Well, some people will be offended no matter what you do; just like some people will be offended if you cold-call them. Email is perhaps slightly less offensive since it doesn't interrupt what you're doing and it's easy to delete.
If you really wanted to, then all of your suggestions are good. Spend some time researching whoever you're emailing, and try to work out how you can provide a benefit to them. Then email them describing the benefit. Since you're unlikely to know whether they're using a service similar to what you offer, or what they're paying for it, your best bet is to provide an estimated quote as well as a summary of the benefits of your offer.
Also while you're researching, make sure the email address you have is appropriate. If you send someone an email about something they have no involvement in, they're more likely to consider it spam. I fairly often receive solicitations for link exchanges sent to the address we list in our WHOIS records, and I discard them. We have a "contact us" page on our web site, which provides contacts for various types of enquiries -- none of which go to me, because I'm the network admin and not involved in marketing or site content. It's questionable whether people who email our WHOIS contact address have even looked at the site, really.
Really, if you somehow wind up with a list of people or businesses who may be interested in your products or services, then you should treat as a bunch of sales leads, because that's what it is. Give them to your sales people and let them work out how to sell your stuff to them.
I thought 911 was for reporting emergencies, i.e. where there is an imminent risk of injury or loss of life. While erratic/dangerous driving probably qualifies, a disabled vehicle or people walking along the highway don't seem to pose any immediate risk. It might be better to add the number(s) of local police stations to your phone so you can report non-emergency situations without tying up emergency operators.
It's not really Google's doing - just people exploiting the page rank algorithm by getting a lot of people to link to the site using particular terms. Normally this is a good input to an algorithm, but it means it's easy to get a particular site to the top for a particular phrase, so long as that phrase isn't commonly used to link to sites.
"Miserable failure" used to be a good one on Google, and this article gives a good overview of the phenomenon, which Google have implemented some measures to prevent.
It also mentions that the Yahoo! and MSN/Live search still returned the targeted page, but only Yahoo! seems to still be returning the the Whitehouse site as its top result now.
Maybe they're just capable of configuring the switch before hooking it up to their network? It's not rocket science, after all.
According to the article, they tested switches from Cisco as well as D-Link, Avaya, 3Com and NetGear. They don't say why the chose the HP over the others though. They did make a mention of the simplicity of the circuits being beneficial, but didn't say whether Cisco's gear didn't survive the tests, or whether HP was simply the cheapest of the surviving devices.
I've not tried it but the real search result would probably lead to when the French battleships kicked the ass of the English Kingdom's navy allowing the formation of the U.S.A
Do a Google search for the phrase french military victories
For the best effect, use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button so it takes you straight to the first result.
It doesn't actually require you to view it; after using the "Get Certificate" button it just says the certificate belongs to a different site, but doesn't tell you what that site is. There is a "View Certificate" button there, but you don't have to use it in order to add the exception.
It's an awful lot of clicking to add an exception though. I wonder if you add it permanently, does it prompt you when the certificate changes? This would at least provide as good security as SSH host keys do when using self-signed certificates.
Lots of monitors (LCDs) look crap at non-native resolution
Changing the resolution takes longer than ctrl+mousewheel (or even using the menu)
Most window managers (in particular, Windows) will move your windows to fit them onto the screen when you change resolution, so when you're done with the stupid website with the tiny text you have to move everything back to where it was.
Changing your screen resolution so you can view a single site that has chosen to use an unreadably small font size is far more hassle than using your browser's zoom or font size feature. Additionally, the fact that it can also enlarge images is helpful on sites that use unreadably small fonts rendered as images.
Also I'm trying to understand what you're actually complaining about. Is someone forcing you to use it or something? I don't use the "Character Encoding" option but I'm sure it's very useful to some people, so I don't see much point in complaining about its existence.
You were modded redundant because your post contributed nothing, and there's no "superfluous" moderation option so people use a somewhat expanded definition of "redundant".
Or to put it another way, moderation is designed to make it easier for people to not waste their time reading content-free posts. A "me too" post fits that criteria, and downmodding is expected.
Sure, and the fact that people are selfish ensures that they'll look after themselves. You, me, and businesses in general are not entitled to make money! We earn the money by providing something that others value as much as money. After all, the basis of the capitalist economic system is to create an environment that caters to consumers; it is left up to others to work out how to make money in that environment.
