Thanks, the selection there looks very good, but the prices are a bit much considering how much I listen to on a daily basis. One thing I have been working on is some of the online courses (.e.g. MIT) that are released in MP3 or audiobook format. Its probably more trouble to combine, convert, and transfer to my iPod than a normal audio CD, but you can't beat the price (free), and the collection is growing everyday.
And then there is always LibriVox.org, www.lecturefox.com, www.learnoutloud.com, and www.audiobooks.org so I cant see how the Guild will be making much money once there is enough 'useable' available material out there for people like me.
In my case one format that can't be used is written text, electronic or not. I simply don't have the time to sit down with a book but spend several hours a day commuting to/from work, business, medical care of family members, etc. If I could listen to any ebook I could get my hands on I might actually buy one. Right now audio books are the only game in town, and quite frankly I have already bought every one of any value to me. I have spent a personal fortune, and there just are no more to buy from my standpoint. I was just seriously contemplating on whether I would buy this ebook reader and have it read other materials to me during my commute, but they just now lost a bunch of money just because that is NOT going to happen now. Authors Guild, take notice! I vote with my wallet.
A real standard which is unencumbered by any patent or licensing agreements. A system, regardless of plug type, where the device can communicate its requirements, and the device receives via an alternate line exactly what it asked for. If a device can connect and recharge despite any limited voltage in the communications channel, and still get what it needs to charge then that is the ideal on the technical side of things. But what is more important to the product vendors it not having to pay any technology or patent licensing fees in order to incorporate the design into their products. A quick look at successful Open Source hardware designs such as reprap, fab@home, or the Ardrino project will demonstrate the worth of Open Hardware Standards. If such as design was put on the table which promised to be free to all manufacturers then and only then would you succeed in having a "Standard".
Just imagine the chaos that would ensue if by chance a right-brained person accidentally clicked on the left-brained-repair-button? We might need to bootstrap a live distro alternate reality recovery module to help us restore the original image before it does permanent damage to the hardware. Better prepare those WinBrainPE(tm) disks in advance just in case.
I hope they are not too worried about interfacing to either quantum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing, photonic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic_computer, or spintronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics circuits. The thermal 1's and 0's would cause immediate decoherence in the other computational circuits, and they have much more potential bandwidth than any thermal type circuit will ever have. Quantum computers will beat the pants off of any thermal flow logic, providing that the problem at hand permits it. The spintronics or photonic solutions would not create all that heat in the first place so there would be no point to adding the "extra" thermal circuits. Just what is it actually solving? This sounds like a solution that is looking for a 'future problem' to solve, because it likely won't be a real tangible product before the others technologies already are, and even then it won't beat out it's competition in raw performance.
why these cutting edge car designers can't make a conventional looking car
Because its hard to make a brick become aerodynamic. The majority of the energy of moving a car down the road goes into making the air that is in front of the car get back behind the car. Its not at all about being yuppie, its just if you want efficiency this is what you need to do. The more it looks like a space pod the more efficient it generally is. Perhaps a Porsche is more your style?
I happen to work in a physics lab, and I had been gathering ideas on exactly what I wanted for the past year, and had almost started buying equipment and materials to build it. Now I am just glad to see that someone actually did it for me, and there is not much wrong with it that I would want to change. Other than its availability in the other 49 states, like mine for one.
Actually this is great! Being across the pond, I should have the benefit of at least a femtosecond to be the first to write and publish a paper on the effects of gravity waves before I go. After all, those Europeans are going to be pretty much getting all the glory and making it much harder for us on this side to be recognized for any new discoveries. With this type of discovery, and it being so close to home, they likely won't even see it coming. And for a Scientist there is surely nothing like getting really embedded into your work to make you forget to publish. But face it, sometimes its just better to distance yourself for a more objective look at a situation.
Check out Process Lasso from here http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php. It was free before but its now $9.99 for personal use which is still a great deal considering what it can do. It dynamically adjusts the priorities and gives you all kinds of control over how things run on your machine. If I was still running Windows(tm) I would never be without it. btw - I have no affiliation with the company what so ever, I just like the product.
Somebody in the MS Intellectual Property department must be asleep on the job. I could have sworn that that Microsoft had a patent on that particular 'business method'...
The big win is there are fewer toxic by products when using a plasma furnace. By use of the plasma ultra high temperatures (e.g. 30,000 deg F) everything ionizes and breaks down to their atomic levels and then recombine as much smaller and less toxic molecules. If you wanted to get rid of the US's stockpiles of chemical weapons this is the way to do it. Too bad it doesn't work for radioactive wastes as well.
