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::: Thursday, July 31 ::: |
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::: Wednesday, July 30 ::: |
Thppt: Suit could squash do-not-call lists
'This truly is a case of regulatory overkill,' Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association (ATA), said in a statement. 'Unfortunately, the FCC ignored its obligations under the federal law and the Constitution to carefully balance the privacy interests of consumers with the First Amendment rights of legitimate telemarketers.
It amazes me that anyone could use the term "legitimate telemarketers" with a straight face. Telemarketers have the right to free speech, but I also have the right to *not listen*. If I go out of my way to register my name on such a list, then I have exercized that right.
I fully understand that the industry is going to take a hit on this one. The costs involved with operating under the new rules must be quite enormous. That said, every business has overhead. In this case, they have been spoiled by years of zero regulation which ended up encouraging "boiler rooms" run by bottom-feeders.
10:36 AM CST ::
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::: Tuesday, July 29 ::: |
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Yep: You can buy Win2k server, but pretend it's 2003?
This is nothing new. We've been buying Win2k licenses and installing NT4 for a few years now. This way the new stuff appears to be selling much faster than it really is.
The same is true for Win98 and Win95, but apparently not for WinXP. That is, you can buy Win98 and install Win95, but you can't buy WinXP and install Win98. This could change, however, when Win98 is no longer available in the channel.
1:32 PM CST ::
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::: Monday, July 28 ::: |
Sweet: Sex.com owner can sue VeriSign
Finally, domain names are property. Now that the court has formally recognized the obvious, the rest of us can breathe a little easier. All that remains to be seen is how much Verisign will end up owing.
10:51 AM CST ::
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::: Friday, July 25 ::: |
Not really: Election fraud risks attract wide notice
After reading the article that details how the Diebold system operates, I'm concerned that so many journalists are using the word "flaw" to describe the problem. This issue doesn't seem like a flaw as much as a designed behavior specifically implemented to allow vote tampering without affecting the audit trail. Even if you give Diebold the benefit of the doubt and assume that the machines used for real elections no longer have the back-door, I would think the fact that it was ever there in the first place would be enough to disqualify them from ever providing voting machines for US elections.
Unfortunately, I don't think many bureaucrats will look too closely at these results because of the sheer amount of work it took for them to decide to use the Diebold machines in the first place. Their opinion is likely to let the next administration earn their own battle scars, because they've done their time. Most will consider the system "good enough" when it is neither good nor enough to satisfy even the most basic auditing requirements.
9:49 AM CST ::
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Hmm: RIAA Hit List
I'm unsure for whom this list is being published. The people who use those aliases likely are already profoundly and deeply aware that they are being targeted by the RIAA. Anyone else wouldn't have a clue who uses "munkeyspanker21", so the list is of little value.
While it is possible that TechTV was trying to spread a little pro-RIAA FUD, it seems to me that they would run a very real risk of alienating their target audience. I really can't figure this one out.
9:37 AM CST ::
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::: Thursday, July 24 ::: |
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::: Wednesday, July 23 ::: |
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Oops: Cracking Windows passwords in seconds
This is pretty bad news, but not earth shattering. The attacker must already have admin access to your machine to grab the password hashes. Once they have that just about any machine on the network can be attacked. Sort of like someone stealing the super's keyring.
Everyone seems to be criticizing the developer for publishing his results before notifying Microsoft, but there's really nothing Microsoft could have done even if they were notified. This is not a patchable flaw as far as I can see. It cuts into the very core of Microsoft's security model on NT-based platforms. Any change to those rules would likely have devastating effect on compatiblity.
So it goes.
9:59 AM CST ::
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Interesting: LindowsOS 4.0 reviewed
I've always assumed that since they went with the Lindows name that the software itself would have to be crap. I mean why saddle your product with a copy-cat name unless that's all you have to trade on? Apparently, I was wrong.
