I hope Windows passwords aren't base64 encoded. My binary email attachments arrive base64 encoded, and pine decodes them just fine. Some sort of one-way hash would make a lot more sense...
I use FPM to generate and manage all my web site passwords, and a couple of non-word passwords for local accounts. That way I never have to remember a zillion different web site passwords, I can make them long mixed-case, alphanumeric non-words and actually entering them is trivial.
It's not perfect, of course, but I wouldn't want one compromised web site to compromise the rest of them (the trouble with using one password for everything) and I'm reasonably sure I can keep my own box secured from attack. And it beats using sticky notes:)
The Idea behind a generic name is that is isn't supposed to be a necessarily ROX-only standard, so.ROX would be a bad name, you would be heading back to the dotdirectory mess we have now.
I think the concept itself, of a standard place to map MIME types to applications, etc., is sound. But if folks are going to adhere to this particular standard, it would be nice to give it a name. That way, if ROX (among others) is using that "foo" system, it could be stored in a ".foo" subdirectory - not only with an easily identifyable name, but also hidden by default.
Oh, and ROX *does* use a "CHOICESPATH" environment variable (as I just discovered) which should allow the directory to be moved (I think), but ROX breaks when the variable is set:(
The primary bit that is really cool is the really simple API for creating, accessing and modifying xml configuration files that follow the same ~/Choices/ convention that ROX-Filer follows, which seems infinitely better than the standard of polluting your home directory with dotfiles and dotdirectories...
The seemingly hard-coded use of the "~/Choices" directory is the one thing that irks me about the ROX-Filer. The convention of.directory is that stuff which needs some disk space but is used only by apps should be hidden from view so that I don't have to look at it when I list my home dir contents. Now, I'm stuck with the vaguely-worded "Choices" directory that would've been better placed in a ".ROX" directory so that I wouldn't have to look at it all the time, but would know what it was at a glance when doing a "ls -a".
Then there are the open source guys who are afraid to/incapable of settling on a well defined, common standard that would bring unified desktop and improve user friendliness on Unix.
In that case, I'd like all the open source guys to drop everything they're doing and provide me, the user, with the most friendly desktop possible. I'm not quite sure what that is yet, but I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve...
And, I'm sure everyone else will love to make it the standard.
Re:More viri on MS- why?
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Unix-alikes are built from the ground-up to prevent accidents (particularly from non-root users) from damaging the system. DOS-alikes assume a single, all-powerful user that is free to annihilate anything at will. Viruses have an easy time exploiting the latter, but have a tough time propagating on the former.
And, without an easy route for propagation, Linux viruses simply can't gain a foothold to cause any real damage.
Naturally, the average user skill and level of vigilence by Linux developers helps too. But I think the basic design plays a big part in the lack of viruses.
Find yourself a R2-capable NTSC player and an importer and you can enjoy Miyazaki films in letterboxed digital glory. For those who prefer dubs to subs, there's even an english language track on the disc.
The sad fact is, Disney acquired the Ghibli rights mainly for all the yen they'll get for the japanese releases as a distributor, not for any US DVD release - heck, they don't even *have* the DVD rights for anything but Monoke, last I checked. And Miyazaki doesn't give a rat's ass about whether his work is released overseas (which, frankly, is his prerogative and I can't complain). So, if you wanna see Ghibli flicks on disc, I highly recommend a multi-region player.
One can browse aol.com quite easily with any browser. Actually connecting to AOL's service requires proprietary means, but AOL's service isn't on the web either. So, if Microsoft is going to put up a broken website that only runs through proprietary software, I think we're entitled to give them hell for being stupid.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Microsoft seems to have forgotten the "World-Wide" part of the WWW. It still pisses me off. Not because I give a rat's ass about MSN, but because so many have forgotten the whole point of the web in the first place.
XBox will probably be used to increase directx games' market share and will help OS domination.
But since, on the MS-Windows platform, most of the games probably use DirectX anyway, there's not a whole lot more leverage needed on that front.
As for the console front, since all the X-Boxes are identical, DirectX just becomes a handy porting tool or development platform. If somebody else comes along with the Whizbangcast that uses development tools that are just as good, the console developers will simply use those instead rather than remain tied to DirectX (console developers have a lot of leeway in that regard).
In short, the X-Box is unlikely to give Microsoft any more leverage than it already has - in spite of Microsoft's own delusions to the contrary.
A good friend of mine once said that if MS's development track record held up, that the X-Box would be a flop. To paraphrase, he said:
"People don't expect their console to crash. If it does, they'll return it."
The X-Box might still be a flop, but not because of stability. The first batch of PSXs was notoriously unstable (anyone remember having to flip the stupid things *upside-down* in order to keep them from freezing during cutscenes?) and older cart-based systems were prone to lockups as they collected more dirt - but people bought them just the same.
In this case, heat is the likely culprit; there simply isn't that much to go wrong just running a demo screen.
