Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: OSX Security, DoD Filtering, Anonymous Posting
University of Wisconsin's Mac OS X Challenge. HABITcky writes "The University of Wisconsin Security Challenge has ended after 38 hours, intermittent DoS attacks, 4000 ssh login attempts, a bandwidth spike of 30 Mbps, and 6 million logged ipfw events. During this time there were 'no successful access attempts, nor any claims of a successful attempt.' You may remember this challenge was proposed in response to the 'woefully misleading' ZDnet article, Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes, which was previously discussed here on Slashdot."
Skeptics investigate cold fusion.smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a previous Slashdot posting, Purdue University is investigating the claims of Rusi Taleyarkhan who claimed in 2004 to have created nuclear fusion at room temperature. The investigation came about from complaints from colleagues who suspect something is amiss. Taleyarkhan, who used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has, since working at Perdue, removed the equipment the co-workers were using to try and replicate the results, claimed results for experimental runs were positive for fusion despite the co-workers never seeing the raw data and opposed the publication of results which contradicted his findings."
More on DoD web filtering. timetrap writes "I work in a mobile combat communications unit, while I'm not in the sandbox right now, I can attest to the DoD policy on blocking web access. First of all when you are down range don't expect to even get DSL speeds from a satellite, we usually roll with about 256kbs for the data side of our trunk. So blocking sites is very important, otherwise 4 or 5 people could start streaming audio and pretty much knock down any legitimate use of the network. We filter websites with smartfilter and yes the military system admins in the IPO office will unblock any web site that isn't blocked by local policy (no pr0n, no streaming audio, no civilian web mail: both the hot and the g varieties, and no chat programs; although irc is used by the DoD) This is no Orwellian conspiracy, but quick and easy system administration; apply smartfilter: check! If you want to check the current smartfilter blocked sites goto: securecomputing and submit some sites to check." Slashdot's own Jamie took a look at Smartfilter back in '99 as a part of the Censorware project and it still remains a mysterious black box to this day. While some would advocate full disclosure using censorware still appears to be merely passing the buck.
AT&T cuts 10,000 jobs after BellSouth merger. mytrip writes to tell us that immediately following their $67 billion acquisition of BellSouth, AT&T plans on cutting about 10,000 jobs.
More child-proofing efforts for MySpace. conq writes "BusinessWeek has an interview with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthalin in which he describes measures MySpace and other similar sites should take to protect children. From the article: 'We're going to be suggesting some very specific measures that MySpace can take based on our conversations with MySpace as well as with other law enforcement authorities at the state and local levels. We've received hundreds of complaints from parents who are concerned about these issues, and we want to be sure that the measures we propose are technologically feasible and financially viable.'"
Why Windows Vista will Suck: a rebuttal. shrapnull writes "Hot on the heels of Extreme Tech's 'Why Windows Vista Won't Suck', Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an alternate position posted on DesktopLinux, and sent to subscribers of Novell's 'Suse Linux Cool Solutions' newsletter."
Harvard researcher punished for reporting bugs. Guillermito writes "A story previously discussed came to a sad conclusion two weeks ago. The bottom line is this means that it is forbidden to use reverse engineering tools to find bugs in a software. You also have to prove that you own a valid license for each version of the tested software. To publish a proof of concept that contains a few dozens of copyrighted bytes is also forbidden. It's a nice precedent for any company selling a defective product."
Assemblyman Biondi backpedals on NJ anonymous posting bill. Quadraginta writes "Earlier, denizens of Slashdot reacted to a story about a bill to be introduced to the New Jersey legislature that would require hosts of forums, bulletin boards and the like to keep track of the real identity of anonymous posters. Seems like there was a strong reaction all over. Assemblyman Biondi now appears to be backpedalling furiously. From a letter quoted after the link: 'I am getting inundated with responses which I will review and use to better educate myself on the implications of this bill. If, after reviewing all of the correspondence and the opinion of OLS, it turns out that the bill is, in fact, unworkable, I will certainly reconsider and withdraw it.'"
A followup on Chinese TLDs. nqz writes "In this story on ComputerWorld, ICANN and the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) both dispute a previous story discussing China's new top-level domains containing Chinese characters."
