It would be like saying that, if most fires did actually burn out of control too quickly for any individual to fight them. That sort of thing happens a lot, but the media doesn't report it because it's not newsworthy. Unless of course, the individual in question is a child or pet dog, in which case it makes a great feel-good story.;)
I strongly doubt it does, because you'd fall foul of vista UAC protection
How does that matter? It's not as if anybody is using Vista yet...:)
On a serious note, is the system temp directory really not world-writeable in Vista?
<rant>Also, what's with Windows never deleting anything in the user temp directories? What part of temporary does it not understand? Every now and then I'll see an app crap itself because it can't create a temporary file... because the directory is full!. What the **** is up with that?! I've still got files in my user temp folder from when the machine was built in September last year! (This may go some way to explaining why Windows PCs seem to get slower and slower with nothing more than age.)</rant>
For a friend's n93 I exported the certificate as a "DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)" using the Windows Certificates MMC (it was for our OWA server's certificate; not sure what the OpenSSL equivalent would be), and downloaded it to the phone using the built-in browser. It then asked me if I'd like to install it.
I think I also renamed the certificate to have a.der extension, but I don't think that should be necessary - IIS uses the same MIME type for.crt and.der files (application/x-x509-ca-cert).
I think that's the problem with all smartphones, in general. They're basically running modern PC-type software (Nokia have even started referring to their N-series as "multimedia computers", IIRC) but are way underpowered for the job in terms of both of CPU and memory speed.
It's much better to have some sort of process supervisor that will restart crashed servers
This always surprises me, like "crashed servers" are such a common and everyday thing that they should just be automatically restarted as a matter of course. I think having things crash should be a bit of a nuisance, because otherwise it's never get fixed. On the other hand, automatically restarting the server makes it easier for people to get your buffer overflows to run their code. Try, try again!
and that will deal with dependencies in some sort of sane manner
Dependency checking sounds nice, but I'm not sure exactly when I'd make use of it. Perhaps after booting to single-user to fix a problem, but even then I'd prefer to do a full reboot (after all, the system's not much good if it fails to boot unattended). Perhaps it's because my systems don't have many depencies, other than basic stuff like "the network has to be up". On the other hand, I doubt that the feature would annoy me.
i.e., the recipient pays the majority of all cost either directly or indirectly for all email.
Is there anything to support this claim? It doesn't sound right to me. Both the sender and the recipient need an internet connection, and both parties have to pay for that. Cheap home internet connections are quite capable of receiving very large numbers of emails (especially with services like Gmail available). Large-volume senders tend to need to either pay another company, or manage their own mail servers.
That is the ONLY reason that spam exists in the first place.
Most spam seems to be sent by botnets, so it's the user of compromised machines that pays for most of the volume; and this cost is spread amongst a very large population. This is what makes it cheap. If the spammers actually had to pay for all the bandwidth they're using, it would almost certainly cease to be profitable.
Chances are the people that actually send the spam messages (those who control the botnets) are not the people making money from stock scams, phishing, or sales of pirated software.
In the same way legitimate businesses will pay marketing companies to run advertising campaigns, design, send and manage email distribution lists, etc, less legitimate 'businesses' pay spammers to send out their message to as many people as possible.
So yes, they do get paid - just not by the victims of the spam.
A well-designed central approach, with built-in redundancy and a qualified backup scheme can usually outperform the poorly administered "edge" systems run by end users.
True, but a) you have no idea of knowing just how resilient their systems are, or how reliable their backup scheme is... until it fails, of course; b) online apps require an internet connection; and c) trust.
The need for an internet link to the central site is still a pretty significant failure point, especially if we're talking "end user" systems which are probably connected via a single phone or cable line.
Trust is probably the most significant problem. Not just that the company that stores your files will do so in a secure and discreet manner, but also that they'll behave in an ethical way. Once you become reliant on a service, they can start extorting you for access to your own documents. They can increase their fees, and refuse to release the documents to you until you pay them a severance fee. They can then release them in a secret proprietary format which only their systems can accurately interpret. All of these things you could sue for... but do you really want to be suing a monster corporation (or even a small, nasty one) to get your own documents back?
And what happens when your favourite do-no-evil corp is bought out or sells their central application services to a do-nothing-but-evil megacorp? Quickly grab a copy of all your stuff and then delete it? How do you know it's actually been deleted?
Doesn't copying stuff (for personal use / backups) fall under the umbrella of "fair use"?
