Contents

1. Cyber Attacks On US Military Jump Sharply In 2009
2. RFID Fingerprints To Fight Tag Cloning
3. Try Out Chrome OS In a Virtual Machine
4. Anti-Smoking Vaccine Is Nearing the Market
5. iPhone Owners Demand To See Apple Source Code
6. Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC
7. Microsoft’s Lack of Nightly Builds For IE
8. Some Claim Android App Store Worse Than iPhone’s
9. Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked
10. Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good For Decades To Come
11. Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops
12. Xbox Live Class Action Being Investigated
13. Patent Issued For Podcasting
14. Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Firefox Extensions
15. Second Life To Remove Free Content From Web Search

Garbage - by kestasjk (Score: 3) Thread

“cyber operators”.. “Information Warfare Militia”.. What? 
Try actually reading the linked PDF and see if you can take it seriously. All this stuff about increased “cyber attack incidences” and I can find absolutely nothing explicitly linking any incident with the Chinese government or anything even making explicit what a “cyber attack incident” is. (Also “cyber warfare” is a pretty small part of the report itself; the report isn’t about “cyber-warfare”, but US-China relations.)

I think that quote just about sums it up. I am stunned that people here on slashdot are taking this seriously, this is the sort of thing I’d expect to see on Fox News.

Re:Garbage - by Hurricane78 (Score: 2) Thread

What’s wrong with that?

Oooohhh… I seee… Well, there’s a “app“ for that! :D

One obvious question … - by Daniel Dvorkin (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

Are there actually that many more attacks, or are they just detecting more of them? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in years past, a lot of military computers have been pwned without anyone knowing it happened … especially given the DoD’s ongoing love affair with Windows.

define “attack” - by zkrige (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I have linux boxes all over the place and there are literally thousands of ssh/sft/etc attempts on each box each day. None of them are successful though. Can I claim that my boxes have more attacks than the US Military?

targeted attacks? - by sopssa (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

What would be interesting to know is that if these are targeted attacks specifically against US military networks, or just random scanning for vulnerabilities by every day botnets? I think it’s the later case, because if they were targeted attacks they would be stupid not to hide their origins and you wouldn’t know they are from china or similar country. Or maybe they’re just playing with people’s image of bad china and north korea.

And since when North Korean’s have had internet?

Solving the wrong problem - by lhunath (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

RFID tags are not security devices, they are hyped barcodes. They do not provide any authentication.

If you’re worrying about your RFID tags being cloned for a malicious purpose, you are using them for the wrong thing.

Re:What’s the point? - by cortesoft (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Crypto wouldn’t work… the cloner doesn’t have to break the encryption to copy the chip.

Imagine in this way… you have an encrypted hard drive, and someone wants to pass off their hard drive as yours. They don’t have to break the encryption… they can copy the drive byte for byte, and hand it to the person who if verifying that is the original. The person checking the data is the one who does the decrypting.

Does this say the same at 55-70+ mph or just at - by Joe The Dragon (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Does this say the same at 55-70+ mph or just at much lower walking speeds?

Potentiometer - by White Flame (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

So if I have a pot wired across the power receiver, I can twiddle it until it matches. If people know the factors being sampled, they can adjust them.

Re:Security enhancement at best - by cortesoft (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

I don’t know if it will be that easy. These fingerprints seem to be based on the fact that all RFID chips have flaws, and they are all flawed in different ways… including the device that is trying to act as the clone of the RFID. What this means is that this clone RFID has to be able to mimic EXACTLY the flaws of the real thing without giving itself away by its OWN flaws. Without knowing more details about the flaws they are trying to measure, it is hard to say whether that would be possible. If the flaws are easily mimicked in the sense that you can create a clone whose own defects are not detected because they are all superseded by the original’s flaws, it may work. If they vary so much that every clone will have some flaw that is severe enough to shine through, it would be impossible.

Fast download - by R.Mo_Robert (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’m on dial-up, you insensitive clod!

Shameless Plug - by Jrabbit05 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Torrent and Info: http://pastie.org/706872 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/457451/ide.vmdk.torrent Because making an account on some shady website that’s exploiting the situation seems wrong.

Re:Counterpoint - by postbigbang (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Tho I’ll agree about Enderle and O’Gara, there’s not much to ChromeOS at all. Apps? Look to the web.

I already have browsers coming out my ears. I like doing some of my own processing on the fat multicores in my notebook.

Google still hasn’t shown a real 1) educational 2) business case 3) entertainment or 4) porn case for ChromeOS. Any of those could drive it. Right now, it’s just a lightweight ROM-able appliance and a Microsoft/MacOS/Linux killer looking for a spot marked X.

