Posts by jwenting

Sure it impacts my job. I work in the market data business, and we're the ones supplying the data used to make trades to a lot of brokers and banks.

There is a chance (given historical record) that governments will step in and require that part or all of that data be regulated or even supplied free of charge in the future.
That would affect us massively.

But indeed, the average person won't be affected unless it's he works for one of the mortgage firms or hedgefunds that are now in trouble because of bad deals they funded with loans.

ah, you too have seen The Net.
Sandra Bullock, excellent role.

If all kinds of electronic gadgetry hadn't become so pervasive, with passwords and other identity checks that are easily fooled (or easy to trick people into giving away) the problem would be far less severe than it is.

Quite in contrast to what that (no doubt selfserving) "study" shows, having paper documentation to prove someone's identity is far preferred than just going on some easily hijacked and hacked electronic trail.

The day I can walk into a bank and announce my identity solely by giving a number or codeword is the day that all security as to peoples' identity is gone.
Yet that's exactly what most "security" comes down to when we're talking about e-commerce and other electronic communications.

Having good biometrics scanners somewhat reduces the risk, but still leaves the transaction open to a man in the middle attack as any interested party with the right equipment can monitor and record the data flowing between parties and later retransmit it at leasure, appearing for all to see to be one of the original parties.

That's pretty hard to do when meetings are face to face and identity is established using printed documents on special paper, potentially accompanied by those same biometrics.

Microsoft is fully aware of the grave danger that web based applications pose for data security and privacy sensitive information.

Personally I wouldn't trust any of my data to a company like Google (or any other for that matter).
Way too risky, you loose all control over what happens with your corporate secrets.
The host could sell it all to your competitors and you'd never know until it was way too late (if then) and at that time you will almost certainly be silently pointed at the miniscule print you didn't read in the service contract which states that your host reserves the right to do with the data as they see fit.

The web is no place to store corporate data (or you personal private data), unless you don't mind it being publicly available for anyone with the funds and/or technical ability to buy or steal it.
And paying someone else to store that data for you is even worse, it's like giving a complete stranger the keys to your house and a letter saying they're free to take whatever they want.

that's pretty much what they tried here Dani, except that both parties would have to listen to advertising after the connection was established but before they could talk themselves (and again every 5 minutes or so, they'd be interrupted).

Advertising in lue of subscription and connection fees for phones has been tried in Europe and was a complete flop.
People don't want their calls interrupted for advertising, and people being called by someone who does have such a scheme get extremely annoyed and often block future calls.

In the end the few users could not call anyone but eachother, and were far too few for the company running the service to even break even so they folded.

aren't those the same guys who said that Vista was to be released in 2004 (or was it 2003, I keep forgetting)?

Another factor was discussed at JavaLobby today. And that's overblown media reactions.
When 2 vulnerabilities were found in the Java runtime this month, the media went berserk over the massive increase in vulnerabilities in Java.
And indeed, the number had been 100% higher than over the previous 6 months, when a grand total of 1 problem had been discovered (and promptly fixed, just as these ones had been, in fact all had been fixed before any known exploits were out in the wild).

Of course anyone just reading that the incidence of security problems with a product has doubled over the space of a few months is going to be concerned, especially when they don't get to see the raw data about what numbers are involved (and what was done about them).

The same is no doubt true everywhere. And indeed with the increased efforts by software makers, it should come to no surprise to anyone that they find and fix more problems than in the past (problems which in the past would possibly have gone unnoticed forever until silently removed in the next release of the product instead of in a "security update").

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's no good...
Your attitude is quite typical of the young dogs in the industry (and probably anywhere) who think that high tech gadgetry is the holy grail towards solving any problem and that anything that's not bleeding edge is by definition fundamentally flawed.

Let me tell you a lesson: those systems aren't flawed. They're functional, they do what they're supposed to do, and they're chugging away generating income at almost no cost to their owners.
Sure you can spend $10 million+ to create something new that does the same but has a shiny new AJAX user interface instead of a textbased mainframe terminal and runs on a cluster of Linux PCs instead of an RS6000.
But you're sacrificing stability for looks, performance for buzzwords.

While you young dogs assume those systems are all but dead because they've been around a few years and are implemented using technology that's not at the moment state of the art, those systems are actually alive and kicking the butt off systems that were supposed to replace them but fail consistently to deliver.

All those companies by now have had projects to replace those "legacy" applications, started by managers who think just like you do.
All those projects failed to deliver on time, on budget, and within specs.
Most of them failed to deliver at all.

I've been there, done that, on both sides of the fence.