You're certainly not allowed to distribute copies, but making the copy itself is fine. Unless of course it's protected by "DRM", in which case it's illegal to try to copy it anyway.
Yep, we've been using it since the first beta and it displays HTML fine. The only missing bit is forms, but it appears their lack of functioning wasn't a bug, but a feature. (I was going to set up a form to allow people to manage their dspam quarantine from Outlook, but I guess I'll have to scrap this plan.)
That is not the correct way to adjust your clock for daylight savings. Here in Perth, W. Australia, the state government decided we'd have DST this summer for a 3 year trial (W.A. doesn't usually change its timezone for the summer months). Microsoft released a patch for Windows about 2 weeks before it came into effect (the legislation was rushed through). The Debian timezone update didn't even make it in to testing before the date it came into effect.
Anyway, I have a few contacts who keep sending me emails from the future, because they adjusted their computer's clock forward an hour. This means that if they send me an email at 9am, the Date: header will say it was sent at 9am +0800. Naturally, my system compensates by adding an extra hour to match my local timezone before showing the time to me.
Setting your clock forward one hour is only a solution for things which only need to display the time, not communicate it. If you do this on a web server, for example, then all of its Last-Modified headers will be off by one hour, which can affect content expiration, confuse users of your forums, and so on.
You can get USB-to-serial adapters for these machines. We've had one for ages due to the IT laptop not having a serial port; and our new PCs don't have serial ports either, so it's now come in twice as handy.
Tell me about it. I ordered one from the US (not sold in Australia) on Jan 1st, still waiting for it to arrive - and then they tell me the new model is on the verge of release!
That's what I immediately thought of too, but there's probably practical limitations associated with that. After all, a door that comes open in the middle of a washing or drying cycle isn't going to rate highly with consumers, so simply having it open as the result of applying pressure from the inside won't work. Having a handle on the inside sounds like an excellent way to damage your clothing during normal operation.
Any robust, reliable solution is probably going to add to the cost of producing the appliance; and it's likely most consumers will simply not want to pay more for such a "stupid" feature ("why would I want to be open the door from the INSIDE?!").
I'm not sure whether it was photoshopped, but I recently saw some pictures of a rather low-hanging sign above an escalator warning people not to hit their head on the sign above the escalator. Unfortunately, I can't find a link right now.
This is one of the most bizarre signs I have ever encountered. The sign is comical in itself: stick figure rides up the escalator and bumps his head on a hanging sign, the impact causing VIOLENT RED RAYS OF PAIN. Beware! All is well and good until, armed with a newfound caution, you look around for the offending object and realize that IT'S A SIGN ABOUT THE SIGN ITSELF.
I'm guessing you're probably 16 years old and haven't been using computers very long, but the rest of us who have been around them for longer know that we've been using powers of two since the 60s and 70s, longer than you've been alive.
I'm guessing you're probably 60 years old and haven't been using metric very long, but the rest of us know that the metric system (from which the "kilo", "mega", "giga", etc prefixes originated) was in use well before the 1960s. Computer scientists should have known better than to overload the meaning of existing prefixes, and that "close enough" isn't good enough.
A quick search of the internets tells us that kilo was "Officially adopted in 1795 (though in common use before that), it comes from the Greek "khilioi", meaning thousand.". What kind of "scientist" takes a word that has for hundreds of years meant 1,000 and decided to make it mean 1,024?
Most of the others are listed on Wikipidia as being "confirmed" in 1960, which suggests they were in common use well before then. Even if not, the comp scientists of the era (you, perhaps?) should have at this point seen the problem and stopped overloading the meanings of these terms.
Regardless, saying it shouldn't be changed because it's "always been done like that" (even if "always" is only 50 years) is not a good reason. We have a good solid history if completely ignoring security when designing computer systems, especially for the mass-market. That doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to rectify it.
Computer technology is still in its infacy, and we should seize the opportunity to fix things before they become irretractably entrenched in everyone's everyday lives.
Disclaimer: I like "1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes" (partly because it makes me feel clever, like a real computer scientiest working in base 2 and everything!), and I don't like the KiB notation or term "kibibytes" (because it sounds stupid), but I dislike ambiguous units of measurement even more. And make no mistake: "KB" is an ambiguous unit of measurement.