This is centrist computing at best, and a goofy attempt at targeting the bloat in all of the aforementioend operating systems. Snooze.

Re:Counterpoint - by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
While their initial plans don’t mention it much, I suspect that(if they can get a decent initial launch as a basic consumer netbook OS), ChromeOS could be absolutely killer across a fair swath of the small business market. 
 
Here’s why: 
 
In medium business to enterprise IT, there are a bunch of really useful abilities that are taken for granted. They cost a fair amount of initial effort and money; but once you achieve them, you are get the benefits on all client machines. Those are, centralized storage of files and configurations and centralized application of updates and policies. If some cube-dweller’s computer dies, IT can shove another one at him, he logs in, and all his files and settings are right there again. Easy, standard. 
 
On the small business side, they are lucky if they have real backups to recover from, never mind being able to treat client machines are more or less interchangeable, consumable parts. 
 
Imagine, though, tying ChromeOS’ interesting single sign in setup to Google Apps for business(with an interface for managing the ChromeOS preferences tied to your employee logins added to the ones used for parceling out file access and email accounts)… You’d get idiot-proof access to the same client-independent features, and automatic backups, and single sign on stuff that the big guys have, on cheap, common hardware, without any need for much local IT expertise. 
 
Obviously, this would not be trivial, nor would it necessarily be possible immediately. Google would likely have to either partner with or duplicate and exterminate a number of business software outfits to expand their offerings sufficiently for this to be attractive. Worst comes to worst, they could use Native Client to bring particularly stubborn blobs onto the web. Also, since anything you can get on ChromeOS you could also get in your browser on a full machine, there would be nothing preventing businesses from using a mixture of chrome and full computers.

Re:Torrent? - by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Torrents are actually pretty inefficient(I don’t mean to knock the design of the protocol; but making heavy use of last-mile upload capacity, which is some of the shittiest and most expensive pipe on the whole network, cannot be made as efficient as a conventional client/server setup). Further, they tend to promote the energy-inefficient situation of having large numbers of small servers, all bandwidth starved, spending hours nearly idling(but not able to sleep or shut down) as they wait for the bits to trickle in. 
 
They do, though, have a great advantage, which is why we bother: In absence of a functional micropayment system, bittorrent is pretty much the best way of allowing the bandwidth costs of distributing something to be spread across all parties who are interested in receiving it. If it were possible to transact in 1cent increments, everyone would almost certainly be better off if the distributor just dumped it on Amazon EC2 or some other big hosting service and let interested parties pay the per-megabyte download costs directly(saving themselves the upload bandwidth and power costs). Since that isn’t really viable(particularly, though not exclusively, if what is being distributed isn’t wholly legal), bittorrent’s easy sharing of hosting duties among downloaders is the next best thing.

Ibogaine - by casings (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The only reason why this is necessary is because a compound that already exists is illegal and not profitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine

Side-effects - by Reason58 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Unfortunately, this new vaccine is highly addictive. Not to worry though, they are hard at work on a cure for vaccine addiction. It is passed into the bloodstream through the lungs…

Re:Unfortunately… - by betterunixthanunix (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This has me worrying about “vaccines” for other drugs. In a century, maybe nobody in the USA will be able to relax with $drug_of_choice, because of mandatory “vaccination” against the effects of any psychoactives.

So, this new vaccine… - by camperdave (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
So, this new vaccine… Does it come in a smokable version?

Re:“Vaccine” - by RManning (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

From TFA…

So it effects the immune system to recognize some particular foreign matter and deal with it? That sounds like a vaccine to me.

1.1.1 brick not purposeful - by NetShadow (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I know it’s cool to hate Apple these days, but seriously, get the facts first…

The people who had 1.1.1 phones “bricked” were people who had unlocked their phones with the original (buggy) version of AnySIM that subtly corrupted the seczone where phone locks and IMEI were stored. It was corrupted in such a way that it wasn’t obvious until the baseband was upgraded to the next version (which occurred in 1.1.1) where things totally stopped working.

Apple never deliberately tried to break anyone with an unlock, it just so happens that the unlockers had damaged their seczones and prevented the update from being applied cleanly.

Wasted effort in the wrong place. - by aristotle-dude (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Why don’t they instead petition the FCC to force all carriers to only sell unlocked phones in the US?

Why not force the carriers to offer official unlocks for all currently locked phones?

I’ve been making some humble efforts on behalf of my fellow Canadians with Fido and the CRTC.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=817293

I was able to get as far as getting a phone call from the office of the president of my carrier Fido. If enough people did the same with their carriers and their country’s regulatory body, we might actually get somewhere.

