Things.ParallelEach(function(thing){
Console.Write("{0} is cool, but in parallel", thing);
# serious business goes here });
There are lots of stupid loop structures that are used in desktop apps that are just begging to be run in parallel, but the current crop of languages dont make it braindead easy to do so. Make it so every loop structure has a trivial and non ugly (OpenMP pragmas) way of doing it.
Also, IMHO, not enough languages do stuff like the Javascript Array.Each(function(element){}). Am I blind, or is this construct missing from C#?
Turning off UAC on your own computer is one thing (I leave it on, turning it off is like running as root all day). Turning it off on a computer that isn't yours is horrible. You are opening them up to security issues by doing that. Instead you should keep it enabled and train the users what it means when you get a UAC dialog (hint: they shouldn't get any unless the install software). If they are really "clueless", train them to call you before clicking through one so you can make sure they aren't about to hose their machine.
UAC is a godsend for people who maintain their parents or families computer. My mom calls me all the time with questions like this...
The whole point of computers it to make difficult stuff like that go away so we can spend our time doing things humans are better at doing.
Besides, organized folders are really a piss poor way to structure large amounts of data. It is even piss poor for small amounts of data. For example, how would you structure your folders for a bunch of one-off "I'm learning API XYZ" projects you created in visual studio? Since they are all stupid apps, it isn't worth the time to properly oragnize them, yet still you might want to refer back to them.
And this is triple for music or any other media. I gave up the whole "iTunes/Windows Media Player is for suckers, I can do it better in folders" attitude a long time ago. It is far, far, far easier to let those programs manage your 20,000 song music library then doing it yourself.
The computers should adapt to us, not the other way around. IMHO, hierarchical file systems are on their way out for most content. They are good for the "system stuff" like your applications and their libraries, but they suck for your "content stuff".
What is the login for his paypal account? Last I checked the market for paypal accounts are way higher then a mere credit card number.
Information wants to be free comrade nurb432, so you post your paypal login, I'll post mine*. While you are at it, maybe you can fax me your birth certificate too. I dont plan to use it, but I demand you release it anyway, for freedom's sake.
* Offer expires 30 seconds after this comment is posted. Not valid in the Milky Way Galaxy. Machines used to assemble Paypal may have been used in the making of peanut based products. Void in all 50 states.
The libraries and the languages currently make threading harder then it needs to be.
How about a "parallel foreach(Thing in Things)" ?
I realize there are locking issues and race conditions, but really I think the languages could go a some ways to making things like this more hidden. Oh wait, does that mean I'm advocating for making programming languages more user friendly? I guess so. You know why people use Ruby, C# or Java? Cause those are way more user friendly than C++ or COBOL.
The usability of a programming language matters a lot. Nobody uses threading because the current crop of programing languages makes it complex, confusing, and full of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Make threading user friendly, and we might see more people create multi-threaded apps.
It is even a supported "what OS is the guest running" option in the settings for the machine. And to install VMWare Tools, you dont mess with the kernel, but it does compile a couple kernel modules during its install script. I presume this is the case for any performant virtualization software. I did mention the install script right? You yourself don't mess with anything in the kernel or your xwindows config, they do it all for you just like a good installer should.
- Does it to branching snapshots? No. - Does it support "teams" (groups of virtual machines)? No. - Does it provide DHCP for "internal networks"? No. - Does it let you run guest programs directly on the host desktop? No. - Does it have plugins for Visual Studio and Eclipse for debugging? No. - Do multiple monitors "just work"? Doesn't look like it... looks like I'd have to edit a config file first. - Will it automatically change the resolution of the guest desktop based on the window size? Nope. - Does it support Vista out of the box? Not if you want to connect to the network, you have to install a driver first (32-bit only, sorry 64-bit users). - Does it support Windows 2008? Doesn't say so in the docs. - Does it have good documentation? I just see acronyms.
Sorry. I'll use my $200 copy of VMWare for now.
