Just wondering. Why would you run untrusted executables from your USB drive?
The problem is obviously not hidden in the documents, as you say that under Linux you just delete the offending files. You can do the same with Windows. Or any other OS. Just delete them, don't run them.
I'd say that those always-on Internet-facing Linux servers with their (usually) high bandwidth and high processing power are very juicy targets. And very valuable for hackers as starting point for further hacks, e.g. spreading of malware (inserting a drive-by download to whatever site that server serves), hosting phishing sites, using real mail servers as spam relays, etc.
The value of a single compromised server is definitely way more than that of a compromised desktop.
And really, what do I know about the majority of the smaller software packages in the Ubuntu Software Center?
I've been saying the same ad nauseum. They say it's more secure because the connection between your computer and the package server is verified and encrypted, but when you ask what kind of guarantee the user has that some package wasn't built using tainted source or on a compromised server, the arguments quickly fade away.
I trust those packages because I know that if they do have a problem it will come out soon enough (via channels like/.), after which Ubuntu is sure to start losing users in droves, and go bankrupt.
Ubuntu has a good business reason to not have malware in their software centre packages. And that's what makes me trust them to keep it safe, and also that once a problem has been identified, that they will act to fix it.
The same for organisations like Mozilla or OpenOffice and it's forks: they run a business based on people trusting their software to do what it says it does, and that it doesn't come with any malware that tries to steal your identity or empty your bank account. This makes it a trusted source. Even if I don't get to audit the complete source myself.
corporate types want somebody to blame when things go pear-shaped. There's not many linux companies of enough size to handle that. Just RedHat and SuSe.
The irony here is that you complain there are just two Linux vendors that are big enough to provide such support.
Windows is a known evil when it comes to security.
Linux and other competitors are unknown evils.
That's enough of a difference for many companies. Especially when legal liability is an issue, and Windows being a known evil has much more of a "standard" procedure of dealing with that, so much easier to argue that you followed best industry practice in keeping your system safe in case something does go wrong.
I guess this comes down to the time shifting vs. creating derivative works argument.
If you record an hour of TV broadcast and replay it later unedited, you're time shifting.
If you record a show beginning to end while cutting out the commercials, you are creating a derivative work.
Hereby I'm using the argument that the original TV stream (the combination of fragments of the show you're interested in and the commercials in between those fragments) is an original work, produced by the TV network. Now of course that original work is again a derivative of other works (the original show and the commercials), but that doesn't mitigate the argument that it's an original work.
The TV network certainly has the copyright licenses to do this with the original works.
I don't know what licenses Dish has, and what agreements, but it seems that the only agreement/license they have (either directly or via "fair use") is to provide a time shifting service.
To clean glass of food remains, it's usually stored in a big pile outdoors to let nature do its job. A good reason to clean glass for recycling is that it doesn't start to smell so badly while waiting to be taken to the glass container.
About 25 years ago, on a trip in Czechoslovakia (a few years before the fall of the Wall) I experienced those bags for packing milk. My parents told me that in their childhood also in Netherlands plastic bags were used for milk, but such packing had long since been abandoned. Sure convenient to store and little waste, but that's all there is to them.
When opened, they're a pain to store as they don't have the rigidity of a bottle so tend to fall over. They're hard to grab on to, again no rigidity, so great risk of spills or sprays when picking up an opened bag.
And then they just look plain ugly compared to bottles. And, even though the content is the same, a prettier packing commends a higher retail prices and higher sales. That's just how consumers make their choice.
So long story short: the West used them too, long time ago, and it's not just because that this kind of packing is not used any more for anything but small bags of ketchup in McDonald's.
Long time since I've seen that, and most sites where I see "works best" it's something like "Internet Explorer 5.5". Oh well.
I can't believe web sites nowadays can afford to have it work well in one browser, and not so well (missing bits/poor layout/whatever) in the rest. Because the most-used browser is only just over half of the users according to one set of statistics, and about a third of the users according to another set. So half or more of your users will see a degraded site.
There are quite some alternatives to Lego; some are even fully compatible with the original Lego bricks.
Yet I have to see one with the same quality. Strong blocks (not floppy), and that all fit perfectly together: not falling apart or being impossible to take apart. That's what Lego manages to do, and what all competing bricks that I have had in my hands fall short of. Most of them just don't have the rigidity for starters: usually because they use a cheaper plastic. Many have issues with fitting - usually too loose, especially after a while. Yet the Lego bricks from my childhood, some 30 years old, are now being played with by my son. Mixed with a good quantity of even older bricks. And they work just as well as they did back then.