In a utopia there'd be limitless resources and people could do whatever they wanted, whether or not it was constructive or useful. In such an environment, there would likely still be progress because that's the nature of humankind. However, you can make a strong argument that there's no need for "progress" in such an environment, or at the very least that measuring progress would be even more difficult than it is now. But, unless I've missed a lot of very significant advances, we're nowhere near to having to worry about this "problem". People are going to be dependent on others for their livelihood for the foreseeable future, and that means people will need to do something that others deem worthwhile.
(Incidentally, I don't actually agree that human selfishness is a given that we have to live with forever more; but that's even more OT than we already are.)
If you tried to do that in our society you will have a very small group of people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good and large group of leechers who just enjoy the free stuff and don't contribute back. There will be no progress but stagnation.
Hmmm, haven't you just described open source? Most people who use open source are "leechers" who enjoy the free stuff and don't contribute back. I certainly haven't contributed anything of note to Firefox, PuTTY, KeePass, VNC, XChat, subversion, Linux, Perl, squid or Apache (just to name a few of the things I use every day), but that doesn't seem to have stopped them from progressing. What harm does me (and the countless others like me) benefiting from the work of others without contributing anything back do?
Be careful that your answer to this does not imply the non-existence of the bucketloads of free software available, or else it may not be taken seriously.;)
Essentially, you're arguing that a monopoly on development is good for the developers who get a privileged seat in that monopoly. This is obviously true, but it's harmful to everyone else. Just like competition amongst OS vendors, IDE developers and the makers of the various libraries you use helps you as a developer, so does competition amongst developers and improved efficiencies help those who pay you for your work.
You've presented some reasons why an individual or a business may prefer to not make their code open source, and hence why the "open source utopia" may never come to pass. However, they are all of a selfish nature: individuals or companies benefiting at the expense of society in general. As such, they don't provide a reason as to why we shouldn't go down that road, any more than "job losses due to automation" are a compelling reason not to progress further in robotics and AI.
Because there are more reasons to write code than that to sell it; the majority of software is not written for sale.
We have a bunch of developers at our place who are paid decent bucks, and we have no intention of ever releasing any software. However, we do need to do stuff that's specific to our business and not available in free or off-the-shelf products. (Conceivably we could release their output, but certainly not for profit.)
Well, you know those hot chicks in school who said "no way I'd go out with you, not even for a billion dollars!"? Well, guess what they'd do for TWO billion dollars?
Beaten by another, but I wrote a reply so I'm posting it anyway.
The main thing seems to be that lots of government bodies are putting in place (or have already put in place) legislation requiring all government documents use a format that complies to an "open standard". Requiring this for internal documents is less common, but it is common for anything published for public access. The idea being to ensure every citizen is able to access the information the government produces without having to buy products from a specific vendor, for example.
From a technical point of view what ISO does matters not at all. Microsoft are going to continue to develop the format to suit their needs, and any long-term compatibility with whatever ends up being in the "OOXML ISO specification" will be purely coincidental, as they've already stated. Government departments will continue using whatever software they feel like using, and will make a half-hearted attempt to conform to whatever rules they have to, just like they always have.
If.docx and friends get the magic ISO Standard Tick then government departments can simply slap their.docx files on a website and be in compliance with the legislation regarding making their publications publically accessible without vendor bias: it's not their fault that there's only one working implementation of the "standard". Now they could theoretically mount legal action against Microsoft for selling them a product which they claim supports the OOXML ISO standard but doesn't really, but that's unlikely since everybody knows the whole thing is a sham and they're just playing along to cover their asses.
On the other hand, if.docx and friends don't get the magic tick, then the government departments will have to publish their files in something other than {.doc,.docx}. If the chosen format was ODF (.odt etc) then people will need software that can open it. This means a) the government will be pointing people to alternatives to MS Office, and b) Microsoft will "have to" natively support opening.odt files within Office; otherwise they risk losing customers -- particularly the ones that buy Office because that's "what you use to write documents". Also the government departments will need a way to export to the "standard" format, and if Office can't do it natively some may decide to switch software to save that step.
Consider that currently, even if you use OpenOffice or KOffice or Abiword or anything else, you probably send documents to other people using.doc unless you specifically know they don't use Office. The reason is simply that, even if they do use something else, they can probably import the.doc file without problems. However if they do use Office, they're completely unable to import most other document formats.
