital transmission.
Mobile stellite phones have *never* used geosynchronous to the best of my knowledge. The transmission power needed to hit a satellite that far away without a directional antenna is too great, and a directional antenna isn't an option on something the size of a 10-years-ago cell phone.
There are geosync communication satellites and specialized "phones" that relay through them, but those are generally fairly stationary or even "installations" rather than something you can hold in one hand, and walk around freely while using.
Supreme Commander. It will create dedicated hardware threads to handle things like unit AI (it's an RTS, so better AI means things like superior pathfinding and possibly less risk of friendly fire) based on the number of CPU cores it detects. You *can* play it on a single-core system, but performance will suck. It's specifically intended to use multiple CPUs/cores.
It's also one of a few games that uses multiple monitors. The second display is generally a full-map overview, like a minimap expanded to the resolution of your entire display. This provides a really superior strategic view, though of course there's also a classic minimap for those without this, and you can zoom out the main view until you're viewing the game at this level on the main display (but that makes precision selections and orders harder).
First off, you're way out of date. Windows has supported the permissions structure you're advocating since NT 3.1 came out (it pre-dates Windows 95, although until XP came out the permission-less 9x systems existed in parallel). The first user created had root permissions, but nothing required that you do everything as that user; my day-to-day XP account had limited permissions. For Vista and Win7, by default even members of the Administrators security group run programs with limited permissions, though they can get root (Admin) access on-demand. Except for installers (and not always for those) Windows programs aren't usually given root permissions either.
Also, there's a difference between trusing users (logon credentials) and trusting apps. The usual behavior is that an app has whatever permissions the user running it has. Linux, through AppArmor or SELinux, offers some ways to limit the trust in an application, but most default installs don't use these. The Windows application-level trust system, Mandatory Integrity Control, is less fine-grained than something like AppArmor, but is easy to apply and is used on several out-of-the-box programs, including Internet Explorer. Such apps are marked as being "Low Integrity Level" and therefore are not permitted to write to any portion of the filesystem not *also* marked as Low IL, regardless of the permissions of the user running the program. Similarly, a program can't send messages to a program with a higher IL, so for example standard limited-user programs (default Medium IL) can't attempt to take over Administrator-level (High IL) programs. MIC is only available on NT 6.x (Vista, Server 2008, and Win7) but so far as I know OS X has nothing even vaguely equivalent.
You are correct, but that doesn't mean the nutjobs know this (or would believe it if told). On the other hand, my uncle actually performs IVF. The process inevitably produces many fertilized cells that aren't used, because the expense of the operation means multiple ova are harvested at once to ensure there will be at least one success.
What is done with the ones that aren't implanted? Well, they could be used for medical science that could have an incredible effect on health and treatments of currently incurable conditons. Instead, they're generally quite literally discarded. Thrown away. Wasted. How on Earth that is seen as more moral than using them to try and save or improve lives, I really can't say.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
The best approach I've found is the Sleep/Suspend state. Near-instant to enter and leave, no need for a full reboot, but it will sense PS/2 devices quite happily on resume.
Funny thing... most "adult video" sites (that aren't actually malicious conent in disguise) require Flash. Yes, they probably *could* use HTML5 - but they don't. Lack of Flash really does impair ability to use the iPad for some types of browsing.
Also, while "SQL" in general does not require case-sensitivity, some dialects of it might. No two database engines seem to use exactly the same variant of SQL, and I seem to recall that at least one of them was actually case sensitive.
Fair enough, but it does have potential to hurt Misrosoft's bottom line too (this being the reason IPF does silly things like turn itself off for every new browser session).
That said, this feature sounds like what IPF should have been in the first place. I hope they integrate the automatic detection of third-party content used by multiple sites, but having the ability to subscribe to a block-list will help a lot.
Um... Microsoft is actually an advertiser (well, ad provider). They're much less famous for it than Google, but they nonetheless have search-related and context-related ads on web pages.
