RTFM may or may not be useful, depending on how you say it. If that's all you say, then yes, it's useless. But if you provide a link to TFM (or maybe a chapter/section number of a readily-accessible book) then you are pointing someone at the right answer without doing his work for him.
This is especially important if the question is (or appears to be) someone's homework assignment.
There is very invasive DRM measures in blu-ray that make divx look like it would make Richard Stallman proud. You need to get permission every time you play a disc, and your discs are permanently mated to your player...
If it is that restrictive, then people won't buy it.
DivX died a much-deserved death because people were unwilling to buy pay-per-view discs. If BD (or anything else) ends up being similarly restrictive, the public will choose to not buy into the format.
People don't care much about DVD's restrictions because most people aren't interested in making copies of their discs. And in those markets where people really want foreign discs (most places outside the US), region-free players are fairly easy to buy. But I guarantee you that if a new standard comes with restrictions that gets in consumers' way (like tying the disc to only one player), they'll very quickly stop buying. At which point, either the studios will rethink their decision or the format will die.
Theoretical capacity or capacity-in-a-laboratory is completely irrelevant and is comparable to this press release that claims Blu-ray is what consumers want, even though you can't buy any movies in either format yet. The fact remains that HD movies only require twice the space that a regular movie does, so the first cheap player for cheap discs @ 20GB should be the winner.
I won't presume to know what "consumers" want, but I know what I want.
I couldn't care less about movies. I want a rewriteable disc ("Blu-Ray RW?") with sufficient capacity for system backups.
A 2-layer BD-RW will hold about 50G, which is significantly more than the 33G VXA-1 tape drive I use now. A 4-layer disc (prototypes have been made, I don't know when commercial units will ship) will hold 100G on a disc, which is enough for me to perform a full system backup on a single disc. (Right now, my backups consume about 40G for my music collection and about 22G for everything else.)
When the price comes down to the level I paid for my tape system ($800 for an external FireWire drive, about $50 each for blank media), I will be very interested in switching over to it. Especially given reports that BD drives will be faster than VXA-1 tape (which I've clocked at about 2.5MB/s.)
While HD-DVD may be perfectly fine for movies (at 15G per layer), it is not perfectly fine as a backup device. The maximum theoretical capacity for HD-DVD is currently 45G (3-layer discs). This is less than half of the maximum capacity for BD (100G on 4 layers, and the possibility of 200G/8-layer discs in the future.)
Though technically that's not gravity, though it's a reasonable approximation.
Didn't Einstein prove that gravity and acceleration are interchangeable?
... in fact as long as you're in orbit, you feel practically no gravity, no matter how low your orbit is
Absolutely correct. Because the phenomenon of weightlessness is, in fact, a result of being in free-fall, which all orbiting objects are.
You can experience the exact same thing in anything else that's in free-fall, like an airplane descending at the same rate as gravity (9.81m/s^2) or some amusement park rides.
After they are done they shouldn't even tell them it was a hoax. They should just send them home and wait for them to find out when they watch the first episode with all of their friends and family.
Even more amusing would be if they don't believe the truth afterwards.
I could easily see someone either very gullible or in deep denial, insisting that he really went into space, and that the TV program is the real hoax.
Offering a bait-and-switch price of $600, only to find that this price is without any display whatsoever. After adding a display and memory, you're now up to almost $800.
And then they only accept payment via PayPal. So you have no legal recourse when they take your money and disappear.
And their product description looks like a whole pile of feel-good platitudes with absolutely no technical content whatsoever. Their FAQ goes on at great length about how styli are evil, but the site says absolutely nothing about how you enter text into the thing. My guess is that you can't. Assuming the device exists at all, you probably can only enter text while it's docked to a real computer - making it completely useless for everything I rely on my Palm PDA for.
Seven processors and a custom OS? <SARCASM>And if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop - which can severely damage the processor if left running that way too long. Unfortunately, most novice computer users will not realize what is happening until it is far too late.</SARCASM>
Click here before replying that you don't get the joke.
People hate change. But hey, if you don't want to use it, don't use it. Use kde or fluxbox or _______(insert window manager here).
Ahh...the sweet smell of choice!
Yep. Which is why, today, in 2004, I still prefer to have no desktop at all on my Linux box. My window manager is fvwm, stripped down and configured to behave like the old MWM. There are no destktop icons, tool bars, or any other such tools. The desktop is just a solid color (xset -solid '#7af' if anybody cares).
