that might have been just shire of a good pun

What good is using a stolen twitter handle?

it's a bit like a two character slashdot nick... my... precious...

I thought classified wasn't an excuse for lying to or withholding information from congress?

I thought lying to congress was a felony or something? Maybe that's why they're avoiding the L-word?

They have vowed to safeguard funding for the program to keep it on track.

"Don't worry, even if you don't deliver what we asked for, get way behind schedule, and run way over budget, we'll still pay you." That pretty much sums up the issue right there. That's why we have debacles like the F-35. These clowns making the hardware simply can't fail. We're guaranteeing to buy whatever crap they happen to offer us. Military Contracts have been known to be "gravy" for decades now, and that needs to change. The classic "$250 toilet seat" jab is unfortunately a reality, and a persistent one at that.

It's not jut the government that can't run like a business, it's the businesses working with the government that are having the same issue, and it's again a problem from within the government, it's a behavior that their system both allows and seems to encourage. A select few are getting rich on our tax dollars, and we're not getting what we should in exchange, be it materials or government itself. Pisses me off that there's nothing effective I can do about it. (and no, voting hasn't helped so farâ¦)

this is a little different because the case was filed by the defendant basically. They wanted the court to clarify their non-infringement in advance of any litigation that the patent owner may have decided to spring up at a later time.

"Innovent until proven guilty" usually only applies to the normal direction of cases, not ones that operate in reverse like this does.

I pondered this a bit to see if I could identify an easy avenue of abuse for this, but it looks pretty good. If you want to get into a market with what you believe is novel tech, but are fearful that a certain giant already in the market may sue you later down the road, you can get a judgement either for OR against, right now, before you've invested heavily. Really, it's a "win" for the new player either way. Either the court affirms they're not infringing and they can proceed to enter the market, OR the court finds they are infringing, and they can stop investing immediately or choose to license. It's a very good defensive move for the new player.

Reminds me of in wedding vows, "speak now or forever hold your peace". Prevents a big established player from sitting silent until a new startup gets invested and serious momentum and then the giant springs up out of the bushes demanding licensing fees. When they do that, it places the upstart seriously under the gun since they may have invested very heavily. At that point, licensing becomes much more attractive than walking away, as they might have decided to do if they'd have known from the start that they were infringing. So, statistically, this will end up costing patent holders, and helping people hoping to enter the market. (by keeping them out of it if it's going to end up costing them a bundle they hadn't planned on)

perhaps not. This could cut costs. There's always overhead in having more than one model of anything, whether it's a car, a computer, a hair dryer, or software.

In many cases it's cheaper to do the R&D and design once, manufacture, stock, and deliver a single product, and then deal with "feature activation" after the sale. Software does this a lot. Look at all the software available now that you can buy an upgraded license code for to activate new features. It doesn't cost them a nickel more to ship the software with features that you can't use. (until/unless you pay for them)

If the feature isn't all that expensive to manufacture, it may be cheaper to simply install it in a disabled state in ALL vehicles. Add $10 to the manufacturing cost, (realistic for say, heated seats) and then charge $200 to enable the option. As long as you get at least 5% of customers that buy it, (either at purchase, or down the road) you at least break even. Get 25% total sales for it and make a killing. Customers will find it easier to swallow a feature that can be "enabled" for $200 than to either (A) take it to a dealer and get the seats replaced and the vehicle rewired for $800, or (B) just plain not make the purchase at all since it's too expensive after the sale. In the long run, feature activation will likely generate more profit for the manufacturers, while at the same time getting functioning heated seats in more people's hands. It has the potential to be a win-win.

This will inevitably lead to feature-hacking and all the dmca/pirate/hacking drama, but I don't think I need to get into that. People already do that with the ECUs, reprogramming them for racing etc. I even know someone that reprograms and replaces ECUs right now. 50-150 more HP with a simple software upgrade. The future is now, it's just not for sale by the manufacturers just yet. But I'm sure it's coming.

that DOES NOT WORK. After you launch the latest version, it connects online and "upgrades" your account. Once upgraded, if you try to launch an older version of teamviewer and sign in with your account, "you can no longer use this version of teamviewer, please install the latest update".

BS like that, that's why I left. "OK then, so if you're so into using forced online verification, why can't you let me install it on all the machines here so long as I'm only USING it on one at a time?" They refused to answer that. "Money" of course was the correct answer. I can see pulling a stunt like that for the free users, but we paid for a license and they still gave us the shaft. Bad move to do that to a paying customer.

For now I think you're "safe" as long as you keep the old app, and never login (anywhere) with version 9 and allow it to "upgrade" your account. They don't appear to have been planning to do this in 8, so it doesn't force you to upgrade. I'm sure that's been "fixed" in the latest version.

MY account on the other hand, is ruined, sorry to say. I don't think you can make an earlier version account with 8 anymore either. (I should test that)

TeamViewer recently pushed an "update" that imposes a fairly short time limit on the free connections. This was not mentioned to the users prior to running the update. It also "upgraded your account" online so you can no longer run the older unlimited version of teamviewer.

That, combined with the obsession about not wanting you to install your licensed copy on more than one support computer (despite being totally online and trivially blocked from simultaneous instances) lead me to drop my support for them as well. We even bought a license, but having to bump someone from the machine it's registered on just to remote into someone else here is a hassle. Just another example of making users "regret upgrading". That's a horrible business model.

