2 and 3 were actually good stories told poorly. They were pretty deep and all the nonsense dialog actually DOES make sense once you see all three and spend some time thinking about it.
there are some quite brilliant concepts in there that are unfortunately told by the worst possible storytelling (in stark contrast to the first, where the storytelling was so excellent that everything is understood right away).
you have to really think about what is happening, have a little bit of grounding in physics/philosophy, AND keep in mind that there are no truly wasted scenes (yes, the train station scene was NOT wasted. think about what you learned in it.)
exactly. A car may have power-assisted brakes and steering, but the power systems are not required to be operational. they are nice to have and make life easier, but if they cut out you can rely on your own muscle to continue functioning in an emergency.
So sure, go to electronic voting for fast initial tallies, clearer voter instructions etc, but definitely have your human-readable paper ballots as backups and for spot-checks.
the stakes are so high in certain elections that fraud attempts are already commonplace and guaranteed.
If he didn't attack them, they can't do @#$%, meanwhile he can sue them for slander if they try to claim he did.
Wrong. the truth does not prevent you from getting sued (trials are all about FINDING the truth, at a cost to you of $200/hr for each person on your legal defense team). You can be right and still be bankrupted, and every hour you spend defending yourself is another hour you could have been looking for a job.
Management types are very paranoid and very uninformed about security issues. I'm not saying that these things *might* happen, I'm saying that I've SEEN this happen first hand. I tell you, management was looking for blood, and the guy was guilty until proven guilty until we can outsource. Luckily I happened to be on the "investigating" side and actually was able to exonerate the so-called disgruntled worker.
Protect yourself. You WANT to get escorted out by security. Never look back.
I work in the biz too, and pegr is 100% on target. The other company's salesmen had already sold the "security outsourcing" product to your management (security outsourcing is real big these days). The assessment was just management's cover to get you out of the picture.
When they say you were the "security risk" they mean that a single person in charge of security is not as reliable as their managed service, because you can become sick, disgruntled or killed crossing the street, but their crack team of mega analysts never sleep, cover for each other as needed and are immune to bus collisions. All for the low-low price of only 3x your salary.
I don't recommend you mention your ex-company's name publically since you have already lost this battle and you do not need to be seen as disgruntled in any way (cut off all contact to save yourself, otherwise the enemy consultants may blame the next breakin on YOU. they might anyway).
However it *would* be nice to know the name of the consulting company that shafted you.
Creating and delivering good presentations (with or without powerpoint or any other software) is a skill that is learned. nobody is born knowing how to ride a bicycle.
the main problem is not that "powerpoint makes you dumb" or even that "people are already dumb," but rather the fact that few people take the time to learn ANYTHING about how to create good slides and presentations. they think that powerpoint will do it all for them, no need to learn.
Power Point will NOT make you a good or bad public speaker!
that's why my resume just has a "Languages" subsection under "Computer Skills," with all of the above thrown in. accurate, and satisfies the occasional anal pedantic human resources GuyMannDude I may come across.
Definitions of pedantic on the Web: marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects formal and uninspired; making a vain display of learning adj. - observing strict adherence to formal rules or literal meaning at the expense of a wider view.
come back when you're ready to actually join the conversation. Or is there a comma missing somewhere?
"Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves -- without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits -- rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick." And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song. "
no, the idea behind copyright is that it provides *a* motive to authors creating works. Since nobody can agree on exactly what should be provided to authors as an incentive, copyrights basically say "the author can get whatever he wants."
This idea is flexible enough so that things like the GPL can stand squarely on it. "Copyrights" are never going to go away, The GPL is not a stopgap measure until some future day when Everything is Free (no matter what some people may hope). The GPL is the expression today that some people want things other than money for their work, and they can have it now. The GPL is not, and cannot be, anti-copyright.
So while Darl proposes that Cash Money is the only possible incentive for authors, Linus points out that the success of the GPL in creating new works of the mind for other compensation contradicts him. He catches Darl with his own words.
So you would rather have nvidia making no drivers at all for Linux?