So, the hoped-for end result is that Microsoft will effectively be forced to make Office interoperate with other software, rather than having everyone else trying to implement Microsoft's format. While the documentation for.docx will no doubt be useful in figuring out some corner cases, it's not a significant improvement over the reverse engineered re-implementations of the format currently being used.
That's the theory, anyway. I doubt it will have an earth-shattering affect either way, but I suppose it's another straw on the camel's back.
Hmm - there's been quite a few security updates for the Linux kernel lately, that affect the version in Debian stable. I've been rebooting our Linux boxes a fair bit lately as a result...
It's certainly an interesting issue. It's not that long ago in human history that promising children in marriage before they were 10 was common practice, and sexual relations would be started much earlier than is generally considered "acceptable" now. So characterizing sexual attraction to children as being a serious mental illness seems a bit of a reach -- it was perfectly normal not that long ago. Unless of course the vast majority of people in the middle ages were mentally ill, which is a possibility.
Times change of course, and people live much longer now and popping out new kids at the soonest possible moment isn't a necessity. Further, kids have become increasingly sacred and protected from pretty much everything that has any potential to have an even vaguely negative affect on them, which certainly will affect their ability to deal with things like sex at an early age. Societies evolve, so the above paragraph isn't intended as an "it was okay to have sex with children then so it should be now" argument, merely offering a counterpoint to your suggestion that it's a mental illness.
The main thrust of your initial argument is that exposure to simulated child porn may cause certain individuals (presumably ones who are somehow predisposed) to take their fantasy acts into the real world, and cite that certain types of "users" of adult porn will seek out harder and harder stuff.
I see two philosophical problems with this as a basis for banning anything that might be construed as CP. Firstly, "may cause certain types of people" has a hollow ring to it, and seems to be used by people wanting to enforce their own wishes without a good reason. More to the point, it acknowledges that it doesn't cause the majority of people to behave in an unacceptable manner, no more than watching violent movies or playing violent video games causes a significant number of people to behave in an acceptable manner. As such, we're effectively punishing (as in, restricting the freedoms of) perfectly law-abiding citizens, in order to potentially protect us from a few.
Taken further, consider these ideas which, to the best of my knowledge, are all backed up by studies:
listening to music while driving a vehicle should be banned, as it can cause some people to drive more "dynamically" increasing the risk of accidents (particularly music with a fast tempo)
listening to anything at all while driving a vehicle can distract certain people enough to significantly increase the risk of accident; therefore radios and passengers should be banned
certain people may become violent after drinking alcohol, so alcohol should be banned
similarly, certain people may feel less inhibited by things such as "the law" or "decency" after drinking alcohol, so it should be banned twice
some people commit violent crimes to obtain money, therefore being poor should be banned (not exactly sure how to implement this; perhaps not being poor could be banned instead?)
More seriously, a person who enjoys child porn almost certainly enjoys looking at children in real life, as well. So should we ban children from all public spaces just in case there happens to be a paedophile around who will have bad thoughts because they happen to see a child they find attractive? I mean, having separate "child habitats" where children are made safe from the problems of the real world is the next logical step in the continued cotton-balling of our kids.
The general point being, if people are somehow predisposed to paedophilia, or murder, or rape, or theft, or any of a number of things we want to strongly discourage in our society, then these actions could be partially triggered by any number of inputs. Some might be easy to identify, others more difficult. Moreover, many of these inputs may be perfectly acceptable things that normal folk feel add value to their lives. Lots of people have posted about violent movies as a point of comparison. If we start banning "normal" folk fro
We're rolling it out, even though none of the IT staff (just the manager) wants to. We just see it as being a hassle -- retraining the staff as well as ourselves -- with no real benefit, as all the software anyone needs to use works fine on XP.
Not to mention that we'll now be running an OS which contains code specifically designed to prevent the computer from working. We've already had one system fail to activate using our key management server, and we've only rolled out half a dozen. In a perverse way, I'm actually looking forward to when every desktop is running Vista and then decides it's not activated and nobody can do any work while we try to fix a problem caused by code that shouldn't be there in the first place. A high profile screwup like that could be the death knell for shitty license activation schemes.
I didn't RTF either, but I think I read more comments than you. The first listen on lala is free, for unlimited listens it's 10c per track. You can also buy a ~256kbit VBR mp3 for 89c per track. However if you're happy with streaming, it's 10c per track to listen to it as much as you want.
I'm guessing the album the GP is referring to has 8 tracks on it, hence 80c for unlimited listening (via internet stream).
