If you were using a GUI, you probably wouldn't have unzipped the files into the wrong directory in the first place.
No, because there's no way you could ever drop a file on the wrong directory, right? No way your finger could slip from the button and release something where you didn't intend to, or inadvertently click in the wrong place.
If it becomes as easy to reproduce a product as it is to copy a song, should the ability to make money selling something people want vanish?
Basically, yes. In this book the author analyses the trends for the future, with a rather pessimistic view. Automation in the next few decades will have a significant effect on economics.
There would still be plenty of incentive to create for artists
Artists already have plenty of incentive to create, the do what they love to do and, if they are good, they can earn a comfortable income from live performances.
The big mistake is assuming that every artist deserve to become a millionaire. Let them earn their daily bread from their daily work, like everybody else.
Unfortunately file system managers ain't there yet
And that's all GUI applications intrinsic weakness. The person who develops them has to magically guess which operations people will want to do and consider every possible combination of actions. Even if it were possible to do so, the result would be huge menus, that's where the whole 'ribbonizing' idea comes from.
The big idea in Unix was that users would be able to combine at random the applications they had. Pipe the result of one program to the input of another. That's what Unix does that's so wonderful, that's absolutely impossible for a GUI to emulate.
If it were possible to redirect the "Undo" option from one application's menu to another option in another application's menu then GUIs would be as powerful as the Unix shell. The problem is that every action performed by every option in any menu must be previously designed and coded by the developer who created the application. If the developer never thought of something you need then there's no way to do it.
Right click, extract, it defaults to a new folder in the current directory that doesn't already exist with a name based on the zip file
So what you're saying is that your GUI won't let me merge a set of files from a zip file into an existing directory? Let's say Larry sent me a bunch of files that should go into the December 2007 folder and Susan put those in the November 2007 folder by mistake.
Or are you saying no one can make mistakes on a GUI? It's much, much easier to click a wrong link, a tiny slip of the mouse, than typing something wrong that makes sense. Type Fecember instead of December, no big deal, click November instead of December, "Oh, shit!!!".
Did the zip folder contain any files with the same name as files that were in the folder?
No, it didn't. So what? Or maybe someone clicked "overwrite all" automatically, without thinking. When GUIs present nag pop-ups all the time one develops a tendency to always click automatically some default buttons.
Now, don't get me wrong, GUIs are fine for searching visually among a set of images. I do use GUIs for their appropriate uses. The problem is people who do not know how to use the best tool for each job. When the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, I'm sure you've heard that one.
Let me see a GUI solve the following problem: I unpacked a zipped file in the wrong directory. Now I have hundred files spread through a directory that already contained many files and directories. Delete only the files that were in that zip file.
Bash solution:
1) unpack the zip file in a clean directory tmpdir 2) cd tmpdir; for f in *; do rm../$f; done
I'm guessing that you don't back up your system very often
My system backup is the install disk plus one script that I run under sudo to configure the system options and install application packages not in the default installation. My personal files backup is done using rsync as a non-admin user.
Jobs like printer administration -- what do you mean? I plug the printer in, it just works.
And don't overlook the risk of creating multiple application data files -- one in root and one in your normal user's directory.
No. Packages that come with the distribution are installed by "sudo apt-get install...", or using one of the available GUI utilities for that, also using sudo. Applications that are available only as source code I can install as available only for myself, in which case it's in my user directory, or for the whole system, in which case it's in/usr/local/bin, installed using sudo.
As for "application data files", those are normally created under each user's directory. There are several copies of course, with each user's configuration, as it should be.
Normal Linux may not be specifically designed for extreme secure applications, if you want that you need SElinux, but it's far ahead of MSwindows in that respect, and has always been.
When I started using Linux, back in 1998, I did what Microsoft had got me used to do. I used only one account, root, and did everything as root.
Then I installed one application, I don't even remember which one, that wouldn't run as root. It demanded a non-privileged user to run.
I was astonished to find that I could do anything, except fuck up the system, as a normal user. I didn't need admin privileges at all. Only when installing new applications or configuring the system I had to log in as root.
Next step was learning how to use the sudo command. No more worries about malware for me. I still have a backup CD-RW from 1999 with the/root directory that had all my files back then. I look at my multi-terabyte disks toady and wonder how I could have been so naive once.
