In Australia, the two best known brands of paracetamol are called Panadol and Herron. Herron started running ads that simply told the public, the two products are basically identical (same amount of paracetamol per tab, etc.) The key difference being that Herron is Australian made, and so it is better for the country if you buy herron over panadol.
Fair enough. Panadol's slogan in their counter-advertising? "Panadol - It's My Choice". I think it was quite effective. Appealing to the "screw the man, I'll run whatever OS i want" mentality is completely possible for something like linux.
It is entirely possible to encrypt data in such a way that it appears to be a benign file. JPEG as a format lends itself particularly well to this.
I could craft a file that contains jpeg data ending with an EOI (End-Of-Image) marker, after the EOI marker is my encrypted data, looks like garbage without the decryption key. The file can then be opened (though not edited) in any image preview application and it will look like the benign jpeg.
A forensic computer scientist who knows something about JPEG format structure would notice the garbage data after the EOI marker if they opened the file in a hex editor, but what reason would they have to do so? The file looks *exactly* like any other happy snap, with the exception that its file size is larger than is necessary. A cursory glance of some jpegs i already have in a photo album shows that they vary in size between 550Kb and 750Kb - from the same camera. I could store a lot of sensitive info in 200Kb without ever raising any suspicion.
Now imagine your average security guard. If your photo has 1Gb of encrypted data stored on the end, it will still look the same in the image preview app. Turn off the status bar that shows the size of the selected file and you'll probably never raise an eyebrow.
I once did something like this in javascript in IE on windows 98 and ME (this was before the XP days). I just copy pasted the javascript code "window.open(virus.html)" about 500-1000 times in the script (I was 13 and hadn't learned about loops yet). It managed to chew enough resources that the start menu wouldn't open and the comp had to be restarted. I thought I was so l33t. lol.
Nowadays in XP, the system catches this sort of behaviour and asks if you want to kill the process. Don't know about Linux but will test in Ubuntu Intrepid today for fun.
For now, consider the following: int main()
{
int *i;
while (1)
i = new int;
return 0;
}
Shock horror! Windows XP will catch this and kill it when it takes up enough memory (without even asking! that's a little rude to the power users...), Ubuntu however (at least in hardy, yet to try in intrepid) will let it continue on its merry way until the system becomes, for all intents and purposes, completely unresponsive. Had fun running this and then starting a game of CS:Source in wine. Watched the framerate slowly drop until I didn't move at all anymore. So yes. The thrash-crash line may not always be so clear-cut.
Having said that, this is all without the aid of any AV. I don't know if any AV would pick up an app that include such an intentional loop of leaking memory.
The benchmark of design is not simplicity. The benchmark is probably better described as specified complexity. A good way of spotting design is perhaps to observe an irreducibly complex mechanism that efficiently achieves a purpose. A field may be cleared intentionally, but a clearing in a forest may also naturally occur, so this is not a good example of spotting design.
The classic example is a mousetrap. None of the parts of the mousetrap are particularly useful on their own, but if you obtain them all seperately, then arrange them in a very specific way, the result is a very efficient mouse catching device.
This device is complicated, but not random. The complexity that makes it functional is specified by the person who intentionally assembled the mousetrap, but such a device would not naturally occur. It is irreducibly complex because taking away any of the parts it is composed of would cause it to cease functioning. This means that its function was intentional and had to be conceived as a whole rather than arrived at by gradual steps (since no step along the way would be any closer to the purpose, until the whole mousetrap is built).
I live on campus at university and the sheer number of n00bs (yes, I said the n word), is occasionally mind blowing.
I tell them all to run spybot-sd and avg8. Spybot because it's free, it detects heaps of stuff (that is still relevant) and removes it. Been using it for years and it has detected *some* issue on every system I have ever installed it on (assuming no other anti-spyware had been running).
I use AVG8 because it's free and it can be made to work with the proxy server at our university.
Free is important because I agree with several other posts on this topic - AV is not that important. Spybot I would say is more important, but more important than both is a firewall. To that end I still tell everyone that asks me what AV they should use that the best AV for them is ZoneAlarm.
it seems fairly widely accepted and that people who regularly view pornography are more likely to be involved in sex-related crimes than people who don't (or that sex-offenders are more likely to have porn than non-sex-offenders, whichever way you want to spin it).
