I'll see your trainspotter's guide to Slashdot accounts, and I'll raise you the following list of geek celebrities with Slashdot accounts who've posted at least one comment. This is a somewhat arbitrary order cos the details are split across two files.
Eric Raymond; Bruce Perens; Jordan Hubbard; Chris 'weld pond' Wysopal; Hans Reiser; Miguel de Icaza; Randal Schwartz; Alan Cox; Bradley Kuhn; Fyodor (Nmap); John Carmack; John Nagle; Karl Auerbach; Ingo Molnar; Phil Zimmermann.
Chris de Bona; Dan Kaminsky; Jeremy Allison; Patrik Volkerding; Bowie J Poag; Crispin Cowan; Asa Dotzler; Nick Weaver; Keith Packard; Daniel Mayer; Marten Mickos; Jared Mauch; Ryan Russell; Wendy Seltzer; Wil Wheaton; Eric Eldred; Dave Aitel...
I'm sure there are many more. If you haven't heard of any of these people... well, I dunno, perhaps it's just me. Perhaps I've just spent too long obsessing about this software stuff...
If it appears to be physically difficult to explain these posts, perhaps it is an artificial constRuction. I'd expect an advanced extra-terrestial website to exploit the immense power of the IP cloud and the core routers. Who knows what they are doing with it? Sustanence? Goathole transport? Communication? Entertainment? Maybe one hundred infant geeks whizzing around the front page has something to do with this.
Talking of infrastructure interdependencies, Security Focus ran this excellent piece by Mark Rasch about the lessons of Katrina for info-sec (OK, a lot of it is about BCP / DR stuff, but it's generalisable to other aspects of the subject IMO.)
In the corporate Security Dept. where I work, we take it in turns to do a shotr 20min presentation at our weekly meetings - the subject is up to us, but obviously computer security subjects. I did my first one on the Columbia and Challenger shuttle accidents, and the accident enquiry board's reports into each (they're both absolutely fascinating, if you can find the time, highly recommended.) And both accidents have a lot of lessons for security. "Don't use powerpoint to communicate technical information to managers", for starters;)
Rather to my surprise the feedback was that it was excellent and very interesting... only the second time I'd stood up in front of Powerpoint in my life.
C'mon this isn't news. BBC was reporting it yesterday FFS, and as other pointed out the Wikipedia page on the CEV has a lot of detailed info on the launchers, mission plans etc.
Note to all the Rutan freaks out there: if you can do this was less than $60 billion, feel free to try. Even better, volunteer to be a test pilot...
So conservation does not help global warming, it just lowers the price so that the Chineese can burn more, and it discourages alternative fuel research. For the good of humanity, it is important that you burn as much oil as you can afford to, in order to bump up prices and encourage alternatives to oil.
Y'know, I've been following the global warming debate, and keeping up with the science, for about twenty years now; and I think that's the first new thing on it I've heard, ooh, this century at least... probably since the gas hydrates were seriously noticed and thouught about. (Incidentally, if any treehuggers out there want to really wreck their sleep patterns, check out these stories (and the actual research that they're reporting.)
Sweet suffering baby jesus, who ARE you people that mod this sort of ignorant diahorrea up to 5?!
Seriously, we've had the technology to detect global climate changes for what, a hundred years at most?
Well you did the right thing adding the ? to the end of your question, otherwise I'd assume you were stating this as factual! I'm not going to explain to you why and how you are UTTERLY UTTERLY WRONG, but here are some free google / Wikipedia tips: paleoclimatology. climate proxy data. radioisotope dating. 100,000 years, with less direct proxy data before that.
Of that, we've had useful tools (such as satellites) for less than 50 years.
What is it about non-satellite data that makes it useless? Show your reasoning and data, then book your ticket to Stockholm where Swedish royalty are waiting to give you the Nobel Prize for Extreme Cleverness, and all the world's scientists will be waiting to hear how they could have been so very, very wrong for all these years.
the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not.