No, his point was that your license agreement for any piece of commercial software largely precludes you from suing for anything. Microsoft have a somewhat nicer one which limits any liability to $5 or something like that, which is absolutely useless for your company but could be nasty for them if there's a class action.
It might be an idea to go through the EULAs for the main packages you use and show your boss the sections where they disclaim any liability. Many of them specifically forbid you from suing them for defects, too.
I'm not familiar with chntpw or exactly what "protected storage" is, but I was under the impression that forcing a password change would prevent the user accessing their encrypted files? At least, if I reset a password through computer management I get a warning that starts with:
Resetting this password might cause irreversible loss of information for this user account. For security reasons, Windows protects certain information by making it impossible to access if the user's password is reset.
Did you read the last paragraph, where I explicitly said there needs to be a profit motive and that hasn't been addressed by proponents of this plan? Probably no, because otherwise you wouldn't have ended your post with "NOW do you see the problem?" if you'd read my acknowledgement of the problem.
By the way, if you're making an epic RPG today you're probably doing it as part of a large team of other programmers, artists, animators, musicians, writers, and so on. And guess what? You're paid a salary for your work. The copyright and distribution rights are owned by the game's publisher, who is the one paying your salary. YOU do not get royalties from it. YOU are paid to do a job. (There may be some exceptions to this, for example if you're a rockstar coder who can negotiate a special deal for yourself, but by and large this is how it works. Just like application development.)
Taleworld's development model for Mount & Blade is an interesting one. I'm not sure how far it could scale though; their team is very small in comparison to many others.
True, it probably shouldn't and it was almost certainly just an oversight (or more likely, after careful consideration they decided the application didn't pose a security risk). It may be that the logon screen does not permit unprivileged applications from interacting with it in the manner in which the accessibility tools needs to in order to function. If this is the case then fixing this may require making a lot of changes to the logon system, creating more complex code that increases the chances of there being bugs.
Don't forget, this isn't an "exploit" of the accessibility tools per se, and neither is it a "random application" as you say (it's a very specific application) and it's not started automatically on bootup (but that's just nitpicking). It also requires complete access to the (unencrypted) system drive in order to use this "exploit", which makes it a pretty uninteresting exploit in my view. All the APIs and coding practices in the world won't keep your system secure if an attacker has complete access to the system's drive.
In conclusion, yes they should probably fix it if possible -- the less code running with high privileges the better. In practice, I don't really care if they don't fix it. If an attacker is in a position to be able to replace the accessibility tools with a command shell or other program, then the system is already completely compromised.
People who would prefer to make movies for a living instead of flipping burgers or developing land or writing computer programs or doing sysadmin or answering telephones or...?
I mean, seriously -- is that the best argument you can come up with? Why should film making or book writing or song writing be different from any other career? You get paid to do it, and you decide whether the compensation for doing it and the satisfaction you get from doing it makes it more worthwhile than the other things you could do.
What hasn't been well addressed is the mechanism for paying people to do these things. For a film maker that's "easy" -- someone wants a film made so they find someone that can do it, same as with any other job. But who would want a film made badly enough to want to pay for it? There needs to be a profit incentive, which is currently provided by having a monopoly on the distribution of the finished work.
As the other dude noted, every user login process runs as root on *NIX systems. You know, because they have to. If you have sshd installed, then you have a process that runs as root accepting network connections!
Also note that if you run "su" or "passwd" as an unprivileged user, you are suddenly executing code with root privileges.
It's entirely expected that the login process runs as a super user. The only reason this is a problem is because it invokes an external command under the assumption that the external command is safe to invoke with elevated privileges. Possibly they can change it to run it with lower privileges, though it may have difficulty interacting with the logon desktop in that case.
Another possible fix would be to store a checksum for the accessibility helper program within the logon process, and verify the binary it's about to execute matches that checksum. Or embed the helper within the logon process.
Anyway, the point is the logon process always has high access to the system so it can verify the user's credentials and then start a new session as that user. Any code of this sort needs to be thoroughly audited to ensure there's no bugs that can be exploited by the user to run things they're not supposed to be able to.
Not really, the kernel is just a file or two. If you insist, then rename init to something else (e.g. a shell) and you'll get a similar effect on Linux. Or modify the inittab to run a logged-in root shell on one of the vty's. If you really think this is some special OMG VISTA IS SO INSECURE COMPARED TO EVERYTHING ELSE flaw, then you don't understand the "problem" at all.