Yes.
this state is easy to achieve. *jedi mind trick* Simply pretend that nvidia has not released any drivers. Don't download them, don't install them. You are now exactly where you want to be. Now, in the true tradition of open source, you have every opportunity to reverse engineer and code up your own drivers. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
nvidia binary drivers take away the very freedoms that Linux grants you
How do you come to this conclusion? nobody is stopping you from coding or using your own drivers. Nvidia is not giving you as much as you want (open and Free drivers), but it is certainly not taking anything you had away from you. Perhaps close inspection of their drivers will even assist your reverse engineering efforts.
Open source/Free drivers are indeed a better solution for us all. But when that can't happen, pure scientists must become engineers for the time being, and solve the problem at hand with what tools we have. Binary drivers are NOT worse than nothing.
it looks more like linuxgazette.com was hosted by ssc in some strange way. then ssc decided to radically change the way linuxgazette.com works: turning it into a blog public posting style site versus the existing editor-selected-articles published on a schedule system.
the existing staff decided to move elsewhere and are using the.net temporarily, and expected SSC to hand over the.com. Meanwhile, SSC reposted their old articles on.com without author attribution and without copyright notice (they replaced the author's copyright with their own).
Both sides obviously think they "own" linuxgazette.com in name, body and logo, wholly and utterly. At core the issue is really: Who really owns the linuxgazette.com entity and it's assets?
and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo
bingo, you have exactly identified the reason for this "demand." The purpose of the US is not to be nice, or fair, but act as a sovereign nation that will do whatever it takes to gain every advantage for itself. (this is why US only pretends to go along with the UN, until it no longer serves their purposes).
in international affairs, there are no good guys. there is no "fair." everyone acts in their own best interest to the maximum extent possible. Don't try to look at these things from the "we're nice guys, sure we will let you build electronic systems that reduce our military advantage" perspective, you will be disappointed.
I'm not saying I agree or like this. But reread today's international news section of your local paper. it may seem different to you now.
Do I need to manually verify every single setting supplied to me by my DHCP server because I don't trust it?
in a way, yes. an evil machine on your network may answer your dhcp request with, say, itself as your default route. wham, you have yourself a machine routing all your internet bound packets through itself, doing whatever it is evil people do (nice little man-in-the-middle eh?)
it's back down to ease of use: dhcp, or have the network admin identify himself with DNA samples and personally configure each box on the network.
your OSX server is vulnerable only if it uses DHCP on an untrusted lan. if you're using dhcp for *servers* on an unsecured network.... well then you have more problems than this.
the exploit as I understand is this: evil dhcp server gives you an IP addr and also an evil LDAP server, which if your mac is configured to do so, will allow the LDAP server to authenticate root level users too (besides other fun admin stuff like mount points).
this behavior is actually useful for 'lab full of macs)' scenarios and, as I understand, has been an admin 'feature' since the NeXTStep days.
all applications use frameworks. the only question is where do you get your framework: do you code it yourself or use someone elses?
lots of apps need to validate form input, connect to a database, retrieve data and save settings. these are generic "framework" tasks that apply across a wide range of applications. You start with these base foundations (either you roll your own or use someone elses), and decorate it with your particular business needs.
Frameworks like Struts for web apps include much of the stuff you would do yourself anyway: authentication, validation, form repopulation, session management. since lots of geeks/nerds get together to create these frameworks they are often more complete than something you would whip up yourself.
Since they do stuff you were going to do anyway, they can save tons of development time. that's why it's an important topic to be educated about. they are not just "make money commercial concepts."
lots of programmers are clueless computer users. I've met many supposedly "good programmers" who really have no clue what an IP address is, or who think your default gateway must be the same as your subnet mask.
