It's not really so much that the Russians aren't afraid to make money on space travel. They actually have no real choice. Russia's "Channel One" web site has an article here (in Russian) that talks about the upcoming reality series, and admits that the Russian space agency is hoping to find sponsorship through this programme for upcoming space trips, because right now there's no money for planned fall 2003 space shots.
It reminds me of how when the Soviet Union fell apart, Rosaviacosmos had to resort to shooting milk commercials and other stuff aboard Mir. It was embarrasing for the cosmonauts, to have the once-proud Soviet space program reduced to scraping by on cheap stunts.
The infringing works included songs by such artists as the Police, Sarah McLachlan, A Perfect Circle, Ricky Martin, Aerosmith, Better than Ezra, and The Caifanes.
And once Daddy RIAA divides the million bucks up amongst the artists, proportional to the number of their songs on the server....
Has Microsoft leveraged their monopoly in the operating systems market against the music industry to keep out competition from other platforms (Apple) in the music and video markets as well?
Oh please. What nimrod modded this up? I know bashing Micro$oft is a/. pastime, but be reasonable. The simple fact is, most people who own computers have Windows on them. It's a basic statistic.
Now that situation (most people running Windows) most likely did arise because of monopoly leverage, but I serously doubt that Microsoft actually approached UMG and said, "make this work on Windows only". UMG's decision to make a Windows-only player is simply because they can market it to the largest subset of computer users with a minimum of effort on their part. It may be an indirect effect of the monopoly, but it's not a backroom deal.
Oh please. +1 Insightful? How about -1 FUD-riddled Karma Whoring. Samba has nothing to do with the filesystem. It deals with the Server Message Block network protocol. The filesystem being run on the remote sytem is irrelevant to the operation of Samba.
Now if we were talking about Microsoft coming out with a new obfuscated replacement for SMB (which is an evil hack and needs to be replaced with something less thoroughly bletcherous anyway), then you might have a point. But we're not talking about that at all.
What happens when you do something with a file that the relational database can't handle?
Precisely what happens today, assuming you haven't requested database-type services. The filesystem doesn't become a relational database by default. Your app has to be aware of the DB capabilities. If the app is not transaction-aware, then you get vanilla NTFS behaviour.
What happens is there is a new API call BeginTransaction, or something like unto it (I forget the name). You get a handle to a transaction object, and then all filesystem calls from that point on until the corresponding Commit or Rollback call take place in the context of the transaction.
Done well, this has the potential to be really cool. I doubt it will be done well.
I seriously think that it will be done well. (Having the courage to push it back to Blackcomb from Longhorn should be evidence that they're willing to do it right - there are already people who want this feature in NTFS.)
"Less than 10 years ago, the effort for applying to 100 jobs was as big a deal as sending the invites to a wedding, with all of the paper and stamps," said Marcus Ronaldi, a San Francisco consultant who regularly receives unwanted résumés via e-mail. "Now you are able to apply for many jobs by pointing and clicking with your mouse."
Any sensible employer should refuse to hire a person who chain-guns his résumé to a hundred different people precisely because doing it that way is the easy way out! If you want to be employed, demonstrate that you are willing to go to all the trouble of actually doing it right. Otherwise you're simply telling people, "I'm too lazy to get off my butt and put a little effort into being hired."
Of course they can count. However, as is common with collections of this type, they are presenting the episodes in the order in which they originally aired. See this chart for a table of the original air dates.
I suppose it's okay for 5,000 people to die so some asshole like you can have access to information you don't need.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Amen. That was one of the points of the Revolutionary War in which, coincidentally enough, approximately the same number of people died (4,435 according to this statistical summary of America's major wars). America's history is one of people giving up their lives to secure what we consider to be our basic freedoms. Sadly the average American seems to have forgotten this fact.
Now, it is true that the people killed in the WTC attack were non-combatants, but this reaction by the U.S. government shames their memory. They were the victims of a craven attack by people who would love nothing better than to see our free society become just as tightly controlled as their own insane regimes.
Erm. Except that Brian Valentine is not some "middle-manager salesman guy". Brian Valentine is the Vice President of the entire Windows Division. Everybody in the Windows Division (roughly 6000 people at Microsoft) takes their direction from him.
Perhaps the fire-supression system was inadequate in many respects. That said, how can you seriously blame the scale of this catastrophe on the fire-supression system? Who in their right mind would equip an office building with a fire-suppression system that could extinguish a fire caused by enough jet fuel to take a 767 across the continent?! I think that even if it were up to a higher standard, it would have been absurd for the designing engineers to say, "hey, let's put in a sprinkler system that could extinguish a fire caused by a 767 slamming into the building with a near-full load of fuel!"