Re:Wasted effort in the wrong place. - by kklein (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Yes. This is not really Apple’s fault. Jobs famously called a meeting of wireless execs who were trying to “sell” him, “orifices.” The way that he got things pushed through with the iPhone was by offering an exclusive. If it became illegal to have exclusives, this would be a boon to Apple, because then they could get out from under AT & T and sell to anyone on any carrier. It would be a boon to every handset manufacturer.

The issue here is not Apple or the iPhone or even AT & T; it’s the US’s ridiculous lack of regulations on this market (same thing in Japan, where I live, though). The carriers need to get the hell out of the handset market and just do their damned orifice jobs. They want to be retailers, but they are very obviously utility companies. This and net neutrality are basically the same thing: Utility companies aspiring to be retailers or content companies. They need to be smacked down as the knuckle-draggers they are.

Re:Shooting the moon or their foot - by nametaken (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m not sure it’d be totally irrelevant. If you’d go so far as to brick my phone as an “f-you” to protect your partners network exclusivity, I’d guess that maybe that’s an argument for unfair collusion of the antitrust sort? I am not a lawyer, of course.

careful what you wish for - by mu51c10rd (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

That pony included with your iPhone will only eat iFood, use iWater, and can only be housed in iStable. Unfortunately, all of which must be purchased from Apple as well.

Re:A picture from LHC - by Mike Van Pelt (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Ha ha, funny guy.

They’ve set up some webcams so you can watch what’s going on at the LHC for yourself.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Hopefully they’re more careful - by Nautical Insanity (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

this time around. I have a physics prof who’s part of the project. Part of our lecture on superconductivity was dedicated to the catastrophic malfunction. There’s nothing that conveys the epic nature of the failure like technical language.

According to my professor, they were in too much of a rush to get the thing started they didn’t fully test the whole thing. One of the superconducting junctions quenched (transitioned from superconductive to non-superconductive states due to the 7-8 Tesla magnetic field), necessitating the dispersal of IIRC 1500 A of current. This turned insulating copper into plasma which breached the chamber wall and caused the explosive vaporization of 2 tons of liquid helium into the accelerating chamber.

Long story short, it’s a very large, complicated, and expensive machine. They’d better sure everything works this time.

Real-time Updates - by SMQ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
http://twitter.com/CERN

‘Pew Pew’ noises uttered by people with PHDs - by Kenja (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Come on, you know someone did it…

Remember, this is only ONE hurdle to clear… - by mmell (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
They still have many engineering challenges to complete before the LHC can start looking for the Higgs Boson.

Assuming it exists. After all, this is an experiment designed to determine the accurace of a theory, not to confirm it.

Of course, I believe they’ll find it. My wife goes to ‘mass’ every weekend; I’m assuming that’s where Higgs particles come from? I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t gone. You could describe me as ‘massless’. :)

This story is bookmarked - by Osrin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Filed under “weirdest story ever to appear on /.”

Next week we can discuss the outrage that stems from Microsoft’s refusal to offer free back massages on the New York subway.

Coming up next - by Sowbug (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Can bees think? A new study indicates that no, they cannot.

More Microsoft Bashing - by maxrate (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Why is the finger always at Microsoft? I vote we embargo the use of the word Microsoft on Slashdot, say, for a month. Usually any Microsoft related post is biased and ill-spirited - getting very old. There are countless software vendors that do not release nightly builds. As much as I adore Slashdot, all the MS haters on here often make me feel as if I’m associating myself with a ‘new low’ of computer users (sometimes). Kinda like finding yourself in the company of a bunch of racists. It’s very fashionable on \. to hate Microsoft. Don’t like their stuff?…simply use something else and STFU. I do agree with the article’s opinion of saying the update process Microsoft uses is broken - I think Microsoft can do better.

Who is Many? - by clinko (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

”Many wonder why Microsoft doesn’t offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer.”

Whoever “Many” is, they seem to always be interviewed by Ars and FoxNews.

Normal - by bigstrat2003 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
WTF? Most companies don’t release nightly builds of their software. Why on earth are we singling out Microsoft, and only one of their products at that? Infrequent releases are the norm, not the exception, and while you may argue that it should change, it’s ludicrous to single out one program among thousands for following the standard practice.

It’s not their core business - by CharlyFoxtrot (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

This guy says it best : “So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple continues to maltreat them. […] Can anything break this cycle? No device I’ve seen so far could. Palm and RIM haven’t a hope. The only credible contender is Android. But Android is an orphan; Google doesn’t really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search.”

Re:Why I don’t buy much from the Android Market - by hax4bux (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

http://andappstore.com/

Droid Owner - by explosivejared (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
I just recently converted to android. Maybe I’m just late to the game, and we’re on the tail end of this exodus now. My first impression, having been on the platform for a week, is that there has been almost no development, especially in making games, for android that is anywhere comparable to the iphone. I would posit that this “exodus” is made up. The market is still nowhere near as developed as the app store. Any discussion about a comparison of the two models is premature at best.