The original article said it would be up through Friday, why the early shutdown? Maybe it stayed up for 38 hours or whatever and then someone got in, so they post-pre-maturely ended the contest the minute before the crack?
CIO = Chief Information Officer
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
More like - was done without authorization, and was shut down. From the site linked:
Yesterday we discovered the Mac OSX "challenge" was not an activity authorized by the UW-Madison. Once the test came to the attention of our CIO, she ended it. The site, test.doit.wisc.edu, will be removed from the network tonight.
Our primary concern is for security and network access for UW services. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused to the community.
Still, shut down or 'ended,' not being hacked is a good show. Congrats to OS X.
I think Apple would be well-served by having a continously running OS X security challenge, for both OS X and OS X Server. Offer a reward every time you demonstrate a hole, and fix them fast.
The devolving of this site from "news for nerds" to "left-wing political rants for editors and those who agree with our worldview" continues.
Yesterday, you had a flimsy story about supposed biased filtering by the Marine Corps in Iraq where two seconds of thinking and work would prove that it wasn't some vast right wing conspiracy.
Now today, you have a book review about Markos "Screw Them" Zuniga and his ineffective and ultimately inconsequential site and followers.
Where does it go from here? It seems the editors just want to bash us over the head with their left-wing tripe, without giving any balance.
I remember once CmdrTaco said politics don't belong here. Digg.com is eating slashdot alive right now. Better stories, better tech, better forum. It's only a matter of time slashdot becomes irrelevant unless they can turn it around.
Yesterday, you had a flimsy story about supposed biased filtering by the Marine Corps in Iraq where two seconds of thinking and work would prove that it wasn't some vast right wing conspiracy. ... then why are only so-called "right-wing" sites permitted?
I dunno. I would think a massive, pipe-clogging bandwidth spike, which resulted in the removal of said site, would qualify as a successful attack.
I guess it all just depends on exactly what you want to do.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Does it matter what they say? Any Chinese portal with enough heft can just start handing out Chinese TLDs whenever they like. (For that matter, so could I, but noone would know). Does anyone know the current state of international tld support in browsers? And what encoding is/would it support?
For that matter, if China (mainland) blazes the path for Chinese TLDs, would they go with gb2312 and thus sort of make China (mainland)'s TLD scheme the default for the world as opposed to Taiwan's Big5?
Myself, I'd be happy to see utf-8 tlds, but that's small potatoes compared to my fervent whish for a utf-8 clean php release. Does slashdot support
I don't usually complain about this but, what kind of run on sentence is this?
Taleyarkhan, who used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has, since working at Perdue, removed the equipment the co-workers were using to try and replicate the results, claimed results for experimental runs were positive for fusion despite the co-workers never seeing the raw data and opposed the publication of results which contradicted his findings.
yeesh, spelled it once right, and once wrong. Perdue = the chickens you get at the store. //A Purdue Alumni, who just happens to work on the main campus
It did, in the old days. They rewrote it a long time ago, I think in the jump to Nt 4.0. The userspace command line tools are still BSD based in XP though.
...nobody broke into the box to read the statement.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If this was anyone making the same FUD uninformed posts about Linux or OS X "LOLOLO! OS X cracked in 29 Minutes!! LOLOLOL!" it would be dismissed as always "oh we know this guy, he's an astroturfer and a known shill, yawn" in less time it takes to say "kernel", but I'm sure a lot of people will take this dumbass' word at face value and parrot the same bullshit on IRC, Slashdot and other fine forums. I fully expect to see the "oh, well you know Vista will swap ram to a USB device, so it will be 1,000,000,000 times slower than Linux" argument in the next Windows.vs.Linux flamewar.
It seems it's getting more and more difficult for FOSS to wring their hands and yell "OMFG we're under FUD attack from teh evil empire" given these types of things, not to mention Novell, IBM et.al getting into the game to fight it out with Microsoft.
What a waste of bandwidth. It used to be that the community could craft measured, valid responses to bullshit, but I see that art is being lost.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
And that's why when it says on your military ID "Property of the U.S. Government" they're not just talking about the ID card ... =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Now the ONLY ONES who will publish exploits are the anonymous hackers who are ALREADY doing illegal stuff.
Nice move, smartasses.
As long as they make a backup copy, I'm fine with it.