Have you ever actually used Windows XP? The crash dump uploads are completely voluntary. When the system comes back up after a blue-screen, a dialog box appears that tells you a "serious error" has occurred, and presents you with a choice to send the crash dump to Microsoft or not. You don't have to give away the top secret I-could-tell-you-but-I'd-have-to-kill-you information in your crash dump if you feel the fate of the free world hangs on MS not finding out what drivers you have loaded!
The same thing applies to what happens when an application drops dead. You can either send or not send the app's crash info up to Microsoft.
As far as the driver blocking itself goes, the system only blocks your driver installation when a certain critical threshold of user problems is reported. And here's the kicker: It will even block MICROSOFT'S OWN DRIVERS! Just try installing the 3.x version of the Sidewinder game controller software. The system won't let you do it. (The hardware is still supported in the core XP system; you simply lose the ability to map the buttons to keyboard commands. Irritating, but not disastrous.) To me that means that Microsoft's Windows Division is trying as well as they can to stick to their commitment of shipping as stable a system as they can.
Why don't we just adopt the spelling system proposed by Mark Twain? To wit:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
It's not storing the code at all. Go up one paragraph in the article from the paragraph you quoted. It specifically says that the code is generated based on the hardware in your system. Unless you swapped out hardware as part of your format-and-reinstall, the code that is generated after the reinstall will be identical to the one that was generated before the reinstall.
As the man who single-handedly turned cryptography into a science, Claude E. Shannon is in many ways responsible for the paranoid nature of today's society.
[further rantings munched]
(I know this is a troll, but denigrating the memory of a well-respected scientist is cowardly and inexcusable.)
Your post is unadulterated nonsense. Americans have had a paranoid culture all the way back to before the Founding. Like it or not, a lot of our core national makeup stems from Puritan attitudes. One of those attitudes was paranoia (Salem witch trials, anyone?).
Your assertion that people were open and honest before the 20th century is ludicrous on the face of it. History is chock full of betrayal, double-dealing, and all the other fun stuff that wackos and trolls such as yourself claim sets us apart from the march of ages. Besides, it's not as though Dr. Shannon single-handedly invented cryptography. Or have you never heard of rot13? It's the canonical example of what's known as a Caesar cipher (yes, that Caesar - as in Emperor Julius Caesar, of ancient Rome). People have been trying to hide information for centuries, and as technology and knowledge has expanded, so have methods for information hiding and information discovery.
Just because a Microsoft employee says he doesn't like open-source does not mean that Microsoft as a company holds that view.
If it were just some random Microsoft employee, then you'd have a point. But when it's Jim Allchin, the man who is in charge of the entire Windows division at Microsoft, the remarks are significant. Furthermore, the article itself (which you apparently didn't bother to read) specifically says that Microsoft has already told U.S. lawmakers of these so-called concerns. Therefore, we can say quite truthfully that these are the views of Microsoft as a company.
For the longest time I've been holding off on checking the little box in my/. preferences that'll get Jon Katz off of my page forever. I ha always held out hope that perhaps he'd come up with something more insightful than a FUD-filled, superbiased, three-page rant.
There may be a surface similarity, but ultimately we're talking about two different things here. Hotmail, and other providers of free web-based mail, own their systems. They are under no obligation to provide services to anyone, no matter how much we may think we have a God-given right to digital communications. If some email provider decided to restrict use of their systems to people whose favourite colour was pink, they'd be perfectly within their rights to do so. Webmail is ultimately a private resource.
The Domain Name System, on the other hand, belongs to the net population at large. It is therefore a public resource. Public resources are administered by public organizations, and they must respect the rights of their users, because it is the users as a body who have an inherent right to control the resources. With webmail, it's the organization who is actually providing the service that has the rights to control the resources.
How do you "lose your rights" by getting your damn picture taken when you enter a private building of your own volition?
If it were a private building, then you might have a point. However, large-scale sports venues are almost never private buildings. They are funded almost totally by taxpayer money. In any sane view of the world, a building funded by taking money away from the people who earned it belongs to the people.
Therefore, we are the property owners here, yet we are the ones being scanned, processed, and recorded. Plus, once they have those pictures on file, in an easy-to-analyze digital format, do you honestly think that the police are simply going to chuck 'em once they've determined that there are no terrorists in the crowd? Oh no - you can bet that those pictures are going into a file that will be around for a while to come.
Sorry you got such stupid responses from others on this question. Here's a better one: Yes, it does mean you get better quality.