This means that even if the computer is found to have pornographic content on it of people who are "of age", this still raises a red flag (and IMO rightly so). Porn is the scourge of the internet. When a person's first exposure to internet porn is typically around 10 years old - it has gone way beyond "free speech". Young minds are being forcibly indoctrinated.
I have no problem at all with people creating pipe bombs, full-auto conversion kits, fake passports or even viruses.
It's just one of those issues of great power = great responsibility.
To that end, if the person has previously shown themselves not to be responsible, I am in favour of discriminating against them personally and preventing them from these activities. If its to learn and test your own ingenuity go for it. Just be wise as to who's hands your powerful creation might fall into and whether or not this risk is too great.
Yes. I would imagine ubuntu should get slower - on the same computer. Features in the OS get upgraded to make use of faster hardware as it becomes common. The criticism leveled at Vista is that it took too big of a leap in one go and the average computer didn't run it well enough.
The great thing about Ubuntu over Vista is that it is so customizable. You can use Vista with less eye candy, but you can use Ubuntu with Xfce instead of Gnome, or Fluxbox, or no desktop environment at all if performance bothers you. Sure Hardy may run slower in tests than Feisty on the same machine. Change all the settings in Hardy so that it is essentially Feisty and this "issue" goes away.
Personal (anecdotal) experience definitely confirms this. When I suggest different software for performing a task to someone who feels they "already know how to do this" (even if the results of their method are shabby), the question generally on their mind is "will I have to learn or change anything?"
People look over my shoulder and marvel at the things I do with GIMP regularly. When I tell them it's free and I'm sharing it on the network, no one is keen to install it themselves.
OO.org vs. MSOffice, Linux vs. Windows, Holden vs. Hyundai. Most people just want to use it. They don't care how it works, don't care about "subtle" advantages. It just has to work so they can go back to what they're interested in.
As best I can tell, Android seems to be further along than OpenMoko's open software platform. If I were not a student and had the $400 to shell out for a FreeRunner, I'd totally run Android on that bad boy and be developing an MMO for it later today;)
Given the existence of open phone hardware and now multiple open phone software platforms, who cares about phone vendor lock-down?
The three main problems with flash player (9 and the beta versions of 10) were these:
Crashes firefox, for example, after a few consecutive youtube vids
Fullscreen video is buggy under compiz (check/uncheck hardware acceleration to fix each time)
Caused my system, not just to crash firefox, but actually freeze up on many occasions
My primary use is obviously youtube, and I'm happy to report that with this official version 10 release, all of the above problems seem to have been resolved on my ubuntu 8.04 install.
This could actually be a great idea. Imagine (particularly in the case of mass installs within a company) if an ubuntu install could be accompanied with a separate Tutorial-CD that had demo videos showing where to click to get office documents, how to install one or two (good) games, how to browse web and check email.
Every time my mum wants me to show her how to do something on their computer, I start trying to describe it and she says "Hold on!" while she whips out a pen and paper and starts furiously scribbling out steps like (1) Click in bottom right corner (start), (2) click top menu item...
I try telling her again and again that skills learned this way won't help her down the road or probably even next week (she often complains that I never show her how to do things the same way twice). Users are intimidated by computers and just want a recipe that they can follow exactly. This CD full of video tutorials based on a clean Ubuntu install sounds fantastic.
One of the things I love most about the Linux (and general open source) development paradigm is that researcher's get a great platform to start from and when they come up with new advances in OS technology, everyone can benefit from it as soon as its implemented.
Honestly, its the reason I tell people that a Windows/Mac Box is a home appliance and a Linux Box is a computer. When technology advances, Linux advances. Commercial OS vendors might take years to release a version with a new filesystem technology, etc.
Telling people to read beyond the bible is good advice, but so is the advice to read the bible at a deeper (ie. scholar's as opposed to raving slashdotter's) level.
This may surprise some readers, but a truly orthodox and "fundamentalist" reading of the bible (one by someone who takes the whole bible to be the inspired word of God) shows that it is not because of an inability to reproduce that God condemns homosexual acts as immoral.