Re:Droid Owner - by blackmonday (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
Also, Android phones don’t (yet) have dedicated graphics chips, AFAIK. I just got the Samsung Moment, and winced when I ran the included Bejeweled demo. It’s one of my favorite games on iPhone, but it’s a total joke on Android. You won’t find AAA titles on Android, because they can’t be run. Don’t expect Trench Run or Tiger Woods on the Android or Palm Pre, because it’s not a possibility at this moment.  
 
Actually, it’s worse for the Pre, because it actually has the same CPU and Graphics hardware as the 3GS, yet the hardware currently does nothing. There’s currently no way for a game dev to access it. Lame.

Re:Droid Owner - by dagamer34 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Ditto. Even the crappier looking iPhone apps are FAR more pleasing to the eye than some of the best Android apps because there’s a standardized UI that just about every iPhone app must use (creating your own UI for iPhone apps is often discouraged in the iPhone developer docs unless it’s a game).

My heart goes out to those researchers. - by inhuman_4 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I feel really bad for these researchers.

I have published only a few papers and would be mortified if my emails got released to the public. I am constantly joking around with other lab denizens about fudging stuff, and removing data that doesn’t fit the expectations. The opportunity for out of context quotations is scary to contemplate. Not to mention all of the politically incorrect jokes about such-and-such a graph’s sexual orientation.

If one of these guys said anything like that over the years of emails in this dump, they are in some deep shit for nothing. Image someone going through all of the comments for all of the code you have ever written just looking for any tiny detail to prove you’re a hack.

“just added one to this variable now it works” = screwed. 
“need to go back and fix this” = screwed. 
“not sure why this works but it does” = screwed. 
“Bob is an idiot, I am just going to comment out his code” = screwed.

Like Cardinal Richelieu said: 
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”

Right or wrong, these guys are gonna get the shaft.

Another good writeup - by Eukariote (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Another good writeup on the leaked emails can be found here. Summary: manipulation of evidence, private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, suppression of evidence, fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists, attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period , and communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.

The shame of it - by idontgno (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

isn’t that these files and this correspondence got hacked.

The shame of it is that hacking was necessary at all.

Transparency, People. We’re debating public policy and making decisions for the benefit of all Mankind. Credibility is only hindered by opacity and closed data.

0880476729.txt is interesting: - by inviolet (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

[…header information omitted…] 
Subject: Re: ATTENTION. Invitation to influence Kyoto. 
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 11:52:09 -0700 (MST)

Dear Eleven,

I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get 
others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of 
this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the 
IPCC “view” when you say that “the latest IPCC assessment makes a 
convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions.” In contrast 
to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 
review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting 
arguments in support of both “immediate control” and the spectrum of more 
cost-effective options. It is not IPCC’s role to make “convincing cases” 
for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers 
would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the 
emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your 
statement.

This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a 
dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is 
apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, 
balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not 
be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In 
issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their 
personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others 
when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their 
scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.

[…]

secrecy and data hiding - by zerosomething (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The primary issue is that most climate science has not truly been scrutinize and reviewed. I’ve been reading the files and it’s very damming. It’s almost as bad as cold fusion. For example. In note 1075403821.txt Timo Hmeranta states.

One other thing about the CC paper - just found another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

So they are going to hide behind Intelectual Property Rights to keep their data from being reviewed!. Holy Fucking Shit! How can science do that and still remain respectable?

Re:What about the Foam? - by georgewilliamherbert (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

“Fogbank”, widely presumed to be a heavy-metal doped aerogel material.

We can manufacture it again. There was a gap - we couldn’t for a while, but it’s back in production.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FOGBANK

Man… - by Monkeedude1212 (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Can you imagine what the world was like 100 years ago? Where wars were fought on foot and were mostly civil wars, or simple trade disputes? Where mutually assured destruction and worrying how long your nukes will last were never present.

Or go back even further, like 500 years, where the world was a bold new place worth exploring, and if a war were to be fought, it’d be because you want to rescue the pope, or payback for a political insult, or because you were bored…

Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. The internet is way over-rated.

“Guarantee their Destructiveness” - by natehoy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Does that mean nukes will now have a new label on them?

“Best if used to initiate Global Armageddon by December 12, 2054”

Not atypical - by Overzeetop (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Many programs which require significant development, and then get shelved into “production” with no push to advance or modernize fall prey to this. NASA maned spaceflight vehicles is a prime example.