To use Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format as an example (because they make the same claim as MP3PRO): One of Microsoft's claims on WMA is that you get better quality at half the size. This is actually more true than most people (especially around here) are willing to believe. I thought it was marketing BS until last week, when I decided to run an informal experiment.
Using MusicMatch Jukebox I ripped one song ("Finding Me" by Vertical Horizon, because it starts off immediately with sufficiently dynamic sound) into raw WAV, 128 and 64 kbps MP3 and 128 and 64 kbps WMA. Then I listened to sections of the song, comparing the same section in the five formats. I'm a vocal musician, and have a sensitive ear to sound quality, particularly in music (I know it's not as rigorous as that waveform analysis of MP3 encoders that was published here recently, but in the end it's how the music sounds to the human ear that really counts).
I was impressed with the fidelity of the 128 kbps WMA. In fact (and I was quite surprised at this one) the WMA was truer to the original than the same bitrate MP3. The MP3 was actually slightly dampened in the high ranges compared to the original. What was really surprising were the 64 kbps files. The MP3 at that bitrate basically sucked, because the sample rate was only 22 kHz (resulting in weak low ranges and muted upper tones), while the 64 kbps file sounded quite good, because it was still at a 44 kHz sample rate. Of course, there was a slight degradation (to my hearing) in the sound quality between the 128 and 64 kbps files (mainly a slightly "metallic" sound in some spots), but I suspect that most people wouldn't really notice it.
So, MS's claim of 1/2 the size, better quality is not strictly true in combination; it's more like same size == better quality, half the size == considerably-more-acceptable-than-MP3 quality at that size.
If MP3PRO uses an even better compression/interpolation algorithm than MS Research came up with for WMA, then not only will 128 kbps MP3s sound better, but 64 kbps MP3s will probably start becoming the norm for use in pocket MP3 players.
Re:What is the difference between success and fail
on
Catch Me If You Can
·
· Score: 2
You have got to be kidding. Did you actually think that this guy really flew planes? Performed surgery? Tried defending somebody in court?
Con artists of this nature never ever try to actually do the things that come with the jobs they're impersonating. That would have to be rule one of the con artist: Never actually attempt to bring the BS into the real world. That would instantly blow their cover.
As for your slamming of trained professionals, here's a news flash for you: People aren't perfect. They make mistakes. Even the highly trained people make mistakes, whether by honest accident or because their expert status leads them into the trap of hubris. However, if just any average joe tried performing the activities of the trained professionals, the result would be utter chaos.
...because the guy obviously didn't read the Bastille FAQ, particularly
this question. It says right there that the original purpose of Bastille was to "make a new, more secure Linux distribution".
Given the wording at the above mentioned place in their FAQ, it is highly unlikely that they'll ever do their own distro.
Article 5 of the draft treaty located
here contains some interesting language. To wit:
Each party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law when committed intentionally the serious hindering without right of the functioning of a computer system by inputting, [transmitting,] damaging, deleting, deteriorating, altering, or suppressing computer data. (Emphasis added).
Now IANAL, but that last bit about suppressing computer data where such suppression would hinder the proper operation of the system would seem to make full disclosure almost a requirement. Since in the U.S., corporate entities are more or less treated like an individual under the law, a large company which produces software, yet does not allow the publishing of its vulnerabilities (which seriously hinder its operation, IMHO) should be culpable under any law resulting from the ratification of this treaty.
While that in itself is a Good Thing, the fact that it appears in this treaty which would make the tools that would enable such discovery and disclosure illegal, it must be concluded that no sane person would ratify a treaty with such obvious internal inconsistencies.
Sadly, sanity is not a prerequisite for government position... (one may argue it is a hindrance to getting such a position)
A careful reading of the patent reveals that it is not NAT itself that is being patented; rather a security add-on algorithm to the existing NAT system that disallows dangerous packets.
The way I understood it, it would prevent a malicious external traffic source from sneaking their evil packets past the NAT using the source/destination port numbers that the NAT was sending out on its outbound packets. So FTP packets get through only if an internal host initiated an FTP session, DNS packets get through, certain ICMP packets, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of how when the Soviet Union fell apart, Rosaviacosmos had to resort to shooting milk commercials and other stuff aboard Mir. It was embarrasing for the cosmonauts, to have the once-proud Soviet space program reduced to scraping by on cheap stunts.
Oh, wait.
Oh please. What nimrod modded this up? I know bashing Micro$oft is a /. pastime, but be reasonable. The simple fact is, most people who own computers have Windows on them. It's a basic statistic.