As for the market in general, consoles aren't a good way to make a lot of money. Even if the X-Box is a success, Microsoft will lose a ton subsidizing the hardware. And even if the X-Box becomes the dominant gaming console, it's unlikely that dominance will stay around for long since the business changes so rapidly.
Time here doesn't have to run out at a speedy pace if we find out how we're speeding it up. If we put our minds to it, we could stay here forever.
Don't be silly. Assuming we're not blasted by some errant piece of space rock or drift too close to a black hole, eventually the sun's hydrogen fuel will run out and bake everything we've ever known to a crisp.
We've used up half its lifespan getting this far, so I'd say we'd better expend at least a little energy trying to move away from home while there's still some time to do it.
Of course it's ignorant, but I think it's important to explain *why*.
Here on earth, we spend 99.999% (or more) of our energies trying to survive and improve ourselves already (when we're not spending energy squabbling with each other), and only the tiniest fraction trying to explore what lies beyond this little ball of mud we're stuck on. But if there's to be a future for us, it lies in the worlds we have yet to discover; our time here is slowly running out.
The Onion is always good at these sorts of things.
"It is therefore urgent," Rumsfeld continued, "that all Americans be quiet, stop asking questions, accept the orders of authorities, and let us get on with the
important work of defending liberty, so that America can continue to be a beacon of freedom to all the world."
This one affects most every site, including ones like chase, citibank, aol, slashdot, nytimes and many more. It's cross platform and their is
not an easy patch. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already malicious undetected scripts that could pretty much get your logins to all
your favorite sites.
That one falls under the "bad CGI" umbrella. All freely enterable user data displayed from the user to a web site has to either have all the text escaped (which isn't hard) or filtered for only certain allowable tags (mildly annoying, but not too terrible) - and this applies to stuff fetched from other web sites too.
It's a simple matter of not ever trusting the user to enter sane (non-harmful) text.
Isn't opening a Pandora's Box supposed to be a bad thing?
Considering, according to the fable, opening Pandora's Box let all the troubles into the world, I'd say the analogy was apt - though probably not intended.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that found that whole "digital rights management" section decidedly creepy. Somehow, I don't think my "digital rights" to enjoy content in a non-Microsoft environment is high on their priority list.
Easy. Just play a multiplayer level with no other players/bots. Then just stick with the gauntlet (and no auto-switching of weapons) to ensure the player doesn't blow *himself* up either. Assuming one doesn't fall into the Fog O Death, bottomless pit or the lava, there shouldn't be anything to worry about in terms of violence.
I haven't decided if the new American host is as painful as the last one. But if you want Robert back, just wait for a new season of the Brit edition of JW to air. I'm sure there'll be one, but it's all a matter of whether the shows are done yet are not.
I'm really hoping they'll air the two series back-to-back.
...but only the first half, since the a new Junkyard Wars will finally air in the second - and if it doesn't suck I can catch the rest when it re-airs saturday. If it turns out to be a good show, it might be worth the time.
But if it *does* suck, friday's Farscape will be able to wash away the bad taste, like after that Voyager finale. I have only a couple hours of my life to lose finding out...
I seem to recall SimCity always having a money cheat, and "the Sims" has a particularly easy one.
But I don't think they take the fun out of it.
For me, the fun of "the Sims" is in the house construction, furnishing and interaction rather than earning enough simoleons to add on to the house or buy some bit of furniture. It's all about trying some wacky architectural experiment ("Let's try putting the front door on the second story of the house!") or seeing just how insane a sim party can get. Earning lots of dough just doesn't interest me by comparison.
(Yet I still send my sims to work, simply because the career tracks are pretty fun too.)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope Windows passwords aren't base64 encoded. My binary email attachments arrive base64 encoded, and pine decodes them just fine. Some sort of one-way hash would make a lot more sense...
It's not perfect, of course, but I wouldn't want one compromised web site to compromise the rest of them (the trouble with using one password for everything) and I'm reasonably sure I can keep my own box secured from attack. And it beats using sticky notes :)
I think the concept itself, of a standard place to map MIME types to applications, etc., is sound. But if folks are going to adhere to this particular standard, it would be nice to give it a name. That way, if ROX (among others) is using that "foo" system, it could be stored in a ".foo" subdirectory - not only with an easily identifyable name, but also hidden by default.
Oh, and ROX *does* use a "CHOICESPATH" environment variable (as I just discovered) which should allow the directory to be moved (I think), but ROX breaks when the variable is set :(
The seemingly hard-coded use of the "~/Choices" directory is the one thing that irks me about the ROX-Filer. The convention of .directory is that stuff which needs some disk space but is used only by apps should be hidden from view so that I don't have to look at it when I list my home dir contents. Now, I'm stuck with the vaguely-worded "Choices" directory that would've been better placed in a ".ROX" directory so that I wouldn't have to look at it all the time, but would know what it was at a glance when doing a "ls -a".