There's a feature in IE8 (and IE9 beta) called "InPrivate Filtering" (It's under the "Safety" icon/menu). IPF causes the browser to block third-party content that shows up on more than a few websites - such as scripts that track you by cookies, or advertisers where the client pulls data from a third-party server. It's disabled by default and gimped in various ways, though, because (as I heard it; no citation at hand) the IE team was told that enabling this would make it too hard for their online services (seartch, etc.) division to make money.
However, you can manually enable it and tweak it. I block everything from Google Analytics to Facebook. The neat thing about the latter is that Facebook.com still works, because there it's first-party. Sotes other than Facebook.com can't even tell that I'm signed in, though.
Hell, I'd be glad if they just stop turning off IPF on new browser sessions.
For those who don't know: InPrivate Filtering is a very cool (but never-used) IE8 feature where third-party content embedded in sites is tracked, and if the same content is used in more than a specificed threshold of sites, it gets blocked. For example, Google Analytics is blocked, because their script is embedded on so many sites. It also makes a decent ad-blocker, since either the ad-embedding script or the ad itself is almost always served from an external server.
You can white-list sites, or even specific content, as well. Google Analytics may be blocked, but Google's JS libraries are not. Most advertising sites are blocked, but ProjectWonderful (mostly used on, and for, webcomics) is not. You can also set the filtering to be manual only; it will keep a list of external content but won't block it unless you tell it to (blacklisting, basically). It's not a true ad-blocker, as you can't proactively block content or block any first-party content. However, it does a good job of blocking things like Facebook from knowing where you go on the web, yet still having facebook.com itself work (because it blocks content when it's external but not when it's from the same domain as the page you're on).
There are a few major failures of the feature, though. One of them is just branding; InPrivate Filtering has absolutely nothing to do with InPrivate Browsing (AKA "Porn Mode"). A slightly bigger one is the UI and discoverability, especially in the current IE9 beta (in IE8 there's a status bar button for it). Larger still is that it turns itself off on every new browser session, which was apparently a policy decision.
Fix the last, and maybe second-to-last of those, and it would be great. Add an automatic updater and it would be *awesome.* You can already export and import your filter list, but it must be done manually (think Opera's ad-blocking prior to the newest version).
T-Mobile does in fact charge less on their contract-free month-to-month plan. Even with the expense of the up-front unsubsidized phone purchase, you come out significantly ahead over 2 years.
They're close to the same thing. It's a system setting that IE happens to be the main consumer of, but it's not specific to IE or even to MSHTML. It's not an "OS setting" in the sense that it doesn't force all apps to use the proxy, but generally speaking proxy-aware apps will respect it. Chrome is hardly the only third-party program to do so.
Chrome does not, so far as I know, use the "security zones" concept being exploited in that example. Therefore, it should still run at low integrity level. Sharing proy settings has nothing to do with that attack.
As a security tester by profession, I *really* want to run some fuzzing tools over that PDF reader. In fact, I might just do that. Coming up with a proper minset without using the resources at work would take time, though.
Contacting the attourney general might want to wait until you've confirmed that it could plausibly be called fraud. A little online research or a friendly unofficial chat with a lawyer might work.
Another option would be an official chat with a lawyer, since this sounds like it this might have class-action suit potential. I'd do a little research first.
You could also just ask your bank if they have any good advice. The most likely answers are "Don't shop there," "Always read the fine print," or "Get our cheap monitoring service." They might have some other advice too, though. Chargebacks cost them, in hassle if nothing else. If they're issuing a lot of them against a particular business (or because of a particular business, i.e. BestBuy) they're quite possibly already taking action.
"Virus" in the common sense of today's malware is just another term for Trojan. The purpose of anti-virus software is to look at things you download, and say "This is dangerous, I'm going to make it go away!" You can still run it if you really, REALLY want to, but it's a lot more stumbling blocks and you can't pretend you weren't thoroughly warned.
Vanilla installs of Windows make the assumption that the operator is essentially competent and is only executing safe code. Unfortunately, between things like Adobe running automatically when you come across a PDF and the fact that some users would happily execute RootkitYourSystem.exe if somebody told them it contained naked celebrity pictures... well, you get a need for antivirus.