Now that situation (most people running Windows) most likely did arise because of monopoly leverage, but I serously doubt that Microsoft actually approached UMG and said, "make this work on Windows only". UMG's decision to make a Windows-only player is simply because they can market it to the largest subset of computer users with a minimum of effort on their part. It may be an indirect effect of the monopoly, but it's not a backroom deal.
Now if we were talking about Microsoft coming out with a new obfuscated replacement for SMB (which is an evil hack and needs to be replaced with something less thoroughly bletcherous anyway), then you might have a point. But we're not talking about that at all.
What happens is there is a new API call BeginTransaction, or something like unto it (I forget the name). You get a handle to a transaction object, and then all filesystem calls from that point on until the corresponding Commit or Rollback call take place in the context of the transaction.
I seriously think that it will be done well. (Having the courage to push it back to Blackcomb from Longhorn should be evidence that they're willing to do it right - there are already people who want this feature in NTFS.)Any sensible employer should refuse to hire a person who chain-guns his résumé to a hundred different people precisely because doing it that way is the easy way out! If you want to be employed, demonstrate that you are willing to go to all the trouble of actually doing it right. Otherwise you're simply telling people, "I'm too lazy to get off my butt and put a little effort into being hired."
Of course they can count. However, as is common with collections of this type, they are presenting the episodes in the order in which they originally aired. See this chart for a table of the original air dates.
Except that the sorts of people who worry about power-line emissions are already insane.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Amen. That was one of the points of the Revolutionary War in which, coincidentally enough, approximately the same number of people died (4,435 according to this statistical summary of America's major wars). America's history is one of people giving up their lives to secure what we consider to be our basic freedoms. Sadly the average American seems to have forgotten this fact.
Now, it is true that the people killed in the WTC attack were non-combatants, but this reaction by the U.S. government shames their memory. They were the victims of a craven attack by people who would love nothing better than to see our free society become just as tightly controlled as their own insane regimes.
And our degenerate leadership is obliging them.
Erm. Except that Brian Valentine is not some "middle-manager salesman guy". Brian Valentine is the Vice President of the entire Windows Division. Everybody in the Windows Division (roughly 6000 people at Microsoft) takes their direction from him.
So if Brian says it, then it is significant.
Perhaps the fire-supression system was inadequate in many respects. That said, how can you seriously blame the scale of this catastrophe on the fire-supression system? Who in their right mind would equip an office building with a fire-suppression system that could extinguish a fire caused by enough jet fuel to take a 767 across the continent?! I think that even if it were up to a higher standard, it would have been absurd for the designing engineers to say, "hey, let's put in a sprinkler system that could extinguish a fire caused by a 767 slamming into the building with a near-full load of fuel!"
The same thing applies to what happens when an application drops dead. You can either send or not send the app's crash info up to Microsoft.
As far as the driver blocking itself goes, the system only blocks your driver installation when a certain critical threshold of user problems is reported. And here's the kicker: It will even block MICROSOFT'S OWN DRIVERS! Just try installing the 3.x version of the Sidewinder game controller software. The system won't let you do it. (The hardware is still supported in the core XP system; you simply lose the ability to map the buttons to keyboard commands. Irritating, but not disastrous.) To me that means that Microsoft's Windows Division is trying as well as they can to stick to their commitment of shipping as stable a system as they can.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Makes perfect sense to me!
It's not storing the code at all. Go up one paragraph in the article from the paragraph you quoted. It specifically says that the code is generated based on the hardware in your system. Unless you swapped out hardware as part of your format-and-reinstall, the code that is generated after the reinstall will be identical to the one that was generated before the reinstall.
The last site I saw that sucked so hard did so on purpose.
[further rantings munched]
(I know this is a troll, but denigrating the memory of a well-respected scientist is cowardly and inexcusable.)
Your post is unadulterated nonsense. Americans have had a paranoid culture all the way back to before the Founding. Like it or not, a lot of our core national makeup stems from Puritan attitudes. One of those attitudes was paranoia (Salem witch trials, anyone?).
Your assertion that people were open and honest before the 20th century is ludicrous on the face of it. History is chock full of betrayal, double-dealing, and all the other fun stuff that wackos and trolls such as yourself claim sets us apart from the march of ages. Besides, it's not as though Dr. Shannon single-handedly invented cryptography. Or have you never heard of rot13? It's the canonical example of what's known as a Caesar cipher (yes, that Caesar - as in Emperor Julius Caesar, of ancient Rome). People have been trying to hide information for centuries, and as technology and knowledge has expanded, so have methods for information hiding and information discovery.
If it were just some random Microsoft employee, then you'd have a point. But when it's Jim Allchin, the man who is in charge of the entire Windows division at Microsoft, the remarks are significant. Furthermore, the article itself (which you apparently didn't bother to read) specifically says that Microsoft has already told U.S. lawmakers of these so-called concerns. Therefore, we can say quite truthfully that these are the views of Microsoft as a company.