Software researchers are the most impacted by this, as it's hard for a PhD to claim natural stupidity as a defense. It's expected of most end-users (even when that is unfair) so they can get away with it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is a fairly simple solution to the problem of vendors forbidding security reaseachers from examining their products. At the next big security confab float and get a lot of signatures on a resolution something like this:
"Some companies object to our legitimate research, even though we report our findings responsibly. So be it. We resolve to continue to locate defects in these irresponsible vendor's products. However since they now make it a crime to do the right thing, we resolve to anonymously publish our results for these products to the most vile and wicked cracking gangs we can contact as ready to use fully weaponized exploits. We further assert that we do not fear any legal reprecussions on the grounds that if any Fed can tag us we aren't worthy to continue in this line of research."
Let the business press cogitate on that announcement a day or two and see how fast vendors start backpeddling.
Democrat delenda est
For those who don't want to read the entire article, here is the cliffsnote version.
I understand operating systems and am very smart and I have 20 computers and a dog named spot.
linux power.
Vista will suck because it won't be free.
linux power.
The graphics will suck because it takes an expensive computer to run Aeroglass.
linux power.
Memory management will suck because linux has had good memory management for years.
linux power.
Superfetch will suck because GCC has had it for years, and your dog can run off with your USB card. (Never mind that it's just a *cache*, and it won't do anything but slow your computer down again after your dog starts chewing on it)
linux power.
TCP/IP improvements will suck because it's been in other OS's for years.
linux power.
Security will be bad because they found a bug in vista.
linux power.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I would like to point out that those people who state that MacOS X hacking is of little interest to the hacking community because the Mac has little market presence should pay attention to the draw this challenge precipitated.
Looks like every hacker and their uncle had a go at this one. I wonder how many unique IP addresses were used to access the challenge.
On the other hand, skimming through the Vista article makes it clear that Ziff Davis is a fucking moron.
I read that pile of crap that somone claims to be an article about Why Vista Will Suck and all I got out of it is this guy is a $%@^$@# idiot. Great, he's got a copy of Vista and a fast machine. Most of his complaints can either be dismissed because Vusta is still a BETA or not attributed to Microsoft at all. Is it really Microsoft's fault if you're not careful around your USB drive? And who cares if Linux and Mac OS X have had feature X for years? Isn't Vista going to benefit from using feature X if everyone else has? How can this be a reason why Vista will suck? Isn't this more of a reason why Microsoft's marketing managers suck? What about his anecdotal argument concering security? There was a patch for the WMF swcurity hole. Let's analyze the argument. First of all, the patch was released in January. The CTP was released in February. You do the math. Not to mention that perhaps there was an old portion of XP in the January release of Vista that's since been removed from the February CTP. Did Stephen check? Probably not. If security patches being released for an OS are all the proof he needs that it's insecure than he'd better add OS X and Linux to the list. All in all, this was a poorly written and researched article with little evidence to back up his claims.
Also from that sucky article...
OK, so the first reason that Vista sucks is that, no matter what version you get, it's likely to be expensive.
I'm wondering if this guy has ever bought a copy of Windows. They're generally $200. I don't remember any of Widnows desktop OS's *ever* costing much more than $200, actually. Did this guy just pull this out of his ass, or something?
I don't respond to AC's.
Hi, log on to newegg.com and look at the price for retail Windows XP (not oem). Last week when I looked it was $245.
a *real* version of Windows has always been expensive.
"I work in a mobile combat communications unit, while I'm not in the sandbox right now, I can attest to the DoD policy on blocking web access.
There are several levels of DoD blocking. First, the DoD policy on web access, policy, and security in general, very broad, next is the Departments level, i.e. Army, Navy, etc, then there is the base policy and then the command policy and unit policy all the way down to the company. The "general rule" is that no one can have policy rules lower then that of above. This means a platoons policy can not be more lax then the base policy. This sort of transitive policy based appliance leaves much room for interpretation at all levels of policy implementation. Every service is different, every level is different and every network right down to the hardware is different. So, when you talk about blocking you have to be very specific as it is nearly impossible to just nail down an exact, cut and dry policy. Web content filtering, ACL's and the likes are different from service to service and mission to mission.
First of all when you are down range don't expect to even get DSL speeds from a satellite, we usually roll with about 256kbs for the data side of our trunk.