And who cares about RAM usage. You are running a computer inside a computer--what do you expect! Buy more RAM, 1GB of ram isn't enough to seriously run virtual machines. 4GB is minimum.
But the ability to take multiple, branching snapshots is worth the price of admission alone. Version 6.5, which they pushed out a short while ago, has a new featured called "Unity mode", which basically takes programs running in the Guest and draws them on the Host so they act like any other program running on your host.
If you are a developer who uses virtual machines every day, $200 is a bargain for a tool like Workstation.
Watching comment spammers in a tail -f'd access_log is a sight to behold.
They always fuck up though. Sure they might feed you a cookie you gave one of their brother computers, but the User-Agents are almost never 100% the same. Plus a lot of them do a bad job of screen-scraping and will usually POST to a slightly mis-formed URL. Of course, they'll also POST instead of GET (like the form says) or GET instead of POST. Watch for that.
Since you can't bind to the IP address (proxy and AOL), I you can weed some of these assholes out by binding the cookie to the User-Agent. You can also slow the assholes down by putting a one-time token on each form... if you see that token twice, they are using a "stale" form. Spammers already figured this out though, but it can help mitigate other attacks like XSS attacks.
Good times. Good times.
But seriously, if any of you have a forum, I highly recommend you sit down and "tail -f" your access log and watch these assholes. It is a sight to see.
It's the combination thereof with the natural stupidity necessary to actually fall for the spam that scares the hell outta me.
Just wait until the botnet guys hack up the miniscule $185,000 USD required to purchase.corn and you fall for it too. Or you wont (like most of us) but at the cost of spending more time during your day manually parsing URL's to watch for paypal.com instead of paypal.c0m or paypal.corn. Good times. Good times.
The Buy-your-own-TLD crowd is probably funded by the botnet lobby (who is funded by the modern day mob)
The thing is, your method of "block the IP address" only works because the botnet is allocating maybe a hundred of their computers to the cause. I've seen this too even with comment spammers - they use only a handful of their IP space.
If these people wanted to, a spammer could just use their entire botnet and round-robin using each IP address once. On a 100k botnet, it would be pointless to even try to block the IP's. For starters you couldn't safely discern which are attacks and which are valid.
The problem really is there are a lot of obsolte ideas floating around till. Namely that blocking IP's are an effective tool to combat any kind of network abuse. Or that IP's even have any meaning at all--IP addresses are random and an attacker can and does hop from hundreds or thousands of them during their "work". You simply cannot stop attackers by just banning IP addresses or you'll wind up banning half the internet.
It is best for all of us to start treating IP addresses as opaque, meaningless things and find better ways to deal with abuse. The IP address as a security tool has gone the way of the dodo.
I could be talking out of my ass too though. I'm not all that familiar with the guts of the modern botnet and maybe I'm discounting the cost incurred when a botnet owner "reveals" what they own. I am assuming they could care less if grandma's machine gets exposed as part of the bot. After all, in the end isn't it grandma's box knocking on your SSH door?
If you have the keywords "email" and "form" and probably "addresses", I bet you got hit with a script. I see those to on my contact forms. I suspect these bots are capable of trolling through google search results and then basically launching automated probes against the targets.
The keys to securing your contact form (or a "email a friend" form) is to sanitize anything that will wind up in the mail headers. The easiest way to hack your form is to simply add a CRLF to any bits the spammer thinks goes into the header. If the mail library you use is stupid (2004 versions of PHP, I'm looking at you), it will gladly allow it and let the spammer add headers of their own (like a list of CC:'d addresses).
Sanitizing for those are a bit easy -- dont let the user control your subject line and validate email addresses (using a well known API, not your own!). Strip out anything that doesn't belong (CRLF's for example, anything that would separate multiple email addresses, etc). Ideally your library would do this for you, but not all do (cough, 2004 PHP)
The hard bit is to keep spammers from using your "email a friend" form to send out brute-force spam. You can't ban IP's after all, they use their botnet. Thankfully, I've never really seen this happen. I think it is because doing this is just too slow and thanks to botnets, they can get random, legit IP's much easier.