However I have to wonder: once you have access to the filesystem, why exactly would you bother booting into Vista and getting yourself a privileged cmd.exe? Why not just access whatever data you want from the other OS? Or does "unencrypted hard drives can be read and modified using other computers" not make a good enough headline?
This whole thing is so completely and utterly pointless it's probably created a black hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, some people will be offended no matter what you do; just like some people will be offended if you cold-call them. Email is perhaps slightly less offensive since it doesn't interrupt what you're doing and it's easy to delete.
If you really wanted to, then all of your suggestions are good. Spend some time researching whoever you're emailing, and try to work out how you can provide a benefit to them. Then email them describing the benefit. Since you're unlikely to know whether they're using a service similar to what you offer, or what they're paying for it, your best bet is to provide an estimated quote as well as a summary of the benefits of your offer.
Also while you're researching, make sure the email address you have is appropriate. If you send someone an email about something they have no involvement in, they're more likely to consider it spam. I fairly often receive solicitations for link exchanges sent to the address we list in our WHOIS records, and I discard them. We have a "contact us" page on our web site, which provides contacts for various types of enquiries -- none of which go to me, because I'm the network admin and not involved in marketing or site content. It's questionable whether people who email our WHOIS contact address have even looked at the site, really.
Really, if you somehow wind up with a list of people or businesses who may be interested in your products or services, then you should treat as a bunch of sales leads, because that's what it is. Give them to your sales people and let them work out how to sell your stuff to them.
I thought 911 was for reporting emergencies, i.e. where there is an imminent risk of injury or loss of life. While erratic/dangerous driving probably qualifies, a disabled vehicle or people walking along the highway don't seem to pose any immediate risk. It might be better to add the number(s) of local police stations to your phone so you can report non-emergency situations without tying up emergency operators.
It's not really Google's doing - just people exploiting the page rank algorithm by getting a lot of people to link to the site using particular terms. Normally this is a good input to an algorithm, but it means it's easy to get a particular site to the top for a particular phrase, so long as that phrase isn't commonly used to link to sites.
"Miserable failure" used to be a good one on Google, and this article gives a good overview of the phenomenon, which Google have implemented some measures to prevent.
It also mentions that the Yahoo! and MSN/Live search still returned the targeted page, but only Yahoo! seems to still be returning the the Whitehouse site as its top result now.
Maybe they're just capable of configuring the switch before hooking it up to their network? It's not rocket science, after all.
According to the article, they tested switches from Cisco as well as D-Link, Avaya, 3Com and NetGear. They don't say why the chose the HP over the others though. They did make a mention of the simplicity of the circuits being beneficial, but didn't say whether Cisco's gear didn't survive the tests, or whether HP was simply the cheapest of the surviving devices.
Do a Google search for the phrase french military victories
For the best effect, use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button so it takes you straight to the first result.
It doesn't actually require you to view it; after using the "Get Certificate" button it just says the certificate belongs to a different site, but doesn't tell you what that site is. There is a "View Certificate" button there, but you don't have to use it in order to add the exception.
It's an awful lot of clicking to add an exception though. I wonder if you add it permanently, does it prompt you when the certificate changes? This would at least provide as good security as SSH host keys do when using self-signed certificates.
Changing your screen resolution so you can view a single site that has chosen to use an unreadably small font size is far more hassle than using your browser's zoom or font size feature. Additionally, the fact that it can also enlarge images is helpful on sites that use unreadably small fonts rendered as images.
Also I'm trying to understand what you're actually complaining about. Is someone forcing you to use it or something? I don't use the "Character Encoding" option but I'm sure it's very useful to some people, so I don't see much point in complaining about its existence.
You were modded redundant because your post contributed nothing, and there's no "superfluous" moderation option so people use a somewhat expanded definition of "redundant".
Or to put it another way, moderation is designed to make it easier for people to not waste their time reading content-free posts. A "me too" post fits that criteria, and downmodding is expected.
Sure, and the fact that people are selfish ensures that they'll look after themselves. You, me, and businesses in general are not entitled to make money! We earn the money by providing something that others value as much as money. After all, the basis of the capitalist economic system is to create an environment that caters to consumers; it is left up to others to work out how to make money in that environment.