"plenty" isn't a very precise term; it's kinda true, but what you have to remember is that anthropogenic climate influence is unambiguously distinct from natural variability in the data (google: detection and attribution) and that no other process *except* the sudden and massive release of CO2 and other GHGs into the atmosphere could cause such rapid change. (Hmmm, google for "260 million years ago" "10 degree rise" "methane hydrates" for the last natural climate change of this amplitude and rapidity.)
Secondly, did it occur to you that at the time that such changes occured mankind was cowering in caves making chipping rocks into pointy shapes (the end of the last ice age) and wondering whether to evolve into mammals, respectively. Put it this way. Hurricane Katrina was a gnat's fart in a tornado if compare the energy involved with that of the thermal inertia caused by even a 0.1 degree rise in global temperatures. Think about that for a bit. Remember that we're basically monkeys with speech and written culture, and that all the natural aggressive instincts that got us out of the trees and into the caves in the first place (frenzied killing rages, for example) are still with us. Oh and this time the pointy rocks are nuclear tipped.
(Putting aside the fact that a forest fire or volcano is a hell of a lot more energy than humans normally put out.)
You're merging two straw man arguments into one mega-strawman! Firstly, the issue is not the energy humans release into the environment; it's the energy the SUN puts into the environment, and the fact that we've increased CO2 concentrations by 40% or so in the blink of an eye. See, the CO2 traps the sun's heat inside the earth's environment - just like the way glass traps heat in a greenhouse. hence the term GLOBAL WARMING. Secondly, the 'volcanos' canard goes: "anyway, like, Mount St Helens releases 100,000,000,00000000 times more greenhuose gasses that humans have in the whole of history!!" - and, of course, it's utterly untrue. I'm not giving you google pointers on this one, go educate yourself on your own time.
Life will continue on, and we'll adapt.
If by 'us' you mean 'zygotic life', then you're quite correct. Right at the other end of the scale, if you mean "life as we hav known in it in the West since the end of WW2"*, well, sorry kid, but you're talking through your rectum once more. OK, OK, suppose that 'hundreds of millions' figure is wrong. Say that everyone in the new dustbowl areas just politely drops dead on the spot, rather than trying to move somewhere where there's more than sand to eat. You're still much more likely to end up choking on your own intestines in a pool of burning
One of Adobe's Lawyers (from their Barrel O' Lawyers): Your Honor, in the defendent's own words:
to make The Gimp a little friendlier with a simple UI make-over, creating GimpShop. Despite an outcry from some developers, users have picked it up with passion. Howard Wen has interviewed Scott about why he did this. From the interview: 'I've always thought that GIMP was just as powerful as Photoshop. My way of proving it was to make GIMP work as close to Photoshop as I possibly could
Judge: I have no recourse other than to find for the plaintiff and wreak all sorts of havoc with Open Source Development.
When burbling to people about the evils of teh copyright mafia (the **IAs, the DMCA / EUCD crap, all those sorts of issues), an example I pull out for people who persist in beliefs like "Companies have to be able to protect their inventions!" is "So you're saying that if laws had been right - as they are now - a century ago, there'd eb three or four makes of car in the world (the company that patented the diesel engine, vs. the firm with the rights to the petrol engine vs. the niche of wankel rotary cillender corporation... and they all have completely different controls; one would use a wheel, another would have handles attached to pulleys, the third would use a lever to point where to go... not to mention that they'd all have to have different solutions to drivign in the dark, cos there's only one inventor of the headlight!" Or that the first company (the one with petrol, a steering lever, and magnesium flares on the roof) would have crushed it's rivals and there'd be no alternative? Wow, what a compelling vision of the future of capitalism you paint!"
It doesn't work, of course, but then I don't expect it to.
Re:even worse are misleading options
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 1
Heh, glad I read teh whole thread before hitting reply cos that's exactly what I was thinking. If only they'd see sense and s|c\:\\Windows\\WINNT\System32|C\:\\sbin|g...