Leviticus 18 simply lumps homosexuality in with adultery, bestiality and various forms of incest as being unlawful - that is, being in contrast or opposition to the way the designer of good sex says that sex is best.
If Linus Torvalds gives you a hot quad-core box with all the latest parts running Kubuntu - you don't think he'd be a bit disappointed if you were to format it and install Vista Basic?
I've spent a lot of time now with C++ and Python and been doing a lot of Java at uni lately as well as some ASM.
Java and Python are great for creating business apps where development needs to be rapid, results need to be decently polished and apps are simple enough not to require the full speed of compiled code. They're also great for teaching to non computer science majors who know their subject material really well and need to be able to get a computer to do their grunt work for them.
However, I really love computer science. ASM and C++ both let me code in a way that makes me feel like I'm actually interacting with a computer. Not like I'm scripting some abstract logic to be interpreted to the system for me by a program written by someone who actually interacted with the computer on my behalf.
Why C++ over ASM then? LOL, I still want to have a life outside code. ASM just takes too long to use for most app development.
I think that this new revamped javascript might really cause me some irritation down the track. I'm all for cleaning up javascript a little, but OOP? Does it really need it? I guess there might be a place for it with AJAX apps, but most javascript work is for really simple little functions like checking form input before submitting - and it has been great for that.
For so long, I've been recommending to people who want to learn to program to start with javascript because it is syntactically lenient and has a very quick learning curve (if you know even a little HTML). I'd say leave Java's jobs to Java. Javascript has an entirely different purpose IMHO.
I'm studying CS right now. I love it to pieces, I'm getting top marks - I can't imagine switching degrees. But this all sounds foreboding. Is there going to be any work for me when I'm done or not?
It's going to take a month and a half to create a good "install experience"? Ubuntu update manager suddenly looks state of the art. A team of people should not need a month and a half.
My code before I started taking computer science was largely modelled on the coding styles of whichever projects I'd been recently reading the documentation for (I used to spend a lot of time going over the GTK+ api docs for example).
Now, after doing Comp Sci for a year, I'm starting to develop my own style (by taking the techniques I'm taught and modifying the ones I dislike), which I'm quite proud of and I think works rather well. My code is modular (broken into functional, replaceable sections) and hence easy to modify, easy to debug and easy to document.
I say easy to document because their can be "high-level" documentation that describes what each of these modular pieces actually does (for a forest-for-th-trees kind of overview) and then, their is low level documentation describing how each modular piece does its job. By breaking it up into sections (big task? put it in a function, even if you only use it twice), the documentation job is much less daunting. A practice I highly recommend.
As for judging other peoples code, I'm probably pickier about my C/C++ but I remember starting javascript at age 13 and seeing someone use a for-loop to go through all the elements in an array using the array length as the loop counter and the index of the element inside the code block and thinking "Wow, that is really clever, its concise and when you know what it does it makes heaps of sense." I think we're most impressed by coding technique we feel we would never have thought of.
When children get sexual urges, you would have them restrict them for years. That's repression.
One trouble with this view, it assumes that all [sexual] urges are good and healthy. This may not be the case. Rape starts as a sexual urge - I think we can agree that this urge should definitely be restricted! Maybe porn and masturbation are less extreme and only hurt the self rather than another person, but that still doesn't necessarily make them a good and healthy thing to do.
Is it unfair to claim that viewing pornography, especially regularly, will fundamentally alter a bloke's perceptions of what is normal and what is decidedly warped to do to/with a woman? Or to put it on a more everyday level, is it unfair to claim that promoting pornography as fine and healthy encourages a lifestyle of self-gratification that over time will diminish the value the individual (and thus the society) places on true selfless love, not just in a romantic context but across all personal relationships?
I'm against pornography for more reasons than this, but this alone is enough that I would prefer a society where the porn industry never pushed technology and we all still used Pentium MMXs, but at least husband's still knew how to *really* love their wives.
Freedom of speech is one thing, but I should be free not to listen too. Porn is becoming damn near inescapable these days. In the words of Switchfoot: "sex is currency, she sells cars, she sells magazines... suburban youth, hail your so-called liberty".