I suspect the rocket debris didn't politely touch down on a landing strip, either; so going by your distinction "hits" (or "strikes") is certainly more appropriate than "lands in". Wyoming could well be the equivalent of Planet Earth's eye. (Or some other part of its anatomy.)
For one, conspirators must communicate and underlings must be ordered around and kept silent.
Yes, but why would you put those orders on official documents which are marked CLASSIFIED and subject to all the regulatory bullshit that went with it? If you're conspiring with people in order to do something below-board, then presumably you trust them enough to be able to give them instructions which they are not to keep a record of. Be it in person, by telephone, email, or letters -- the whole point is that you don't want to leave a paper trail, which is exactly what stamping CLASSIFIED or TOP SECRET on documents does.
This is why the iPod goes like crazy, and Apple does its placating DRM-lite [...] while really making the money off the hardware sales. Its also why Microsoft created the Xbox and Zune.
I thought the X-Box was sold at a loss on the hardware itself (and a significant loss at that), and they make their money from sales of licensed games for it. Isn't that how the major consoles work?
Otherwise, interesting post.
You don't need to worry about the MAC address of your NIC. That does not go out over the wire to web servers. The MAC they are talking about the MAC of the router. That is what the outside world see's not the MACs of your internal NICs.
None of your MAC addresses go over the wire to web servers, unless the web servers are on the same physical network as you.
Well, it was specifically released so it'd fall within the Software Assurance (free upgrade) window for corporate customers, so they can claim they've already sold a heck of a lot of licenses.
Wow. "This does not torture them enough" isn't constructive criticism, and really contradicts what you said before. I didn't think I needed to differentiate between good and bad feedback for you. You're a piece of work.
It was a humorous, satirical response, as you said yourself. Apparently other people took it as such, as it's currently moderated +4 funny. Perhaps you don't see the humour in ticking that particular box in response to someone suggesting we torture and kill them and their family; but presumably the person who posted the form response did.
Here's an idea for you: nations that fail to uphold their end of the bargain should be totally disconnected from the Internet.
This is the kind of argument that form was created for! All it takes is for one single country that you wish to have part of "your" internet to decide not to agree to this, and you're stuffed. There's plenty of reasons they might decide this: money being the most likely, but also some crazy idea of not wanting to make the entire country's population do without the benefits of the internet in order to punish the tiny minority who abuse the privilege.
Not to mention the requirement for a technical solution, as it's virtually impossible to tell where the spam sent from botnets actually originated from.
Just because you don't have time does not mean that others do not.
And just because I (or someone else) sends a satirical pro-forma response, doesn't mean that nobody else can respond in a more serious manner if they think it'd be more helpful. Note that there was only one other reply to the original suggestion, which was advocating a completely different solution. So it would appear that none of the many other slashdot readers thought it worth responding to the OP, either.
If you're done having me lecture you on kindergarten morals and ethics,
Perhaps that's precisely the issue here: you seem to want to apply kindergarten morals and ethics to the real world. In the real world, there is nothing immoral or unethical about dismissing an argument or point of view which you see zero value in. Quit being a freaking crybaby.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be like saying that, if most fires did actually burn out of control too quickly for any individual to fight them. That sort of thing happens a lot, but the media doesn't report it because it's not newsworthy. Unless of course, the individual in question is a child or pet dog, in which case it makes a great feel-good story. ;)
How does that matter? It's not as if anybody is using Vista yet... :)
On a serious note, is the system temp directory really not world-writeable in Vista?
<rant>Also, what's with Windows never deleting anything in the user temp directories? What part of temporary does it not understand? Every now and then I'll see an app crap itself because it can't create a temporary file... because the directory is full!. What the **** is up with that?! I've still got files in my user temp folder from when the machine was built in September last year! (This may go some way to explaining why Windows PCs seem to get slower and slower with nothing more than age.)</rant>
For a friend's n93 I exported the certificate as a "DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)" using the Windows Certificates MMC (it was for our OWA server's certificate; not sure what the OpenSSL equivalent would be), and downloaded it to the phone using the built-in browser. It then asked me if I'd like to install it. I think I also renamed the certificate to have a .der extension, but I don't think that should be necessary - IIS uses the same MIME type for .crt and .der files (application/x-x509-ca-cert).
I think that's the problem with all smartphones, in general. They're basically running modern PC-type software (Nokia have even started referring to their N-series as "multimedia computers", IIRC) but are way underpowered for the job in terms of both of CPU and memory speed.