Also nice that someone else remembers NT4, the last time when there was any real doubt about whether NT4 or Linux made the best server &&|| hacker's desktop.
Doesn't MS realize that the majority of business users will be using the same old Windows 2000 interface?
s/2000/1995/, but I'm sure you knew that the 'classic' Start-menu-and-task-bar interface arrived with Win95. That said, being an old fart now (closer to 40 than 30), I'm... 'sad', I think is the best word, that a five year old interface is considered "old" these days.
Final thought: yes, of course Microsoft know many users will revert to the win95 interface (if that's an option.) Now, imagine how slick that's going to feel on the ludicrous pimped-up hardware Longhorn needs...
When are people going to accept the fact that the Earth goes in cycles?
When are people going to stop posting bullshit oon subjects they know very little about to Slashdot? When other idiots stop modding them up to +5 I suppose. *expletives deleted*
I deployed Firefox on the corporate network to improve security. Five updates later, I'm explaining to my manager that Firefox, just like IE, is full of security holes that need to be patched.
If your manager hasn't realised that all software has bugs, and that software that fetches remote data over the network and then parses it is doing something very complicated in an extremely hostile environment, then perhaps you should have managed his/her expectations better? You might also explain that the Fx holes are, in general, much less severe than IE holes (remote root from Mozilla? not likely); that they are usually patched within a matter of days, rather than the months Microsoft takes (and you might point him to eEye's long list of critical vulnerabililties that they won't tell us about until MS release a patch - and how overdue those fixes are; google for it); and you could also cheat a bit and mention that in-the-wild exploits of Firefox are far far less common than IE exploits, because it's still comparitively rare.
Unlike IE, Firefox can't be updated through Windows Update
Neither can any other software apart from Windows itself. So you can just patch it using the same patch management process you use for your other software that isn't Windows. (You know about OfficeUpdate, right?) Anyway, you can use the official Microsoft answer to this problem (SUS) with non-Microsoft MSI files, so you can push updates out to all your users whenever you want to. If you can't be bothered to use SUS, just patch Fx the same way you patch your other high-risk software such as RealPlayer, Quicktime, and so on... you do patch that stuff, right? And those non-networking apps - your workflow stuff, databases and so on - you patch those so the anti-social smartarse on the Helpdesk can't haxx0r the salary database of course; do you do walkrounds for those?
and it doesn't have a patch release cycle.
New versions are released according to the roadmap published on the website "from time to time"; patches are released when they're ready. It's not Mozilla.org's fault if Microsoft release patches when it suits them, holding up vital security fixes for up to four weeks to hit that artificial schedule, is it!
That makes it harder to plan for and harder to deploy Firefox patches.
That phrase stinks of Redmond koolaid I'm afraid. What's to plan? A patch is released; you do whatever testing your vuln management policy says is appropriate for that class of vulnerability; when you're ready to deploy, you hit the big button. How can you plan for that beyond making sure you have resources available to meet your worst-case threat scenario? You know roughly how many patches to expect in a year (because you collect those stats from your workflow system, right?) You know roughly how long it takes to deploy a patch (whether it's a single NMS / SUS button push, or a sneakernet, or a server-side upgrade that must be done out of hours). You can't control when those patches will be released because you never know what's going to be patched from one day to the next (apart from Microsoft's artificial schedule, of course.) Incidentally does anyone know of any other sw vendor who saves patches up for the vendor's convenience? Didn't IBM do that in the 60s?) You realise they batch them up because they were getting embarrassed by the sheer number of advisories they release? (I realise people were getting a bad impression for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that MS moved to the monthly schedule for PR and marketing reasons.)
hallelujah, brother, you preach it! Actually I'm delighted to see that the usual addled Zemeckis zealots and other people who seem to think the titles for Star Trek: Enterprise are a future historical documentary. Yeah, they laughed at Einstein* and the Wright brothers but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown, who has as much chance of making it to Mars as these jokers.
