The title of the article is "2010's best tales from the tech trenches". Each tale that's mentioned in the article has a link. If you click on the link, you get more information. For example, in the story that you mentioned, the full article is "User ignorance wreaks havoc on company's computer files". If you read the full article it clearly explains what happened. I suppose you could say that Infoworld sucks at pull quotes but all the information was there, one click away.
Overall, he had deleted almost 300MB off of his 20MB hard drive.
Wait... what?
Infoworld really sucks at giving Information...
Or maybe you suck at reading?
His laptop only had a 20MB hard drive. He actually did delete 300MB of files. That is the whole point of the story. The only way it would be possible for him to delete that much data is if he was deleting it from somewhere other than his laptop hard drive.
Personally, I have a MacBook Pro with a NVIDIA 9600 chip. I was kind of disappointed when I got StarCraft II. I had to run on one of the lowest resolutions with medium defaults. Increasing any setting made the game close to unplayable when complex graphics were being displayed (such as the lava level). Then I updated the graphics drivers. I was able to bump to the highest supported resolution and bumped the graphic settings to high defaults without noticeable slowdowns. I had to go to the ultra defaults before I started getting slowdowns and warnings.
I haven't had a chance to really sit down with it and play for an extended time (damn real life...) but there certainly is a huge improvement. The urge to upgrade is fading...
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition says, "acronym n. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging."
MOdulation/DEModulation certainly seems like it qualifies to me. It is using the initial parts of a series of words. I don't see how it is any different than RAdio Detecting And Ranging.
The upload speed is not inherently limited to 33.6k. In fact, the V.92 standard allows up to 48k upload speeds but that increase comes at the cost of reduced download speeds.
It depends on your telephone company. If you have Touch Tone, you usually have to use *70 or #70. If you still have pulse dialing, you have to use 1170.
The commas are also important. Each comma adds a two-second pause (unless that's been modified in the modem's registers). Placing a comma or two after the *70 gives the telephone company time to give you a dial tone again so the phone number digits aren't lost.
]P.S. The word MODEM (as the article indicates) represents MOdulatorDEModulator. Hence it should be capitalized. This is also try of enCOderDECoder (CODEC). Slightly less related yet as correct LASER and RADAR....
Generally when an acronym is pronounced as a single word and has entered general usage, it is not capitalized. These days scuba, laser, and radar are not capitalized. Nor is modem.
Can't Apple produce 15" or 13" laptops without that damn glossy display? These mirrors mounted on laptops get really annoying, and I'm not the only one who thinks that non-glossy displays are superior to their allegedly cheaper glossy displays.
One more guy who's looking for a used MBP on ebay.
Why buy used? There are other options for anti-glare screens.
Those boards are using standard PHP BBS packages off the shelf. They're already pretty buggy; on the EFA you keep getting immediately logged out, you keep losing posts, etc.
Yup, that's what it was. I was on the boards during the attack. The admins had disabled HTML in posts but there was a bug in the filter. Various JavaScript and HTML could be written that would slip past the filters. The attackers added a redirect tag of some sort and all of the sudden clicking on a forum topic would send you to an entirely different site. Then put a little JavaScript on that site that pops up endless alerts so you can't quit your browser. For the average web user it was impossible to stop short of not going to the site at all.
Plus the attack was started early on Easter weekend. I don't know if that was intentional but it meant that the admins weren't reachable for a day or two.
I am betting that you live closer to the equator than I do. Sure, on a balmy summer evening it can be pleasant to pump one's own gas. But when that -40 wind chill kicks up from across the icy lake, I would gladly pay a few extra pennies to have a robot do the pumping. (Of course, the robot would have an OUT OF ORDER sign on it because of the extreme cold...)
The/. summary and most of the/. posters seem to be missing the point of the article. (To be fair, the author wasn't too clear himself. He's done some clarification in the comments section of his article.)
Sure, it's annoying that DTrace can't "see" iTunes. But that's more of a DRM issue. Whether you agree with DRM and Apple's implementation of it or not, this DTrace feature is merely a logical extension of that issue.
The real problem though is that this feature actually does break iTunes. If DTrace probes while the iTunes application happens to be the application currently running on the CPU, the DTrace probe won't run. (It's technically a thread of iTunes' at that moment.) So not only will DTrace not show iTunes, it won't show ANY information until it happens to fire off when iTunes isn't the app running on the CPU.
It is fair to say that Apple has made a change to DTrace that has introduced a bug that they need to fix. It is possible for them to fix that bug while continuing to block using DTrace on iTunes.