I think creating a spammable contact form is kind of a right-of-passage for web developers. Everybodies first will eventually get used for spamming. Hell, I'm just as guilty of putting out a contact form that was susceptible to header injection.
You only make that mistake once though and the lessons you learn from it teach you all kinds of lessons about cleaning up tainted user input.
Maybe "contact form header injection" is kind of like the chicken pox. Most of us get infected when we were "kid developers" and never get it again.
It is a big step forward from the days when if you wanted a domain name, you had to go to Internic and hack up $75/year. Now you can register at godaddy for $7/year or you can even renew for the "low price" of $30/year by being stupid and replying to those fake-invoices you get in the mail from scam companies when your domain is about to expire.
That is like spit in the bucket for the people who would buy TLD's. And worse, all it does is make it easy for those with means to buy TLDs and those with out to get screwed.
So you'll get www.cocacola and www.pepsi (or just pepsi) but never www.apache or www.firefox.
That actually raises an interesting question. Under this hypothetical regime, if I cough up a cool $100k and register "coryking", do I have to add a hostname? Can I just be "http://coryking" and "cory@coryking" or will I have to go "http://hostname.coryking" and "me@somewhere.coryking"?
Here. I admit. I'm part of the so-called "whitehat guys" who profit from stoping the botnets. But since I have no ethics or morals, I dont really stop them, I just give them kickbacks to make it look like I'm stopping them.
Now excuse me while I go get a back massage on from the hot ladies serving me martinis on the beach in Tahiti. Me and my fellow whitehats are making millions off you poor fools. If you only knew!
(adjust your tinfoil good sir, you are blocking the wrong signals)
Wow, you just made me completly re-evalute how I thought about dealing with botnets. I've long thought of internet security as something very, very analogous to meatspace problems like insects, virii, or bacteria. Every time we try to squish the buggers out, we just make them stronger.
Your post made me think about how we over-use antibiotics in meatspace and how it applies to security. Things like graylisting spam, or random port assignments will are only stop-gap until the fuckers up the ante and just portscan your ass to find SSH.
Already I'm noticing graylisting is becoming almost useless. Everybody has started to deal with it, from registration emails to spam. A year ago, what used to take five minutes thanks to graylisting now takes 30 seconds (the bottom end of my retry limit). The people who boast about using random ports are only going to make the problem worse because soon everybody will be using random ports.
That said, I think in the end we will be forced to have our cake and eat it too. We do need to lock any asshole we catch up and toss the key. Make no mistake, we cannot send signals that this sort of behavour is tolerated in modern society. But at the same time, we need to not pretend that locking them up will make the illness go away. All we can do is beef up our immune systems and lock the assholes we manage catch up for a long, long, long, long time.
Since the advent of the internet, we are no longer subjected to have biased news of television, radio, or newspapers.
Because thanks to the internet, we can now get our news from places that are *even more biased* then we could in print or tv. With the click of the back button, you can leave any page or content you disagree with, all the while justifying it by saying "oh they are just biased" then go back to your DailyKos, Digg, or wherever. After all, Digg isn't biased--the people decide what is important. DailyKos tells it like it is. Slashdot is the only place I trust for reporting on Microsoft, everybody else has been bought and paid for, right?
You should be scared of this future you tout. It is one that will be more partisan, and more bitter then the world we are in now.
Main stream media serves an important function--No matter our age, gender, political views, religion or sexuality, the main stream media is something we all use as a common reference point to our world. Without it, what will bind us together?
You just don't notice it because of the flood of other news from the limited number of places you look (many of which are likely tailored to your interests), and that is the fault of the internet.
Or you turned it off or wrote a nasty email because whoever they were investigating was "your guy" and "the mainstream media is just trying to smear him".