(*actually they didn't laugh at Einstein if they had enough mathematics and physics to understand his work.)
SSL 2.0 is so old that it should have gone the way of the Dodo bird.
The game was up when a Bond villain, discovering that it's trivial to hack some top secret installation, says contemptuously "*pffft* , they're using SSL - version two." And that was in 1997.
No kidding... it took me two or three years before I decided to register a user
ISTR noticing that two-figure UID owners were taunting those lamer n00bs with three figure UIDs... at that point the cat was out of the bag and the scramble began in earnest.
Slashdot user since before there were user accounts (and when they were launched, alas! I thought "why would I want to waste time registering for an account? They'll probably just sell my email address to spammers...")
There's been a hell of a lot of water under the bridge since the late 90s, for me personally, for the Wacky World of Computinga and Geekdom, and the world in general... OSX on Intel... 9/11... the Iraq war... the slow inexorable rise of Linux and Free Software... the 'Slash' code was finally released (after many fun years taking the piss out of Taco because it was closed!)... DEC was bought by Compaq, Compaq bought by HP... IBM drank the koolaid and started pushing Linux.... Lucas released three of the worst films ever made... Matrix I... all the trollers and crapfloods (come back UG the open-source caveman, all is forgiven!)
And many other happy memories of hours wasted at work. And home. And I've changed from a Microsoft / Access developer to Perl, Apache, MySQL, become a real proper developer using Linux as a workstation and CVS... designed & built the system that automatically produces and releases antivirus updates... worked for a dotcom that went titsup... been unemployed... and managed to move over to fulltime network security / pentesting. But enough of my yakkin'...
Slashdot Mirror
Eric Raymond; Bruce Perens; Jordan Hubbard; Chris 'weld pond' Wysopal; Hans Reiser; Miguel de Icaza; Randal Schwartz; Alan Cox; Bradley Kuhn; Fyodor (Nmap); John Carmack; John Nagle; Karl Auerbach; Ingo Molnar; Phil Zimmermann.
Chris de Bona; Dan Kaminsky; Jeremy Allison; Patrik Volkerding; Bowie J Poag; Crispin Cowan; Asa Dotzler; Nick Weaver; Keith Packard; Daniel Mayer; Marten Mickos; Jared Mauch; Ryan Russell; Wendy Seltzer; Wil Wheaton; Eric Eldred; Dave Aitel...
I'm sure there are many more. If you haven't heard of any of these people... well, I dunno, perhaps it's just me. Perhaps I've just spent too long obsessing about this software stuff...
"Shark sandwich? Shit sandwich."
If it appears to be physically difficult to explain these posts, perhaps it is an artificial constRuction. I'd expect an advanced extra-terrestial website to exploit the immense power of the IP cloud and the core routers. Who knows what they are doing with it? Sustanence? Goathole transport? Communication? Entertainment? Maybe one hundred infant geeks whizzing around the front page has something to do with this.
In the corporate Security Dept. where I work, we take it in turns to do a shotr 20min presentation at our weekly meetings - the subject is up to us, but obviously computer security subjects. I did my first one on the Columbia and Challenger shuttle accidents, and the accident enquiry board's reports into each (they're both absolutely fascinating, if you can find the time, highly recommended.) And both accidents have a lot of lessons for security. "Don't use powerpoint to communicate technical information to managers", for starters ;)
Rather to my surprise the feedback was that it was excellent and very interesting... only the second time I'd stood up in front of Powerpoint in my life.
*ding*! We have a comment of the day. Congratulations!
Note to all the Rutan freaks out there: if you can do this was less than $60 billion, feel free to try. Even better, volunteer to be a test pilot...
with naked hippies smoking pot in the desert? Sure beats working for a living...
Q: Why are pirates called pirates?
:)
A: Because they Aaaarrrrrrr!
Nice story. Got any references?