And there are still people who say Microsoft systems only have more malware because they are the most used...
Well, there's that old joke about the schoolgirl who was asked about the differences between a screw, a bolt, and a nail: "I've never been bolted" she answered.
And how are you supposed to take the wine out of the barrel if you cannot screw a cock into the bung hole?
MS is vulnerable because its the biggest target out there.
While it's true that few people would try to exploit a system nobody uses, MS does its share of the effort to become insecure.
In this specific case, the first breach was done by a Flash program embedded in an Excel spreadsheet. We are going waaay back to all that DDE/COM/OLE/ActiveX thing that has been opening so many backdoors in Microsoft systems for the last decades. Broken by design.
The papers mentioned in TFA mention the probability of a rock ejected from Earth reaching Europa. I didn't see in the abstract anything about the probability of survival of a viable spore.
We must take into account that all life is dependent of an ecological niche. For earth to seed life on another planet or vice versa one would need a spore that can survive the extreme conditions of vacuum, temperature variations, and radiation found in space. Then those spores should find an environment where they landed that would supply the needed conditions for reproduction and growth of that life form.
One often sees people mentioning, "look, this bacteria can survive in hot springs under the sea", or "look, this bacteria spores can survive in vacuum", or "look, this bacteria can survive in highly acidic liquids". They are not the same bacteria.
Being able to survive in one specific condition that might be considered extreme for us does not mean it will survive in all the extreme conditions needed to survive and reproduce after being ejected from one planet and falling on another celestial body.
The US is better at building airplanes than Taiwan is
I was just last week talking with a manager at a big US aerospace company. He said that they much prefer government business than commercial, because a commercial project will bring $20 million in profits while a government project of the same size could bring a billion.
As long as the US has a strong military sector to subsidize the aerospace industry they can compete, but how long will that last?
the seeds of life are simply everywhere, inside and outside the solar system, and life is simply always lying dormant, everywhere in the galaxy
I'd say the elements of life are everywhere, but not the seeds. Having the material but not the proper information is not enough. Life is composed by amino acids, but those are merely the bricks used to make proteins. One must have a suitable floor plan to build a house.
What makes conditions on early earth so special is not the existence of organic chemistry, but the special circumstances, so far not known to us, that brought the formation of complex self-reproducing chains of amino acids.
It's the board and investors who are supposed to hold management to strategies of long term value, but they often don't have any long term commitment themselves.
In today's world of mega-corporations there's no personal involvement in the future of a company.
In the days of family owned businesses a long term vision was what guaranteed the retirement pensions of the investors. Today investments are managed by pension funds, none of which is committed to investing in one company alone.
Likewise, board members are director of several different companies, they are always ready to sacrifice one of them for short term profit.
If you are interested in politics at all, I highly recommend working at a polling station during an election
I have done this, in Brazil in 1998. That was the first election when Brazil went to 100% electronic voting. I'm an electronics engineer and was drafted by the electoral court (voting in Brazil is controlled by a special branch of the Judiciary) to work as a "section president".
I was doubtful about electronic voting, but my experience there convinced me that it's much more reliable than people here in Slashdot admits. There are several verification steps that I performed on the ballot. The final one, at the end of the day, was to print the results and glue them to the door of the public school room where voting took place.
I can't say that the software in the electronic ballot was correct, but I can swear that the separate card with the audit program I inserted into the machine reported that it verified OK. I mean "swear" in the courtroom sense, there was a formal process for me to receive the material and perform the verification, I would be guilty of a felony if I didn't do it exactly according to the training I received.
According to my personal experience, electronic voting works.
Slashdot Mirror
because contagious diseases preferentially kill stupid people
In this case that's absolutely correct, or should we say contagious diseases preferentially kill stupid people's genes.
People who make decisions about their children's health based on what a celebrity said in the Oprah show are stupid, no doubt about it.
If you aren't doing anything bad
TIL accessing my bank account through the internet is bad.
If you were using a GUI, you probably wouldn't have unzipped the files into the wrong directory in the first place.
No, because there's no way you could ever drop a file on the wrong directory, right? No way your finger could slip from the button and release something where you didn't intend to, or inadvertently click in the wrong place.
Oh, wait!...
If it becomes as easy to reproduce a product as it is to copy a song, should the ability to make money selling something people want vanish?