This is too far from the truth depending on the environment. The Ku band in Iraq is quite substantial in fact the smallest direct BGP Sat link might be a T-1 up to 8 and 32Meg or so via a Sat package called the DKET. This is speaking for the Marine side by the way. Also lateral links are about 3Meg at the smallest level via another Ku Sat package. This of course has its caveats. At this level we are talking about a non-mobile infrastructure were as a mobile infrastructure would be a Microware shot thru a TSR or MUX link at anywhere from 96k to 512k or more depending on voice needs and breakdown of classified to unclassified network needs. (Data bandwidth is shared between the two types of DoD networks when multiplexed, voice generally rides its own trunk card thru the multiplexer, typically a Promina node does this multiplexing or at lower levels in the unit they have what is called an FCC multiplexer)
So blocking sites is very important, otherwise 4 or 5 people could start streaming audio and pretty much knock down any legitimate use of the network. We filter websites with smartfilter and yes the military system admins in the IPO office will unblock any web site that isn't blocked by local policy (no pr0n, no streaming audio, no civilian web mail: both the hot and the g varieties, and no chat programs; although irc is used by the DoD)
This is somewhat accurate. From the Corps standpoint, when I first went to Iraq this was not the case. We could chat all day long until it was "locked down". This is done at the BGP point via the highest headquarters out there, CentCom etc. Even then it isn't full proof, I found ways around it, i.e. bypass or just good ole bribing the E-3 at the terminal.
This is no Orwellian conspiracy, but quick and easy system administration; apply smartfilter: check! If you want to check the current smartfilter blocked sites goto: securecomputing and submit some sites to check."
Once again, take this with a grain of salt. Though this seems like it applies to all agencies and to all services at all times it really doesn't. The mobile and deployed units are in constant flex so nothing is really ever solidified when it comes to policy. The ONLY real way to know for sure is to go out there and site down behind their network and try it yourself, or ask someone you know out there to do it. I have a couple dozen friends out there right now on the Net Admin side so if you have a specific inquiry post it and I will see what I can come up with.
those people who state that MacOS X hacking is of little interest to the hacking community because the Mac has little market presence should pay attention to the draw this challenge precipitated.
I completely agree with you. a 4,5% share seems low but many hackers would get a terrific ego boost by being able to shut up once for all the mac fanboys. Also some attacks on windows rely on unpatched machines with this and that service running and reachable through firewalls, which could well mean an attack on the 10% or less of the total of windows machines which in turns makes like an 8-6% or even less share. Crackers still take time to engineer them, though.
Mod parent up, please.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'll secound that! Thats a pretty weak article.
We're going to be suggesting some very specific measures that MySpace can take based on our conversations with MySpace as well as with other law enforcement authorities at the state and local levels.
Not sure what the point of this article is, he doesn't even say what his "specific measures" are. Probably just some political move.
I don't know what the big deal is about myspace, just politician noise, I guess. What kind of 14 year old girl is going to go out with a 30 year old man? If they do, there is probably some other problem (like they are starved for affection). I remember here on slashdot a few years ago there was a story about a girl who got seduced by a predator, but her mother was encouraging it!
So yeah, there is a problem here, but making laws about myspace isn't going to help anything.
Qxe4
Having said that, if we're going to use UTF, we might as well use it right. Otherwise, it is going to be an agonizing pain every time we have to step up a version. DNS issues, alone, will preclude frequent updates from a half-hearted update. For this reason, it would seem stupid to use UTF-8 or UTF-16. Those don't encode everything that need to be encoded, if we're to have a truly international system.
Based on the current definitions, we should be looking at UTF-32, BOM and version 5 of the Unicode specification. The Unicode FAQ talks a lot about how nobody needs more character sets than UTF-16 can support, but (a) they don't represent all languages, or even a reasonable set, because UTF-16 can't handle that many, (b) only the criminally insane don't provide room for inevitable expansion, and (c) DNS is far more constrained by efficient processing and reliability than by bandwidth, and UTF-32 is described by Unicode themselves as faster and simpler.
The problem with Unicode internationalization is that there are multiple ways of defining what is effectively the same character, which means that users will not be able to differentiate between strings the computer regards as different. This is important, when dealing with copyright, phishing, cybersquatting, etc.