The people who whine the most about the quality and standards of our media are probably the least of us all to handle what they are asking for. Lord forbid the "real journalists" start going after their worldview.
After all, unless it meshes with your reality, it is either "liberal bias" or "conservative bias". I fear the internet will only amplify this growing chasm.
And I say this as somebody who has been known to watch MSNBC... they are pretty much on course to be the "opposite FOX". And besides, liberals are just as guilty of "boycotting" "MSM" because some journalist dared to "smear" their political candidate.
All's fair in love and war, and if you want real journalism, you better be prepared when "they" "attack" your guy.
The truth is, we as a society can't handle real journalism. It isn't that there is a vast conspiracy holding it back. The simple truth is there is no ratings in real, hard-core journalism. After all, you might piss off 50% of your market or get 1,000 angry emails from liberals (if they "smeared" a democrat) or 1,000 angry emails from libertarians (if they dare question some guy from texas's old newsletters).
We don't have real journalism in this country because we don't have the stomach for it. Simple as that.
The internet will make it even easier to filter out propaganda we don't agree with. We'll all live in our little echo-chambers where every blog and every comment agrees with us. If you ask me, that is the one things print newspapers and "mainstream media" are good for--they tend to pull you out of your internet-cocoon.
And if you think I'm joking, I've read comments on Digg (shudder) were the poster claims Digg is their only source for news. Could you imagine how fucked up your worldview must be if you only get your news source from Digg (or even 100% slashdot for that matter)? The "death" of mainstream media will only make this social problem worse...
I've found that most of the time, working with old hardware sucks. The money you save on the hardware is lost when you factor in the time you need to find ancient drivers, deal with shitty issues that PC manufacturers have long since solved. Dealing with bugs and annoyances in the old OS's. Plus most of that old hardware is flaky as hell compared to the new stuff.
It just isn't worth it. You think you are saving money, but you aren't. You are pissing your time away instead.
Slashdot Mirror
But you have to think about it too much.
How about:
Things.ParallelEach(function(thing){
Console.Write("{0} is cool, but in parallel", thing);
# serious business goes here
});
There are lots of stupid loop structures that are used in desktop apps that are just begging to be run in parallel, but the current crop of languages dont make it braindead easy to do so. Make it so every loop structure has a trivial and non ugly (OpenMP pragmas) way of doing it.
Also, IMHO, not enough languages do stuff like the Javascript Array.Each(function(element){}). Am I blind, or is this construct missing from C#?
Turning off UAC on your own computer is one thing (I leave it on, turning it off is like running as root all day). Turning it off on a computer that isn't yours is horrible. You are opening them up to security issues by doing that. Instead you should keep it enabled and train the users what it means when you get a UAC dialog (hint: they shouldn't get any unless the install software). If they are really "clueless", train them to call you before clicking through one so you can make sure they aren't about to hose their machine.
UAC is a godsend for people who maintain their parents or families computer. My mom calls me all the time with questions like this...
The whole point of computers it to make difficult stuff like that go away so we can spend our time doing things humans are better at doing.
Besides, organized folders are really a piss poor way to structure large amounts of data. It is even piss poor for small amounts of data. For example, how would you structure your folders for a bunch of one-off "I'm learning API XYZ" projects you created in visual studio? Since they are all stupid apps, it isn't worth the time to properly oragnize them, yet still you might want to refer back to them.
And this is triple for music or any other media. I gave up the whole "iTunes/Windows Media Player is for suckers, I can do it better in folders" attitude a long time ago. It is far, far, far easier to let those programs manage your 20,000 song music library then doing it yourself.
The computers should adapt to us, not the other way around. IMHO, hierarchical file systems are on their way out for most content. They are good for the "system stuff" like your applications and their libraries, but they suck for your "content stuff".
What is the login for his paypal account? Last I checked the market for paypal accounts are way higher then a mere credit card number.