Legos are expensive, sure. But until there is a competitor on the market that can produce a cheaper brick with the same overall quality, you just can't say they're overpriced.
I'm always impressed with such dockings, considering they happen while both craft travel at many kms per second, yet their speeds are to be virtually equal. So you have to speed up to a certain speed, and then make sure the speed is exactly the right speed, and the exact right direction, and that the craft is at the exact right position when reaching that speed and direction.
And I don't think that firing your thrusters is such a great idea when in close proximity to another space craft: I would expect that the matter thrown out by the thrusters could damage and push away the other craft if directed at it.
Of course NASA relies on the expertise from those industries. Why not? Why re-invent the wheel? On the other hand NASA had the funds, and could take the huge risks, of developing space technology without any known benefits - without even knowing whether it'd be possible.
Also those private companies have the means to actually build stuff. They have the know-how and the tools to put stuff together, so when NASA develops a design, they hire someone to build it for them.
On the other hand, companies like SpaceX can only become a success because of the enormous research effort done by NASA over the past decades. They can learn from what NASA has done: things that work, things that don't. And use that as a starting point for their own rocketry. Also it's their first flight, so naturally they will use an existing launch pad instead of building their own.
It's just like an ecosystem, everyone relies on everyone else. For finance, knowledge, development, construction, etc. And it's not just space flight, almost all technology and engineering is developed by a combination of private and public research - but most publicly funded research is not done by a high-profile agency like NASA but by institutes like universities.
And to come back on the launch pad: it's generally considered a task of the government to provide infrastructure, including roads, railways, airports, power lines, water lines, sewage, etc. So why not launch pads? Mind I'm not saying they should provide them for free: let the user pay, but the large upfront investment in such things, the general economical benefits and the prevention of double work is what makes it a typical government task.
Too bad that one of America's top companies outsources most of its production. Their profit margins could support USA jobs.
Profit is not made on production. That's a very low-margin business, as it's largely unskilled labour. And unskilled labour, by being unskilled, is easily replaceable. The only thing that gives companies like Foxconn a negotiation position is because Foxconn is so big, that they can actually handle the volumes Apple demands, and that they can make significant investments in new plants by themselves. Most factories in China are not that big, can't handle huge volumes, and are not in a strong position to negotiate with buyers. If their neighbour can do the same work for 0.5% less, they lose the contract to that neighbour. And can get it back when they cut their price by 1%.
Most profit is in supporting fields like financing (of a.o. investment and trade), marketing, design, logistics. And guess what: those are still mostly done in the US. It's just the low-margin, low-profit stuff that is pushed out. Freeing up your local, expensive US workers to do more productive things. So don't you worry, most of Apple's profit is made in the US (even though they may book it somewhere else to avoid taxes), and most of the high-productivity, high-paying jobs are also still in the US.
Chinese workers are cheap, and plentiful (in the less developed provinces that is, this plant is to set up in Hainan, not in Shenzhen where their main site is).
No matter what, that's going to be one heck of a crowded factory.
40,000 m2 for 35,800 workers: that's just over 1 m2 per employee. Now they're said to work 12 hours a day, so assume two shifts, that's doubling the space to 2 m2 per worker. That's incredibly tight, considering this includes all space for tools and machines, conveyor belts, warehousing of both parts and finished products, etc. Now Chinese factories tend to be quite packed, but this just doesn't sound right.
Or not. I rarely used IE. It was Mosaic, then Netscape, then Firefox as my main browsers, and all of them appeared to render everything just fine.
Many company web pages I have had issues with. Banks were especially notorious to require IE.
And the thing is: everything APPEARS to render just fine. Until you talk to someone on the phone and discuss things you can find on that page, and you can't find the link because that part of the page is simply not rendered. I also have had many issues with links (often javascript) that just didn't work in Mozilla, while it worked fine in IE.
You can use Firefox instead. Or one of many other browsers.
The important thing here is not so much IE losing the #1 position. It's actually irrelevant since they went under 60, 70% or so. Now pretty much all web pages work fine for pretty much all browsers - compare that to 10 years ago when a large part of the web was IE-only. To view those pages you had to use IE, and companies got away with it because >90% did use IE which came with some convenient but proprietary extensions, and it was not worth catering for the other <10%.