This always surprises me, like "crashed servers" are such a common and everyday thing that they should just be automatically restarted as a matter of course. I think having things crash should be a bit of a nuisance, because otherwise it's never get fixed. On the other hand, automatically restarting the server makes it easier for people to get your buffer overflows to run their code. Try, try again!
Dependency checking sounds nice, but I'm not sure exactly when I'd make use of it. Perhaps after booting to single-user to fix a problem, but even then I'd prefer to do a full reboot (after all, the system's not much good if it fails to boot unattended). Perhaps it's because my systems don't have many depencies, other than basic stuff like "the network has to be up". On the other hand, I doubt that the feature would annoy me.
Is there anything to support this claim? It doesn't sound right to me. Both the sender and the recipient need an internet connection, and both parties have to pay for that. Cheap home internet connections are quite capable of receiving very large numbers of emails (especially with services like Gmail available). Large-volume senders tend to need to either pay another company, or manage their own mail servers.
Most spam seems to be sent by botnets, so it's the user of compromised machines that pays for most of the volume; and this cost is spread amongst a very large population. This is what makes it cheap. If the spammers actually had to pay for all the bandwidth they're using, it would almost certainly cease to be profitable.
Chances are the people that actually send the spam messages (those who control the botnets) are not the people making money from stock scams, phishing, or sales of pirated software.
In the same way legitimate businesses will pay marketing companies to run advertising campaigns, design, send and manage email distribution lists, etc, less legitimate 'businesses' pay spammers to send out their message to as many people as possible.
So yes, they do get paid - just not by the victims of the spam.
True, but a) you have no idea of knowing just how resilient their systems are, or how reliable their backup scheme is... until it fails, of course; b) online apps require an internet connection; and c) trust.
The need for an internet link to the central site is still a pretty significant failure point, especially if we're talking "end user" systems which are probably connected via a single phone or cable line.
Trust is probably the most significant problem. Not just that the company that stores your files will do so in a secure and discreet manner, but also that they'll behave in an ethical way. Once you become reliant on a service, they can start extorting you for access to your own documents. They can increase their fees, and refuse to release the documents to you until you pay them a severance fee. They can then release them in a secret proprietary format which only their systems can accurately interpret. All of these things you could sue for... but do you really want to be suing a monster corporation (or even a small, nasty one) to get your own documents back?
And what happens when your favourite do-no-evil corp is bought out or sells their central application services to a do-nothing-but-evil megacorp? Quickly grab a copy of all your stuff and then delete it? How do you know it's actually been deleted?
</doomsday>
You paste screenshots to notepad?! No wonder you find OSX's method better! ;)
Doesn't copying stuff (for personal use / backups) fall under the umbrella of "fair use"?
You're certainly not allowed to distribute copies, but making the copy itself is fine. Unless of course it's protected by "DRM", in which case it's illegal to try to copy it anyway.
Yep, we've been using it since the first beta and it displays HTML fine. The only missing bit is forms, but it appears their lack of functioning wasn't a bug, but a feature. (I was going to set up a form to allow people to manage their dspam quarantine from Outlook, but I guess I'll have to scrap this plan.)
That is not the correct way to adjust your clock for daylight savings. Here in Perth, W. Australia, the state government decided we'd have DST this summer for a 3 year trial (W.A. doesn't usually change its timezone for the summer months). Microsoft released a patch for Windows about 2 weeks before it came into effect (the legislation was rushed through). The Debian timezone update didn't even make it in to testing before the date it came into effect.
Anyway, I have a few contacts who keep sending me emails from the future, because they adjusted their computer's clock forward an hour. This means that if they send me an email at 9am, the Date: header will say it was sent at 9am +0800. Naturally, my system compensates by adding an extra hour to match my local timezone before showing the time to me.
Setting your clock forward one hour is only a solution for things which only need to display the time, not communicate it. If you do this on a web server, for example, then all of its Last-Modified headers will be off by one hour, which can affect content expiration, confuse users of your forums, and so on.
You can get USB-to-serial adapters for these machines. We've had one for ages due to the IT laptop not having a serial port; and our new PCs don't have serial ports either, so it's now come in twice as handy.
Tell me about it. I ordered one from the US (not sold in Australia) on Jan 1st, still waiting for it to arrive - and then they tell me the new model is on the verge of release!
Them's the breaks, I guess.