"the state of the standalone high definition player market in Europe,"

I didn't know there was such a market in Europe.
Sure the devices are available but I've not heard of anyone actually purchasing one (either HDDVD or BluRay).
Everyone is pretty much waiting to see who will be the winner as well as for prices to come down.
When you can get a regular DVD player that can play the movies you ripped from some P2P stream for €50, why pay €500+ for a fancy new tech thing that might be overtaken by events as the competing tech wins in a year or so (and will certainly come down in price a lot even if it does win)?

Same for built-in players in computers. Hardly anyone cares about which if any of the techs is installed in their systems.
They don't have the discs and aren't going to invest in them anyway until the dust settles, and by that time they're probably replacing that PC anyway.

For example a friend bought a new laptop that has such a player.
He didn't notice it in the brochure, and even after several months can't remember whether it's BluRay or HDDVD.
And that's an uebergeek, over a dozen computers around the place, had his house wired for a personal LAN a decade ago when many companies had never heard of networks, runs his own software and consulting company, etc.
But his attitude …

"Who would have thought, before the Nintendo Wii came along, that the concept of controlling a video game by waving a lump of plastic around in the air like a deranged loon would gain such mass appeal so quickly?"

I'd never have thought of the idea, but once voiced I had no doubt it would catch on quickly.
After all, the average person IS a deranged loon in many ways...

Very little has changed. In the past people could walk out the door with boxes full of copied documents from the company archives and noone would blink, today they copy those same documents to a flashdrive or CDR (yes, ever more people have CDR drives in their systems at work).

The idea is to not allow people access to things they have no need to see, and to make them happy enough that they have no incentive on leaving to steal things (and make sure they know the consequences if caught).

My father could easily have walked out on his job as a tax/business consultant at a major firm with damning information about hundreds of companies (including the one he worked for and all the customers of his department) and noone would have noticed.
At the time his only computer access was a mainframe terminal and a 5150 series IBM luggable which he can't carry because of his bad back...
But as a senior consultant he had access to all the archives as well as having copies of ALL client files for his department in his office and a photocopier just around the corner in the hallway.
He also had the keys to the building so he could work nights and weekends.

Noone ever checks who takes boxes of paper and other small stuff from store rooms and noone ever checks who uses photocopiers (in most companies, there are some where you have to …

far more damaging is all the information those people carry out in their heads!
All the years of training you spend on them, all the secrets about your company processes and products they accumulated through creating them.

Must not allow your people to take their heads out of the building!

but there's most likely a very good reason why it's so bland.
Anything more interesting is bound to offend someone somewhere for some reason and we can't have that...

what do you expect when you try to get a brand created on the cheap?
The going rate is several million at the very least...

been photographing for over 25 years,the first 20 years with all manual cameras.
AF is nice now that my eyes are failing, apart from that I still do pretty much everything by hand.

Keeping the camera steady is easy, and when not there are tripods (but get a decent one, the cheap things you get at the superstore are worse than useless).

90% at least of blurred images people get are NOT a result of poorly placed focal plane (which larger DOF would cure or ameliorate, though why you'd want that is beyond me as often shallow DOF is preferable to extreme DOF) but due to a too long shutter speed or camera shake leading to blurring due to movement.

Cameras with essentially unlimited DOF have existed for a long time.
Take a lens with a very short focal length, use a very small sensor, and close that lens down far, and you have what you're looking for.
Problem is that it will not work well in dark conditions, but a more sensitive sensor will solve that (and so will to a point the overexposure that most printing machines do unless you tell them not to).

Given that almost 98% of workstations used by the (young and) uninformed are running Windows it's no surprise that that's the majority of respondents...

It's the same target audience as any other malware author. "I love you" mass emails, "Britney Spears naked" mass emails, they all target exactly the same users and with similar success.

Of course the vast majority of well informed and well educated people also run Windows.

And oh, the only reason a larger percentage of stupid people don't run Macs is the price, with availability also being a factor.
Those are generally people who are extremely sensitive to status and marketing, and Macs are "kewl", but their high price and generally poor availability through mass market channels make them less easy to get for that same audience.

"I think it was clicked on more for the curiosity factor than people who were just too click happy for their own good. "

I'd love to have your confidence in people. But experience with end users has led me to believe otherwise.
There is no bound to the stupidity of the average person, especially when it looks like (s)he can get something cheap (or even better, for free).
Hordes will loose all sense when they see the words "free" or "discount" and purchase whatever it is no matter the actual price or whether it's something they could even theoretically use.
One prime example was a large sign outside a …

heck, like I said most of those people aren't sex offenders at all.

Someone with a grudge filed a complaint against them, which automatically places them on the register with no recourse.
Most of them probably don't even know they're on their because they're never charged with anything nor even questioned by police, but the entry in the register stands for them to come and bite them when they ever apply for a job or anything else where they get subjected to a background check.

you get life for even being suspected of being a sex offender.
You're put on a registry that's open for all to see, and are an outcast from then on.
Even if you're cleared of all charges, people will still shun you for, they choose to believe you were cleared not because you were innocent but because you had a good lawyer.