Developers now code to standards, to make it work for all their users. Sure it's all not perfect and so (yet) but having a browser ecosystem with three major browsers with a large userbase (plus a whole lot of alternatives) but each well under half the total market is what counts. You have real choice now. You're not forced anymore to use IE to see a web page, you can use any browser you like. If you don't like IE and Chrome/Chromium, use FF, Safari, Opera, whatever: they all will do the job just fine.
IE falling from the #1 spot is just psychologically important. It goes to show how far MS has fallen. And it proves that Windows may be next - if only a truly viable competitor shows up.
Statistics of the top-ten are seriously flawed. Sure the number of downloads is highest in Australia, but there are a few small countries in the top-ten list too, and anyway population sizes vary vastly between the countries in the list. We should really correct for population. Doing so gives me a very different result, with a number to give the download rate corrected for population - the US rate indexed as 1:
1 Norway (24)
2 Australia (14)
3 The Netherlands (8.5)
4 Greece (8.4)
5 Canada (7.1)
6 United Kingdom (3.9)
7 Poland (2.5)
8 Spain (2.2)
9 United States (1)
10 Philippines (0.95)
Most notable is how the US falls down to the bottom of this list. Australia down to #2, Norway all the way on top, and Netherlands on #3. This I think says more about the relative popularity of a show in an area than plain download numbers.
The lower end of this top-ten is probably not accurate as there are plenty more small countries that may move up further but I don't have the numbers. The number of downloads from the US is actually quite small compared to it's population size.
sometimes up to 6 ad breaks in a single 21 minute show!
This truly makes me wonder why anyone is still watching it. I've been put off watching TV by the regular breaks (4-5 an hour), cutting up a movie in dozens of parts and sometimes nearly doubling the playing time. Yet the fact that they do this, means that there are still lots of people put up with it and are watching the show on TV. The advertisers also accept it, and think people are watching their ads, otherwise they wouldn't buy those slots.
With bittorrent and so becoming easier and easier these days, and forums aplenty where people will be happy to help those who don't know how it works and where to find the good torrents, it makes me wonder why not more people download the show instead - if only as form of revolt against too much advertising.
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Just wondering. Why would you run untrusted executables from your USB drive?
The problem is obviously not hidden in the documents, as you say that under Linux you just delete the offending files. You can do the same with Windows. Or any other OS. Just delete them, don't run them.
I'd say that those always-on Internet-facing Linux servers with their (usually) high bandwidth and high processing power are very juicy targets. And very valuable for hackers as starting point for further hacks, e.g. spreading of malware (inserting a drive-by download to whatever site that server serves), hosting phishing sites, using real mail servers as spam relays, etc.
The value of a single compromised server is definitely way more than that of a compromised desktop.
And really, what do I know about the majority of the smaller software packages in the Ubuntu Software Center?
I've been saying the same ad nauseum. They say it's more secure because the connection between your computer and the package server is verified and encrypted, but when you ask what kind of guarantee the user has that some package wasn't built using tainted source or on a compromised server, the arguments quickly fade away.
I trust those packages because I know that if they do have a problem it will come out soon enough (via channels like /.), after which Ubuntu is sure to start losing users in droves, and go bankrupt.
Ubuntu has a good business reason to not have malware in their software centre packages. And that's what makes me trust them to keep it safe, and also that once a problem has been identified, that they will act to fix it.
The same for organisations like Mozilla or OpenOffice and it's forks: they run a business based on people trusting their software to do what it says it does, and that it doesn't come with any malware that tries to steal your identity or empty your bank account. This makes it a trusted source. Even if I don't get to audit the complete source myself.
corporate types want somebody to blame when things go pear-shaped. There's not many linux companies of enough size to handle that. Just RedHat and SuSe.
The irony here is that you complain there are just two Linux vendors that are big enough to provide such support.
While there is just one Windows vendor.
Windows is a known evil when it comes to security.
Linux and other competitors are unknown evils.
That's enough of a difference for many companies. Especially when legal liability is an issue, and Windows being a known evil has much more of a "standard" procedure of dealing with that, so much easier to argue that you followed best industry practice in keeping your system safe in case something does go wrong.
What, do you mean there is any content left in between the commercials?
I guess this comes down to the time shifting vs. creating derivative works argument.
If you record an hour of TV broadcast and replay it later unedited, you're time shifting.
If you record a show beginning to end while cutting out the commercials, you are creating a derivative work.
Hereby I'm using the argument that the original TV stream (the combination of fragments of the show you're interested in and the commercials in between those fragments) is an original work, produced by the TV network. Now of course that original work is again a derivative of other works (the original show and the commercials), but that doesn't mitigate the argument that it's an original work.