"computers" is a broad field with lots of room for idiot-savants.
look at netscreen. pretty advanced firewall in a box, many different levels of hardware available, pretty secure and far, far cheaper than checkpoint.
hardware accelerated vpns, available redundancy/HA, straightforward config, and no need to buy/maintain server class hardware + os in order to run it (no moving parts except fan I think).
not a bad deal if you don't need specific Checkpoint features. unfortunately their last firmware update seems to have undone the "simplicity factor" that they were so popular for.
a good point, but that doesn't help against the offline dictionary attack listed in this paper: sniff some data, crack the password offline, THEN connect/spoof/raise hell. it will appear succeed on the first *visible to you* attempt.
I think this problem is present in *any* system that relies on user passwords. according to the article, each character in a password is equivalent to about 2.5 "bits" of encryption (since you can't use the entire ascii bitspace and some words/letters are more common, etc). this is a higher number than I saw referenced in one of bruce schneier's books (he said 1.3 bits of entropy per char I think.).
so, if your 128 bit or 256 bit or bit security system is ultimately based from a human-rememberable (and thus probably short) password, is there ANYTHING that can be done short of requiring 30 character passwords?
fool. you want these sites to continue, otherwise you wouldnt need ad blocking, because you would never go to those sites anyway.
what you are doing is freeloading: "I love your content, give it me for free, no I will make YOU pay to serve me, every day, on every site I hit, because I am too much of a loser to let a damned jpg banner load."
let me guess: you've never "bought the mug, the t-shirt, or donated via paypal" either right? *Act* on your "principles" and do everyone a favor, DON'T VISIT BANNER SUPPORTED SITES AT ALL.
almost right... people will move to ipv6 when ipv6 is cheaper than ipv4.
when your new company's ISP will sell you either a 4 addr ipv4 block for $200, or 64,000 ipv6 addresses for $100, AND the ipv6 enabled router/firewall/webserver/smtpserver devices are the same price, THEN people will switch.
I have problems with lotus notes too. Notes seems to be useful only if you have a notes programmer customizing the system to your business workflow. "out of the box" it is merely an OK email/calendar system.
the client is a bitch to admin on a large scale. custom notes.id for each user? copying icon files and dlls for EACH user on a windows terminal server? screw that. I question whether the notes.id file buys you any security (encryption keys or whatever they do for you), since you have to put them on your unencrypted network shares anyway for backup/centralization purposes.
you are the first groupwise admin I've ever heard who actually liked groupwise. my admittedly limited experience with the client was that it's clunky and seems to have very little developer resources behind it.
novell has a long history of fucking up good ideas. only now, at the end, do they realize what has been kicking their ass: limited APP server offerings.
Novell is perceived by most of my customers as a (fairly kick ass) file-print-directory services server only system. but file-print-directory services are only part of what companies need these days. they need groupware/email (groupwise is a joke), they need SQL servers, and they need "Micro Vertical App Server" for Their Tiny Industry that somebody in a garage is addressing. And they want it all on the same platform, with integrated authentication.
small vertical apps is a big one, but it seems to be too much of a bitch to write these VBesque vertical apps on novell, so nobody does. "Small Dentist Office Accounting Pro" gets cooked up on windows by a small software company and not on novell. (incidentally this is a bit of a problem for linux on the desktop front: the crazy apps like "BeeKeeper Ranching and Honey Tracking" are what keep most businesses from switching on the desktop).
looks like Novell is trying to do what they failed to do with the original Unix license they pissed away: create a Novell branded viable app server platform. they screwed up the first time with proprietary unix. maybe a more open system will succeed, but knowing Novell, probably not.
An Open source product that requires the purchase of a proprietary software product. Kinda defeats the purpose.
if you think that the main point of Open Source is "free as in beer," then you don't understand Open Source. With this system a user has full visibility into the inner workings of the product AND can modify/maintain/extend it at the source level.
If the providers "go out of business" users can shop support out to somebody else. THESE are the big reasons to do it, even though it requires non-free software to function. I can see how a big giant company with infinite cash might be tempted by those reasons from a business continuity perspective.
by your standard, there would be no point in releasing Open Source software for Windows either (cygwin? perl?)