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia, the two best known brands of paracetamol are called Panadol and Herron. Herron started running ads that simply told the public, the two products are basically identical (same amount of paracetamol per tab, etc.) The key difference being that Herron is Australian made, and so it is better for the country if you buy herron over panadol.
Fair enough. Panadol's slogan in their counter-advertising? "Panadol - It's My Choice". I think it was quite effective. Appealing to the "screw the man, I'll run whatever OS i want" mentality is completely possible for something like linux.
but that's where the encryption comes into play. 2 complications are better than 1.
It is entirely possible to encrypt data in such a way that it appears to be a benign file. JPEG as a format lends itself particularly well to this.
I could craft a file that contains jpeg data ending with an EOI (End-Of-Image) marker, after the EOI marker is my encrypted data, looks like garbage without the decryption key. The file can then be opened (though not edited) in any image preview application and it will look like the benign jpeg.
A forensic computer scientist who knows something about JPEG format structure would notice the garbage data after the EOI marker if they opened the file in a hex editor, but what reason would they have to do so? The file looks *exactly* like any other happy snap, with the exception that its file size is larger than is necessary. A cursory glance of some jpegs i already have in a photo album shows that they vary in size between 550Kb and 750Kb - from the same camera. I could store a lot of sensitive info in 200Kb without ever raising any suspicion.
Now imagine your average security guard. If your photo has 1Gb of encrypted data stored on the end, it will still look the same in the image preview app. Turn off the status bar that shows the size of the selected file and you'll probably never raise an eyebrow.
Hmmm, hadn't heard of that before. Seems like it would do the job.
I once did something like this in javascript in IE on windows 98 and ME (this was before the XP days). I just copy pasted the javascript code "window.open(virus.html)" about 500-1000 times in the script (I was 13 and hadn't learned about loops yet). It managed to chew enough resources that the start menu wouldn't open and the comp had to be restarted. I thought I was so l33t. lol.
Nowadays in XP, the system catches this sort of behaviour and asks if you want to kill the process. Don't know about Linux but will test in Ubuntu Intrepid today for fun.
For now, consider the following:
int main()
{
int *i;
while (1)
i = new int;
return 0;
}
Shock horror! Windows XP will catch this and kill it when it takes up enough memory (without even asking! that's a little rude to the power users...), Ubuntu however (at least in hardy, yet to try in intrepid) will let it continue on its merry way until the system becomes, for all intents and purposes, completely unresponsive. Had fun running this and then starting a game of CS:Source in wine. Watched the framerate slowly drop until I didn't move at all anymore. So yes. The thrash-crash line may not always be so clear-cut.
Having said that, this is all without the aid of any AV. I don't know if any AV would pick up an app that include such an intentional loop of leaking memory.
The benchmark of design is not simplicity. The benchmark is probably better described as specified complexity. A good way of spotting design is perhaps to observe an irreducibly complex mechanism that efficiently achieves a purpose. A field may be cleared intentionally, but a clearing in a forest may also naturally occur, so this is not a good example of spotting design.
The classic example is a mousetrap. None of the parts of the mousetrap are particularly useful on their own, but if you obtain them all seperately, then arrange them in a very specific way, the result is a very efficient mouse catching device.
This device is complicated, but not random. The complexity that makes it functional is specified by the person who intentionally assembled the mousetrap, but such a device would not naturally occur. It is irreducibly complex because taking away any of the parts it is composed of would cause it to cease functioning. This means that its function was intentional and had to be conceived as a whole rather than arrived at by gradual steps (since no step along the way would be any closer to the purpose, until the whole mousetrap is built).
I live on campus at university and the sheer number of n00bs (yes, I said the n word), is occasionally mind blowing.
I tell them all to run spybot-sd and avg8. Spybot because it's free, it detects heaps of stuff (that is still relevant) and removes it. Been using it for years and it has detected *some* issue on every system I have ever installed it on (assuming no other anti-spyware had been running).
I use AVG8 because it's free and it can be made to work with the proxy server at our university.
Free is important because I agree with several other posts on this topic - AV is not that important. Spybot I would say is more important, but more important than both is a firewall. To that end I still tell everyone that asks me what AV they should use that the best AV for them is ZoneAlarm.
it seems fairly widely accepted and that people who regularly view pornography are more likely to be involved in sex-related crimes than people who don't (or that sex-offenders are more likely to have porn than non-sex-offenders, whichever way you want to spin it).