I understand that "Bob" was the absolute worst. Kind of like having a fancy Clippy tell you how to 'think' just so that you can learn to use something that does absolutely nothing other than tell you how to use it. In never used it, so maybe that's why I don't think much of MS products these days, I have not been assimilated yet.
When you wire in your core devices that need continued power it is good to use a set of automatic transfer switches. When the grid power is up the electricity flows like normal, but when the generator us up the switches divert the inputs for those devices to the generator. When your power comes back up you simply turn off the generator and everything goes back to normal. If you buy the expensive whole house generator models they should come with this equipment, but you can buy them at your local hardware store, or eBay, for the low end generators. Having everything pre-wired saves a lot of fumbling around in the dark playing with kinked cords and potential high voltage, and a lot fewer headaches. No more pulling all refrigerators out just to plug them into the generator any more. Been there, done that. What I have that needs power has it as soon as I turn the key and pull the cord.
Gee, and I though 'the delay' was due to all the malware BHO's fighting over who gets to control your system 'this time'. Ultimately the BHO who gets control of the OS first is likely to win. Once they all stop thrashing each other for the top spot in the chain then the html rendering engine finally gets a chance to receive some precious cpu resources.
And for any IE die-hards out there, the best remedy to keeping your system safe is to make the "Windows Update" site your home page. That extra minute is for you to check what emergency fixes are out there to keep it from getting infected when you browse anywhere else. Windows Update, don't leave home without it!
There are just too many ways to make the tail wag the dog when dealing with native binary execution. Anyone who knows the x86 processor well enough will understand that truth. ActiveX was a big mistake. Using a 'trust model' for something that can't be trusted sure makes a lot of sense. What you are trusting is the key that signed the applet, not the original owner nor the app itself. With a little social engineering even you can own a Microsoft key for signing applets. Others have.
Oh and I noticed this little titbit in the paper:
Better segment support in the operating system might allow us to resolve this problem and allow for better hardware exception support in untrusted code.
Oh yea, right. Like Microsoft is going to rewrite Windows just for Google? On the bright side, if the browser apps only run on Linux then that would certainly be a switch.
Because if done properly the phone can emulate any SIM you like, on demand. Phones get rooted and bugged all the time, you just have no way of knowing its been done. Ever seen a root-kit scanner for your model cell phone? Even software applets can be installed to put back door in them. There is even a market for hacked phones to give as "a gift" to your loved one or business competition at work, just in case you are sadistically and totally insane about/over them. With a properly hacked phone you can even listen in on their conversations, even when their phone supposedly is turned off. Keep a field strength meter handy if you care to really know that answer. Watching the battery level is a poor mans way to know something is not quite right, as any cell phone will suck much more power when it is transmitting. And now days with the addition of GPS's you can even tell where they were when they said something, within just a few meters.
Did you know that many phones automatically download and update software on demand? It gets updated when someone else wants it to just not by you. The telco can do it, and the Government can do it. The question is who else knows how to do it. I don't know about you but I would not trust a cell phone in this particular instance unless you don't care about having your laptop 'bricked' at the worst possible moment.
That SMS text messages are completely unforgeable and also ultra ultra reliable in delivery. I am sure that the thief will also be so kind as to send a reply back to let you know it was received correctly so you will know it was not garbled or dropped in transit. And nobody would ever dream of hacking or moding a cell phone for spoofing, or even think of installing software on your phone would they? That kind of thing just could never happen these days.
Seriously, perhaps next time you get spammed via an SMS text message you will also get a "buy my product or else" message included if they know you own a laptop.
Find a CA Government politician that carpools and get the police to arrest them. It's against the law isn't it? If they refuse to do it just remind them that we now have legal presidence to back it up in a court of law. Problem solved.
On another note, it seems that one loophole in the statute might be that if no money changes hands, as in round-robin ride sharing, that no law has been broken. Its totally stupid, but that might still be legal.
Actually I think they just left out a word in that title that is more or less implied with any typical Microsoft double speak. Try reading it like this and it may just sound a little more familiar to your ears, coming from Microsoft and all that:
Microsoft's Office Web Will Do [in] iPhone, Linux, Mac...
Of course, we've all heard that line before...