Slashdot Mirror
2 and 3 were actually good stories told poorly. They were pretty deep and all the nonsense dialog actually DOES make sense once you see all three and spend some time thinking about it.
there are some quite brilliant concepts in there that are unfortunately told by the worst possible storytelling (in stark contrast to the first, where the storytelling was so excellent that everything is understood right away).
you have to really think about what is happening, have a little bit of grounding in physics/philosophy, AND keep in mind that there are no truly wasted scenes (yes, the train station scene was NOT wasted. think about what you learned in it.)
exactly. A car may have power-assisted brakes and steering, but the power systems are not required to be operational. they are nice to have and make life easier, but if they cut out you can rely on your own muscle to continue functioning in an emergency.
So sure, go to electronic voting for fast initial tallies, clearer voter instructions etc, but definitely have your human-readable paper ballots as backups and for spot-checks.
the stakes are so high in certain elections that fraud attempts are already commonplace and guaranteed.
If he didn't attack them, they can't do @#$%, meanwhile he can sue them for slander if they try to claim he did.
Wrong. the truth does not prevent you from getting sued (trials are all about FINDING the truth, at a cost to you of $200/hr for each person on your legal defense team). You can be right and still be bankrupted, and every hour you spend defending yourself is another hour you could have been looking for a job.
Management types are very paranoid and very uninformed about security issues. I'm not saying that these things *might* happen, I'm saying that I've SEEN this happen first hand. I tell you, management was looking for blood, and the guy was guilty until proven guilty until we can outsource. Luckily I happened to be on the "investigating" side and actually was able to exonerate the so-called disgruntled worker.
Protect yourself. You WANT to get escorted out by security. Never look back.
I work in the biz too, and pegr is 100% on target. The other company's salesmen had already sold the "security outsourcing" product to your management (security outsourcing is real big these days). The assessment was just management's cover to get you out of the picture.
When they say you were the "security risk" they mean that a single person in charge of security is not as reliable as their managed service, because you can become sick, disgruntled or killed crossing the street, but their crack team of mega analysts never sleep, cover for each other as needed and are immune to bus collisions. All for the low-low price of only 3x your salary.
I don't recommend you mention your ex-company's name publically since you have already lost this battle and you do not need to be seen as disgruntled in any way (cut off all contact to save yourself, otherwise the enemy consultants may blame the next breakin on YOU. they might anyway).
However it *would* be nice to know the name of the consulting company that shafted you.
Creating and delivering good presentations (with or without powerpoint or any other software) is a skill that is learned. nobody is born knowing how to ride a bicycle.
the main problem is not that "powerpoint makes you dumb" or even that "people are already dumb," but rather the fact that few people take the time to learn ANYTHING about how to create good slides and presentations. they think that powerpoint will do it all for them, no need to learn.
Power Point will NOT make you a good or bad public speaker!
that's why my resume just has a "Languages" subsection under "Computer Skills," with all of the above thrown in. accurate, and satisfies the occasional anal pedantic human resources GuyMannDude I may come across.
define: pedantic on google
Definitions of pedantic on the Web:
marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects
formal and uninspired; making a vain display of learning
adj. - observing strict adherence to formal rules or literal meaning at the expense of a wider view.
come back when you're ready to actually join the conversation. Or is there a comma missing somewhere?
"Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves -- without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits -- rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick." And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song. "
This man Understands.
no, the idea behind copyright is that it provides *a* motive to authors creating works. Since nobody can agree on exactly what should be provided to authors as an incentive, copyrights basically say "the author can get whatever he wants."
This idea is flexible enough so that things like the GPL can stand squarely on it. "Copyrights" are never going to go away, The GPL is not a stopgap measure until some future day when Everything is Free (no matter what some people may hope). The GPL is the expression today that some people want things other than money for their work, and they can have it now. The GPL is not, and cannot be, anti-copyright.
So while Darl proposes that Cash Money is the only possible incentive for authors, Linus points out that the success of the GPL in creating new works of the mind for other compensation contradicts him. He catches Darl with his own words.
So you would rather have nvidia making no drivers at all for Linux?