In a utopia there'd be limitless resources and people could do whatever they wanted, whether or not it was constructive or useful. In such an environment, there would likely still be progress because that's the nature of humankind. However, you can make a strong argument that there's no need for "progress" in such an environment, or at the very least that measuring progress would be even more difficult than it is now. But, unless I've missed a lot of very significant advances, we're nowhere near to having to worry about this "problem". People are going to be dependent on others for their livelihood for the foreseeable future, and that means people will need to do something that others deem worthwhile.
(Incidentally, I don't actually agree that human selfishness is a given that we have to live with forever more; but that's even more OT than we already are.)
If you tried to do that in our society you will have a very small group of people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good and large group of leechers who just enjoy the free stuff and don't contribute back. There will be no progress but stagnation.Hmmm, haven't you just described open source? Most people who use open source are "leechers" who enjoy the free stuff and don't contribute back. I certainly haven't contributed anything of note to Firefox, PuTTY, KeePass, VNC, XChat, subversion, Linux, Perl, squid or Apache (just to name a few of the things I use every day), but that doesn't seem to have stopped them from progressing. What harm does me (and the countless others like me) benefiting from the work of others without contributing anything back do?
Be careful that your answer to this does not imply the non-existence of the bucketloads of free software available, or else it may not be taken seriously. ;)
Essentially, you're arguing that a monopoly on development is good for the developers who get a privileged seat in that monopoly. This is obviously true, but it's harmful to everyone else. Just like competition amongst OS vendors, IDE developers and the makers of the various libraries you use helps you as a developer, so does competition amongst developers and improved efficiencies help those who pay you for your work.
You've presented some reasons why an individual or a business may prefer to not make their code open source, and hence why the "open source utopia" may never come to pass. However, they are all of a selfish nature: individuals or companies benefiting at the expense of society in general. As such, they don't provide a reason as to why we shouldn't go down that road, any more than "job losses due to automation" are a compelling reason not to progress further in robotics and AI.
Because there are more reasons to write code than that to sell it; the majority of software is not written for sale.
We have a bunch of developers at our place who are paid decent bucks, and we have no intention of ever releasing any software. However, we do need to do stuff that's specific to our business and not available in free or off-the-shelf products. (Conceivably we could release their output, but certainly not for profit.)
Well, you know those hot chicks in school who said "no way I'd go out with you, not even for a billion dollars!"? Well, guess what they'd do for TWO billion dollars?
Beaten by another, but I wrote a reply so I'm posting it anyway.
The main thing seems to be that lots of government bodies are putting in place (or have already put in place) legislation requiring all government documents use a format that complies to an "open standard". Requiring this for internal documents is less common, but it is common for anything published for public access. The idea being to ensure every citizen is able to access the information the government produces without having to buy products from a specific vendor, for example.
From a technical point of view what ISO does matters not at all. Microsoft are going to continue to develop the format to suit their needs, and any long-term compatibility with whatever ends up being in the "OOXML ISO specification" will be purely coincidental, as they've already stated. Government departments will continue using whatever software they feel like using, and will make a half-hearted attempt to conform to whatever rules they have to, just like they always have.
If .docx and friends get the magic ISO Standard Tick then government departments can simply slap their .docx files on a website and be in compliance with the legislation regarding making their publications publically accessible without vendor bias: it's not their fault that there's only one working implementation of the "standard". Now they could theoretically mount legal action against Microsoft for selling them a product which they claim supports the OOXML ISO standard but doesn't really, but that's unlikely since everybody knows the whole thing is a sham and they're just playing along to cover their asses.
On the other hand, if .docx and friends don't get the magic tick, then the government departments will have to publish their files in something other than {.doc,.docx}. If the chosen format was ODF (.odt etc) then people will need software that can open it. This means a) the government will be pointing people to alternatives to MS Office, and b) Microsoft will "have to" natively support opening .odt files within Office; otherwise they risk losing customers -- particularly the ones that buy Office because that's "what you use to write documents". Also the government departments will need a way to export to the "standard" format, and if Office can't do it natively some may decide to switch software to save that step.
Consider that currently, even if you use OpenOffice or KOffice or Abiword or anything else, you probably send documents to other people using .doc unless you specifically know they don't use Office. The reason is simply that, even if they do use something else, they can probably import the .doc file without problems. However if they do use Office, they're completely unable to import most other document formats.