Information wants to be free comrade nurb432, so you post your paypal login, I'll post mine*. While you are at it, maybe you can fax me your birth certificate too. I dont plan to use it, but I demand you release it anyway, for freedom's sake.
* Offer expires 30 seconds after this comment is posted. Not valid in the Milky Way Galaxy. Machines used to assemble Paypal may have been used in the making of peanut based products. Void in all 50 states.
The libraries and the languages currently make threading harder then it needs to be.
How about a "parallel foreach(Thing in Things)" ?
I realize there are locking issues and race conditions, but really I think the languages could go a some ways to making things like this more hidden. Oh wait, does that mean I'm advocating for making programming languages more user friendly? I guess so. You know why people use Ruby, C# or Java? Cause those are way more user friendly than C++ or COBOL.
The usability of a programming language matters a lot. Nobody uses threading because the current crop of programing languages makes it complex, confusing, and full of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Make threading user friendly, and we might see more people create multi-threaded apps.
It is even a supported "what OS is the guest running" option in the settings for the machine. And to install VMWare Tools, you dont mess with the kernel, but it does compile a couple kernel modules during its install script. I presume this is the case for any performant virtualization software. I did mention the install script right? You yourself don't mess with anything in the kernel or your xwindows config, they do it all for you just like a good installer should.
But:
- Does it to branching snapshots? No.
- Does it support "teams" (groups of virtual machines)? No.
- Does it provide DHCP for "internal networks"? No.
- Does it let you run guest programs directly on the host desktop? No.
- Does it have plugins for Visual Studio and Eclipse for debugging? No.
- Do multiple monitors "just work"? Doesn't look like it... looks like I'd have to edit a config file first.
- Will it automatically change the resolution of the guest desktop based on the window size? Nope.
- Does it support Vista out of the box? Not if you want to connect to the network, you have to install a driver first (32-bit only, sorry 64-bit users).
- Does it support Windows 2008? Doesn't say so in the docs.
- Does it have good documentation? I just see acronyms.
Sorry. I'll use my $200 copy of VMWare for now.
And who cares about RAM usage. You are running a computer inside a computer--what do you expect! Buy more RAM, 1GB of ram isn't enough to seriously run virtual machines. 4GB is minimum.
But the ability to take multiple, branching snapshots is worth the price of admission alone. Version 6.5, which they pushed out a short while ago, has a new featured called "Unity mode", which basically takes programs running in the Guest and draws them on the Host so they act like any other program running on your host.
If you are a developer who uses virtual machines every day, $200 is a bargain for a tool like Workstation.
Watching comment spammers in a tail -f'd access_log is a sight to behold.
They always fuck up though. Sure they might feed you a cookie you gave one of their brother computers, but the User-Agents are almost never 100% the same. Plus a lot of them do a bad job of screen-scraping and will usually POST to a slightly mis-formed URL. Of course, they'll also POST instead of GET (like the form says) or GET instead of POST. Watch for that.
Since you can't bind to the IP address (proxy and AOL), I you can weed some of these assholes out by binding the cookie to the User-Agent. You can also slow the assholes down by putting a one-time token on each form... if you see that token twice, they are using a "stale" form. Spammers already figured this out though, but it can help mitigate other attacks like XSS attacks.
Good times. Good times.
But seriously, if any of you have a forum, I highly recommend you sit down and "tail -f" your access log and watch these assholes. It is a sight to see.
Just wait until the botnet guys hack up the miniscule $185,000 USD required to purchase .corn and you fall for it too. Or you wont (like most of us) but at the cost of spending more time during your day manually parsing URL's to watch for paypal.com instead of paypal.c0m or paypal.corn. Good times. Good times.
The Buy-your-own-TLD crowd is probably funded by the botnet lobby (who is funded by the modern day mob)
The thing is, your method of "block the IP address" only works because the botnet is allocating maybe a hundred of their computers to the cause. I've seen this too even with comment spammers - they use only a handful of their IP space.