Yes.
this state is easy to achieve. *jedi mind trick* Simply pretend that nvidia has not released any drivers. Don't download them, don't install them. You are now exactly where you want to be. Now, in the true tradition of open source, you have every opportunity to reverse engineer and code up your own drivers. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
nvidia binary drivers take away the very freedoms that Linux grants you
How do you come to this conclusion? nobody is stopping you from coding or using your own drivers. Nvidia is not giving you as much as you want (open and Free drivers), but it is certainly not taking anything you had away from you. Perhaps close inspection of their drivers will even assist your reverse engineering efforts.
Open source/Free drivers are indeed a better solution for us all. But when that can't happen, pure scientists must become engineers for the time being, and solve the problem at hand with what tools we have. Binary drivers are NOT worse than nothing.
Can't really tell but:
.net temporarily, and expected SSC to hand over the .com. Meanwhile, SSC reposted their old articles on .com without author attribution and without copyright notice (they replaced the author's copyright with their own).
it looks more like linuxgazette.com was hosted by ssc in some strange way. then ssc decided to radically change the way linuxgazette.com works: turning it into a blog public posting style site versus the existing editor-selected-articles published on a schedule system.
the existing staff decided to move elsewhere and are using the
Both sides obviously think they "own" linuxgazette.com in name, body and logo, wholly and utterly. At core the issue is really: Who really owns the linuxgazette.com entity and it's assets?
and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo
bingo, you have exactly identified the reason for this "demand." The purpose of the US is not to be nice, or fair, but act as a sovereign nation that will do whatever it takes to gain every advantage for itself. (this is why US only pretends to go along with the UN, until it no longer serves their purposes).
in international affairs, there are no good guys. there is no "fair." everyone acts in their own best interest to the maximum extent possible. Don't try to look at these things from the "we're nice guys, sure we will let you build electronic systems that reduce our military advantage" perspective, you will be disappointed.
I'm not saying I agree or like this. But reread today's international news section of your local paper. it may seem different to you now.
Do I need to manually verify every single setting supplied to me by my DHCP server because I don't trust it?
in a way, yes. an evil machine on your network may answer your dhcp request with, say, itself as your default route. wham, you have yourself a machine routing all your internet bound packets through itself, doing whatever it is evil people do (nice little man-in-the-middle eh?)
it's back down to ease of use: dhcp, or have the network admin identify himself with DNA samples and personally configure each box on the network.
your OSX server is vulnerable only if it uses DHCP on an untrusted lan. if you're using dhcp for *servers* on an unsecured network.... well then you have more problems than this.
the exploit as I understand is this: evil dhcp server gives you an IP addr and also an evil LDAP server, which if your mac is configured to do so, will allow the LDAP server to authenticate root level users too (besides other fun admin stuff like mount points).
this behavior is actually useful for 'lab full of macs)' scenarios and, as I understand, has been an admin 'feature' since the NeXTStep days.
all applications use frameworks. the only question is where do you get your framework: do you code it yourself or use someone elses?
lots of apps need to validate form input, connect to a database, retrieve data and save settings. these are generic "framework" tasks that apply across a wide range of applications. You start with these base foundations (either you roll your own or use someone elses), and decorate it with your particular business needs.
Frameworks like Struts for web apps include much of the stuff you would do yourself anyway: authentication, validation, form repopulation, session management. since lots of geeks/nerds get together to create these frameworks they are often more complete than something you would whip up yourself.
Since they do stuff you were going to do anyway, they can save tons of development time. that's why it's an important topic to be educated about. they are not just "make money commercial concepts."
lots of programmers are clueless computer users. I've met many supposedly "good programmers" who really have no clue what an IP address is, or who think your default gateway must be the same as your subnet mask.