It is in fact the only crime that carries an automatic life sentence for even the suspicion...

The high cost is not because Dell is greedy (which the title and text of the post suggests) but because of the high manufacturing cost of the devices.

A regular harddrive is (nowadays) dirt cheap to build. Flash memory is expensive, especially the large size units used here.
It is however (contrary to TFT screens and digital imaging sensors) still getting rapidly cheaper, so expect this technology to get to the stage where it's available in midrange units in a few years at most.

I still remember buying my first 8MB CF card back in 1998.
The 4GB card I bought last year cost less than that first card did, and is a lot faster too. And today that 4GB card costs quite a bit less than it cost even last year.

and Redhat has a large closed source codebase in their commercial offering (including all those performance and stability enhancements).
We pay tens of thousands of Euros (maybe hundreds of thousands, I'm not sure about the exact amount) per year for Redhat license fees, and are constantly juggling to find unused machines we can transfer licenses from to newer machines at the end of the year when the software budget for new licenses has run out.

Major advantage (critical to anyone who values his privacy and the integrity of his data) is that no outside parties will have access to your documents.

That's THE big problem with Google's system (and other, similar products), Google has complete and unrestricted access to everything you do, with no controls in place over what they can do with those documents.
They could sell your business secrets to your competitors and there'd be nothing to stop them.
They could send the love letters you wrote to your secretary to your wife, and the first you'd learn about it would be from her divorce lawyer.

never seen the need for those gadgets.
My paper maps may seem cumbersome to today's electronic junkies but noone's ever hacked one of them (unless they hacked into the source data from which the maps were produced, before the map was ever printed).

possibly, as /. regularly has messages posted which are critical of the Chinese state...

Of course their definition of "pornographic" is pretty much like the old Soviet definition which included pretty much any display of skin.
A swimsuit calendar could land you in prison (in China they're rather more drastic in their punishment, unless some slave labour camp needs new people to replace those worked to death sewing those swimsuits)...

did you have to ruin my sleep with nightmares about a naked Paris Hilton doing something with my PC? :-O :X

"while at the same time sticking it to the consumer who will ultimately be faced with less legitimate choice when searching for people to do business with online."

Companies resorting to stealing keywords are hardly doing legitimate business...

And I don't have too much faith in the Goooogles of this world to put the law before profit, Google's not known to do so after all (and yes, they're powerful enough to get away with it too, anyone opposing them will just find himself blacklisted from their search results).

sure, and none of them were altruistic... None of them had the marketing power Goooooogle has, nor the recognised interest in building up profiles of everyone for unknown purposes (possibly just marketing, but for just marketing they're collecting way too much data on people).

If government agencies collected the amount of data on people that Google does, the ACLU and civil liberties and human rights organisations would be all over them...
If Microsoft did a fraction of what Google is doing they'd be up over their heads in lawsuits about it.
But Google is run by a couple of far left kids so it's OK.

one more way for Goooooooogle to track what you're doing and build up a complete commercial and political/social profile of almost everyone on this dirtball.

well, seeing how Greenpeace are hardly an organisation to be taken seriously, there's little surprise here...

They're a far left political pressure group affiliated with ecoterrorists, and won't be happy until everyone is living in caves in fear of the night again, like our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago (and even then they'll likely complain that we're driving bears and bats out of caves that rightfully don't belong to us).

It's not Microsoft who put those stickers on PCs, it's the hardware manufacturers.

But of course Microsoft has more money to extort from them than does the local computer shop so they're the ones get sued...

Yawn. And if Microsoft had announced sales figures below expectation you'd have said they're hiding the fact that they're "forcing" people to upgrade.

Just another anti-Microsoft rant from a slashdot kiddo.

if your contract states they can do it, they can...
there used to be a phone operator on the fixed net here that did it in exchange for extremely low rates.
That didn't work as most people aren't going to stand for it (if you have a phoneline you have a house either rented or owned so you have some money), but with mobiles (especially prepaid ones aimed at kids) there's certainly potential to promise people lower rates in exchange for advertising.

You'll get Google ads inserted at 10 second intervals into every phonecall you make or receive (and so will the other side) and into every SMS message you send and receive as well.
And of course Google will store (for your convenience and their financial gain) everything you say and do using that phone, with no way for you to delete it.

If history is any indication Blu-Ray is dead already.
That's what usually happens in the end with Sony technology.
Betamax anyone?

why not? I wouldn't mind a tour of duty on an ice breaker in the arctic...

yeah right. Letting kids know where to find the latest cracks is going to help improve software security...