The desktop menu only has a few core options - launch an xterm, refresh the screen, quit the window manager. I launch my apps by typing commands into xterm windows. And you know what? It works just fine. I have yet to find an application that couldn't be used in this environment, and my window manager's overhead is virtually nil, compared to those huge all-encompassing programs like Gnome and KDE.
The way to make this work for mode switching was to use a second idiosyncracy of the video hardware. For some reason (probably simplicity of implementation), during the horizontal retrace interval at the end of each scan line, the video hardware kept stepping through video memory, reading one byte at a time. Thus, there were a few undisplayed bytes that would appear on the data bus during the horizontal retrace interval, in memory that was basically just wasted. So, you could put a multi-byte signature in that area of exactly one line in display memory, and spend all of your CPU time in a loop waiting to see this signature appear. When it did, you knew which line had just been displayed, and could immediately switch video modes in the middle of the screen. You could use a few of these to display multiple video modes (low res graphics, hi res graphics, and text) on the screen in different vertical bands.
I did something like that on my TRS-80 color computer to get text and graphics modes displaying at once.
The problem with doing this is the timing. You have to sync to the vertical blank interrupt and then switch modes at the correct interval afterwards. If you don't time it exaxtly right, the banding doesn't take place exactly where you want and the region doesn't remain in a fixed place.
Normally, it's easier to just draw the text using pixels in hi-res mode. But that mode is monochrome. Low-res graphics (implemented by the text-mode character generator) was 8-color. So if you want colors and high resolution at once, you need to play games with the timing.
And then, there was also the trick of drawing only even-numbered pixels or odd-numbered pixels, or appropriate hatch patterns in order to get other colors. The CoCo's 256-pixel horizontal resolution resulted in pixels smaller than the display's phosphors. So although the mode was actually black and grey (which they called "buff"), appropriate patterns could also produce red, blue, yellow, purple and a few others.
and the resolutions the same as I use on a 14' monitor
But more than enough for television.
A standard NTSC TV frame is about 525 scan lines, of which about 480 are visible (the rest are off-screen and don't contain image data.)
The highest progressive-scan HDTV signal is 720 lines. The highest interlaced HDTV signal is 1080 lines.
Sure, my computers do much better than this (between 1600x1200 and 2048x1536, depending on which computer/monitor I'm using), but computers and televisions have very different requirements. For a computer screen, you have to render very fine details, and you're sitting only a few feet away. For televisions, you never have that kind of detail, and you're usually sitting across the room from the screen.
I don't know about all brands/models, but the one I mentioned above has a depth of about 26". That should fit through most doors (although you may have to remove it from the shipping carton first.
FWIW, my desk at home has a 30"x60" surface. It gets through a standard doorway (with a fraction of an inch clearance) if I remove the door from the hinges first. I would expect anything with a depth less than 30" to have no problem getting through doors.
I went through a similar level of tech-support hell with eBay last year.
I had an eBay account for many years, although I only used it 2 or 3 times. I decided that I wanted to start using it again, but my registered e-mail address was the address of an ISP account that I stopped using several years ago.
So, I went to change the address, and eBay says that I need to give them a credit card number. What gives? I read through their help pages, and they say that they request this from free/anonymous e-mail services, and that I should use an address from a paid-up ISP account to avoid having to give them a CC#.
But my address is a paid-up ISP account. So I e-mail them to try and resolve this. They first tell me that my ISP is a free-mail service. It's not (I'm using Earthlink with an address in the mindspring.com domain.) Then they tell me that Earthlink also offers a free-mail service, which is why their database lists it as such.
I phone up Earthlink and ask about this. They tell me that EL does not, and never has, provided free mail access. I ask them if they can talk to eBay about correcting this. EL says that this isn't their problem, and they won't make the call.
So I contact eBay again. I tell them everything EL told me and asked them to review their database entry for EL/mindspring, since it is obviously wrong. The response I get back was basically "we don't make mistakes, you are a con-artist trying to defeat our security, give us the CC# or go away." Not in so many words, but that was the impression I got after several more rounds of attempted communication.
I gave up in disgust. I changed my eBay password to a random string that I made no attemt to remember, to make sure I will never be tempted to use their service again. Then I sent their corporate management a snail-mail letter telling them exactly why I will never do business with them or any of their subsidiary companies again.