Personally I'll believe Microsoft will be fair to other web browsers when I see it. My wife is pissed at Microsoft because of all the headaches she has had recently using Firefox 3.0 with msn hotmail. Not only does it require her to reload the page each time she logs in, just to get past the "please upgrade your browser to IE 7", but now I've had to resort to installing a Firefox plug-in that simply lies to their Web server to say it is running IE 7, just to make it usable again. If my browser tells the truth the web page it receives is broken, and if it lies and says its IE 7 it simply works. Ok M$, Why would I be so masochistic as to try and edit an important document when we can't even edit a simple text email on your site? Just because M$ is trying trying so hard to be difficult with what would otherwise be a very simple task, she is finally convinced. She created herself a Gmail account yesterday and is currently migrating everything off of hotmail.
I have to agree about the VirtualBox as a solution. If he makes a snapshot and restarts from that snapshot each time he could save a lot of time, and a separate snapshot OS/image could even be used for actually performing the delta imaging and comparison. The WinDiff on the other hand may be under powered depending on his actual purpose. If he is examining malware code he will need some more powerful tools to see what was actually changed, such as hidden NTFS data streams, raw disk sectors, etc. In that case some forensic tools might be a better bet in looking for that hidden information.
I looked into this a while back and found one solution that you might find interesting. GD makes an Iridium reachback device that will combine four Iridium data channels into one larger virtual network pipe. If one connection goes down (which I understand happens often since the satellites are moving) the system will divert that traffic through the remaining three channels until the failed connection recovers. I was told that the unit can be booted using windows or Linux, which of course makes it more configurable. The unit can be used as a network router between disparate networks to give a low bandwidth dial on demand network connection which can then be used to tunnel your management IP traffic without any additional support on either end for what ever software you choose for your remote management. Alternately each of the four channels can be used separately to connect to other remote sites if desired.
http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=7b0bceb6-36e0-49f3-b879-8df91d6a3409&page=5
If the problem is at the interface between subsections of the Internet how can we be sure someone is not just playing around with (screwing up) one of these two ISPs?
On the other hand maybe some hacker on the dark side of the Internet connection might like to BGP reroute all those lost packets around the offending ISP routers thus fixing the offending ISP's problems for them. It seems that Net Neutrality is a long way off yet if the children (CEO's) can't even play nice, never mind the Governments.
The only protection that Full Disk Encryption gives is if someone physically gets their hands on the machine that they can not boot the machine and read its contents. This make perfect sense for laptops but makes little sense for any pertinently fixed location workstations. A laptop will physically leave the premises so it leaves itself open to theft, but a workstation (assuming you have some decent form of physical security) is much less likely to need this protection. Once a workstation is booted and the disk drive unlocked digitally then any hacker that gets a foothold on the system would then have access to it, so all that overhead of full disk encryption does no good unless the encryption is done per-user-session. When you need assess to the data you authenticate and start decrypting then, and keep it encrypted across the network. Yes, that data that you speak of should be encrypted, but you must encrypt it at the correct level to actually increase its security rather than just slowing down the machine. Anything short of that level of control and you are just fooling yourself into thinking you have protected the data. Fool-Disk-Encryption is not always the answer.
DRM is just using a technology to try and solve a "social" problem. It will never happen, in fact it just makes the urge to become a criminal stronger. I might not think of pirating software or music, but when I can't use what I purchased I then become a criminal under the DMCA for going around the technological road blocks.
The whole concept of DRM is flawed, because they give me the media, and the key, and the algorithm and then tell me I can not put the three together in any other way than the way they choose. Sorry, not happening here. You can keep your broken products to yourself and I'll spend my money somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
And then there is always LibriVox.org, www.lecturefox.com, www.learnoutloud.com, and www.audiobooks.org so I cant see how the Guild will be making much money once there is enough 'useable' available material out there for people like me.
Thats Ok, but I think this is better http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224764.html?series=37 of course I'm not exactly unbiased.
In my case one format that can't be used is written text, electronic or not. I simply don't have the time to sit down with a book but spend several hours a day commuting to/from work, business, medical care of family members, etc. If I could listen to any ebook I could get my hands on I might actually buy one. Right now audio books are the only game in town, and quite frankly I have already bought every one of any value to me. I have spent a personal fortune, and there just are no more to buy from my standpoint. I was just seriously contemplating on whether I would buy this ebook reader and have it read other materials to me during my commute, but they just now lost a bunch of money just because that is NOT going to happen now. Authors Guild, take notice! I vote with my wallet.
A real standard which is unencumbered by any patent or licensing agreements. A system, regardless of plug type, where the device can communicate its requirements, and the device receives via an alternate line exactly what it asked for. If a device can connect and recharge despite any limited voltage in the communications channel, and still get what it needs to charge then that is the ideal on the technical side of things. But what is more important to the product vendors it not having to pay any technology or patent licensing fees in order to incorporate the design into their products. A quick look at successful Open Source hardware designs such as reprap, fab@home, or the Ardrino project will demonstrate the worth of Open Hardware Standards. If such as design was put on the table which promised to be free to all manufacturers then and only then would you succeed in having a "Standard".