If you only need to do research and development once every 25-50 years you end up starting nearly from scratch every time you decide to upgrade. Now, I’m not advocating some kind of special nuclear bomb advancement program. Still, by the time somebody wants to “replace” these, there will be nobody left who actually worked on them tom begin with. Humans are particularly bad at passing this kind of knowledge over extended time gaps.

Re:Not atypical - by jpmorgan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Yes, as unpolitically correct as it may be, an active nuclear weapons program might be necessary. Complete disarmament is all well and good, and a slow loss of weapons and skills to age could be one way to accomplish that. But complete disarmament isn’t worthwhile without permanent disarmament also, and I don’t see how that’s possible. The knowledge and technology exists, and as the general level of technology in this world increases it will only become easier to build nuclear weapons. Without permanent disarmament (which would be impossible without some form of world government), you have to accept one of these possibilities: 
1. A hostile power is nuclear armed and you are not. 
2. You are now racing a hostile power to rearm yourself… except they have a headstart, since you only found out they’ve been building weapons after their program has progressed considerably. And that in turn gives them an incentive to use their weapons before you finish yours… 
3. Abandon disarmament and proactively maintain a deterrence force.

Look, the technology to build nuclear weapons is never going to go away. Until we find a technology to neuter these devices without playing deterrence/MAD games, then a continued nuclear weapons program is essential. Otherwise we are locked in a cycle of decay, and panicked rebuilding. I’d rather things be as boring as possible, even if that means the occasional underground bang.

Question the source - by greyhueofdoubt (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Another /. story brought this to my attention and I did some digging. It turns out that the entire tech-blog-sphere is basing their articles on a ‘study’ done by Squaretrade, a company that sells extended warranties for computers and phones. I won’t get into the ethics of selling warranties for brand-new computers that already carry OEM warranties.

The problem is that Squaretrade is in direct competition with Apple’s Applecare. A few quick searches on their website shows that their plans cost more than applecare and that they lack some of the features of applecare (phone support, apple store support, ups dropoff service, etc).

So my advice is to take that bar graph with a grain of salt.

-b

Re:Jive with anyone else’s experience. - by King_TJ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not sure what type of I.T. support you do, but could your experiences be a bit limited because you work in corporate I.T. where only certain brands and models were purchased in any quantity?

I’ve done quite a bit of on-site service for people, and my experiences line up fairly accurately with some of this. I definitely see a *lot* of HP notebook failures out there. Dell always seemed to me like they build “hit and miss” products. It’s a crap-shoot with them, essentially. They’ve produced some of the most durable and reliable laptops out there, and turned around and produced some total duds that practically ALL had failures in a 2 year time-frame. You can’t really make blanket statements about Dell because depending on when you analyze the data, they’re going to look really good, somewhere right in the middle, or really bad.

I used to like Toshiba products, but I’ve come to realize that they have a pretty high long-term failure rate. Satellites, especially, seem to suffer from a large number of motherboard issues. (Ever run across one that lets you power it on but powers right back off after 2 seconds or so? Usually a bad motherboard, and I run into it pretty often.) A buddy of mine had a Toshiba Qosmio (high-end media centric model) that died like that just out of the factory warranty period. Luckily, Toshiba had a “silent recall” on that one, which we found out about online. He was able to call in, demand they repair it under said recall, and get it fixed free — but only after getting past a 1st. level tech. on the phone who wanted to charge him for the repair and denied knowledge of any recall…

I haven’t had real good experiences with Sony laptops either, all in all. It seems like they build really attractive and sleek machines, but they break fairly easily.

I was a bit surprised that Lenovo didn’t rate better. I know their quality has gone downhill from back when IBM owned the Thinkpad line (and they weren’t assembled in China). but they still seem to take a lot of design cues from the IBM days, and as a result, seem fairly well-built. They tend to have fewer “bells and whistles” than some models too, so less stuff to go wrong.

And Apple? I have a lot of experience with their notebooks. They do need warranty service occasionally. The idea that “they practically never break!” is kind of a myth. I mean, they do use the same hard drives and displays as everyone else … But I’ve had better than average results getting an Apple notebook serviced by Apple while under warranty, and I think more people buy the AppleCare warranties on them up-front. If you have an issue and Apple overnights you a return mailer box to put it in, fixes it in 1 day, and overnights it back, how annoyed are you going to be about the problem vs. the guy with some other laptop that has to wait WEEKS for a repair? That’s what helps Apple keep in the lead with “customer satisfaction”, even if they don’t have the absolutely least likely to break systems.

Re:Jive with anyone else’s experience. - by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

According to consumer reports, the opposite has been true for a long time. Dell used to have terrible rates, and as of the last study, was doing poorly for desktops, but near the top for laptops. Apple consistently scores the highest for laptop reliability among all companies.