They never replied. Probably never will.
This isn't the only such incident, but it was the worst.
More recently, I tried to convince The Motley Fool to stop spamming me. Every time I get a mailing from them, I follow the unsubscribe links. I get another mailing a week later, and when I follow the links, I find that they "helpfully" re-subscribed me. Direct mail to the people suppsedly in charge doesn't even get me a form letter in reply. I ended having to change my registered e-mail address to a bogus address in order to make the mailings go away. Which also locked out all access to my account - good riddance.
Ditto for Fry's Electronics/Outpost.com. They spam me every month and they ignore all their unsubscribe requests. Direct mail to their customer support addresses and corporate offices accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm just glad I gave them my spam-trap mailbox when I ordered that hard drive last year, so I don't have to see their junk in my real mailbox.
These corporations just don't give a damn about their customers. They've dropped all pretense of even pretending to care. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is typical of everybody these days. The corproation that actually takes an interest in customer concerns is extremely rare, and growing more rare evevry day.
You are correct. Apogee on their May 13 flight was 211,400 feet, or about 64.4km. In order to win the X-prize, they must reach 100km and do it twice in two weeks.
VMac looks Carbonized, but it's still asking for a ROM. Does this mean I have to go hunt down my original Mac 128k?
IIRC, vMac wants a Mac Plus ROM. I don't think others will work with it (emulation of other classic Macs is on their to-do list.) Which is kind of annoying - I have a working SE at home, but not a Plus.
Of course, I could just go play Dark Castle on the SE....
HFS+ was one of the major features of the OS 8.1 update. OS 8.0 and earlier can't "see" HFS+ volumes- they see a tiny disk with a simpletext file titled "where have all my files gone?" which, if I remember correctly, gives a brief explanation that the disk is HFS+ and requires 8.1 or higher to view.:)
And the person who came up with this idea was a genius. This is far far better than what most other operating systems do (refuse to mount the volume.)
If I boot MS-DOS on a machine that has FAT-32 or NTFS volumes, I simply don't find any volume. I can't tell the difference between an unsupported file system and an unformatted partition. If the file system would create a FAT-compatible read-only stub (like HFS+ does), it would be much better for the user. Instead of thinking you have a corrupt drive, you'd know that there is a file system that your OS can't read.
My point is... where there are humans involved... no secret is 'that' secret:)...whether you encase it in concrete; or some rocket science parallel encryption technology.
Or in other words: A secret known by more than one person is no secret.
If you want to keep a secret, make sure you never tell anybody, and that there are no written records. Otherwise, discovery is simply a matter of time.
The most interesting part of the article isn't that some anti-spammers got an invite to SpamClub.
The most interesting part is that the links between virus/worm developers and spammers is no longer just hypothetical/assumed. It is now known for a fact.
Which means that, if enough evidence is gathered, these spammers can be proesecuted under the various cyber-crime/anti-hacking laws - which can result in imprisonment. A far cry better than the anti-spam laws, which only result in fines.
Maybe a few years behind bars, only coming out to pick up trash along the interstates, will teach them the lesson that gigabytes of hate mail didn't.
Your father had an internet connection and web browser at work in 1992? Wow.
OK. So maybe I was a little off with the date. I was sure that this incident happened before I finished grad school (end of 1993), but maybe it was a little later. It certainly wasn't a recent event.
His company did provide internet access early on (back when that just meant e-mail and news), and they did start out using keyword filters when web access started to become popular (they later switched to something better when commercial filters became available), and these early filters did block all attempts to lookup information on Middlesex county.
So while I may have overstated the amount of elapsed time, I stand by my initial assertion that corporate America tried and gave up on keyword filters a long time ago. Our government should (but obviously doesn't) know better.
Can someone with clue explain to us lay-people how what the article describes is different from what this kid did 'in a couple of late nights'? His software scans the record in using a standard flatbed scanner. Is the new version being goverment funded supposed to able to 'rip' at a better quality, or what exactly is the deal with the government funding on this?
I'm not exactly sure, but this paragraph from the NYT article implies quite a bit:
The team shoots thousands of precise sequential images of the groove and then stitches the images together, measuring the shape of each undulation and calculating the route a stylus would take along the path.