This means that even if the computer is found to have pornographic content on it of people who are "of age", this still raises a red flag (and IMO rightly so). Porn is the scourge of the internet. When a person's first exposure to internet porn is typically around 10 years old - it has gone way beyond "free speech". Young minds are being forcibly indoctrinated.
I have no problem at all with people creating pipe bombs, full-auto conversion kits, fake passports or even viruses.
It's just one of those issues of great power = great responsibility.
To that end, if the person has previously shown themselves not to be responsible, I am in favour of discriminating against them personally and preventing them from these activities. If its to learn and test your own ingenuity go for it. Just be wise as to who's hands your powerful creation might fall into and whether or not this risk is too great.
Yes. I would imagine ubuntu should get slower - on the same computer. Features in the OS get upgraded to make use of faster hardware as it becomes common. The criticism leveled at Vista is that it took too big of a leap in one go and the average computer didn't run it well enough.
The great thing about Ubuntu over Vista is that it is so customizable. You can use Vista with less eye candy, but you can use Ubuntu with Xfce instead of Gnome, or Fluxbox, or no desktop environment at all if performance bothers you. Sure Hardy may run slower in tests than Feisty on the same machine. Change all the settings in Hardy so that it is essentially Feisty and this "issue" goes away.
Personal (anecdotal) experience definitely confirms this. When I suggest different software for performing a task to someone who feels they "already know how to do this" (even if the results of their method are shabby), the question generally on their mind is "will I have to learn or change anything?"
People look over my shoulder and marvel at the things I do with GIMP regularly. When I tell them it's free and I'm sharing it on the network, no one is keen to install it themselves.
OO.org vs. MSOffice, Linux vs. Windows, Holden vs. Hyundai. Most people just want to use it. They don't care how it works, don't care about "subtle" advantages. It just has to work so they can go back to what they're interested in.
As best I can tell, Android seems to be further along than OpenMoko's open software platform. If I were not a student and had the $400 to shell out for a FreeRunner, I'd totally run Android on that bad boy and be developing an MMO for it later today ;)
Given the existence of open phone hardware and now multiple open phone software platforms, who cares about phone vendor lock-down?
My primary use is obviously youtube, and I'm happy to report that with this official version 10 release, all of the above problems seem to have been resolved on my ubuntu 8.04 install.
This could actually be a great idea. Imagine (particularly in the case of mass installs within a company) if an ubuntu install could be accompanied with a separate Tutorial-CD that had demo videos showing where to click to get office documents, how to install one or two (good) games, how to browse web and check email.
Every time my mum wants me to show her how to do something on their computer, I start trying to describe it and she says "Hold on!" while she whips out a pen and paper and starts furiously scribbling out steps like (1) Click in bottom right corner (start), (2) click top menu item...
I try telling her again and again that skills learned this way won't help her down the road or probably even next week (she often complains that I never show her how to do things the same way twice). Users are intimidated by computers and just want a recipe that they can follow exactly. This CD full of video tutorials based on a clean Ubuntu install sounds fantastic.
One of the things I love most about the Linux (and general open source) development paradigm is that researcher's get a great platform to start from and when they come up with new advances in OS technology, everyone can benefit from it as soon as its implemented.
Honestly, its the reason I tell people that a Windows/Mac Box is a home appliance and a Linux Box is a computer. When technology advances, Linux advances. Commercial OS vendors might take years to release a version with a new filesystem technology, etc.
Telling people to read beyond the bible is good advice, but so is the advice to read the bible at a deeper (ie. scholar's as opposed to raving slashdotter's) level.
This may surprise some readers, but a truly orthodox and "fundamentalist" reading of the bible (one by someone who takes the whole bible to be the inspired word of God) shows that it is not because of an inability to reproduce that God condemns homosexual acts as immoral.
Leviticus 18 simply lumps homosexuality in with adultery, bestiality and various forms of incest as being unlawful - that is, being in contrast or opposition to the way the designer of good sex says that sex is best.
If Linus Torvalds gives you a hot quad-core box with all the latest parts running Kubuntu - you don't think he'd be a bit disappointed if you were to format it and install Vista Basic?