So, the hoped-for end result is that Microsoft will effectively be forced to make Office interoperate with other software, rather than having everyone else trying to implement Microsoft's format. While the documentation for .docx will no doubt be useful in figuring out some corner cases, it's not a significant improvement over the reverse engineered re-implementations of the format currently being used.
That's the theory, anyway. I doubt it will have an earth-shattering affect either way, but I suppose it's another straw on the camel's back.
I didn't think he was talking about condoms, not with the "sock" reference.
Plus, I suspect your ladyfriend would not be especially appreciative of you using a highly absorbent material in that fashion.
Hmm - there's been quite a few security updates for the Linux kernel lately, that affect the version in Debian stable. I've been rebooting our Linux boxes a fair bit lately as a result...
YMMV if you're still running a 2.4 kernel though.
It's certainly an interesting issue. It's not that long ago in human history that promising children in marriage before they were 10 was common practice, and sexual relations would be started much earlier than is generally considered "acceptable" now. So characterizing sexual attraction to children as being a serious mental illness seems a bit of a reach -- it was perfectly normal not that long ago. Unless of course the vast majority of people in the middle ages were mentally ill, which is a possibility.
Times change of course, and people live much longer now and popping out new kids at the soonest possible moment isn't a necessity. Further, kids have become increasingly sacred and protected from pretty much everything that has any potential to have an even vaguely negative affect on them, which certainly will affect their ability to deal with things like sex at an early age. Societies evolve, so the above paragraph isn't intended as an "it was okay to have sex with children then so it should be now" argument, merely offering a counterpoint to your suggestion that it's a mental illness.
The main thrust of your initial argument is that exposure to simulated child porn may cause certain individuals (presumably ones who are somehow predisposed) to take their fantasy acts into the real world, and cite that certain types of "users" of adult porn will seek out harder and harder stuff.
I see two philosophical problems with this as a basis for banning anything that might be construed as CP. Firstly, "may cause certain types of people" has a hollow ring to it, and seems to be used by people wanting to enforce their own wishes without a good reason. More to the point, it acknowledges that it doesn't cause the majority of people to behave in an unacceptable manner, no more than watching violent movies or playing violent video games causes a significant number of people to behave in an acceptable manner. As such, we're effectively punishing (as in, restricting the freedoms of) perfectly law-abiding citizens, in order to potentially protect us from a few.
Taken further, consider these ideas which, to the best of my knowledge, are all backed up by studies:
More seriously, a person who enjoys child porn almost certainly enjoys looking at children in real life, as well. So should we ban children from all public spaces just in case there happens to be a paedophile around who will have bad thoughts because they happen to see a child they find attractive? I mean, having separate "child habitats" where children are made safe from the problems of the real world is the next logical step in the continued cotton-balling of our kids.
The general point being, if people are somehow predisposed to paedophilia, or murder, or rape, or theft, or any of a number of things we want to strongly discourage in our society, then these actions could be partially triggered by any number of inputs. Some might be easy to identify, others more difficult. Moreover, many of these inputs may be perfectly acceptable things that normal folk feel add value to their lives. Lots of people have posted about violent movies as a point of comparison. If we start banning "normal" folk fro
We're rolling it out, even though none of the IT staff (just the manager) wants to. We just see it as being a hassle -- retraining the staff as well as ourselves -- with no real benefit, as all the software anyone needs to use works fine on XP.
Not to mention that we'll now be running an OS which contains code specifically designed to prevent the computer from working. We've already had one system fail to activate using our key management server, and we've only rolled out half a dozen. In a perverse way, I'm actually looking forward to when every desktop is running Vista and then decides it's not activated and nobody can do any work while we try to fix a problem caused by code that shouldn't be there in the first place. A high profile screwup like that could be the death knell for shitty license activation schemes.
I didn't RTF either, but I think I read more comments than you. The first listen on lala is free, for unlimited listens it's 10c per track. You can also buy a ~256kbit VBR mp3 for 89c per track. However if you're happy with streaming, it's 10c per track to listen to it as much as you want.
I'm guessing the album the GP is referring to has 8 tracks on it, hence 80c for unlimited listening (via internet stream).
No, his point was that your license agreement for any piece of commercial software largely precludes you from suing for anything. Microsoft have a somewhat nicer one which limits any liability to $5 or something like that, which is absolutely useless for your company but could be nasty for them if there's a class action.
It might be an idea to go through the EULAs for the main packages you use and show your boss the sections where they disclaim any liability. Many of them specifically forbid you from suing them for defects, too.