It seems to me that they are taking lots of close-up photos of the grooves. Probably from an oblique angle. This will let you make a 3-D contour map of the record. (Note the image on the NYT article).
When you have a 3-D map, you can decode the variations in the diagonal sides of the groove to extract the stereo audio content.
With a 2-D top-down image, such as what you get from a flatbed scanner, the only data you have is the floor of the groove. For stereo recordings (and probably modern mono ones as well), this contains little more than noise and aliassing.
Corporate America stopped using keyword-filters for precisely this reason over 10 years ago.
I remember by father's inability to access the Middlesex county government page from work because of the string "sex" in the URL. This was 12 years ago. They switched to a different filter system a few months afterwards.
It's actually intereting -- given Verizon's victories, why would Comcast play DMCA ball for MGM?
I'm also curious about whether they are proactively scanning their own network for content, or if they are merely forwarding DMCA cease-and-desist letters from the studios.
If they're doing the former, then they're filtering their network based on content, which is enough for them to lose "common carrier" status under the law, making them liable for all illegal traffic that their routers forward.
No service provider with half a brain would want that.
Personally I think that there should be an generic framework for transforming any resource locator for all popular protocols.
There is. It's called the proxy autoconfig file. Most of your better browsers these days support it. It's a quick piece of JavaScript that your browser shunts every URL through.
The intended purpose is to set up rules so that some URLs (presumably external ones) go through a proxy server and others (presumably internal ones) go directly to the destination. But you can also use it to block stuff. Simply direct some URLs (by domain name, address, or anything else you like) to a machine that isn't running a proxy server and let the rest go to where it normally goes.
Redirecting to 127.0.0.1 does an OK job. Redirecting to a machine running a web server (like Apache) is better. This way, those ad-requests get back "404 not found" errors, which doesn't upset the ad scripts. (Some scripts will cause the page rendering to hang if they fail to get a response from their request for the ad content, but a legitimate error from a server doesn't seem to bother them.)
I recently wrote this journal entry describing the technique. It works very well, although you do have to update the list of blocked domains/URLs as advertisers switch to new servers.
Yeah, I'm waiting for one that reprograms the BIOS EEPROM with a flashing program to display thier adds when you boot up, in the logo space that most BIOS chips have now.
First off, I have never had to reinstall my system software on any of my computers, so it's a moot question. But I did recently build a new PC, so here's what I installed first (not counting device drivers and Windows updates - that's part of the OS, not application code.)
Virus scanner (I use McAfee)
MS Word
MS Excel
MS PowerPoint
iTunes
AOL Instant Messenger (and then I uninstall the WildTangent and Viewpoint plugins that they so helpfully install without even telling me.)
Mozilla
Stuffit Expander (I prefer it to WinZip)
Emacs
Adobe Acrobat Reader
No firewall software. My router does a good enough job, so I don't bog down Windows with redundant functionality.
Here's what the list would be for my Mac, if I had to reinstall the system (Mac OS X "Panther"). Again, I'm leaving out device drivers and system software updates:
AppleWorks
FileMaker Pro
Toast
iTunes
iPhoto
Mozilla
AOL Instant Messenger
Emacs
Apple's Developer Tools
Palm Desktop and related utilities
Finally, my Linux boxes. This is a bit weird, because most of the apps I use come with my distribution, so many of these are effectively preloaded. But I'll see what I can come up with, leaving out stuff that clearly belongs in the category of "system software".
Mozilla (downloaded - the ones that come with distributions are usually out of date.)
Development tools (gcc and related packages) (bundled with the distribution)
Emacs (bundled with the distribution)
cdrecord and related packages (bundled with the distribution)
Sun Java VM
Adobe Acrobat Reader
TiK (my favorite UNIX-based AIM-client)
mikmod (am I the only one left who still listens to MOD files?) (bundled with the distribution)
OpenOffice
xv (bundled with the distribution)
It really says something about Linux that of my 10 must-have apps, 5 of them come bundled with my distribution and probably come bundled with everybody else's as well. This is one of the few systems where I can be productive using nothing but software that's available as free downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
This is especially important if the question is (or appears to be) someone's homework assignment.
If it is that restrictive, then people won't buy it.
DivX died a much-deserved death because people were unwilling to buy pay-per-view discs. If BD (or anything else) ends up being similarly restrictive, the public will choose to not buy into the format.