The article says, "To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist..." So what is the Slashdot headline? "Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port"
Apple Corps (Beatles) filed their first lawsuit against Apple Inc. (computers) back in 1978. They extracted an agreement where Apple Inc. agreed to never get into the music business. I would hardly call that not doing much about it.
It's hard to say that Jobs "won" the dispute. Apple Inc. now owns all trademarks related to "Apple" and licenses specific ones back to Apple Corps but it was a settlement, not a legal decision. Each side took care of their own legal costs and I think it's safe to assume that Apple Corps got something out of the deal.
Does anybody have a definitive origin? Like the bug in Grace Hoppers log book?
Grace Hopper was not the origin of the term "bug" to refer to a defect in a mechanical device. Both "bug" and "debug" were in use before then. Thomas Edison, for example, referred to bugs in his inventions. Wikipedia's article on software bugs is a good place to start learning more.
1) Go to a porn site 2) Download a plugin from the porn site 3) Click "OK" that you are downloading a.DMG file. 4) Mount the.DMG 5) Go back to the Finder 6) Double-click the installer 7) Type in your account password 8) Click next a few times
Calling this, "In the Wild," is laughable. How did the porn site "get infected"? I'll bet anything that the porn site(s) in question know exactly what they are doing...
If the user is using Safari with the default settings, steps 4-6 aren't needed (which is mentioned in the article summary).
"In the wild" means that it isn't limited to just researchers' labs. Of course the porn site knows exactly what it's doing. That's not the point. The point is that an average user has a chance of encountering this trojan.
From what I understand, that was Jim Fallon... Fallon filed suit against Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett... over their Film Crew series of DVD releases
First of all, it's Mallon, not Fallon. His name is even in the Slashdot summary of this article!
I found some forum posts mentioning "a lawsuit", "legal trouble", or "threats" but I wasn't able to find anything reliable. Do you have any confirmed sources about a suit being filed?
In any case, the Film Crew DVDs are available so nothing came of the suit, if there ever was one.
Some of the DVDs do come with un-riffed versions on the flip sides of the DVDs. I don't recall which ones though. Also, I don't think it is worth viewing the movies without the riffing.
This list shows which releases come with the original movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me. Did you say "knives"?
The title of the article is "2010's best tales from the tech trenches". Each tale that's mentioned in the article has a link. If you click on the link, you get more information. For example, in the story that you mentioned, the full article is "User ignorance wreaks havoc on company's computer files". If you read the full article it clearly explains what happened. I suppose you could say that Infoworld sucks at pull quotes but all the information was there, one click away.
Wait... what?
Infoworld really sucks at giving Information...
Or maybe you suck at reading?
His laptop only had a 20MB hard drive. He actually did delete 300MB of files. That is the whole point of the story. The only way it would be possible for him to delete that much data is if he was deleting it from somewhere other than his laptop hard drive.
It's linked to from TFA but Valve's technical article Game Performance Improvements in Latest Mac OS X Update gives a lot of insight into the OS X driver situation.
Personally, I have a MacBook Pro with a NVIDIA 9600 chip. I was kind of disappointed when I got StarCraft II. I had to run on one of the lowest resolutions with medium defaults. Increasing any setting made the game close to unplayable when complex graphics were being displayed (such as the lava level). Then I updated the graphics drivers. I was able to bump to the highest supported resolution and bumped the graphic settings to high defaults without noticeable slowdowns. I had to go to the ultra defaults before I started getting slowdowns and warnings.
I haven't had a chance to really sit down with it and play for an extended time (damn real life...) but there certainly is a huge improvement. The urge to upgrade is fading...
ObOnionArticle:
"United Airlines Exploring Viability Of Stacking Them Like Cordwood"
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition says, "acronym n. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging."
MOdulation/DEModulation certainly seems like it qualifies to me. It is using the initial parts of a series of words. I don't see how it is any different than RAdio Detecting And Ranging.
The upload speed is not inherently limited to 33.6k. In fact, the V.92 standard allows up to 48k upload speeds but that increase comes at the cost of reduced download speeds.
I believe you had to add a *70 after the AT
It depends on your telephone company. If you have Touch Tone, you usually have to use *70 or #70. If you still have pulse dialing, you have to use 1170.
The commas are also important. Each comma adds a two-second pause (unless that's been modified in the modem's registers). Placing a comma or two after the *70 gives the telephone company time to give you a dial tone again so the phone number digits aren't lost.