I'm not familiar with chntpw or exactly what "protected storage" is, but I was under the impression that forcing a password change would prevent the user accessing their encrypted files? At least, if I reset a password through computer management I get a warning that starts with:
Resetting this password might cause irreversible loss of information for this user account. For security reasons, Windows protects certain information by making it impossible to access if the user's password is reset.Did you read the last paragraph, where I explicitly said there needs to be a profit motive and that hasn't been addressed by proponents of this plan? Probably no, because otherwise you wouldn't have ended your post with "NOW do you see the problem?" if you'd read my acknowledgement of the problem.
By the way, if you're making an epic RPG today you're probably doing it as part of a large team of other programmers, artists, animators, musicians, writers, and so on. And guess what? You're paid a salary for your work. The copyright and distribution rights are owned by the game's publisher, who is the one paying your salary. YOU do not get royalties from it. YOU are paid to do a job. (There may be some exceptions to this, for example if you're a rockstar coder who can negotiate a special deal for yourself, but by and large this is how it works. Just like application development.)
Taleworld's development model for Mount & Blade is an interesting one. I'm not sure how far it could scale though; their team is very small in comparison to many others.
True, it probably shouldn't and it was almost certainly just an oversight (or more likely, after careful consideration they decided the application didn't pose a security risk). It may be that the logon screen does not permit unprivileged applications from interacting with it in the manner in which the accessibility tools needs to in order to function. If this is the case then fixing this may require making a lot of changes to the logon system, creating more complex code that increases the chances of there being bugs.
Don't forget, this isn't an "exploit" of the accessibility tools per se, and neither is it a "random application" as you say (it's a very specific application) and it's not started automatically on bootup (but that's just nitpicking). It also requires complete access to the (unencrypted) system drive in order to use this "exploit", which makes it a pretty uninteresting exploit in my view. All the APIs and coding practices in the world won't keep your system secure if an attacker has complete access to the system's drive.
In conclusion, yes they should probably fix it if possible -- the less code running with high privileges the better. In practice, I don't really care if they don't fix it. If an attacker is in a position to be able to replace the accessibility tools with a command shell or other program, then the system is already completely compromised.
People who would prefer to make movies for a living instead of flipping burgers or developing land or writing computer programs or doing sysadmin or answering telephones or ...?
I mean, seriously -- is that the best argument you can come up with? Why should film making or book writing or song writing be different from any other career? You get paid to do it, and you decide whether the compensation for doing it and the satisfaction you get from doing it makes it more worthwhile than the other things you could do.
What hasn't been well addressed is the mechanism for paying people to do these things. For a film maker that's "easy" -- someone wants a film made so they find someone that can do it, same as with any other job. But who would want a film made badly enough to want to pay for it? There needs to be a profit incentive, which is currently provided by having a monopoly on the distribution of the finished work.
As the other dude noted, every user login process runs as root on *NIX systems. You know, because they have to. If you have sshd installed, then you have a process that runs as root accepting network connections!
Also note that if you run "su" or "passwd" as an unprivileged user, you are suddenly executing code with root privileges.
It's entirely expected that the login process runs as a super user. The only reason this is a problem is because it invokes an external command under the assumption that the external command is safe to invoke with elevated privileges. Possibly they can change it to run it with lower privileges, though it may have difficulty interacting with the logon desktop in that case.
Another possible fix would be to store a checksum for the accessibility helper program within the logon process, and verify the binary it's about to execute matches that checksum. Or embed the helper within the logon process.
Anyway, the point is the logon process always has high access to the system so it can verify the user's credentials and then start a new session as that user. Any code of this sort needs to be thoroughly audited to ensure there's no bugs that can be exploited by the user to run things they're not supposed to be able to.
Not really, the kernel is just a file or two. If you insist, then rename init to something else (e.g. a shell) and you'll get a similar effect on Linux. Or modify the inittab to run a logged-in root shell on one of the vty's. If you really think this is some special OMG VISTA IS SO INSECURE COMPARED TO EVERYTHING ELSE flaw, then you don't understand the "problem" at all.
However I have to wonder: once you have access to the filesystem, why exactly would you bother booting into Vista and getting yourself a privileged cmd.exe? Why not just access whatever data you want from the other OS? Or does "unencrypted hard drives can be read and modified using other computers" not make a good enough headline?
This whole thing is so completely and utterly pointless it's probably created a black hole.