Re:What “legendary reliability of Macs”? - by Anonymusing (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

As someone who professionally provided tech support for Macs for more than 15 years, I have to disagree with you. I do think that when Macs have problems, they have BIG problems, but overall they have proven (to me anyway) that they are generally much more reliable than systems made by Windows PC vendors.

As for this SquareTrade article, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple fell a few points behind other manufacturers, though I cannot possibly imagine why someone would buy a new Mac and get a SquareTrade warranty instead of Apple’s excellent 3-year warranty. Makes me wonder if the Macs covered by SquareTrade are largely used? You can’t buy them at Target.

I also find it very odd that this year’s SquareTrade report is almost entirely the reverse of last year’s, when HP came out on top. Also, Lenovo is calling shenanigans on this year’s data.

Re:What “legendary reliability of Macs”? - by SunnyDaze (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
And the reason for the MagSafe adapters is because in the old Mac books the Weak Power plugs were breaking off when someone hit them requiring a full main board replacement :D

re: features being revoked - by A.Bettik (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
It’s worth noting that the features that were revoked *ARE* connected to the Live service. You need a Live connection to install a game to the hard drive, to use the media extender, or to check your Netflix queue. If you don’t believe me, please unplug your xbox from your network and try to use these features. They haven’t removed any functionality from your console that you had when your ethernet cable was unplugged. Whether or not those features should be gated on being connected to Xbox Live is a totally different discussion. However, after the ‘loss of these unrelated features’ argument has been dissolved, the overall case is sincerely weakened. Corrupted save games are a valid concern, as are unrefunded subscriptions (though it’s possible that TOU handle the latter with ease).

Piracy AND Cheating - by Xocet_00 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
There seems to be an overwhelming consensus here that Microsoft is trying to protect its interests by preventing piracy. This is, of course, true. However, someone above mentioned a mother buying a PS3 instead of an XBox 360 because she was concerned about the banning, etc. The argument then is that Microsoft loses revenue by scarying people away, while all the banned people continue to refuse to buy games. In other words, they see Microsoft taking a net loss on this. 
 
However, aside from preventing piracy, Microsoft is trying to prevent cheating. People are throwing around a number like 99% of people are doing this to pirate games. However in my experience there are as many people who mod in order to cheat in multiplayer games as there are people who do it specifically to pirate. I’m sure that the cheaters ALSO pirate games, but for a large number of people it is not their primary goal. 
 
Lots of gamers will be turned of XBox Live and buying 360 games in general if they encounter a large number of cheaters while playing online. I’ve encountered more than my fair share. Microsoft gains from protecting legitimate customers from cheaters, keeping those customers playing and buying new games (and XBL subscriptions).

Not just banned from XBox Live… - by Loibisch (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I’ve been reading the argument that people have just been banned from XBL, because modifying your console somehow violates the TOS of XBL.

However, this time the ban does not just kick you off online multiplayer, it also disables functionality to install games on the included HDD! Games already installed on that HDD will not be accessible anymore. Also, any savegame you continue playing with on the banned console will get tagged with the result that you can’t copy it to any other (banned or unbanned) consoles anymore.

Since a lot of people bought the Xbox360 with the ability to install games on the internal HDD right out of the box it can be argued that MS impaired the users’ hardware in some way. 
Also: it is rumored that it is possible for MS to band your console through future (mandatory) updates on game discs, even if you never played online. The technical capabilites are there, but if they ever start doing that their XBL-TOS-argument will be seriously flawed.

One might want to think twice… - by doug141 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

before signing a form admitting one’s xbox was modded in the first place.

Terms of use seem pretty clear - by sfbiker (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

The terms of use seem pretty clear:

So what part of that seems unclear enough that it warrants a lawsuit? If you don’t agree with terms of use, don’t sign up for the service then whine when they catch you violating the terms of service and terminate your account.

Claim 1, not that anyone will read it - by sir_eccles (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: 
- providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; 
- receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; 
- automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and 
- providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.

Heinlein’s View - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

From The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein (1956): 
      There wasn’t anything really new in it; it was just the way that I put it together. The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.

Pre-programmed episodic media - by flaming error (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Well, starting in 1977 users who wanted to watch a pre-programmed episodic audio/video stream called “Inside the NFL” could subscribe to the cable TV HBO/Showtime channel, and after subscribing would continue to automatically receive new episodes. Does that count?