There really isn't any good free 3rd party alternative out there that I've seen. I can map ports and even have set up remote check-ins to manage changing IP addresses, but being able to automatically traverse routers (uPNP) I haven't managed to replicate yet. The easiest thing for me at this point, since I run mac, is to simply use FaceTime's screen sharing, which provides the auto check-in for dynamic IPs and also does a good job of getting in through routers. The last os upgrade was free even, which makes it a bit cheaper than LogMeIn or TeamViewer ;)

Now, do you have a good way to deal with messages that are two-lines instead of one line?

Since SED and GREP only like to work on single lines, in some applications I will use TR to change linefeeds to some other character (like /x01) and do my replacements and then TR them back to linefeeds. I know SED supports pattern buffers but I have yet to take the time to play with it.

And what's wrong with apple's grep?

I forget. I know I've ran into problems in the past but I just grabbed an older build from an earlier version of OS X one time when I needed it. I honestly can't recall why I needed to do that. Either a behavior change or a bug I believe it was. Might have been a string length limitation that cropped up. (important if you're removing linefeeds)

TR, GREP, CUT, and SED together tend to do whatever I need doing. I also use BBEdit quite a lot for handling large text files. Its find and replace supports regular expressions. For one-offs it's often easier to do transformations with BBEdit. If you haven't used CUT before, you'll want to look into it and all its modes of operation. Often CUT is a simpler option than SED.

Final note: If your script works fine from command line but mysteriously fails when run by cron, check to see what is and isn't in cron's PATH. I've ran into that issue on several occasions when trying to do periodic batch file processing. (specific lack of SBIN iirc was the biggie)

In the case of the 2008 and the 2.2/2.4 mbp's, the problem was actually Nvidia, fault, not Apple.. Apple pushes the design limits of their components pretty close to the edge to keep their designs small, light, and enduring. The frame and cooling was designed to only slightly exceed required cooling for nvidia's GPU, according to their provided specifications.

Nvidia lied about the cooling requirements of their GPU, describing it as requiring less cooling than it actually did. (probably as a selling point to get Apple to use it) As a result, the machine didn't adequately cool it under very high stress. (playing WoW for an extended time was a known cause of failure) As a result, boards and GPUs flexed, ball solder joints failed, and gpus stopped functioning. (this is not a gpu defect or a ball problem, it's a mechanical problem, caused by thermal stress due to inadequate cooling)

After Apple had encountered a larger number of in-warranty failures than expected, they contacted Nvidia, who denied the problem. Bad logic boards continued to pour in and get repaired under the one year warranty, but replaced boards were frequently failing again, and users were sometimes seeing 2-4 replacements within the first year. A few customers got a new machine per Apple's policy on "three major repairs within warranty", some of which had gpu failures on their replacement machines as well. Apple put their own engineers to work testing new GPUs, and found that the cooling requirements were significantly above Nvidia's stated specs.

Although they were aware of this issue well before the first year, Apple's SOP on an issue like this is to stay quiet until the units start dropping out of their first year's warranty, and then issue a Repair Extension on them. (probably trying to mitigate a drop in sales on a "defective model") Coverage time for REPs vary, and only extend the warranty on the specific part, and only for the specific failure. REPs typically extend coverage to the 2, 3, or 4 year point after purchase. It does not stack with applecare extended warranty. This REP I believe went the maximum at four years from date of purchase.

Apple has issued a dozen or so REPs in the last ten years. Considering the units sold, the variety of models offered, and the cutting-edge technology they'r fond of using, this is actually a pretty low failure rate, as well as a very good manufacturer's response.

2011 is not a new computer, it's going on three years old. Referring to them as "dropping dead" makes it sound like it's a very early failure (first year or so) I think the article is being sensational and a bit deceptive to link-bait. Apple expects their products to last 3-5 years before they get replaced. Considering how fast tech advances, and that Apple users typically want new and cutting-edge tech, this isn't at all unreasonable. With as many models as they make, there are going to be those that fail sooner than others, and that you can expect to get less than 7-8 years out of. This may just be one of them. It happens. And it can suck to be the unlucky one that owns one. But "only" getting three years out of a laptop may not be desirable, but it's hardly a travesty. If Apple were to refuse to cover failures inside the one year warranty, or not extend coverage to units failing frequently in the 2-3 year area, that'd be newsworthy. This really isn't.

for what it's worth:
http://vftp.net/virtual1/temp/comb

the same technique can be applied to any log file that you can manage to parse consistently. devs that don't understand the need to escape delimiters in text fields can make your day go bad.

the identification of some kind of 6502 assembly code in the Terminator's red overlay,

fyi, one of those was a Merlin Pro disassembly of the layout of the VTOC (Volume Table of Contents) of the DOS 3.3 catalog track, from an Apple ][. I don't recall if the other one was or not.

There's really no better way to scan a log file for odd log entries than to write a big regexp that filters out whitelisted entries. Lets you find log entries you're NOT expecting. (and occasionally, log entries that not even the developers are expecting)

Editing them of course is a royal pain, (not to mention debugging!) so I usually write a script to compose the regexp. I just checked on one of mine, and it composes a 17,000+ character single-liner that scans my wired.log file.

I've got a smaller one that keeps an eye on secure.log for anomalies.

BEST use of "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag I've seen in at least a year.