Basically, yes. In this book the author analyses the trends for the future, with a rather pessimistic view. Automation in the next few decades will have a significant effect on economics.
There would still be plenty of incentive to create for artists
Artists already have plenty of incentive to create, the do what they love to do and, if they are good, they can earn a comfortable income from live performances.
The big mistake is assuming that every artist deserve to become a millionaire. Let them earn their daily bread from their daily work, like everybody else.
Unfortunately file system managers ain't there yet
And that's all GUI applications intrinsic weakness. The person who develops them has to magically guess which operations people will want to do and consider every possible combination of actions. Even if it were possible to do so, the result would be huge menus, that's where the whole 'ribbonizing' idea comes from.
The big idea in Unix was that users would be able to combine at random the applications they had. Pipe the result of one program to the input of another. That's what Unix does that's so wonderful, that's absolutely impossible for a GUI to emulate.
If it were possible to redirect the "Undo" option from one application's menu to another option in another application's menu then GUIs would be as powerful as the Unix shell. The problem is that every action performed by every option in any menu must be previously designed and coded by the developer who created the application. If the developer never thought of something you need then there's no way to do it.
Right click, extract, it defaults to a new folder in the current directory that doesn't already exist with a name based on the zip file
So what you're saying is that your GUI won't let me merge a set of files from a zip file into an existing directory? Let's say Larry sent me a bunch of files that should go into the December 2007 folder and Susan put those in the November 2007 folder by mistake.
Or are you saying no one can make mistakes on a GUI? It's much, much easier to click a wrong link, a tiny slip of the mouse, than typing something wrong that makes sense. Type Fecember instead of December, no big deal, click November instead of December, "Oh, shit!!!".
Did the zip folder contain any files with the same name as files that were in the folder?
No, it didn't. So what? Or maybe someone clicked "overwrite all" automatically, without thinking. When GUIs present nag pop-ups all the time one develops a tendency to always click automatically some default buttons.
Now, don't get me wrong, GUIs are fine for searching visually among a set of images. I do use GUIs for their appropriate uses. The problem is people who do not know how to use the best tool for each job. When the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, I'm sure you've heard that one.
Let me see a GUI solve the following problem: I unpacked a zipped file in the wrong directory. Now I have hundred files spread through a directory that already contained many files and directories. Delete only the files that were in that zip file.
Bash solution:
1) unpack the zip file in a clean directory tmpdir ../$f; done
2) cd tmpdir; for f in *; do rm
As the number of laws and regulations continue to grow exponentially, at some point we will all become violators of something
Unfortunately, it seems that only the rightmost fringe of religious fanatics oppose that trend right now.
The others, under the guise of "stimulus spending", seem to welcome all sort of government agencies.
I'm guessing that you don't back up your system very often
My system backup is the install disk plus one script that I run under sudo to configure the system options and install application packages not in the default installation. My personal files backup is done using rsync as a non-admin user.
Jobs like printer administration -- what do you mean? I plug the printer in, it just works.
And don't overlook the risk of creating multiple application data files -- one in root and one in your normal user's directory.
No. Packages that come with the distribution are installed by "sudo apt-get install ...", or using one of the available GUI utilities for that, also using sudo. Applications that are available only as source code I can install as available only for myself, in which case it's in my user directory, or for the whole system, in which case it's in /usr/local/bin, installed using sudo.
As for "application data files", those are normally created under each user's directory. There are several copies of course, with each user's configuration, as it should be.
Normal Linux may not be specifically designed for extreme secure applications, if you want that you need SElinux, but it's far ahead of MSwindows in that respect, and has always been.
When I started using Linux, back in 1998, I did what Microsoft had got me used to do. I used only one account, root, and did everything as root.
Then I installed one application, I don't even remember which one, that wouldn't run as root. It demanded a non-privileged user to run.
I was astonished to find that I could do anything, except fuck up the system, as a normal user. I didn't need admin privileges at all. Only when installing new applications or configuring the system I had to log in as root.
Next step was learning how to use the sudo command. No more worries about malware for me. I still have a backup CD-RW from 1999 with the /root directory that had all my files back then. I look at my multi-terabyte disks toady and wonder how I could have been so naive once.