]P.S. The word MODEM (as the article indicates) represents MOdulatorDEModulator. Hence it should be capitalized. This is also try of enCOderDECoder (CODEC). Slightly less related yet as correct LASER and RADAR....
Generally when an acronym is pronounced as a single word and has entered general usage, it is not capitalized. These days scuba, laser, and radar are not capitalized. Nor is modem.
Can't Apple produce 15" or 13" laptops without that damn glossy display? These mirrors mounted on laptops get really annoying, and I'm not the only one who thinks that non-glossy displays are superior to their allegedly cheaper glossy displays.
One more guy who's looking for a used MBP on ebay.
Why buy used? There are other options for anti-glare screens.
But then there's always the BSDs... they all do just fine without PAM, ALSA, sysV, apt-get/yum, etc.
PAM is part of the base system on FreeBSD, not sure about the other BSDs.
ls -l | sort -n +4 -- sorts files in size order, good for finding big files in a directory
Why not ls -lSr ?
This isn't the first time that Deutsche Telekom has tried this. They have also sued a couple of radio stations and an IT firm.
Check out the Free Magenta campaign.
Yup, that's what it was. I was on the boards during the attack. The admins had disabled HTML in posts but there was a bug in the filter. Various JavaScript and HTML could be written that would slip past the filters. The attackers added a redirect tag of some sort and all of the sudden clicking on a forum topic would send you to an entirely different site. Then put a little JavaScript on that site that pops up endless alerts so you can't quit your browser. For the average web user it was impossible to stop short of not going to the site at all.
Plus the attack was started early on Easter weekend. I don't know if that was intentional but it meant that the admins weren't reachable for a day or two.
I am betting that you live closer to the equator than I do. Sure, on a balmy summer evening it can be pleasant to pump one's own gas. But when that -40 wind chill kicks up from across the icy lake, I would gladly pay a few extra pennies to have a robot do the pumping. (Of course, the robot would have an OUT OF ORDER sign on it because of the extreme cold...)
Doh! "this feature actually does break iTunes" should have been "this feature actually does break DTrace". My bad.
The /. summary and most of the /. posters seem to be missing the point of the article. (To be fair, the author wasn't too clear himself. He's done some clarification in the comments section of his article.)
Sure, it's annoying that DTrace can't "see" iTunes. But that's more of a DRM issue. Whether you agree with DRM and Apple's implementation of it or not, this DTrace feature is merely a logical extension of that issue.
The real problem though is that this feature actually does break iTunes. If DTrace probes while the iTunes application happens to be the application currently running on the CPU, the DTrace probe won't run. (It's technically a thread of iTunes' at that moment.) So not only will DTrace not show iTunes, it won't show ANY information until it happens to fire off when iTunes isn't the app running on the CPU.
It is fair to say that Apple has made a change to DTrace that has introduced a bug that they need to fix. It is possible for them to fix that bug while continuing to block using DTrace on iTunes.
The article says, "To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist..." So what is the Slashdot headline? "Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port"
Nice...
I made SPAM sushi once using the recipe in SPAM: A Biography. Ugh, never again.... There are just some things that Should Not Be.
Apple Corps (Beatles) filed their first lawsuit against Apple Inc. (computers) back in 1978. They extracted an agreement where Apple Inc. agreed to never get into the music business. I would hardly call that not doing much about it.
It's hard to say that Jobs "won" the dispute. Apple Inc. now owns all trademarks related to "Apple" and licenses specific ones back to Apple Corps but it was a settlement, not a legal decision. Each side took care of their own legal costs and I think it's safe to assume that Apple Corps got something out of the deal.
Grace Hopper was not the origin of the term "bug" to refer to a defect in a mechanical device. Both "bug" and "debug" were in use before then. Thomas Edison, for example, referred to bugs in his inventions. Wikipedia's article on software bugs is a good place to start learning more.
This t-shirt from the Cheapass Games folks pretty much sums up German games. (Zoom in on the image of the back.)
If the user is using Safari with the default settings, steps 4-6 aren't needed (which is mentioned in the article summary).
"In the wild" means that it isn't limited to just researchers' labs. Of course the porn site knows exactly what it's doing. That's not the point. The point is that an average user has a chance of encountering this trojan.
I found some forum posts mentioning "a lawsuit", "legal trouble", or "threats" but I wasn't able to find anything reliable. Do you have any confirmed sources about a suit being filed?
In any case, the Film Crew DVDs are available so nothing came of the suit, if there ever was one.