The TV network certainly has the copyright licenses to do this with the original works.
I don't know what licenses Dish has, and what agreements, but it seems that the only agreement/license they have (either directly or via "fair use") is to provide a time shifting service.
To clean glass of food remains, it's usually stored in a big pile outdoors to let nature do its job. A good reason to clean glass for recycling is that it doesn't start to smell so badly while waiting to be taken to the glass container.
About 25 years ago, on a trip in Czechoslovakia (a few years before the fall of the Wall) I experienced those bags for packing milk. My parents told me that in their childhood also in Netherlands plastic bags were used for milk, but such packing had long since been abandoned. Sure convenient to store and little waste, but that's all there is to them.
When opened, they're a pain to store as they don't have the rigidity of a bottle so tend to fall over. They're hard to grab on to, again no rigidity, so great risk of spills or sprays when picking up an opened bag.
And then they just look plain ugly compared to bottles. And, even though the content is the same, a prettier packing commends a higher retail prices and higher sales. That's just how consumers make their choice.
So long story short: the West used them too, long time ago, and it's not just because that this kind of packing is not used any more for anything but small bags of ketchup in McDonald's.
That's not Lego. Can't use it to build a house, then a truck, then an airplane, then just some random pile of bricks.
Long time since I've seen that, and most sites where I see "works best" it's something like "Internet Explorer 5.5". Oh well.
I can't believe web sites nowadays can afford to have it work well in one browser, and not so well (missing bits/poor layout/whatever) in the rest. Because the most-used browser is only just over half of the users according to one set of statistics, and about a third of the users according to another set. So half or more of your users will see a degraded site.
There are quite some alternatives to Lego; some are even fully compatible with the original Lego bricks.
Yet I have to see one with the same quality. Strong blocks (not floppy), and that all fit perfectly together: not falling apart or being impossible to take apart. That's what Lego manages to do, and what all competing bricks that I have had in my hands fall short of. Most of them just don't have the rigidity for starters: usually because they use a cheaper plastic. Many have issues with fitting - usually too loose, especially after a while. Yet the Lego bricks from my childhood, some 30 years old, are now being played with by my son. Mixed with a good quantity of even older bricks. And they work just as well as they did back then.
Legos are expensive, sure. But until there is a competitor on the market that can produce a cheaper brick with the same overall quality, you just can't say they're overpriced.
Most end-users don't have datasets big enough to warrant a tape drive for backups. For them a few 1 TB drives is more than enough.
I'm always impressed with such dockings, considering they happen while both craft travel at many kms per second, yet their speeds are to be virtually equal. So you have to speed up to a certain speed, and then make sure the speed is exactly the right speed, and the exact right direction, and that the craft is at the exact right position when reaching that speed and direction.
And I don't think that firing your thrusters is such a great idea when in close proximity to another space craft: I would expect that the matter thrown out by the thrusters could damage and push away the other craft if directed at it.
Of course NASA relies on the expertise from those industries. Why not? Why re-invent the wheel? On the other hand NASA had the funds, and could take the huge risks, of developing space technology without any known benefits - without even knowing whether it'd be possible.
Also those private companies have the means to actually build stuff. They have the know-how and the tools to put stuff together, so when NASA develops a design, they hire someone to build it for them.
On the other hand, companies like SpaceX can only become a success because of the enormous research effort done by NASA over the past decades. They can learn from what NASA has done: things that work, things that don't. And use that as a starting point for their own rocketry. Also it's their first flight, so naturally they will use an existing launch pad instead of building their own.
It's just like an ecosystem, everyone relies on everyone else. For finance, knowledge, development, construction, etc. And it's not just space flight, almost all technology and engineering is developed by a combination of private and public research - but most publicly funded research is not done by a high-profile agency like NASA but by institutes like universities.
And to come back on the launch pad: it's generally considered a task of the government to provide infrastructure, including roads, railways, airports, power lines, water lines, sewage, etc. So why not launch pads? Mind I'm not saying they should provide them for free: let the user pay, but the large upfront investment in such things, the general economical benefits and the prevention of double work is what makes it a typical government task.
Last time I checked, US unemployment is well below 99%.
I'm all for hating the banks, let's just hate the right banks.
You should hate the wrong banks, imho.
Too bad that one of America's top companies outsources most of its production. Their profit margins could support USA jobs.