Wikipedia - by Minupla (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Wikipedia has a whole section of prior art in their history section of the podcasting article here

“Method” patents - by l2718 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The patent should be invalidated because business methods should not be patentable. There’s plenty of prior art for the individual pieces (making files available for download to subscribers is as old as the BBS, and email notifications when new files are available are not newer), but the patentee will claim “we are the first to put all these ideas together”. Of course what they did would have been obvious to anyone trying to solve the problem, but even that’s not the point. The real issue is with what they are trying to patent. Would the PTO (or the CFFC) accept a patent on the same business method, except that users send requests on postcards, the audio will be burned to CDs and mailed by post, and the subscription lists will be maintained in paper folders? If not, then the PTO should explain why sending files by post is not patentable, but sending them by internet is.

It’s about trust - by TheCoders (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

The problem is not necessarily with Firefox’s security model - Firefox never claimed that plugins were secure. The problem is with perception. Users need to be aware that installing a plugin is tantamount to installing an application. You wouldn’t willy-nilly install any old software on your computer. (Well, some people would, but hopefully not too many who frequent Slashdot.) You should take the same caution when installing a plugin.

The problem is that there is a perception that since Firefox is trusted then its plugins should be trusted. Especially those that are listed in Firefox’s official plugin repository. Maybe some more verification is necessary before admitting these plugins, and definitely some more user education is required.

Re:It’s about trust - by jadin (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I’m in the ‘supposed to know crowd’ and I had this misconception for a long time. If I failed so quickly in this aspect, what hope is there for “ma and pa” and the rest of the fam’? Which makes the question simply -

What is easier to fix? Firefox’s security model or most of the world’s perception?

Re:Lobo? - by owlstead (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

I’m very much in favor of that. I would even like to help building a Java based browser (e.g. with a OSGi based plug-in system). But the thing is that these extensions use all kinds of technologies, but not C/C++ (as far as I could see). So if the browser was managed code you would have the same issues. Managed code helps against many bugs, but not against all.

Damned Activex Controls! - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

This is why Microsoft should turn off Activex Controls altogether…oh wait…

Re:I have to say, I am depressed… - by farlukar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I will have to go back to using linx now because I trust nothing else…

If you’re that paranoid — use a virtual machine to browse the web and rollback to a trusted, clean snapshot a few times a day.

Good riddance, SL - by (arg!)Styopa (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

SL was neither the best nor the brightest of the various shells that tried to offer a ‘new’ way of browsing and providing web content. I can think of at least 4 off the top of my head, and that was 6+ years ago. It was essentially nothing more than a graphical shell for a MUD, an ancient concept in Internet years. (TiA: I was a beta for ViOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vios in 1999, so SL in 2003 was utterly not impressive.)

In fact, it was one of the slowest, kludgiest ones I ever had the misfortune to try. (In truth, that probably had a lot to do with the unprecedented amount of access the users had to customize their experience and manipulate the world in non-trivial ways.)

Probably inspired by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, it was an attractive concept … only until you analyzed it rigorously. Let’s see, I can type “Deutsche bank berlin customer services” in a browser, wait 0.246 seconds for the links to pop up, and click one to get to their site. OR, in the ‘internet as virtual world’ paradigm, I could log in to my avatar, and go ‘flying’ at Mach 15 to wherever DB Berlin’s virtual hq was (which I’d probably have to look up), “enter” it, and then navigate in some Euclidean way to the customer service ‘office’. Lot more fun, sure, not so efficient (not to mention orders of magnitude more hardware and bandwidth required). I can turn on “NPR’s Science Friday” or d/l from the web to listen at FM-radio quality…or I could go into SL (login), travel to the SL place, and then watch my screen flicker at 15 fps while the giant penis-avatar to my left keeps lagging into the zebra-chick hovering over the stage, all the while the audio stutters and drops all over the place. Improvement?

It took all the efficiencies of the internet, and rendered them BACK into their real-world constraints of geography and linearity - being able to fly really fast doesn’t really help that. Putting the internet in a real-world context doesn’t improve efficiency of use nor quality of results, so what good is it? Who ever thought that was actually, a good idea? As far as I can tell, only the promoters.

Second Life somehow managed to gather a tiny bit more focus and attention (probably because it was free for users), making it the “go-to” place for all the people WHO DIDN’T REALLY UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thus, some businesses followed out of simple cash-sniffing self-interest. Some other sorts of organizations showed up - as the BBC article says, you could hardly open a newspaper Technology section or computer magazine without some reference to SL for a couple of years there.

Couple all this failure with the Linden Labs’ arbitrariness and hypocrisy*, I was astonished then that people (and especially businesses) bought into it for so long.