Just imagine the chaos that would ensue if by chance a right-brained person accidentally clicked on the left-brained-repair-button? We might need to bootstrap a live distro alternate reality recovery module to help us restore the original image before it does permanent damage to the hardware. Better prepare those WinBrainPE(tm) disks in advance just in case.
I hope they are not too worried about interfacing to either quantum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing, photonic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic_computer, or spintronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics circuits. The thermal 1's and 0's would cause immediate decoherence in the other computational circuits, and they have much more potential bandwidth than any thermal type circuit will ever have. Quantum computers will beat the pants off of any thermal flow logic, providing that the problem at hand permits it. The spintronics or photonic solutions would not create all that heat in the first place so there would be no point to adding the "extra" thermal circuits. Just what is it actually solving? This sounds like a solution that is looking for a 'future problem' to solve, because it likely won't be a real tangible product before the others technologies already are, and even then it won't beat out it's competition in raw performance.
Because its hard to make a brick become aerodynamic. The majority of the energy of moving a car down the road goes into making the air that is in front of the car get back behind the car. Its not at all about being yuppie, its just if you want efficiency this is what you need to do. The more it looks like a space pod the more efficient it generally is. Perhaps a Porsche is more your style?
I happen to work in a physics lab, and I had been gathering ideas on exactly what I wanted for the past year, and had almost started buying equipment and materials to build it. Now I am just glad to see that someone actually did it for me, and there is not much wrong with it that I would want to change. Other than its availability in the other 49 states, like mine for one.
Actually this is great! Being across the pond, I should have the benefit of at least a femtosecond to be the first to write and publish a paper on the effects of gravity waves before I go. After all, those Europeans are going to be pretty much getting all the glory and making it much harder for us on this side to be recognized for any new discoveries. With this type of discovery, and it being so close to home, they likely won't even see it coming. And for a Scientist there is surely nothing like getting really embedded into your work to make you forget to publish. But face it, sometimes its just better to distance yourself for a more objective look at a situation.
Check out Process Lasso from here http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php. It was free before but its now $9.99 for personal use which is still a great deal considering what it can do. It dynamically adjusts the priorities and gives you all kinds of control over how things run on your machine. If I was still running Windows(tm) I would never be without it. btw - I have no affiliation with the company what so ever, I just like the product.
Somebody in the MS Intellectual Property department must be asleep on the job. I could have sworn that that Microsoft had a patent on that particular 'business method'...
The big win is there are fewer toxic by products when using a plasma furnace. By use of the plasma ultra high temperatures (e.g. 30,000 deg F) everything ionizes and breaks down to their atomic levels and then recombine as much smaller and less toxic molecules. If you wanted to get rid of the US's stockpiles of chemical weapons this is the way to do it. Too bad it doesn't work for radioactive wastes as well.
http://gas2.org/2008/02/03/more-on-plasma-gasification-technology/
I understand that "Bob" was the absolute worst. Kind of like having a fancy Clippy tell you how to 'think' just so that you can learn to use something that does absolutely nothing other than tell you how to use it. In never used it, so maybe that's why I don't think much of MS products these days, I have not been assimilated yet.
When you wire in your core devices that need continued power it is good to use a set of automatic transfer switches. When the grid power is up the electricity flows like normal, but when the generator us up the switches divert the inputs for those devices to the generator. When your power comes back up you simply turn off the generator and everything goes back to normal. If you buy the expensive whole house generator models they should come with this equipment, but you can buy them at your local hardware store, or eBay, for the low end generators. Having everything pre-wired saves a lot of fumbling around in the dark playing with kinked cords and potential high voltage, and a lot fewer headaches. No more pulling all refrigerators out just to plug them into the generator any more. Been there, done that. What I have that needs power has it as soon as I turn the key and pull the cord.
MS life-support Cycle http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;lifesupsps
You can't buy it http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx
"No further updates planned."
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/servicepacks.mspx
Ok, my bad. Extended service ends 2010, so by the time they get the bugs out of it they will need to upgrade.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean36
And for any IE die-hards out there, the best remedy to keeping your system safe is to make the "Windows Update" site your home page. That extra minute is for you to check what emergency fixes are out there to keep it from getting infected when you browse anywhere else. Windows Update, don't leave home without it!