Well you did the right thing adding the ? to the end of your question, otherwise I'd assume you were stating this as factual! I'm not going to explain to you why and how you are UTTERLY UTTERLY WRONG, but here are some free google / Wikipedia tips: paleoclimatology. climate proxy data. radioisotope dating. 100,000 years, with less direct proxy data before that.
What is it about non-satellite data that makes it useless? Show your reasoning and data, then book your ticket to Stockholm where Swedish royalty are waiting to give you the Nobel Prize for Extreme Cleverness, and all the world's scientists will be waiting to hear how they could have been so very, very wrong for all these years.
"plenty" isn't a very precise term; it's kinda true, but what you have to remember is that anthropogenic climate influence is unambiguously distinct from natural variability in the data (google: detection and attribution) and that no other process *except* the sudden and massive release of CO2 and other GHGs into the atmosphere could cause such rapid change. (Hmmm, google for "260 million years ago" "10 degree rise" "methane hydrates" for the last natural climate change of this amplitude and rapidity.)
Secondly, did it occur to you that at the time that such changes occured mankind was cowering in caves making chipping rocks into pointy shapes (the end of the last ice age) and wondering whether to evolve into mammals, respectively. Put it this way. Hurricane Katrina was a gnat's fart in a tornado if compare the energy involved with that of the thermal inertia caused by even a 0.1 degree rise in global temperatures. Think about that for a bit. Remember that we're basically monkeys with speech and written culture, and that all the natural aggressive instincts that got us out of the trees and into the caves in the first place (frenzied killing rages, for example) are still with us. Oh and this time the pointy rocks are nuclear tipped.
You're merging two straw man arguments into one mega-strawman! Firstly, the issue is not the energy humans release into the environment; it's the energy the SUN puts into the environment, and the fact that we've increased CO2 concentrations by 40% or so in the blink of an eye. See, the CO2 traps the sun's heat inside the earth's environment - just like the way glass traps heat in a greenhouse. hence the term GLOBAL WARMING. Secondly, the 'volcanos' canard goes: "anyway, like, Mount St Helens releases 100,000,000,00000000 times more greenhuose gasses that humans have in the whole of history!!" - and, of course, it's utterly untrue. I'm not giving you google pointers on this one, go educate yourself on your own time.
If by 'us' you mean 'zygotic life', then you're quite correct. Right at the other end of the scale, if you mean "life as we hav known in it in the West since the end of WW2"*, well, sorry kid, but you're talking through your rectum once more. OK, OK, suppose that 'hundreds of millions' figure is wrong. Say that everyone in the new dustbowl areas just politely drops dead on the spot, rather than trying to move somewhere where there's more than sand to eat. You're still much more likely to end up choking on your own intestines in a pool of burning
When burbling to people about the evils of teh copyright mafia (the **IAs, the DMCA / EUCD crap, all those sorts of issues), an example I pull out for people who persist in beliefs like "Companies have to be able to protect their inventions!" is "So you're saying that if laws had been right - as they are now - a century ago, there'd eb three or four makes of car in the world (the company that patented the diesel engine, vs. the firm with the rights to the petrol engine vs. the niche of wankel rotary cillender corporation... and they all have completely different controls; one would use a wheel, another would have handles attached to pulleys, the third would use a lever to point where to go... not to mention that they'd all have to have different solutions to drivign in the dark, cos there's only one inventor of the headlight!" Or that the first company (the one with petrol, a steering lever, and magnesium flares on the roof) would have crushed it's rivals and there'd be no alternative? Wow, what a compelling vision of the future of capitalism you paint!"
It doesn't work, of course, but then I don't expect it to.
Now you're just trolling. Discussion over.
Also nice that someone else remembers NT4, the last time when there was any real doubt about whether NT4 or Linux made the best server &&|| hacker's desktop.
s/2000/1995/, but I'm sure you knew that the 'classic' Start-menu-and-task-bar interface arrived with Win95. That said, being an old fart now (closer to 40 than 30), I'm... 'sad', I think is the best word, that a five year old interface is considered "old" these days.