(Unicode is also very poor at handling character sets that can't fit into a single block, is very inefficient - only the first 21 bits of a 32-bit UTF are meaningful according to Unicode, and is an encoding for a whole glyph - which means that it will make meaningless distinctions and won't make sensible relationships.)
The first step to true Internationalization is to burn the Unicode specification and replace it with something cohesive, extensible and logical. The second step is to have standard hardware work on the unit size directly, so that anything that logically worked fine with bytes on byte-based hardware will logically work fine UNMODIFIED on the new units, totally transparently. The encumbrance of UTF decoding doesn't make it any easier to use. Transparency is the key to universality.
(If I can't use the new encoding on an early copy of Mosaic, if I can't load the text file into a standard text editor and edit it directly, if I need vast numbers of supplementary libraries and conversion charts to get it to work, then it's not transparent and adoption is going to be a real pain. Updates are a headache for programmer and user alike.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Why Windows Vista won't be known to suck."
Yes, and his brother Elroy isn't too bright either, I hear. I wonder how he got the name Ziff, anyway. Nice reading skills there, Chief.
Staples in the UK sell XP Pro for £209.99, which is ~$360. Ok it's not the cheapest your going to find, and OEM versions are about half that price, but it's still a significant amount for an operating system, especially when compared to the Free alternatives.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Looks like every hacker and their uncle had a go at this one. I wonder how many unique IP addresses were used to access the challenge.
why? apparently there were only 4k ssh attacks (and how many of those from automated bots that found port 22 open?) - and there really isn't much to hack at apache serving a static page (especially if no interesting modules are enabled) It looks more like someone with a botnet had a go at DOS-ing the 'challenge.' Which proved effective at one thing - showing that this was not 'the UoW challenge' but just a guy there acting on his own agenda.
It will be interesting to see whether he will have to answer why he didn't at least make it explicit that the project was not University-endorsed or even properly approved (looks like all he got approval for was a new dns record) In fact, in many places what he did would count as a severe abuse of resources leading to a pink slip.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of a security challenge is interesting - and worth a real-world type of test. But this was not it.
Listen, any box on a well connected pipe with some free disk space is of great interest to the hacking community.
It also happens that cracking a *nix box garners far more cred than cracking a windows box.
music lover since 1969
How could you miss it? A perpetual ongoing "security test", one at which they fail quite often. It is called "the internet".
The "real" AT&T, pathetic as it was in the last couple of decades of its existence, had a long and interesting history, dating to the 1870s. There's something profoundly phony about a company like SBC claiming to be a continuation of that.
Blumenthal mentioned on Slashdot.
Well, to anyone reading this not familiar with the state AG, he's basically glory hound. I am pretty skeptical of anything he says... things just look like he wants his name mentioned everywhere.
Granted, he does an ok job as AG, but that often seems to be secondary to the blatant glory hounding that infects everything he says to the media.
This is no Orwellian conspiracy, but quick and easy system administration; apply smartfilter: check!
Well, then the issue is the contents of the block list. According to a guy behind the filter:
My take on it as it was a test a member of the IT staff came up with and implemented on his/her own without knowledge or approval of IT management. It probably didn't take long for the network people at wisc.edu to notice the bandwidth spikes and identify the cause.
His heart was in the right place, but I hope he doesn't get fired.
My take on it as it was a test a member of the IT staff came up with and implemented on his/her own without knowledge or approval of IT management. It probably didn't take long for the network people at wisc.edu to notice the bandwidth spikes and identify the cause.
So isn't that a success? They've basically proven that DoSsing a site that's administered by someone else is a quick way of taking it down.
And those are a few of the reasons Vista will suck.
There are two Vista concepts at play here, SuperFetch and External Memory Devices (EMDs).
r everyone/performance.mspx
0 100).
"Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. USB flash drives can be used as External Memory Devices (EMDs) to extend system memory and improve performance without opening the box. Your computer is able to access memory from an EMD device much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive, boosting system performance. When combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvement in system responsiveness."
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/fo
SuperFetch can apparently use an EMD as additional ram and "A unique algorithm optimizes wear patterns, so that a USB device can run as an EMD for many years, even when heavily used.". I think that I'd take it with a grain of salt until I saw it working, this is still marketing fluff as the USB support won't be available until a later preview version of Vista (http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=2
I am curious about the Hybrid Hard Drives mentioned in the article on the Microsoft site. Anyone know which manufacturers are developing hard drives with a large flash cache?