* and I do mean hypocrisy; The only value I thought it MIGHT have was that I thought the whole thing MIGHT be an interesting social experiment of the concepts of the Commmons, broadened to numbers of people undreamed-of by late-90’s standards. The ability to customize the code, plus what was a strict hands-off policy by the Lindens, seemed like it might be a cauldron for a working-through of the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/). Sadly, when actually confronted with a situation that turned somewhat internet-ugly, they folded to their interventionist sensibilities to make sure everyone ‘played nice’. (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html)

People using Second Life to experience the internet always seemed to me like chimps futilely trying to use their termite sticks to dial a phone…it *might* work, clumsily, but conceptually you’re light-years away from really ‘getting it’.

Business motives from a business? outrageous - by DanielRavenNest (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Just before the announcement of listing fees, there were 1.15 million items listed on http://www.xstreetsl.com/ , their web commerce site. Many of them were just color variations of the same item, or free items. By not having a listing fee previously, people had no incentive to be efficient in what they put there, in fact they had incentive to spam the listings with as many items as possible to be seen (just like email spam occurs because sending emails is essentially free).

So this move will force people to be somewhat efficient in what they put there. Note that the fee is L$10 per month, which equates to about a postage stamp for a year’s worth of listing. Big surprise that people whine about the changes in a social media space (not). They were whining before the changes that it was cluttered with too many listings.

For those who say it’s not popular, they have 750,000 active accounts (people who log in more than once a month), which is probably more than the active accounts here at Slashdot. It does not appeal to everyone, but then *nothing* appeals to everyone. It does, however fit with some of the tropes at Slashdot, the people who like to make their own stuff, and mess around with open source. The viewer code for Second Life (the client software you run on your PC) has been open-sourced for a while now, and around 40% of players are using alternate viewers (especially the one that has enabled “breast physics” *heh*).

Disclosure: I’m a top 20 currency trader in SL and derive a moderate monthly income from that and other in-game activities. I’m also a developer for Blue Mars, a new virtual world that’s in early beta (much better graphics, using the Cryengine2 graphics engine from the Crysis games), so I’m agnostic about virtual worlds if they are good ones.

Hanlon’s Razor - by Moraelin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Or we could just apply Hanlon’s Razor: Never ascribe to mallice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

While some collusion _is_ possible there, it could also be that they just listened to the wrong crowd. That’s also a “welcome to reality” kind of thing. A vocal minority can often seem like they’re the majority, or at least representative enough for a majority of players. It’s not just a Second Life or selling goods issue, it’s that a tiny number of vocal people can generate more posts and whole circle-jerk treads, than the vast majority… who’s too busy playing the game or coding flying penises for Second Life and doesn’t bother much with posting.

Just look at almost any gaming board and you can see the same phenomenon: a minority of fanboys or malcontents can generate more posts than everyone else combined. And if left to their own devices, can actually gang up on anyone saying otherwise and try to drive them off. It can be about off-line single player games too (about half a dozen fanboys were enough to insult anyone who had a problem with Morrowind, back when that launched), online games (just read the Stalker boards in COV and you’d think that (A) 99% of the players want only PvP, and (B) everyone agrees that Stalkers should be able to one-shot any other class, including tanks), etc.

And occasionally you see some game screwing up spectacularly, because they listened to the wrong crowd. Without any anti-communist ideology being involved at all. E.g., it seems Vanguard owes half its screw ups to listening too much to the gang that, basically, went, “I’ve played WoW for 2 years straight and raided every night, and then discovered that everything about it sucks and only an idiot kiddie would like it.” If you figured out by now that whoever makes such a claim, just called himself an idiot kiddie, and that only an even bigger idiot would take design advice from a self-confessed idiot… well, then you’d be smarter and more perceptive than some designers ;)

Where is second life big? - by santax (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
For real, here in the Netherlands media hyped about 2nd life about 3, 4 years ago. Some banks even bought some land etc. But nowadays, I personally don’t know anyone using it. So where is second life big? This is not meant as a flame or anything, I am just curious. 1000 protests doesn’t seem like a lot. Check the protests on Forza 3 missing custom lobby or the Modern Warfare missing custom servers… That’s a bit more than 1000…

Re:Where is second life big? - by Blakey Rat (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Second Life has always been a mediocre-to-awful virtual reality primarily filled with furry perverts.

What happened is about 3 years ago, they hired the BEST PR TEAM EVER. They got companies and even some governments to set up shop in there, thinking it was the next big thing. They got stories in the news almost every day— if you visited this site, you probably remember how often it came up here. It was remarkable, when you consider what product they were actually selling!

Either people actually tried Second Life and realized the marketing was all lies, or their awesome marketing team is gone. For whatever the reason, in the last year or so all the hype has virtually disappeared, and now Second Life is back to being a mediocre-to-awful virtual reality primarily filled with furry perverts again.

Signal to Noise ratio over time