9:55 AM CST ::
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::: Tuesday, July 22 ::: |
w00t: Daily Reads
I updated my links page today. There really weren't as many changes as one might expect. I suppose I need to look for some new stuff to read.
Any suggestions?
4:38 PM CST ::
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::: Monday, July 21 ::: |
Interesting: YouGuysAreStupid.com
Andy, Erik and John are walking from Chicago to San Francisco. They are detailing the journey on their website via photos and journal entries.
It sounds like fun to me, but I can't even imagine the preparation that would be required for such a trip.
4:53 PM CST ::
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::: Friday, July 18 ::: |
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Dumb: Service tunes 56Kbps modems up to 784Kbps
Let's be charitable and assume that QuikCAT has found some miraculous compression algorithm that can support their claims. Such an algorithm would require a fair amount of processing power to insure that the time consumed by compression and decompression didn't outweigh the uncompressed transfer time. Since their service works as a proxy, all your data goes to their servers first, gets compressed and then gets sent to your modem where your machine must then decompress the stream.
Consider for a moment the server power required to serve 500,000 subscribers. If 10% of those subscribers are online at any given time there would be 50,000 streams open. If 50% of those streams were downloading simultaneously you have 25,000 people trying to suck a bowling ball through a soda straw. In short, any gains from the compression would be instantly eaten by the proxy structure and the processing overhead at the server.
The only other possibility is that they have a big enough pool of ridiculously powerful servers to handle the load. This, of course, would raise the number of subscribers necessary to reach profitability. Which then leads to more servers and so on.
11:12 AM CST ::
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::: Thursday, July 17 ::: |
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RIP: AOL kills Netscape
Not surprising news really, but sad nonetheless. I think my opinions line up pretty close with those in the article. Yes, Mozilla rocks, but it took far too long to get to this point. It's sad to think what could have happened if the project hadn't been crippled by bad development decisions. (non-native widgets anyone?)
11:43 AM CST ::
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Indeed: A comedy of injustice
Regardless of whether I like Martha Stewart or not, I'm glad to see someone is finally standing up for her rights. Being a hard-nosed business woman does not revoke your right to freedom from persecution. And that's a Good Thing.
11:04 AM CST ::
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::: Tuesday, July 15 ::: |
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::: Monday, July 14 ::: |
Nice: SAproxy
SAProxy is an open source, freeware SpamAssassin POP3 proxy. I'm using it with Eudora, but it supports just about any POP3 client. My only concern at this point is that I haven't found any native support for updating the SpamAssassin signatures, but that's a small quibble.
2:01 PM CST ::
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::: Friday, July 11 ::: |
Sweet: WiFi Finder
Kensington has developed a simple WiFi detector that can sniff out 802.11b and 802.11g signals from up to 200 feet away. Their site doesn't list a price, but I searched a few of my vendor catalogs and it looks like the street price is somewhere around $22. Not too shabby.
[link courtesy of Gizmodo]
2:06 PM CST ::
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I was just reading Penny Arcade when I starting thinking about the names of coins. I knew that the word penny was derived from the English "pence" and the word cent comes from "percent" meaning 1/100. The quarter, much like the cent, is named for being 1/4 of a dollar and the word nickel came from the metal used to mint early versions of the coin.
The question then becomes how did we arrice at the word "dime" to represent a ten cent piece? Luckily the ever-faithful Google came to my rescue. Apparently early versions of the coin were called the "disme" (pronounced dime) which is a french word meaning "decimal". Once the word was adopted by english speakers the silent "s" was evenually dropped for ease of pronunciation.
Now you know and knowing is half the battle.
12:08 PM CST ::
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::: Thursday, July 10 ::: |
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Ugh: IE bugs keep coming
Even if I never use IE, I'd love to install this patch. The problem is that I can't. WindowsUpdate crashes on my machine and Microsoft won't provide another download mechanism. It really ticks me off when companies lay blame on the user when the user's hands are tied.