Meh, the iPhone still doesn't even really allow true multitasking of third-party apps anyhow. There's a very limited set of things such apps are allowed to do (which covers the major use cases but is far from complete) and you can still only interact with one application at a time. The latter restriction makes some sense given the form-factor, but I don't feel it should be mandatory. The former... well, it's better than nothing, but in my opinion doesn't really qualify as "iPhones now have multi-tasking" intil you add the word "limited" in there.
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Agreed. "To the left of the average member of Congress" is not a particularly strong indicator unless Congress itself is strongly leftist. It isn't, especially when you consider the presence of extreme right-wingers in there to tip the scales from the extremely centrist Democratic party. If they used median it's a little more valid, but "average" is synonymous with "mean" to most Americans.
Or if you want to support a company that releases specs for their hardware that enable open-source drivers. The proprietary-blob nVidia drivers are good on Linux, but the reverse-enginered OSS drivers are awful. ATI/AMD hardware has rapidly developing OSS drivers, although they're not yet better than nVidia's proprietary blobs.
C can be a 9 as well, which usually indicates a late-in-the-generation (A) variant that has a slightly better clock speed or something similar. Typically the ab90 will be cheaper than the (a+1)b70 or even (a+1)b50, but perform better than the (now slightly obsolete) ab70.
Newer generations aren't always about maximum performance, though. The 6bc0 series seems to be focused on efficiency, giving good but not revolutionary performance at lower power / heat production and generally good prices.
Thank you. I still think this patent is BS, but you're right that it's not the trivial thing people are assuming.
Ever done a search on Google and had the terms you searched for highlighted in the returned (Google Cache) pages? That's a personal modification of the original document to assist you in finding the terms you searched for, without needing to do a find-on-page operation.
Uh... are you just behind the times? IE is optional in Windows 7, and has been that way since well before its release.
That only works if the satellite is tracking you. Getting a better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiving end can be done a number of ways, including using a more highly directed antenna (this is what you get from a "larger dish.") However, that highly directed antenna now can only receive signals from a very small area.
One advantage of using geosync is usually that a ground installation with a directional antenna can hit it reliably - this is why you can get a better SNR off geosync than off some low Earth orbit birds - but that requires A) you don't move, and B) your antenna is perfectly stable (one degree of inclination will cause notable signal loss).
Another advantage of geosync is that you can cover the whole Earth with just a few satellites. It's expensive to get them into such a high orbit, but so is launching enough to provide good coverage from LEO (probably moreso, actually). However, this means each bird must do more. If that "more" is trying to track a great many signals using its own directional antenna... well, that's hard.
Just boosting sensitivity doesn't inherently help with SNR (since the noise becomes stronger too), though it may make the signal strong enough to pick it up with some signal processing.
You can usually get an external antenna for a satphone. The result is basically a throwback to the early cellular "car-phones" in many ways; they're big, heavy, low-quality, expensive, and don't work everywhere (blocked signals)... but they work in places where nothing else will, and while you probably leave it plugged in most of the time you can disconnect it and use the built-in antenna and battery.
Actually, battery life isn't that bad (compared to a cell phone). You'll want a charger if you plan to use it for more than a few hours, and you'll want spare batteries if you plan to be unplugged for more than a few days, but it's doable.
That said, you're very correct about the power cost (although satellites can use mildly directional antennas to partially alleviate the problem). The reason you can get battery life comparable to a cell phone is because a satphone's battery is the size of an entire cell phone (including its battery) or larger. That (and the antenna) is a big part of why satphones are still pretty bulky. Of course, early analog cell phones had the same problem for the same reason, and didn't have the excuse of needing a 500-mile radio range, but that's the wonder of the Li-ion battery and digital transmission.
Mobile stellite phones have *never* used geosynchronous to the best of my knowledge. The transmission power needed to hit a satellite that far away without a directional antenna is too great, and a directional antenna isn't an option on something the size of a 10-years-ago cell phone.
There are geosync communication satellites and specialized "phones" that relay through them, but those are generally fairly stationary or even "installations" rather than something you can hold in one hand, and walk around freely while using.