People don't care much about DVD's restrictions because most people aren't interested in making copies of their discs. And in those markets where people really want foreign discs (most places outside the US), region-free players are fairly easy to buy. But I guarantee you that if a new standard comes with restrictions that gets in consumers' way (like tying the disc to only one player), they'll very quickly stop buying. At which point, either the studios will rethink their decision or the format will die.
I won't presume to know what "consumers" want, but I know what I want.
I couldn't care less about movies. I want a rewriteable disc ("Blu-Ray RW?") with sufficient capacity for system backups.
A 2-layer BD-RW will hold about 50G, which is significantly more than the 33G VXA-1 tape drive I use now. A 4-layer disc (prototypes have been made, I don't know when commercial units will ship) will hold 100G on a disc, which is enough for me to perform a full system backup on a single disc. (Right now, my backups consume about 40G for my music collection and about 22G for everything else.)
When the price comes down to the level I paid for my tape system ($800 for an external FireWire drive, about $50 each for blank media), I will be very interested in switching over to it. Especially given reports that BD drives will be faster than VXA-1 tape (which I've clocked at about 2.5MB/s.)
While HD-DVD may be perfectly fine for movies (at 15G per layer), it is not perfectly fine as a backup device. The maximum theoretical capacity for HD-DVD is currently 45G (3-layer discs). This is less than half of the maximum capacity for BD (100G on 4 layers, and the possibility of 200G/8-layer discs in the future.)
Didn't Einstein prove that gravity and acceleration are interchangeable?
Absolutely correct. Because the phenomenon of weightlessness is, in fact, a result of being in free-fall, which all orbiting objects are.
You can experience the exact same thing in anything else that's in free-fall, like an airplane descending at the same rate as gravity (9.81m/s^2) or some amusement park rides.
Even more amusing would be if they don't believe the truth afterwards.
I could easily see someone either very gullible or in deep denial, insisting that he really went into space, and that the TV program is the real hoax.
And then they only accept payment via PayPal. So you have no legal recourse when they take your money and disappear.
And their product description looks like a whole pile of feel-good platitudes with absolutely no technical content whatsoever. Their FAQ goes on at great length about how styli are evil, but the site says absolutely nothing about how you enter text into the thing. My guess is that you can't. Assuming the device exists at all, you probably can only enter text while it's docked to a real computer - making it completely useless for everything I rely on my Palm PDA for.
Seven processors and a custom OS? <SARCASM>And if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop - which can severely damage the processor if left running that way too long. Unfortunately, most novice computer users will not realize what is happening until it is far too late.</SARCASM>
Click here before replying that you don't get the joke.
Ahh...the sweet smell of choice!
Yep. Which is why, today, in 2004, I still prefer to have no desktop at all on my Linux box. My window manager is fvwm, stripped down and configured to behave like the old MWM. There are no destktop icons, tool bars, or any other such tools. The desktop is just a solid color (xset -solid '#7af' if anybody cares).
The desktop menu only has a few core options - launch an xterm, refresh the screen, quit the window manager. I launch my apps by typing commands into xterm windows. And you know what? It works just fine. I have yet to find an application that couldn't be used in this environment, and my window manager's overhead is virtually nil, compared to those huge all-encompassing programs like Gnome and KDE.
I did something like that on my TRS-80 color computer to get text and graphics modes displaying at once.
The problem with doing this is the timing. You have to sync to the vertical blank interrupt and then switch modes at the correct interval afterwards. If you don't time it exaxtly right, the banding doesn't take place exactly where you want and the region doesn't remain in a fixed place.
Normally, it's easier to just draw the text using pixels in hi-res mode. But that mode is monochrome. Low-res graphics (implemented by the text-mode character generator) was 8-color. So if you want colors and high resolution at once, you need to play games with the timing.
And then, there was also the trick of drawing only even-numbered pixels or odd-numbered pixels, or appropriate hatch patterns in order to get other colors. The CoCo's 256-pixel horizontal resolution resulted in pixels smaller than the display's phosphors. So although the mode was actually black and grey (which they called "buff"), appropriate patterns could also produce red, blue, yellow, purple and a few others.
and the resolutions the same as I use on a 14' monitor
But more than enough for television.
A standard NTSC TV frame is about 525 scan lines, of which about 480 are visible (the rest are off-screen and don't contain image data.)