In that case, I'd like all the open source guys to drop everything they're doing and provide me, the user, with the most friendly desktop possible. I'm not quite sure what that is yet, but I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve...
And, I'm sure everyone else will love to make it the standard.
Naturally, the average user skill and level of vigilence by Linux developers helps too. But I think the basic design plays a big part in the lack of viruses.
The sad fact is, Disney acquired the Ghibli rights mainly for all the yen they'll get for the japanese releases as a distributor, not for any US DVD release - heck, they don't even *have* the DVD rights for anything but Monoke, last I checked. And Miyazaki doesn't give a rat's ass about whether his work is released overseas (which, frankly, is his prerogative and I can't complain). So, if you wanna see Ghibli flicks on disc, I highly recommend a multi-region player.
One can browse aol.com quite easily with any browser. Actually connecting to AOL's service requires proprietary means, but AOL's service isn't on the web either. So, if Microsoft is going to put up a broken website that only runs through proprietary software, I think we're entitled to give them hell for being stupid.
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Microsoft seems to have forgotten the "World-Wide" part of the WWW. It still pisses me off. Not because I give a rat's ass about MSN, but because so many have forgotten the whole point of the web in the first place.
But since, on the MS-Windows platform, most of the games probably use DirectX anyway, there's not a whole lot more leverage needed on that front.
As for the console front, since all the X-Boxes are identical, DirectX just becomes a handy porting tool or development platform. If somebody else comes along with the Whizbangcast that uses development tools that are just as good, the console developers will simply use those instead rather than remain tied to DirectX (console developers have a lot of leeway in that regard).
In short, the X-Box is unlikely to give Microsoft any more leverage than it already has - in spite of Microsoft's own delusions to the contrary.
The X-Box might still be a flop, but not because of stability. The first batch of PSXs was notoriously unstable (anyone remember having to flip the stupid things *upside-down* in order to keep them from freezing during cutscenes?) and older cart-based systems were prone to lockups as they collected more dirt - but people bought them just the same.
In this case, heat is the likely culprit; there simply isn't that much to go wrong just running a demo screen.
As for the market in general, consoles aren't a good way to make a lot of money. Even if the X-Box is a success, Microsoft will lose a ton subsidizing the hardware. And even if the X-Box becomes the dominant gaming console, it's unlikely that dominance will stay around for long since the business changes so rapidly.
Don't be silly. Assuming we're not blasted by some errant piece of space rock or drift too close to a black hole, eventually the sun's hydrogen fuel will run out and bake everything we've ever known to a crisp.
We've used up half its lifespan getting this far, so I'd say we'd better expend at least a little energy trying to move away from home while there's still some time to do it.
Of course it's ignorant, but I think it's important to explain *why*.
Here on earth, we spend 99.999% (or more) of our energies trying to survive and improve ourselves already (when we're not spending energy squabbling with each other), and only the tiniest fraction trying to explore what lies beyond this little ball of mud we're stuck on. But if there's to be a future for us, it lies in the worlds we have yet to discover; our time here is slowly running out.
That one falls under the "bad CGI" umbrella. All freely enterable user data displayed from the user to a web site has to either have all the text escaped (which isn't hard) or filtered for only certain allowable tags (mildly annoying, but not too terrible) - and this applies to stuff fetched from other web sites too.
It's a simple matter of not ever trusting the user to enter sane (non-harmful) text.
And then I'll get arrested for violating the DMCA.
Considering, according to the fable, opening Pandora's Box let all the troubles into the world, I'd say the analogy was apt - though probably not intended.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that found that whole "digital rights management" section decidedly creepy. Somehow, I don't think my "digital rights" to enjoy content in a non-Microsoft environment is high on their priority list.
Easy. Just play a multiplayer level with no other players/bots. Then just stick with the gauntlet (and no auto-switching of weapons) to ensure the player doesn't blow *himself* up either. Assuming one doesn't fall into the Fog O Death, bottomless pit or the lava, there shouldn't be anything to worry about in terms of violence.
So, either we're both okay, or we're both toast.
Tho the reason for the name switch still eludes me. Maybe "Scrapheap Challenge" wasn't American enough for some strange reason.
I'm really hoping they'll air the two series back-to-back.
It's not fixed. Here's information about what the junkyard is like. The real challenge is making sure all the bits get bodged together right in time.
But if it *does* suck, friday's Farscape will be able to wash away the bad taste, like after that Voyager finale. I have only a couple hours of my life to lose finding out...
But I don't think they take the fun out of it.
For me, the fun of "the Sims" is in the house construction, furnishing and interaction rather than earning enough simoleons to add on to the house or buy some bit of furniture. It's all about trying some wacky architectural experiment ("Let's try putting the front door on the second story of the house!") or seeing just how insane a sim party can get. Earning lots of dough just doesn't interest me by comparison.
(Yet I still send my sims to work, simply because the career tracks are pretty fun too.)
It's nearly impossible to believe that the buildings in those pictures no longer exist and are gone forever. The horror is truly unimaginable.