Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Unstranding, Xecurity, Spurning
Multi-player markets are a good thing. Indiana University seems to be one of the first big fish to publicly announce a license agreement with Progeny's Transition Service. This service provides updates for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 beyond January 1st 2004, and RedHat 9 after May 1, 2004. According to the press release, this will allow for 'a flexible migration path as the University considers various options regarding Linux distributions during the coming year.'"
But I thought MPlayer ... Simon Bysshe writes "In response to some complaints about the WMV encoding of the recent pro-gaming film 'Intel Extreme Edition Challenge' (featured here on Slashdot). Intel have requested that the film also be encoded as a DIVX file especially for Slashdot. This divx file can now be downloaded here."
More on (At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight relbs was one of many to submit word (as reported by MIT News) of a replica of the Wright brothers' Flyer perched above the Great Dome early yesterday morning, and relbs adds a link to additional photos, too.
They had better luck getting off the ground than did those trying to actually fly a Wright flyer: CrazyTalk writes "As a follow-on to the earlier story, the much-ballyhooed attempt to recreate the first flight of the Wright's literally fell flat."
Maltese Falcon writes with another candidate for First Powered Flight. "Or was it Gustave Weiskopf (aka Gustave Whitehead)? There are many claims that he flew up to 2 yrs before the Wright Bros. NPR's report yesterday seemed to imply almost paranoia as far as a conspiracy to why the NASM only recognizes the Wrights, but this link provides more info on why this could be true. Look here for another article."
Speaking of audacious pilots, jcenters writes "An earlier Slashdot story reported that Australian adventurer Jon Johanson was trapped in Antarctica, and scientists stationed there refused to sell him fuel. Reuters is reporting that Johanson has now obtained fuel from a British rival, but weather conditions are preventing his departure. Johanson hopes to leave by the end of the weekend."
BlameFate writes that "British adventurer, Polly Vacher has allowed Johanson to use her pre-stored fuel at the base after her expedition was forced to be cancelled. Fox News has the scoop. Choice quote from the head of NZ's Antarctic Research dept: 'Polly's trip was well organized and properly planned,' he said. 'It is ironic that she is now assisting a stranded pilot who embarked upon an ill-prepared and secret flight over the South Pole.'"
If something happens in Berkeley, does it count as a "real world" experience? codythefreak writes to deflect certain barbs lately directed at the security level of Mac OS X: "Working as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley's Residential Computing, since we serve more than 6,000 clients living in the dorms, we tend to know the major computing trends. There are 5,120 registered Windows XP machines in our system, and our staff have logged 2,452 duty logs to assist them (about one in two). On the other hand, there are 341 Mac OS X machines, and only 56 duty logs (about one in six). If we restrict these to virus and security related duty logs: Windows XP has 491 (about one in ten) and OS X has 2 (less than one in a hundred)!"
(See also this well-reasoned response to the recent OS X criticism.)
Was it the tail? Really, is the pointy tail a deal-breaker? Mister.de points out this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story which says "VMware Inc., a business-software maker that is being acquired by EMC Corp. for $635 million, turned down an offer last year from Microsoft Corp.
'"We were unable to come to terms, so they bought out our distant competitor, Connectix" Corp., said Diane Greene, VMware's chief executive officer and co-founder.'"
Alas, we hardly knew ye. dlc3007 writes "The Register has published the results of the JenniCam Poetry Competition. There is little funnier in the world than creative geeks pouring their hearts and souls into 'a haiku or limerick lamenting the demise of JenniCam.'" I can think of some things ...
Battlestar Galactica 2003: Series Highly Likely, Say Recent Rumors Cliff writes: "Syfy Portal reports that officials for the Sci-Fi channel are likely to announce that the new Battlestar Galactica will become a series, most likely to air as early as Summer of 2004. No official announcement has yet been made, but since the 'mini-series' is Sci-Fi channel's third highest rated program, it is assumed that such an announcement will be made before the end of 2003, if they are going to keep options on the major actors. Personally, I'm looking forward to the show, as long as they stay away from monkeys in robot-dog suits!"
The news of the day:
Real is suing Microsoft for abusing its OS monopoly in digital audio/video markets
The BBC had her standing up for the stranded Jon, although interestingly enough, the new page (just checked it) hasn't got the quote on it any more. It went something like "Jon's flight was as carefully planned as mine, and it was the highly unseasonal winds that caused us both problems".
It just seems to me as though there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than the scientists out there are all admitting to...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
According to the piece Discovery Channel was running on the Wright Flyer yesterday (Dec. 17th), the Wright Brothers specifically steered away from steam powered engines because it took roughly 100 lbs. per horsepower and tehy wanted 8 horse power from each engine. That would have been a whopping 1600 lbs. for the engines alone. They wound up developing an gas powered aluminum engine similar to the ones Henry Ford was developing at the time as well. The engines painstakingly recreated for the replica weighed in at 170lbs. a piece and produced about 14 horse power each. Either Whitehead discovered a way to magically make significantly lighter steam-powered engines or the Discovery Channel show was grossly wrong in their estimates.