The highest progressive-scan HDTV signal is 720 lines. The highest interlaced HDTV signal is 1080 lines.
Sure, my computers do much better than this (between 1600x1200 and 2048x1536, depending on which computer/monitor I'm using), but computers and televisions have very different requirements. For a computer screen, you have to render very fine details, and you're sitting only a few feet away. For televisions, you never have that kind of detail, and you're usually sitting across the room from the screen.
PS: You may find this link of interest.
Sure.
HTF do you even get that through your front door?
I don't know about all brands/models, but the one I mentioned above has a depth of about 26". That should fit through most doors (although you may have to remove it from the shipping carton first.
FWIW, my desk at home has a 30"x60" surface. It gets through a standard doorway (with a fraction of an inch clearance) if I remove the door from the hinges first. I would expect anything with a depth less than 30" to have no problem getting through doors.
I went through a similar level of tech-support hell with eBay last year.
I had an eBay account for many years, although I only used it 2 or 3 times. I decided that I wanted to start using it again, but my registered e-mail address was the address of an ISP account that I stopped using several years ago.
So, I went to change the address, and eBay says that I need to give them a credit card number. What gives? I read through their help pages, and they say that they request this from free/anonymous e-mail services, and that I should use an address from a paid-up ISP account to avoid having to give them a CC#.
But my address is a paid-up ISP account. So I e-mail them to try and resolve this. They first tell me that my ISP is a free-mail service. It's not (I'm using Earthlink with an address in the mindspring.com domain.) Then they tell me that Earthlink also offers a free-mail service, which is why their database lists it as such.
I phone up Earthlink and ask about this. They tell me that EL does not, and never has, provided free mail access. I ask them if they can talk to eBay about correcting this. EL says that this isn't their problem, and they won't make the call.
So I contact eBay again. I tell them everything EL told me and asked them to review their database entry for EL/mindspring, since it is obviously wrong. The response I get back was basically "we don't make mistakes, you are a con-artist trying to defeat our security, give us the CC# or go away." Not in so many words, but that was the impression I got after several more rounds of attempted communication.
I gave up in disgust. I changed my eBay password to a random string that I made no attemt to remember, to make sure I will never be tempted to use their service again. Then I sent their corporate management a snail-mail letter telling them exactly why I will never do business with them or any of their subsidiary companies again.
They never replied. Probably never will.
This isn't the only such incident, but it was the worst.
More recently, I tried to convince The Motley Fool to stop spamming me. Every time I get a mailing from them, I follow the unsubscribe links. I get another mailing a week later, and when I follow the links, I find that they "helpfully" re-subscribed me. Direct mail to the people suppsedly in charge doesn't even get me a form letter in reply. I ended having to change my registered e-mail address to a bogus address in order to make the mailings go away. Which also locked out all access to my account - good riddance.
Ditto for Fry's Electronics/Outpost.com. They spam me every month and they ignore all their unsubscribe requests. Direct mail to their customer support addresses and corporate offices accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm just glad I gave them my spam-trap mailbox when I ordered that hard drive last year, so I don't have to see their junk in my real mailbox.
These corporations just don't give a damn about their customers. They've dropped all pretense of even pretending to care. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is typical of everybody these days. The corproation that actually takes an interest in customer concerns is extremely rare, and growing more rare evevry day.
You are correct. Apogee on their May 13 flight was 211,400 feet, or about 64.4km. In order to win the X-prize, they must reach 100km and do it twice in two weeks.
IIRC, vMac wants a Mac Plus ROM. I don't think others will work with it (emulation of other classic Macs is on their to-do list.) Which is kind of annoying - I have a working SE at home, but not a Plus.
Of course, I could just go play Dark Castle on the SE....
And the person who came up with this idea was a genius. This is far far better than what most other operating systems do (refuse to mount the volume.)
If I boot MS-DOS on a machine that has FAT-32 or NTFS volumes, I simply don't find any volume. I can't tell the difference between an unsupported file system and an unformatted partition. If the file system would create a FAT-compatible read-only stub (like HFS+ does), it would be much better for the user. Instead of thinking you have a corrupt drive, you'd know that there is a file system that your OS can't read.
Or in other words: A secret known by more than one person is no secret.
If you want to keep a secret, make sure you never tell anybody, and that there are no written records. Otherwise, discovery is simply a matter of time.