If these people wanted to, a spammer could just use their entire botnet and round-robin using each IP address once. On a 100k botnet, it would be pointless to even try to block the IP's. For starters you couldn't safely discern which are attacks and which are valid.
The problem really is there are a lot of obsolte ideas floating around till. Namely that blocking IP's are an effective tool to combat any kind of network abuse. Or that IP's even have any meaning at all--IP addresses are random and an attacker can and does hop from hundreds or thousands of them during their "work". You simply cannot stop attackers by just banning IP addresses or you'll wind up banning half the internet.
It is best for all of us to start treating IP addresses as opaque, meaningless things and find better ways to deal with abuse. The IP address as a security tool has gone the way of the dodo.
I could be talking out of my ass too though. I'm not all that familiar with the guts of the modern botnet and maybe I'm discounting the cost incurred when a botnet owner "reveals" what they own. I am assuming they could care less if grandma's machine gets exposed as part of the bot. After all, in the end isn't it grandma's box knocking on your SSH door?
If you have the keywords "email" and "form" and probably "addresses", I bet you got hit with a script. I see those to on my contact forms. I suspect these bots are capable of trolling through google search results and then basically launching automated probes against the targets.
The keys to securing your contact form (or a "email a friend" form) is to sanitize anything that will wind up in the mail headers. The easiest way to hack your form is to simply add a CRLF to any bits the spammer thinks goes into the header. If the mail library you use is stupid (2004 versions of PHP, I'm looking at you), it will gladly allow it and let the spammer add headers of their own (like a list of CC:'d addresses).
Sanitizing for those are a bit easy -- dont let the user control your subject line and validate email addresses (using a well known API, not your own!). Strip out anything that doesn't belong (CRLF's for example, anything that would separate multiple email addresses, etc). Ideally your library would do this for you, but not all do (cough, 2004 PHP)
The hard bit is to keep spammers from using your "email a friend" form to send out brute-force spam. You can't ban IP's after all, they use their botnet. Thankfully, I've never really seen this happen. I think it is because doing this is just too slow and thanks to botnets, they can get random, legit IP's much easier.
I think creating a spammable contact form is kind of a right-of-passage for web developers. Everybodies first will eventually get used for spamming. Hell, I'm just as guilty of putting out a contact form that was susceptible to header injection.
You only make that mistake once though and the lessons you learn from it teach you all kinds of lessons about cleaning up tainted user input.
Maybe "contact form header injection" is kind of like the chicken pox. Most of us get infected when we were "kid developers" and never get it again.
If you can't remember a 128-bit hash, you should be on the internet anyway.
It is a big step forward from the days when if you wanted a domain name, you had to go to Internic and hack up $75/year. Now you can register at godaddy for $7/year or you can even renew for the "low price" of $30/year by being stupid and replying to those fake-invoices you get in the mail from scam companies when your domain is about to expire.
That is like spit in the bucket for the people who would buy TLD's. And worse, all it does is make it easy for those with means to buy TLDs and those with out to get screwed.
So you'll get www.cocacola and www.pepsi (or just pepsi) but never www.apache or www.firefox.
That actually raises an interesting question. Under this hypothetical regime, if I cough up a cool $100k and register "coryking", do I have to add a hostname? Can I just be "http://coryking" and "cory@coryking" or will I have to go "http://hostname.coryking" and "me@somewhere.coryking"?
Here. I admit. I'm part of the so-called "whitehat guys" who profit from stoping the botnets. But since I have no ethics or morals, I dont really stop them, I just give them kickbacks to make it look like I'm stopping them.
Now excuse me while I go get a back massage on from the hot ladies serving me martinis on the beach in Tahiti. Me and my fellow whitehats are making millions off you poor fools. If you only knew!
(adjust your tinfoil good sir, you are blocking the wrong signals)
Wow, you just made me completly re-evalute how I thought about dealing with botnets. I've long thought of internet security as something very, very analogous to meatspace problems like insects, virii, or bacteria. Every time we try to squish the buggers out, we just make them stronger.