Oh and I noticed this little titbit in the paper:
Oh yea, right. Like Microsoft is going to rewrite Windows just for Google? On the bright side, if the browser apps only run on Linux then that would certainly be a switch.
Because if done properly the phone can emulate any SIM you like, on demand. Phones get rooted and bugged all the time, you just have no way of knowing its been done. Ever seen a root-kit scanner for your model cell phone? Even software applets can be installed to put back door in them. There is even a market for hacked phones to give as "a gift" to your loved one or business competition at work, just in case you are sadistically and totally insane about/over them. With a properly hacked phone you can even listen in on their conversations, even when their phone supposedly is turned off. Keep a field strength meter handy if you care to really know that answer. Watching the battery level is a poor mans way to know something is not quite right, as any cell phone will suck much more power when it is transmitting. And now days with the addition of GPS's you can even tell where they were when they said something, within just a few meters.
Did you know that many phones automatically download and update software on demand? It gets updated when someone else wants it to just not by you. The telco can do it, and the Government can do it. The question is who else knows how to do it. I don't know about you but I would not trust a cell phone in this particular instance unless you don't care about having your laptop 'bricked' at the worst possible moment.
Seriously, perhaps next time you get spammed via an SMS text message you will also get a "buy my product or else" message included if they know you own a laptop.
On another note, it seems that one loophole in the statute might be that if no money changes hands, as in round-robin ride sharing, that no law has been broken. Its totally stupid, but that might still be legal.
Microsoft's Office Web Will Do [in] iPhone, Linux, Mac...
Of course, we've all heard that line before...
Personally I'll believe Microsoft will be fair to other web browsers when I see it. My wife is pissed at Microsoft because of all the headaches she has had recently using Firefox 3.0 with msn hotmail. Not only does it require her to reload the page each time she logs in, just to get past the "please upgrade your browser to IE 7", but now I've had to resort to installing a Firefox plug-in that simply lies to their Web server to say it is running IE 7, just to make it usable again. If my browser tells the truth the web page it receives is broken, and if it lies and says its IE 7 it simply works. Ok M$, Why would I be so masochistic as to try and edit an important document when we can't even edit a simple text email on your site? Just because M$ is trying trying so hard to be difficult with what would otherwise be a very simple task, she is finally convinced. She created herself a Gmail account yesterday and is currently migrating everything off of hotmail.
Forensic Toolkit could help there
http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/forensictoolkit.htm
http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources-free-tools.asp
There are lots of other Open Source forensic tools as well but this may get them started.
I looked into this a while back and found one solution that you might find interesting. GD makes an Iridium reachback device that will combine four Iridium data channels into one larger virtual network pipe. If one connection goes down (which I understand happens often since the satellites are moving) the system will divert that traffic through the remaining three channels until the failed connection recovers. I was told that the unit can be booted using windows or Linux, which of course makes it more configurable. The unit can be used as a network router between disparate networks to give a low bandwidth dial on demand network connection which can then be used to tunnel your management IP traffic without any additional support on either end for what ever software you choose for your remote management. Alternately each of the four channels can be used separately to connect to other remote sites if desired. http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=7b0bceb6-36e0-49f3-b879-8df91d6a3409&page=5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking
On the other hand maybe some hacker on the dark side of the Internet connection might like to BGP reroute all those lost packets around the offending ISP routers thus fixing the offending ISP's problems for them. It seems that Net Neutrality is a long way off yet if the children (CEO's) can't even play nice, never mind the Governments.
The only protection that Full Disk Encryption gives is if someone physically gets their hands on the machine that they can not boot the machine and read its contents. This make perfect sense for laptops but makes little sense for any pertinently fixed location workstations. A laptop will physically leave the premises so it leaves itself open to theft, but a workstation (assuming you have some decent form of physical security) is much less likely to need this protection. Once a workstation is booted and the disk drive unlocked digitally then any hacker that gets a foothold on the system would then have access to it, so all that overhead of full disk encryption does no good unless the encryption is done per-user-session. When you need assess to the data you authenticate and start decrypting then, and keep it encrypted across the network. Yes, that data that you speak of should be encrypted, but you must encrypt it at the correct level to actually increase its security rather than just slowing down the machine. Anything short of that level of control and you are just fooling yourself into thinking you have protected the data. Fool-Disk-Encryption is not always the answer.
The whole concept of DRM is flawed, because they give me the media, and the key, and the algorithm and then tell me I can not put the three together in any other way than the way they choose. Sorry, not happening here. You can keep your broken products to yourself and I'll spend my money somewhere else.