10:31 AM CST ::
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::: Wednesday, July 9 ::: |
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Sweet: New Memory That Doesn't Forget
MRAM sounds quite attractive. Six times faster and no need for a constant power source. What they don't mention, however, is the cost which is likely to be quite high initially to recoup R&D costs.
It would certainly be a big step toward an instant-on computer "appliance" if they can pull it off.
10:55 AM CST ::
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::: Tuesday, July 8 ::: |
Heh: NinjaGear
When memes collide, said d3dk0w with due pride, "I'm gonna shown off some l33t haxor skilz".
1:23 PM CST ::
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Sad: Adobe pares Mac support
I guess we can all see how deep Adobe's loyalty runs. To put it simply, Adobe wouldn't exist without Apple. All of Adobe's flagship products were specifically designed for the Mac and then, many years later, brought over to the Windows platform.
That said, I can certainly understand Adobe's point of view regarding Apple launching its own competing titles. It's looking more and more like Jobs wants to return to the Lisa days where Apple controls both the hardware and the software.
12:02 PM CST ::
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Hell yeah: Tuesday 8 July 2003
Bob Thompson echoes my sentiments regarding Intel motherboards. I'm going to save this link and pass it on any time someone asks me why I always buy Intel regardless of the price difference.
11:15 AM CST ::
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::: Monday, July 7 ::: |
Sad: Piracy vs. peer-to-peer
This interview would be almost funny if it weren't so obvious that the RIAA considers its customers to all be criminals. All their arguments about shoplifting and bank robbing fail to consider that all of those crimes remove the original owners ability to use (or sell) the stolens items. By their own argument, no one is "file swapping" because complete copies can be made without disturbing the original version.
Side stepping the moral and copyright angles for the moment, my opinion is this: anyone who would pay for a cd will not download the individual tracks, burn a cd, and print their own liner notes just to piss off the RIAA. If they wouldn't buy it in the first place, then there is no loss of sales involved. Case closed.
10:45 AM CST ::
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Uhm, no: Software gets new lease on life
Ok. I'll accept that there is a niche market where having someone else host your apps makes sense. I'll even go so far as to allow that this niche could include a few small to medium businesses.
What I still can't understand is how it would ever make sense to pay monthly payments *forever* rather than a one-time lump sum expense. The arguments which laud the "pay for what you use" plans fall a little flat when you consider that most companies could buy the software they are leasing many times over within the first few years of their contracts.
Maybe someone will explain it to me someday.
10:24 AM CST ::
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::: Thursday, July 3 ::: |
Interesting: As Seen On Screen
This site offers versions of clothing, jewelry and accessories patterned after those seen in movies or on tv. This (in)famous wallet will give you an idea of what's available. I'm also quite impressed with their currency selector. Not many sites would offer such convenience.
[thanks to jwz for the link]
2:24 PM CST ::
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Oops: Microsoft Word snares Tony Blair
This sort of thing is going to become more and more prevalent in coming years. In fact, one of the more interesting features of Microsoft's upcoming OS is automatic file versioning. Once the feature is activated you will be able to trace backward through multiple versions of a single file. Mostly I think this was just another way for Microsoft to drive the market toward bigger hard drives, but it could find its way into the courts during cases like this one.
11:06 AM CST ::
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Yep: HP Unveils Under-$40 Ink-Jet
I've said it before and I'll say it again... there's really no reason that HP et al need to charge for printer hardware at all. They have effectively eliminated mass-market third-party cartridges for both ink-jet and laser printers. The initial hardware price just pays some of the shipping at this point.
[thanks to Gizmodo for the link]
10:38 AM CST ::
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::: Tuesday, July 1 ::: |
Whoa: Out of control
Bill thinks the FCC made a mistake. I can't say I disagree. I love the byline: "Clinton was President of the United States, 1993-2001".
Heh.
4:06 PM CST ::
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dinoneil[at]newdream[dot]net
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