Supreme Commander. It will create dedicated hardware threads to handle things like unit AI (it's an RTS, so better AI means things like superior pathfinding and possibly less risk of friendly fire) based on the number of CPU cores it detects. You *can* play it on a single-core system, but performance will suck. It's specifically intended to use multiple CPUs/cores.
It's also one of a few games that uses multiple monitors. The second display is generally a full-map overview, like a minimap expanded to the resolution of your entire display. This provides a really superior strategic view, though of course there's also a classic minimap for those without this, and you can zoom out the main view until you're viewing the game at this level on the main display (but that makes precision selections and orders harder).
First off, you're way out of date. Windows has supported the permissions structure you're advocating since NT 3.1 came out (it pre-dates Windows 95, although until XP came out the permission-less 9x systems existed in parallel). The first user created had root permissions, but nothing required that you do everything as that user; my day-to-day XP account had limited permissions. For Vista and Win7, by default even members of the Administrators security group run programs with limited permissions, though they can get root (Admin) access on-demand. Except for installers (and not always for those) Windows programs aren't usually given root permissions either.
Also, there's a difference between trusing users (logon credentials) and trusting apps. The usual behavior is that an app has whatever permissions the user running it has. Linux, through AppArmor or SELinux, offers some ways to limit the trust in an application, but most default installs don't use these. The Windows application-level trust system, Mandatory Integrity Control, is less fine-grained than something like AppArmor, but is easy to apply and is used on several out-of-the-box programs, including Internet Explorer. Such apps are marked as being "Low Integrity Level" and therefore are not permitted to write to any portion of the filesystem not *also* marked as Low IL, regardless of the permissions of the user running the program. Similarly, a program can't send messages to a program with a higher IL, so for example standard limited-user programs (default Medium IL) can't attempt to take over Administrator-level (High IL) programs. MIC is only available on NT 6.x (Vista, Server 2008, and Win7) but so far as I know OS X has nothing even vaguely equivalent.
You are correct, but that doesn't mean the nutjobs know this (or would believe it if told). On the other hand, my uncle actually performs IVF. The process inevitably produces many fertilized cells that aren't used, because the expense of the operation means multiple ova are harvested at once to ensure there will be at least one success.
What is done with the ones that aren't implanted? Well, they could be used for medical science that could have an incredible effect on health and treatments of currently incurable conditons. Instead, they're generally quite literally discarded. Thrown away. Wasted. How on Earth that is seen as more moral than using them to try and save or improve lives, I really can't say.
The best approach I've found is the Sleep/Suspend state. Near-instant to enter and leave, no need for a full reboot, but it will sense PS/2 devices quite happily on resume.
Funny thing... most "adult video" sites (that aren't actually malicious conent in disguise) require Flash. Yes, they probably *could* use HTML5 - but they don't. Lack of Flash really does impair ability to use the iPad for some types of browsing.
Also, while "SQL" in general does not require case-sensitivity, some dialects of it might. No two database engines seem to use exactly the same variant of SQL, and I seem to recall that at least one of them was actually case sensitive.
Fair enough, but it does have potential to hurt Misrosoft's bottom line too (this being the reason IPF does silly things like turn itself off for every new browser session).
That said, this feature sounds like what IPF should have been in the first place. I hope they integrate the automatic detection of third-party content used by multiple sites, but having the ability to subscribe to a block-list will help a lot.
Um... Microsoft is actually an advertiser (well, ad provider). They're much less famous for it than Google, but they nonetheless have search-related and context-related ads on web pages.
There's a feature in IE8 (and IE9 beta) called "InPrivate Filtering" (It's under the "Safety" icon/menu). IPF causes the browser to block third-party content that shows up on more than a few websites - such as scripts that track you by cookies, or advertisers where the client pulls data from a third-party server. It's disabled by default and gimped in various ways, though, because (as I heard it; no citation at hand) the IE team was told that enabling this would make it too hard for their online services (seartch, etc.) division to make money.
However, you can manually enable it and tweak it. I block everything from Google Analytics to Facebook. The neat thing about the latter is that Facebook.com still works, because there it's first-party. Sotes other than Facebook.com can't even tell that I'm signed in, though.