So much for that hope. Good bye, Jon!
*plonk!*
The Domain Name System, on the other hand, belongs to the net population at large. It is therefore a public resource. Public resources are administered by public organizations, and they must respect the rights of their users, because it is the users as a body who have an inherent right to control the resources. With webmail, it's the organization who is actually providing the service that has the rights to control the resources.
The difference is subtle, but vast.
If it were a private building, then you might have a point. However, large-scale sports venues are almost never private buildings. They are funded almost totally by taxpayer money. In any sane view of the world, a building funded by taking money away from the people who earned it belongs to the people.
Therefore, we are the property owners here, yet we are the ones being scanned, processed, and recorded. Plus, once they have those pictures on file, in an easy-to-analyze digital format, do you honestly think that the police are simply going to chuck 'em once they've determined that there are no terrorists in the crowd? Oh no - you can bet that those pictures are going into a file that will be around for a while to come.
To use Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format as an example (because they make the same claim as MP3PRO): One of Microsoft's claims on WMA is that you get better quality at half the size. This is actually more true than most people (especially around here) are willing to believe. I thought it was marketing BS until last week, when I decided to run an informal experiment.
Using MusicMatch Jukebox I ripped one song ("Finding Me" by Vertical Horizon, because it starts off immediately with sufficiently dynamic sound) into raw WAV, 128 and 64 kbps MP3 and 128 and 64 kbps WMA. Then I listened to sections of the song, comparing the same section in the five formats. I'm a vocal musician, and have a sensitive ear to sound quality, particularly in music (I know it's not as rigorous as that waveform analysis of MP3 encoders that was published here recently, but in the end it's how the music sounds to the human ear that really counts).
I was impressed with the fidelity of the 128 kbps WMA. In fact (and I was quite surprised at this one) the WMA was truer to the original than the same bitrate MP3. The MP3 was actually slightly dampened in the high ranges compared to the original. What was really surprising were the 64 kbps files. The MP3 at that bitrate basically sucked, because the sample rate was only 22 kHz (resulting in weak low ranges and muted upper tones), while the 64 kbps file sounded quite good, because it was still at a 44 kHz sample rate. Of course, there was a slight degradation (to my hearing) in the sound quality between the 128 and 64 kbps files (mainly a slightly "metallic" sound in some spots), but I suspect that most people wouldn't really notice it.
So, MS's claim of 1/2 the size, better quality is not strictly true in combination; it's more like same size == better quality, half the size == considerably-more-acceptable-than-MP3 quality at that size.
If MP3PRO uses an even better compression/interpolation algorithm than MS Research came up with for WMA, then not only will 128 kbps MP3s sound better, but 64 kbps MP3s will probably start becoming the norm for use in pocket MP3 players.
Con artists of this nature never ever try to actually do the things that come with the jobs they're impersonating. That would have to be rule one of the con artist: Never actually attempt to bring the BS into the real world. That would instantly blow their cover.
As for your slamming of trained professionals, here's a news flash for you: People aren't perfect. They make mistakes. Even the highly trained people make mistakes, whether by honest accident or because their expert status leads them into the trap of hubris. However, if just any average joe tried performing the activities of the trained professionals, the result would be utter chaos.
Given the wording at the above mentioned place in their FAQ, it is highly unlikely that they'll ever do their own distro.
Each party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law when committed intentionally the serious hindering without right of the functioning of a computer system by inputting, [transmitting,] damaging, deleting, deteriorating, altering, or suppressing computer data. (Emphasis added).
Now IANAL, but that last bit about suppressing computer data where such suppression would hinder the proper operation of the system would seem to make full disclosure almost a requirement. Since in the U.S., corporate entities are more or less treated like an individual under the law, a large company which produces software, yet does not allow the publishing of its vulnerabilities (which seriously hinder its operation, IMHO) should be culpable under any law resulting from the ratification of this treaty.
While that in itself is a Good Thing, the fact that it appears in this treaty which would make the tools that would enable such discovery and disclosure illegal, it must be concluded that no sane person would ratify a treaty with such obvious internal inconsistencies.
Sadly, sanity is not a prerequisite for government position... (one may argue it is a hindrance to getting such a position)
The way I understood it, it would prevent a malicious external traffic source from sneaking their evil packets past the NAT using the source/destination port numbers that the NAT was sending out on its outbound packets. So FTP packets get through only if an internal host initiated an FTP session, DNS packets get through, certain ICMP packets, etc.