Profit is not made on production. That's a very low-margin business, as it's largely unskilled labour. And unskilled labour, by being unskilled, is easily replaceable. The only thing that gives companies like Foxconn a negotiation position is because Foxconn is so big, that they can actually handle the volumes Apple demands, and that they can make significant investments in new plants by themselves. Most factories in China are not that big, can't handle huge volumes, and are not in a strong position to negotiate with buyers. If their neighbour can do the same work for 0.5% less, they lose the contract to that neighbour. And can get it back when they cut their price by 1%.
Most profit is in supporting fields like financing (of a.o. investment and trade), marketing, design, logistics. And guess what: those are still mostly done in the US. It's just the low-margin, low-profit stuff that is pushed out. Freeing up your local, expensive US workers to do more productive things. So don't you worry, most of Apple's profit is made in the US (even though they may book it somewhere else to avoid taxes), and most of the high-productivity, high-paying jobs are also still in the US.
Three shifts? More like two. Read TFA. Many workers report working 12 hours a day.
Chinese workers are cheap, and plentiful (in the less developed provinces that is, this plant is to set up in Hainan, not in Shenzhen where their main site is).
No matter what, that's going to be one heck of a crowded factory.
40,000 m2 for 35,800 workers: that's just over 1 m2 per employee. Now they're said to work 12 hours a day, so assume two shifts, that's doubling the space to 2 m2 per worker. That's incredibly tight, considering this includes all space for tools and machines, conveyor belts, warehousing of both parts and finished products, etc. Now Chinese factories tend to be quite packed, but this just doesn't sound right.
TFA is just a troll. Or flamebait. Or both. I don't know.
>>>To view those pages you had to use IE,
Or not. I rarely used IE. It was Mosaic, then Netscape, then Firefox as my main browsers, and all of them appeared to render everything just fine.
Many company web pages I have had issues with. Banks were especially notorious to require IE.
And the thing is: everything APPEARS to render just fine. Until you talk to someone on the phone and discuss things you can find on that page, and you can't find the link because that part of the page is simply not rendered. I also have had many issues with links (often javascript) that just didn't work in Mozilla, while it worked fine in IE.
You can use Firefox instead. Or one of many other browsers.
The important thing here is not so much IE losing the #1 position. It's actually irrelevant since they went under 60, 70% or so. Now pretty much all web pages work fine for pretty much all browsers - compare that to 10 years ago when a large part of the web was IE-only. To view those pages you had to use IE, and companies got away with it because >90% did use IE which came with some convenient but proprietary extensions, and it was not worth catering for the other <10%.
Developers now code to standards, to make it work for all their users. Sure it's all not perfect and so (yet) but having a browser ecosystem with three major browsers with a large userbase (plus a whole lot of alternatives) but each well under half the total market is what counts. You have real choice now. You're not forced anymore to use IE to see a web page, you can use any browser you like. If you don't like IE and Chrome/Chromium, use FF, Safari, Opera, whatever: they all will do the job just fine.
IE falling from the #1 spot is just psychologically important. It goes to show how far MS has fallen. And it proves that Windows may be next - if only a truly viable competitor shows up.
Statistics of the top-ten are seriously flawed. Sure the number of downloads is highest in Australia, but there are a few small countries in the top-ten list too, and anyway population sizes vary vastly between the countries in the list. We should really correct for population. Doing so gives me a very different result, with a number to give the download rate corrected for population - the US rate indexed as 1:
1 Norway (24)
2 Australia (14)
3 The Netherlands (8.5)
4 Greece (8.4)
5 Canada (7.1)
6 United Kingdom (3.9)
7 Poland (2.5)
8 Spain (2.2)
9 United States (1)
10 Philippines (0.95)
Most notable is how the US falls down to the bottom of this list. Australia down to #2, Norway all the way on top, and Netherlands on #3. This I think says more about the relative popularity of a show in an area than plain download numbers.
The lower end of this top-ten is probably not accurate as there are plenty more small countries that may move up further but I don't have the numbers. The number of downloads from the US is actually quite small compared to it's population size.
sometimes up to 6 ad breaks in a single 21 minute show!
This truly makes me wonder why anyone is still watching it. I've been put off watching TV by the regular breaks (4-5 an hour), cutting up a movie in dozens of parts and sometimes nearly doubling the playing time. Yet the fact that they do this, means that there are still lots of people put up with it and are watching the show on TV. The advertisers also accept it, and think people are watching their ads, otherwise they wouldn't buy those slots.
With bittorrent and so becoming easier and easier these days, and forums aplenty where people will be happy to help those who don't know how it works and where to find the good torrents, it makes me wonder why not more people download the show instead - if only as form of revolt against too much advertising.