Hell, I'd be glad if they just stop turning off IPF on new browser sessions.
For those who don't know: InPrivate Filtering is a very cool (but never-used) IE8 feature where third-party content embedded in sites is tracked, and if the same content is used in more than a specificed threshold of sites, it gets blocked. For example, Google Analytics is blocked, because their script is embedded on so many sites. It also makes a decent ad-blocker, since either the ad-embedding script or the ad itself is almost always served from an external server.
You can white-list sites, or even specific content, as well. Google Analytics may be blocked, but Google's JS libraries are not. Most advertising sites are blocked, but ProjectWonderful (mostly used on, and for, webcomics) is not. You can also set the filtering to be manual only; it will keep a list of external content but won't block it unless you tell it to (blacklisting, basically). It's not a true ad-blocker, as you can't proactively block content or block any first-party content. However, it does a good job of blocking things like Facebook from knowing where you go on the web, yet still having facebook.com itself work (because it blocks content when it's external but not when it's from the same domain as the page you're on).
There are a few major failures of the feature, though. One of them is just branding; InPrivate Filtering has absolutely nothing to do with InPrivate Browsing (AKA "Porn Mode"). A slightly bigger one is the UI and discoverability, especially in the current IE9 beta (in IE8 there's a status bar button for it). Larger still is that it turns itself off on every new browser session, which was apparently a policy decision.
Fix the last, and maybe second-to-last of those, and it would be great. Add an automatic updater and it would be *awesome.* You can already export and import your filter list, but it must be done manually (think Opera's ad-blocking prior to the newest version).
T-Mobile does in fact charge less on their contract-free month-to-month plan. Even with the expense of the up-front unsubsidized phone purchase, you come out significantly ahead over 2 years.
They're close to the same thing. It's a system setting that IE happens to be the main consumer of, but it's not specific to IE or even to MSHTML. It's not an "OS setting" in the sense that it doesn't force all apps to use the proxy, but generally speaking proxy-aware apps will respect it. Chrome is hardly the only third-party program to do so.
Chrome does not, so far as I know, use the "security zones" concept being exploited in that example. Therefore, it should still run at low integrity level. Sharing proy settings has nothing to do with that attack.
As a security tester by profession, I *really* want to run some fuzzing tools over that PDF reader. In fact, I might just do that. Coming up with a proper minset without using the resources at work would take time, though.
BBB would be an excellent place to start, yes.
Contacting the attourney general might want to wait until you've confirmed that it could plausibly be called fraud. A little online research or a friendly unofficial chat with a lawyer might work.
Another option would be an official chat with a lawyer, since this sounds like it this might have class-action suit potential. I'd do a little research first.
You could also just ask your bank if they have any good advice. The most likely answers are "Don't shop there," "Always read the fine print," or "Get our cheap monitoring service." They might have some other advice too, though. Chargebacks cost them, in hassle if nothing else. If they're issuing a lot of them against a particular business (or because of a particular business, i.e. BestBuy) they're quite possibly already taking action.
"Virus" in the common sense of today's malware is just another term for Trojan. The purpose of anti-virus software is to look at things you download, and say "This is dangerous, I'm going to make it go away!" You can still run it if you really, REALLY want to, but it's a lot more stumbling blocks and you can't pretend you weren't thoroughly warned.
Vanilla installs of Windows make the assumption that the operator is essentially competent and is only executing safe code. Unfortunately, between things like Adobe running automatically when you come across a PDF and the fact that some users would happily execute RootkitYourSystem.exe if somebody told them it contained naked celebrity pictures... well, you get a need for antivirus.
Meh, the iPhone still doesn't even really allow true multitasking of third-party apps anyhow. There's a very limited set of things such apps are allowed to do (which covers the major use cases but is far from complete) and you can still only interact with one application at a time. The latter restriction makes some sense given the form-factor, but I don't feel it should be mandatory. The former... well, it's better than nothing, but in my opinion doesn't really qualify as "iPhones now have multi-tasking" intil you add the word "limited" in there.