And there are still people who say Microsoft systems only have more malware because they are the most used...
have you ever noticed how fast any programming-related discussion here becomes an exchange of jargon?
I've noticed that when someone tries to explain why Ruby is better than Python.
Well, there's that old joke about the schoolgirl who was asked about the differences between a screw, a bolt, and a nail: "I've never been bolted" she answered.
And how are you supposed to take the wine out of the barrel if you cannot screw a cock into the bung hole?
I'm sure this knowledge was a big influence on who Mrs. Ballmer chose as a mate.
Are you saying that his mate was trying to boost his/her immune system?
One of the people in this photo is a billionaire. See if you can guess which one.
MS is vulnerable because its the biggest target out there.
While it's true that few people would try to exploit a system nobody uses, MS does its share of the effort to become insecure.
In this specific case, the first breach was done by a Flash program embedded in an Excel spreadsheet. We are going waaay back to all that DDE/COM/OLE/ActiveX thing that has been opening so many backdoors in Microsoft systems for the last decades. Broken by design.
the Sneaker Net can easily defeat the air gap
IOW, Nike Air defeats Air Gap.
it's actually happening from our frame of reference right now.
Correction: It's happening in those photons' frame of reference right now.
Tell him to go to Reddit. He could start posting in http://www.reddit.com/r/chiropractic
If my name were William and I were a cyber criminal, that's how I would like to be known. Cybercrime Bill sounds awesome!
The papers mentioned in TFA mention the probability of a rock ejected from Earth reaching Europa. I didn't see in the abstract anything about the probability of survival of a viable spore.
We must take into account that all life is dependent of an ecological niche. For earth to seed life on another planet or vice versa one would need a spore that can survive the extreme conditions of vacuum, temperature variations, and radiation found in space. Then those spores should find an environment where they landed that would supply the needed conditions for reproduction and growth of that life form.
One often sees people mentioning, "look, this bacteria can survive in hot springs under the sea", or "look, this bacteria spores can survive in vacuum", or "look, this bacteria can survive in highly acidic liquids". They are not the same bacteria.
Being able to survive in one specific condition that might be considered extreme for us does not mean it will survive in all the extreme conditions needed to survive and reproduce after being ejected from one planet and falling on another celestial body.
The US is better at building airplanes than Taiwan is
I was just last week talking with a manager at a big US aerospace company. He said that they much prefer government business than commercial, because a commercial project will bring $20 million in profits while a government project of the same size could bring a billion.
As long as the US has a strong military sector to subsidize the aerospace industry they can compete, but how long will that last?
the seeds of life are simply everywhere, inside and outside the solar system, and life is simply always lying dormant, everywhere in the galaxy
I'd say the elements of life are everywhere, but not the seeds. Having the material but not the proper information is not enough. Life is composed by amino acids, but those are merely the bricks used to make proteins. One must have a suitable floor plan to build a house.
What makes conditions on early earth so special is not the existence of organic chemistry, but the special circumstances, so far not known to us, that brought the formation of complex self-reproducing chains of amino acids.
It's the board and investors who are supposed to hold management to strategies of long term value, but they often don't have any long term commitment themselves.
In today's world of mega-corporations there's no personal involvement in the future of a company.
In the days of family owned businesses a long term vision was what guaranteed the retirement pensions of the investors. Today investments are managed by pension funds, none of which is committed to investing in one company alone.
Likewise, board members are director of several different companies, they are always ready to sacrifice one of them for short term profit.
If you are interested in politics at all, I highly recommend working at a polling station during an election
I have done this, in Brazil in 1998. That was the first election when Brazil went to 100% electronic voting. I'm an electronics engineer and was drafted by the electoral court (voting in Brazil is controlled by a special branch of the Judiciary) to work as a "section president".
I was doubtful about electronic voting, but my experience there convinced me that it's much more reliable than people here in Slashdot admits. There are several verification steps that I performed on the ballot. The final one, at the end of the day, was to print the results and glue them to the door of the public school room where voting took place.
I can't say that the software in the electronic ballot was correct, but I can swear that the separate card with the audit program I inserted into the machine reported that it verified OK. I mean "swear" in the courtroom sense, there was a formal process for me to receive the material and perform the verification, I would be guilty of a felony if I didn't do it exactly according to the training I received.
According to my personal experience, electronic voting works.