Flamebait not intended.
I've spent a lot of time now with C++ and Python and been doing a lot of Java at uni lately as well as some ASM.
Java and Python are great for creating business apps where development needs to be rapid, results need to be decently polished and apps are simple enough not to require the full speed of compiled code. They're also great for teaching to non computer science majors who know their subject material really well and need to be able to get a computer to do their grunt work for them.
However, I really love computer science. ASM and C++ both let me code in a way that makes me feel like I'm actually interacting with a computer. Not like I'm scripting some abstract logic to be interpreted to the system for me by a program written by someone who actually interacted with the computer on my behalf.
Why C++ over ASM then? LOL, I still want to have a life outside code. ASM just takes too long to use for most app development.
int main()
{
int *i;
while (1)
i = new int;
return 0;
}
And just watch them kick their keyboard across the room shouting "Freakin LAG!" he he.
The point of this post is to demonstrate that crashing a computer is not as hard for a programmer to do as people might think.
I think that this new revamped javascript might really cause me some irritation down the track. I'm all for cleaning up javascript a little, but OOP? Does it really need it? I guess there might be a place for it with AJAX apps, but most javascript work is for really simple little functions like checking form input before submitting - and it has been great for that.
For so long, I've been recommending to people who want to learn to program to start with javascript because it is syntactically lenient and has a very quick learning curve (if you know even a little HTML). I'd say leave Java's jobs to Java. Javascript has an entirely different purpose IMHO.
I'm studying CS right now. I love it to pieces, I'm getting top marks - I can't imagine switching degrees. But this all sounds foreboding. Is there going to be any work for me when I'm done or not?
It's going to take a month and a half to create a good "install experience"? Ubuntu update manager suddenly looks state of the art. A team of people should not need a month and a half.
I'm a computer science student in Australia with a big empty summer break (unless I find work), I'd love the chance to work on an SoC project.
My code before I started taking computer science was largely modelled on the coding styles of whichever projects I'd been recently reading the documentation for (I used to spend a lot of time going over the GTK+ api docs for example). Now, after doing Comp Sci for a year, I'm starting to develop my own style (by taking the techniques I'm taught and modifying the ones I dislike), which I'm quite proud of and I think works rather well. My code is modular (broken into functional, replaceable sections) and hence easy to modify, easy to debug and easy to document. I say easy to document because their can be "high-level" documentation that describes what each of these modular pieces actually does (for a forest-for-th-trees kind of overview) and then, their is low level documentation describing how each modular piece does its job. By breaking it up into sections (big task? put it in a function, even if you only use it twice), the documentation job is much less daunting. A practice I highly recommend. As for judging other peoples code, I'm probably pickier about my C/C++ but I remember starting javascript at age 13 and seeing someone use a for-loop to go through all the elements in an array using the array length as the loop counter and the index of the element inside the code block and thinking "Wow, that is really clever, its concise and when you know what it does it makes heaps of sense." I think we're most impressed by coding technique we feel we would never have thought of.
One trouble with this view, it assumes that all [sexual] urges are good and healthy. This may not be the case. Rape starts as a sexual urge - I think we can agree that this urge should definitely be restricted! Maybe porn and masturbation are less extreme and only hurt the self rather than another person, but that still doesn't necessarily make them a good and healthy thing to do.
Since it came up, in response to Caspian:
Is it unfair to claim that viewing pornography, especially regularly, will fundamentally alter a bloke's perceptions of what is normal and what is decidedly warped to do to/with a woman? Or to put it on a more everyday level, is it unfair to claim that promoting pornography as fine and healthy encourages a lifestyle of self-gratification that over time will diminish the value the individual (and thus the society) places on true selfless love, not just in a romantic context but across all personal relationships?
I'm against pornography for more reasons than this, but this alone is enough that I would prefer a society where the porn industry never pushed technology and we all still used Pentium MMXs, but at least husband's still knew how to *really* love their wives.
Freedom of speech is one thing, but I should be free not to listen too. Porn is becoming damn near inescapable these days. In the words of Switchfoot: "sex is currency, she sells cars, she sells magazines... suburban youth, hail your so-called liberty".