"computers" is a broad field with lots of room for idiot-savants.
oh man, this is probably the greatest usenet post I've ever seen.
long live ratpoison!
look at netscreen. pretty advanced firewall in a box, many different levels of hardware available, pretty secure and far, far cheaper than checkpoint.
hardware accelerated vpns, available redundancy/HA, straightforward config, and no need to buy/maintain server class hardware + os in order to run it (no moving parts except fan I think).
not a bad deal if you don't need specific Checkpoint features. unfortunately their last firmware update seems to have undone the "simplicity factor" that they were so popular for.
a good point, but that doesn't help against the offline dictionary attack listed in this paper: sniff some data, crack the password offline, THEN connect/spoof/raise hell. it will appear succeed on the first *visible to you* attempt.
I think this problem is present in *any* system that relies on user passwords. according to the article, each character in a password is equivalent to about 2.5 "bits" of encryption (since you can't use the entire ascii bitspace and some words/letters are more common, etc). this is a higher number than I saw referenced in one of bruce schneier's books (he said 1.3 bits of entropy per char I think.).
so, if your 128 bit or 256 bit or bit security system is ultimately based from a human-rememberable (and thus probably short) password, is there ANYTHING that can be done short of requiring 30 character passwords?
fool. you want these sites to continue, otherwise you wouldnt need ad blocking, because you would never go to those sites anyway.
what you are doing is freeloading: "I love your content, give it me for free, no I will make YOU pay to serve me, every day, on every site I hit, because I am too much of a loser to let a damned jpg banner load."
let me guess: you've never "bought the mug, the t-shirt, or donated via paypal" either right? *Act* on your "principles" and do everyone a favor, DON'T VISIT BANNER SUPPORTED SITES AT ALL.
otherwise you are just a hypocrite.
almost right... people will move to ipv6 when ipv6 is cheaper than ipv4.
when your new company's ISP will sell you either a 4 addr ipv4 block for $200, or 64,000 ipv6 addresses for $100, AND the ipv6 enabled router/firewall/webserver/smtpserver devices are the same price, THEN people will switch.
not until then, because of da cash money.
I have problems with lotus notes too. Notes seems to be useful only if you have a notes programmer customizing the system to your business workflow. "out of the box" it is merely an OK email/calendar system.
the client is a bitch to admin on a large scale. custom notes.id for each user? copying icon files and dlls for EACH user on a windows terminal server? screw that. I question whether the notes.id file buys you any security (encryption keys or whatever they do for you), since you have to put them on your unencrypted network shares anyway for backup/centralization purposes.
you are the first groupwise admin I've ever heard who actually liked groupwise. my admittedly limited experience with the client was that it's clunky and seems to have very little developer resources behind it.
novell has a long history of fucking up good ideas. only now, at the end, do they realize what has been kicking their ass: limited APP server offerings.
Novell is perceived by most of my customers as a (fairly kick ass) file-print-directory services server only system. but file-print-directory services are only part of what companies need these days. they need groupware/email (groupwise is a joke), they need SQL servers, and they need "Micro Vertical App Server" for Their Tiny Industry that somebody in a garage is addressing. And they want it all on the same platform, with integrated authentication.
small vertical apps is a big one, but it seems to be too much of a bitch to write these VBesque vertical apps on novell, so nobody does. "Small Dentist Office Accounting Pro" gets cooked up on windows by a small software company and not on novell. (incidentally this is a bit of a problem for linux on the desktop front: the crazy apps like "BeeKeeper Ranching and Honey Tracking" are what keep most businesses from switching on the desktop).
looks like Novell is trying to do what they failed to do with the original Unix license they pissed away: create a Novell branded viable app server platform. they screwed up the first time with proprietary unix. maybe a more open system will succeed, but knowing Novell, probably not.
An Open source product that requires the purchase of a proprietary software product. Kinda defeats the purpose.
if you think that the main point of Open Source is "free as in beer," then you don't understand Open Source. With this system a user has full visibility into the inner workings of the product AND can modify/maintain/extend it at the source level.
If the providers "go out of business" users can shop support out to somebody else. THESE are the big reasons to do it, even though it requires non-free software to function. I can see how a big giant company with infinite cash might be tempted by those reasons from a business continuity perspective.
by your standard, there would be no point in releasing Open Source software for Windows either (cygwin? perl?)