That's what I immediately thought of too, but there's probably practical limitations associated with that. After all, a door that comes open in the middle of a washing or drying cycle isn't going to rate highly with consumers, so simply having it open as the result of applying pressure from the inside won't work. Having a handle on the inside sounds like an excellent way to damage your clothing during normal operation.
Any robust, reliable solution is probably going to add to the cost of producing the appliance; and it's likely most consumers will simply not want to pay more for such a "stupid" feature ("why would I want to be open the door from the INSIDE?!").
Possibly you're referring to this bizarre self-referential sign?
This is one of the most bizarre signs I have ever encountered. The sign is comical in itself: stick figure rides up the escalator and bumps his head on a hanging sign, the impact causing VIOLENT RED RAYS OF PAIN. Beware! All is well and good until, armed with a newfound caution, you look around for the offending object and realize that IT'S A SIGN ABOUT THE SIGN ITSELF.
I'm guessing you're probably 60 years old and haven't been using metric very long, but the rest of us know that the metric system (from which the "kilo", "mega", "giga", etc prefixes originated) was in use well before the 1960s. Computer scientists should have known better than to overload the meaning of existing prefixes, and that "close enough" isn't good enough.
A quick search of the internets tells us that kilo was "Officially adopted in 1795 (though in common use before that), it comes from the Greek "khilioi", meaning thousand.". What kind of "scientist" takes a word that has for hundreds of years meant 1,000 and decided to make it mean 1,024?
Most of the others are listed on Wikipidia as being "confirmed" in 1960, which suggests they were in common use well before then. Even if not, the comp scientists of the era (you, perhaps?) should have at this point seen the problem and stopped overloading the meanings of these terms.
Regardless, saying it shouldn't be changed because it's "always been done like that" (even if "always" is only 50 years) is not a good reason. We have a good solid history if completely ignoring security when designing computer systems, especially for the mass-market. That doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to rectify it.
Computer technology is still in its infacy, and we should seize the opportunity to fix things before they become irretractably entrenched in everyone's everyday lives.
Disclaimer: I like "1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes" (partly because it makes me feel clever, like a real computer scientiest working in base 2 and everything!), and I don't like the KiB notation or term "kibibytes" (because it sounds stupid), but I dislike ambiguous units of measurement even more. And make no mistake: "KB" is an ambiguous unit of measurement.
He said "defrag", which is not in any way related to "fsck".
And I never do a full-system AV scan, but then again I don't run random binaries from the internet on my computer, either.
I suspect the rocket debris didn't politely touch down on a landing strip, either; so going by your distinction "hits" (or "strikes") is certainly more appropriate than "lands in". Wyoming could well be the equivalent of Planet Earth's eye. (Or some other part of its anatomy.)
None of your MAC addresses go over the wire to web servers, unless the web servers are on the same physical network as you.
Well, it was specifically released so it'd fall within the Software Assurance (free upgrade) window for corporate customers, so they can claim they've already sold a heck of a lot of licenses.
Gross.
It was a humorous, satirical response, as you said yourself. Apparently other people took it as such, as it's currently moderated +4 funny. Perhaps you don't see the humour in ticking that particular box in response to someone suggesting we torture and kill them and their family; but presumably the person who posted the form response did.
Here's an idea for you: nations that fail to uphold their end of the bargain should be totally disconnected from the Internet.This is the kind of argument that form was created for! All it takes is for one single country that you wish to have part of "your" internet to decide not to agree to this, and you're stuffed. There's plenty of reasons they might decide this: money being the most likely, but also some crazy idea of not wanting to make the entire country's population do without the benefits of the internet in order to punish the tiny minority who abuse the privilege.
Just because you don't have time does not mean that others do not.Not to mention the requirement for a technical solution, as it's virtually impossible to tell where the spam sent from botnets actually originated from.
And just because I (or someone else) sends a satirical pro-forma response, doesn't mean that nobody else can respond in a more serious manner if they think it'd be more helpful. Note that there was only one other reply to the original suggestion, which was advocating a completely different solution. So it would appear that none of the many other slashdot readers thought it worth responding to the OP, either.
If you're done having me lecture you on kindergarten morals and ethics,Perhaps that's precisely the issue here: you seem to want to apply kindergarten morals and ethics to the real world. In the real world, there is nothing immoral or unethical about dismissing an argument or point of view which you see zero value in. Quit being a freaking crybaby.
I'll stop if you'll agree to stop.Agreed.