Final thought: yes, of course Microsoft know many users will revert to the win95 interface (if that's an option.) Now, imagine how slick that's going to feel on the ludicrous pimped-up hardware Longhorn needs...
Of course it does; but I'm tired of the uneducated and ill-informed trotting this notion out as an "argument against global warming" [sic].
If your manager hasn't realised that all software has bugs, and that software that fetches remote data over the network and then parses it is doing something very complicated in an extremely hostile environment, then perhaps you should have managed his/her expectations better? You might also explain that the Fx holes are, in general, much less severe than IE holes (remote root from Mozilla? not likely); that they are usually patched within a matter of days, rather than the months Microsoft takes (and you might point him to eEye's long list of critical vulnerabililties that they won't tell us about until MS release a patch - and how overdue those fixes are; google for it); and you could also cheat a bit and mention that in-the-wild exploits of Firefox are far far less common than IE exploits, because it's still comparitively rare.
Neither can any other software apart from Windows itself. So you can just patch it using the same patch management process you use for your other software that isn't Windows. (You know about OfficeUpdate, right?) Anyway, you can use the official Microsoft answer to this problem (SUS) with non-Microsoft MSI files, so you can push updates out to all your users whenever you want to. If you can't be bothered to use SUS, just patch Fx the same way you patch your other high-risk software such as RealPlayer, Quicktime, and so on... you do patch that stuff, right? And those non-networking apps - your workflow stuff, databases and so on - you patch those so the anti-social smartarse on the Helpdesk can't haxx0r the salary database of course; do you do walkrounds for those? New versions are released according to the roadmap published on the website "from time to time"; patches are released when they're ready. It's not Mozilla.org's fault if Microsoft release patches when it suits them, holding up vital security fixes for up to four weeks to hit that artificial schedule, is it! That phrase stinks of Redmond koolaid I'm afraid. What's to plan? A patch is released; you do whatever testing your vuln management policy says is appropriate for that class of vulnerability; when you're ready to deploy, you hit the big button. How can you plan for that beyond making sure you have resources available to meet your worst-case threat scenario? You know roughly how many patches to expect in a year (because you collect those stats from your workflow system, right?) You know roughly how long it takes to deploy a patch (whether it's a single NMS / SUS button push, or a sneakernet, or a server-side upgrade that must be done out of hours). You can't control when those patches will be released because you never know what's going to be patched from one day to the next (apart from Microsoft's artificial schedule, of course.) Incidentally does anyone know of any other sw vendor who saves patches up for the vendor's convenience? Didn't IBM do that in the 60s?) You realise they batch them up because they were getting embarrassed by the sheer number of advisories they release? (I realise people were getting a bad impression for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that MS moved to the monthly schedule for PR and marketing reasons.)(*actually they didn't laugh at Einstein if they had enough mathematics and physics to understand his work.)
Well, no; actually, it was just a figure of speech...
There's been a hell of a lot of water under the bridge since the late 90s, for me personally, for the Wacky World of Computinga and Geekdom, and the world in general... OSX on Intel... 9/11... the Iraq war... the slow inexorable rise of Linux and Free Software... the 'Slash' code was finally released (after many fun years taking the piss out of Taco because it was closed!)... DEC was bought by Compaq, Compaq bought by HP... IBM drank the koolaid and started pushing Linux.... Lucas released three of the worst films ever made... Matrix I... all the trollers and crapfloods (come back UG the open-source caveman, all is forgiven!)
And many other happy memories of hours wasted at work. And home. And I've changed from a Microsoft / Access developer to Perl, Apache, MySQL, become a real proper developer using Linux as a workstation and CVS... designed & built the system that automatically produces and releases antivirus updates... worked for a dotcom that went titsup... been unemployed... and managed to move over to fulltime network security / pentesting. But enough of my yakkin'...
"Gentlemen, start someone else's engines!"