While I'm as big a fan of conspiracy theories as the next guy, I'm sorry to say that no such speculation is neccessary in this case.
The guy just cannot write.
Seriously, check out Linux Desktop or Linux Watch and check out other articles by this guy (his name is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols). It's all the same story: flawed, simpleton logic; egregious typos (he must hate copy editors, because he's obviously never let one near one of his articles); sentences so poorly constructed that although you know you're reading English you can't figure out for the life of you what the guy is saying.
Even when he's not that bad, he's bad...
DSL, for those of you who don't know it, is one of several "mini-Linux" distributions. Of the set, it's probably the most well thought of since it actually manages to pick a GUI into its goodness and, having turned version 2.0 recently, it's the most mature of the mini-Linuxes.
See, he's just a bit off-kilter; it's not that you can't parse the sentence, it just gives you that queezy feeling in your stomach that you can't explain. I don't know where this guy learned to write, but I can tell you that I won't be reading any more of his "articles."
Look at what actually was tried as an attack vector...
Looks like every CLUELESS SCRIPT KIDDIE and their uncle had a go at this one. I'm sure port 135 got alot of traffic.
That's correct. Rush's audio is streamed from akamai.com's servers which are blocked.
Hopefully someone will come along and mod up your post.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I put up my own rebuttal for that article when it was released
- vista-will-suck.html
http://rjdohnert.blogspot.com/2006/03/why-windows
http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/press/press514 .html
I guess Rush made a smart choice in going with akamai. I doubt many blogs will bother to connect those dots and will instead run with the "omg teh mil1t4ry is t3h republican!!11"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
Message: you can pay more to get less.
This is a surprising message from anyone at Ziff Davis, much less a senior editor. It's the first sensible thing I've read from them in years.
He's run Vista and thinks it sucks because it has all the old crufty problems M$ is infamous for, despite a few superficial improvements. Have you done as much? It ate his biggest and best dual core 3GHz monster and will cost the average person thousands of dollars in hardware and software if they try to upgrade the M$ way. What are you willing to sacrifice
If you want suck, look at your own boring little sneer. Microsoft really needs to hire some better joke writers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But that's a subject for another post. In the meantime, I think it's preposterous to stop people from reporting bugs. It's freedom of speech, as far as I'm concerned, and it should also be your right to use reverse engineering tools to uncover bugs and to report those bugs to the world at large. Otherwise, there is a huge imbalance of power in complete favor of the program writer and in complete unfavor to the entire population that uses that program.
Let me get his point across for you:
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
You know they want to give him the best they have, but it did not live up to the competition, much less they hype. If you own a computer go get things done, you can get those things done with far less money. You can even do it with "beta" versions of free software, like Debian Etch or Sid, which do not hog up 6 GHz of processor or 850 MB of RAM on idle, but do offer every feature a user could want.
Five years ago, XP offered the world a pretty good reason to leave the Microsoft world. Indeed, until a year or two ago, the majority of people on Microsoft had not yet moved to XP, despite it being the default install on every Major brand of computer sold. Sales of Vista are going to be much worse because the hardware suck is so much greater.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ok, I don't agree with the 'counter' article on why Vista will suck, as we have also been using it, and there are some rough edges, but even at this beta point it is more stable and mature than some other 'full scale' shipping OSes.
/. community truly use this article as a 'definitive' answer of what Vista will or won't do.
/. quality? And yes, that is kind of a loaded question as some of the stuff we see is questionable anyway.
However, I had to go WTH when I read the article. How can anyone here in the
#1) The person writing the article doesn't even have a video card that does Vista Glass, that means, they don't have a video Card made in the last 4 years, all it takes is a Pixel Shader 2.0 on the card, that NVidia debuted years ago at Comdex with the GeforceFX 5200 for 80 bucks.
#2) Did anyone else catch this line about his reference to the Vista video requirements, " would only add that if you expect to see the fancy desktop, you need to invest in, say, an ATI Radeon XPress 200, an Nvidia nForce4, or a high-end graphics card."