The most interesting part is that the links between virus/worm developers and spammers is no longer just hypothetical/assumed. It is now known for a fact.
Which means that, if enough evidence is gathered, these spammers can be proesecuted under the various cyber-crime/anti-hacking laws - which can result in imprisonment. A far cry better than the anti-spam laws, which only result in fines.
Maybe a few years behind bars, only coming out to pick up trash along the interstates, will teach them the lesson that gigabytes of hate mail didn't.
You're double-counting fuel sources. The electricity is generated from the gas, so you should just count gas consumption.
It would be different if you had to charge it from an electric power source in addition to putting in gasoline.
OK. So maybe I was a little off with the date. I was sure that this incident happened before I finished grad school (end of 1993), but maybe it was a little later. It certainly wasn't a recent event.
His company did provide internet access early on (back when that just meant e-mail and news), and they did start out using keyword filters when web access started to become popular (they later switched to something better when commercial filters became available), and these early filters did block all attempts to lookup information on Middlesex county.
So while I may have overstated the amount of elapsed time, I stand by my initial assertion that corporate America tried and gave up on keyword filters a long time ago. Our government should (but obviously doesn't) know better.
I'm not exactly sure, but this paragraph from the NYT article implies quite a bit:
It seems to me that they are taking lots of close-up photos of the grooves. Probably from an oblique angle. This will let you make a 3-D contour map of the record. (Note the image on the NYT article).
When you have a 3-D map, you can decode the variations in the diagonal sides of the groove to extract the stereo audio content.
With a 2-D top-down image, such as what you get from a flatbed scanner, the only data you have is the floor of the groove. For stereo recordings (and probably modern mono ones as well), this contains little more than noise and aliassing.
I remember by father's inability to access the Middlesex county government page from work because of the string "sex" in the URL. This was 12 years ago. They switched to a different filter system a few months afterwards.
I'm also curious about whether they are proactively scanning their own network for content, or if they are merely forwarding DMCA cease-and-desist letters from the studios.
If they're doing the former, then they're filtering their network based on content, which is enough for them to lose "common carrier" status under the law, making them liable for all illegal traffic that their routers forward.
No service provider with half a brain would want that.
There is. It's called the proxy autoconfig file. Most of your better browsers these days support it. It's a quick piece of JavaScript that your browser shunts every URL through.
The intended purpose is to set up rules so that some URLs (presumably external ones) go through a proxy server and others (presumably internal ones) go directly to the destination. But you can also use it to block stuff. Simply direct some URLs (by domain name, address, or anything else you like) to a machine that isn't running a proxy server and let the rest go to where it normally goes.
Redirecting to 127.0.0.1 does an OK job. Redirecting to a machine running a web server (like Apache) is better. This way, those ad-requests get back "404 not found" errors, which doesn't upset the ad scripts. (Some scripts will cause the page rendering to hang if they fail to get a response from their request for the ad content, but a legitimate error from a server doesn't seem to bother them.)
I recently wrote this journal entry describing the technique. It works very well, although you do have to update the list of blocked domains/URLs as advertisers switch to new servers.
You may find this article I wrote to be of interest as well.
You're about five years too late for this kind of paranoia.
No firewall software. My router does a good enough job, so I don't bog down Windows with redundant functionality.
Here's what the list would be for my Mac, if I had to reinstall the system (Mac OS X "Panther"). Again, I'm leaving out device drivers and system software updates:
Finally, my Linux boxes. This is a bit weird, because most of the apps I use come with my distribution, so many of these are effectively preloaded. But I'll see what I can come up with, leaving out stuff that clearly belongs in the category of "system software".
- Mozilla (downloaded - the ones that come with distributions are usually out of date.)
- Development tools (gcc and related packages) (bundled with the distribution)
- Emacs (bundled with the distribution)
- cdrecord and related packages (bundled with the distribution)
- Sun Java VM
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- TiK (my favorite UNIX-based AIM-client)
- mikmod (am I the only one left who still listens to MOD files?) (bundled with the distribution)
- OpenOffice
- xv (bundled with the distribution)
It really says something about Linux that of my 10 must-have apps, 5 of them come bundled with my distribution and probably come bundled with everybody else's as well. This is one of the few systems where I can be productive using nothing but software that's available as free downloads.