I worked at the technical support desk for the university I attend. I don't have any hard numbers to give but from my experience there about 99% of the calls for assitance were for machines running Windows. I never once in the two years I worked for the help desk had a call about a Mac virus, or worm. Almost all calls concerning Mac were problems with our long range etherenet and OS X computers not getting an IP address properly from the DHCP server without a reboot. There just wasn't anything to troubleshoot with Mac's they just seemed to work.
And no I'm no Mac zealot, although I use them quite a bit (I now work for the UNIX System Admin group and there are quite a few Xserves popping up around campus).
-- Is it a right to remain ignorant? -- Calvin
Q.
Insert Signature Here
If someone can install DHCP servers on your network, then it's *ALREADY* *COMPROMISED*. In short, your security is already crap, so a couple of extra compromised macs is not going to make a huge amount of difference.
Plus, if you're willing to spend an extra minute setting up security, you could always use it to turn the damn option off. It's not exactly hard. You get a whole 55 seconds left over to do other things. Like maybe securing that damn XP box that people keep installing rogue DHCP servers on. Yeesh, treat the cause, not the symptoms.
"I am downloading the file now, and it may indeed be compressed with DIVX, but it should be called an MPEG-4 video since that is the final output format, regardless of the AVI FOURCC marker."
MPEG4 files (i.e. files generated so that any MPEG4 compliant viewer can play them) have the extension MP4. DivX is a mutated version of MPEG4, thus it deserves the seperate distinction.
In other words, I'm having trouble seeing the justification of your nitpick here.
"Maybe we should call "HTML" "MicroSoft Web Content" if I use Microsoft Notepad to generate it, but "Emacs Markup-language" if I use Emacs."
This is a bad example. There is, however, code that only works in IE and not in other browsers. It's code that only works in IE, so it wouldn't be all that improper to informally call it MSML. Nobody's doing that, but it'd be hard to nail them on it.
It's all about standards compliance here, and DivX does not conform to Mpeg4. You have to tell it specifically to make an MPEG4 file, and when it does, it saves it with the MP4 extension.
So, yeah, save it for when somebody calls an MP4 file DivX.
"Derp de derp."
Uhm, what? DivX is a derivative of MPEG4, not just a tool for producing open standard-compliant files - as a text editor would be in your case - as you can see on DivX networks' page.
DHCP is a broadcast protocol. Any device connected to the network can be a DHCP server, and there is no way to prevent it unless you have a really smart managed network. Smart managed networks are nice, but by no means ubiquitous. BTW, I actually wrote the book on this... :')
The problem is that the average user never reads bugtraq, and has no idea that s/he needs to do something special to avoid getting rooted while drinking a latte at Starbucks.
Kerberos is also an open standard. Apple actually supports Kerberos, but configures its systems to use LDAP for security by default, thus unfortunately not taking advantage of the secure open standard that they could be using. :'(
I don't think anyone is calling MPEG4 video (in a modified MOV/MP4 container with AC3 audio) a Divx file.
OTOH, what everyone *is* calling a Divx file, is very specific... Divx is MPEG4 video, fit into an AVI container, and almost always with MPEG-1 Layer3 audio. I think the designation "Divx" is quite appropriate for that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You're right. I forgot they linked the two props via chains to a single engine. Regardless, this would have been an 800 lbs. engine and even that was far too heavy.
Actually, people are already making Ogg media files, except they're using XviD for the video codec instead of Theora. It's getting pretty popular in the DVD *ahem* backup scene, especially for foreign movies, since the Ogg container format handles things like multiple audio and subtitle tracks a little more gracefully than AVI does.
For the record ... I happen to currently be a residential network administrator at Stanford, as well as ResComp support. I also work closely with a ex Berkley ResComp admin.
... they don't take any longer (and usually less time) than a Windows user. Another thing to note: every time I sit down at a OS X machine, I ask, what's wrong? Everytime I sit down to a
If anything, your first point is outdated. I have to deal with both Windows and Mac users on a regular basis, and if anything PC users are the ones with tweaked out (either software or hardware) computers, with 1001 different accessories making their computer less and less useful as a tool. Mac users on the other hand, usually have a core application suite (ie. Safari, Mail or Entourage, Word Proc / Graphics / Coding IDE depending on use) and no gimmicks. Sure Apple's design phase is more indepth to begin with and more asthetically pleasing, but I wouldn't call that snobbish. I'd classify it as stylish and functional.
As for your second point. I'm not even gonna touch the majority of that. Let me just say that your example may have been Apple in the Pre-OS X days, but now we don't see those problems.
The post clearly referes to the number of trouble tickets per system on campus being an order of magnitude different. I don't see how less Macs would explain a difference in ratio.
As for your third point, so do we. All machines are patched and users are recommended to patch their machines as often as possible. Even with that, the fall RPC exploit managed to infect over 6000 machines, with a maximum infection time of 10 seconds during the peak (ie. plug your machine in while running, 10 seconds later it was infected). Yep, keeping up to date sure helped there, especially since Microsoft kept sending out different patches, resulting in several custom patch packages which our coding team had to spit out, none of which were compatable.
As for my own experience with OS X users
Windows machine, I run Ad-Aware, find between 30 and 800 spyware objects, clean the machine repeatedly, and then try to see if the behavior has stopped, if it hasn't _then_ I start troubleshooting. Don't even start to lecture me about the ease of administrating Windows.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
The Vatican is not a member of the United Nations. It has a non-voting observer to the UN.