Ok, hold your hand up if you know the difference between Video and Mainboard chipsets? nForce/Geforce anyone? I know 10 year olds that would laugh at this. And the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 as a base line? An integrated ATI Chipset that debuted last year? That is even crazy.
How about an NVidia PCI 5200 Graphics card made several years ago as the baseline, and Vista does Glass quite well on it even. Even generic notebooks baseline for Video anymore is ATI or Nvidia chipsets that include Pixel Shader 2.0 technology or basically hardware DirectX 9 support as others would call it.
I don't fully disagree with this person's article either, but really, is this
Make your own judgements on this, even as the article says, Vista seems to be better than XP, and who knows for sure how it will turn out...
I'm afraid I can't agree with you.Breaking OSX Security was the challenge, not "how to make it possible to win the contest by making the other one impossible to win or even compete".
Example: let's say two persons had a contest: who was the most intelligent. And say 5 minutes before the contest started, person A shot person B in the head, several times. It would be a bit ridiculous to claim that person A won, wouldn't it.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Oh yes, and: "The challenge is as follows: simply alter the web page on this machine, test.doit.wisc.edu (128.104.16.150)." Not DOS it or other machines around it.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Great analogy! You're like a.. like a SHARK! :)
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Read the article to see what i mean
Because you will have paid money for it.
And, of course, because that big company said so. Big companies are always right.
You know he had a chance to raise a fantastic case against Vista, but he was too busy riding the *nix wagon through town to even bother.
First off, the concept that you can have the SuperFetch cache on any attached storage drive. Oh noes! Someone might try to run it from a detachable drive! We're doomed! Seriously, was this his mother doing his homework for him?
"Oh, we have to run DX10 and DX9 at the same time and it's so horrible I just might die!" Why not pick out something that's actually an issue in DX10, like Microsoft's "We hate triple buffering" stance, or that MS have done the unthinkable and are wrapping DirectX around OpenGL. Can anyone here say Nerfed?
It might have been acceptable if he didn't scream "OMG LINUX" in every second line, unfortunately he neglects the fact that most of the world dont want to use Linux, sad I know, but true. You'd be doing yourself a huge favour if you wrote to get the Gamers and the video enthusiasts and the network administators on your side, rather than marginalising your self and your own voice by making it painfully clear you're in love with a competing operating system.
Nice try though =PWell, Did anyone notice which Day of Defeat servers they are going to be filtering? I have specific servers I have to be able to connect to on a regular bases...
Eerm, thank you? All I meant was: the end doesn't justify the means (not in this case anyway, or in my analogys'). Now, where's that coffee I made...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
If I'm not mistaken, there's also a big company in Thailand with its own Thai-script domain server, so Thai speakers can use familiar words and letters in website domain names. I assume it uses Unicode, but I'm not certain.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Why is this modded troll when it's a very erudite, brief and TRUE statement?
Have you people ANY shame?
Buy a stick of RAM, or a DVD burner, and get the OEM version. Half the price. Why does a normal user need retail?
Prove it.
This really wasn't an OSX test. It was an apache/ssh test. In fact, it was a test of 2 of the most hardened piece of software in use. We just had an article about how apache had signifigantly lower defects/ksloc than other source that Homeland Security had evaluated. Almost any updated OS with only apache and ssh showing is going to be rock solid assuming the apache install is simple and both are configured correctly.
I do security
Example: let's say two persons had a contest: who was the most intelligent. And say 5 minutes before the contest started, person A shot person B in the head, several times. It would be a bit ridiculous to claim that person A won, wouldn't it.
Well, not quite, but if you asked something like which person is worth more, and instead of trying to prove his abilities he just shot the other guy, then yes, he is now worth more.
(Except for the minor quibble that murderers have negative worth.)
He said he's in the consulting industry. That make me wonder what kind of idiots would hire him as an IT consultant?
Well, obviously, because a shark is like a car and the medium that a shark swims through (ceaselessly making analogies), i.e., the ocean, is like the road system.
Some analogies are like 5 lane highways, while others are little more than dirt paths. Just make sure you don't get shot in the head while on the dirt path, or this analogy will fail miserably.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I completely understand your point. Yet I choose to heartily disagree. Especially the 'minor quibble'. The words 'unfair' and 'cheating' come to mind.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
attention dogshit: EAT DICK AND DIE!
that is all.