Your post made me think about how we over-use antibiotics in meatspace and how it applies to security. Things like graylisting spam, or random port assignments will are only stop-gap until the fuckers up the ante and just portscan your ass to find SSH.
Already I'm noticing graylisting is becoming almost useless. Everybody has started to deal with it, from registration emails to spam. A year ago, what used to take five minutes thanks to graylisting now takes 30 seconds (the bottom end of my retry limit). The people who boast about using random ports are only going to make the problem worse because soon everybody will be using random ports.
That said, I think in the end we will be forced to have our cake and eat it too. We do need to lock any asshole we catch up and toss the key. Make no mistake, we cannot send signals that this sort of behavour is tolerated in modern society. But at the same time, we need to not pretend that locking them up will make the illness go away. All we can do is beef up our immune systems and lock the assholes we manage catch up for a long, long, long, long time.
Before you can't get them again without using drivers-r-us.com (now with 50% more spyware!)
Because thanks to the internet, we can now get our news from places that are *even more biased* then we could in print or tv. With the click of the back button, you can leave any page or content you disagree with, all the while justifying it by saying "oh they are just biased" then go back to your DailyKos, Digg, or wherever. After all, Digg isn't biased--the people decide what is important. DailyKos tells it like it is. Slashdot is the only place I trust for reporting on Microsoft, everybody else has been bought and paid for, right?
You should be scared of this future you tout. It is one that will be more partisan, and more bitter then the world we are in now.
Main stream media serves an important function--No matter our age, gender, political views, religion or sexuality, the main stream media is something we all use as a common reference point to our world. Without it, what will bind us together?
Or you turned it off or wrote a nasty email because whoever they were investigating was "your guy" and "the mainstream media is just trying to smear him".
The people who whine the most about the quality and standards of our media are probably the least of us all to handle what they are asking for. Lord forbid the "real journalists" start going after their worldview.
After all, unless it meshes with your reality, it is either "liberal bias" or "conservative bias". I fear the internet will only amplify this growing chasm.
And I say this as somebody who has been known to watch MSNBC... they are pretty much on course to be the "opposite FOX". And besides, liberals are just as guilty of "boycotting" "MSM" because some journalist dared to "smear" their political candidate.
All's fair in love and war, and if you want real journalism, you better be prepared when "they" "attack" your guy.
The truth is, we as a society can't handle real journalism. It isn't that there is a vast conspiracy holding it back. The simple truth is there is no ratings in real, hard-core journalism. After all, you might piss off 50% of your market or get 1,000 angry emails from liberals (if they "smeared" a democrat) or 1,000 angry emails from libertarians (if they dare question some guy from texas's old newsletters).
We don't have real journalism in this country because we don't have the stomach for it. Simple as that.
The internet will make it even easier to filter out propaganda we don't agree with. We'll all live in our little echo-chambers where every blog and every comment agrees with us. If you ask me, that is the one things print newspapers and "mainstream media" are good for--they tend to pull you out of your internet-cocoon.
And if you think I'm joking, I've read comments on Digg (shudder) were the poster claims Digg is their only source for news. Could you imagine how fucked up your worldview must be if you only get your news source from Digg (or even 100% slashdot for that matter)? The "death" of mainstream media will only make this social problem worse...
I've found that most of the time, working with old hardware sucks. The money you save on the hardware is lost when you factor in the time you need to find ancient drivers, deal with shitty issues that PC manufacturers have long since solved. Dealing with bugs and annoyances in the old OS's. Plus most of that old hardware is flaky as hell compared to the new stuff.
It just isn't worth it. You think you are saving money, but you aren't. You are pissing your time away instead.
At least for most things :-)
Since you asked,
Your mom is so poor, a 386DX *is* worth more then her house.
She is also so dumb, the 386DX has more transistors then she has brain cells.
She is also so fat, you can throw a 386DX at her and it will float around her in orbit.
(ps: booya)