Yet another age old argument of the piracy advocates, "we're doing it to help improve software".
Right up there with "punishing large companies" and "it should have been free because it's only a minor upgrade".

you seem very intent on getting people to know about ways to crack Microsoft products...

Yahoo doesn't have anything like "Google Library" which scans and puts online entire books without asking the publisher (Microsoft Press in this case) for permission...
Or a news service that rips entire articles from the sites of newspapers and publishes them as their own (with maybe a small link to the original somewhere).

Microsoft cannot be accused of stealing content because they don't.

Wouldn't be the first time Google interprets the law to mean that they can do whatever they want while other can do only what Google wants them to do.
It's time a large company with deep coffers stepped in, I doubt anyone (even the US government) at this point has the finances to deal with Google and the menace they pose to freedom of speech and privacy.

Apple doesn't need to worry because there's no way to get a Mac without MacOs...
There are millions of computers out there however that can run Windows and get sold or built without a Windows license (including all those Macs since a few years).

Piracy protection is absolutely vital. Not only does a company loose all rights to their intellectual property if they don't protect it, it also prevents the majority of at least casual piracy.
You'll never stop the pros, but at least you're going to get rid of kids giving each other copies of their discs they got for their birthdays.

The ONLY people who state that protecting your property against criminals is useless are those criminals, who want to create an easier working environment for themselves.
Anyone else is smart enough to realise you should lock your door when you leave your house even if a determined burglar will find a way to open that lock.

I'm firmly in the Nokia camp. I can almost dream their user interface after 9 years of using Nokias.
I see no reason to change to another brand, unless it were my phone were due replacement (which likely won't be until 2009 or 2010) and at the time Nokia has severe quality control problems and is suffering from a high failure rate in their products.

Almost noone pays the full price (or rather, thinks they pay the full price) of a mobile phone.
Rather they get it "free" or "discounted" with a subscription which would over its runtime have been the cheaper by the full price of that phone (or more).

So someone gets a new subscription for 2 years and gets an iPhone for $100, but if he'd purchased that same plan without the phone would have paid $20 per month less.
In the end he pays $580 over 2 years for that phone and most likely doesn't even realise it...

they probably got more money this way than had they done as youy suggested...

And at least this way they have made certain they have a right to their IP (all of it), which they'd have lost instantly had they let Apple take the name without a fight.

IMO it's a shame and Apple should have been made to publicly witdraw the name (and maybe even the product), but that's business.

He's probably also a fan of pirated music and software.
All out of his "conviction that everything should be free" of course, and "to punish record companies for not paying artists enough".

Maybe you won't survive without Google Dani, but I can.
After all, they pay (at least in part) for your bills and so you may go hungry without them, but not for mine ;)

There are other search engines, which often give more relevant results.
And if you've been online for a decade you have a repository of hundreds of sites (which sometimes turn out to be dead when you revisit them years later, truth be told) to get all kinds of information that's relevant to your regular work/hobbies and don't frequently use a general purpose search engine.

Google is far from a fantastic group, they're extremely dangerous.
The amount of data they collect on people is massive, with no guarantees about protecting the privacy of those people in any way.

If a government were to do a fraction of what Google does the civil rights movement would be up in arms about it, and rightly so.

That's why I've blocked all traffic to Google on my machines. Their DNS entries are redirected to a localhost so nothing ever leaks back to them.

Apple is setting the average Joe up to blame Microsoft...

Rather childish of them, blaming their own ineptness on Microsoft, but they're no different in that (just more public) than any other /. kiddo.

if his domain is inactive emails to that domain won't be delivered, DOH!

If he published content that's in violation of the law (which cracks certainly would be, whichever excuse he uses to publish them) his hosting provider may well have pulled the plug, wouldn't be the first time.

It's a good thing there are several versions, and 4 isn't excessive.
The editions map well to the current versions of XP: Home, MCE, Pro, and 2003 Server edition.

Easy choice, though I think the basic edition won't sell too well (especially as a boxed product, it's got a bright future powering lowend machines in the OEM version).

Microsoft is extremely wary of advertising any productivity tools of any kind in their OS. This is the result of the politically motivated lawsuits against them in the US and Europe which were paid for in bribes by their competitors.
Microsoft doesn't want a repeat of that so plays a low key game, smart of them.

Will I be using Vista?
Well, the free (S&H only) upgrade for my laptop is on order and will be installed once my anti-virus supplier gets a Vista capable version of their corporate product (which I use as it's cheaper to buy a volume license for that than multiple licenses for each machine of their consumer version, and has a more capable user interface) out the door.
That should take too long, as they already have had the consumer version ready to go for some weeks.