Maybe, if you can avoid 20+ minutes of annoying ads followed by 15 minutes of previews. And if you manage to get an audience where people don't spend the entire movie yakking on cell phones or narrating the action to their friends "Later in the movie you find out that 'Rosebud' is his sled. But this is the part where..."
A good trip to the movie theater is much better than just watching TV because it's a communal experience. It's the modern equivalent of sitting around a campfire listening spellbound to a good storyteller. When you interfere with that experience -- by playing obnoxious ads or by talking -- you make it worse than the solitary experience of the living room. People are less inclined to go to the effort to risk all that frustration.
What can theaters do?
Ditch or majorly cut down on the ads.
Limit the previews. 3 per film is a good balance between showing people what's coming up and actually getting to the even they came in for.
Enforce policies. If audience members can ignore three "Please silence your cell phones" announcements and a cutesy short film clip telling them the same thing, they need a little more persuasion.
And if rude audience members would just be a little more polite, and studios would make better movies, the rest of us would be more inclined to go in the first place.
I often crank my iPod higher than I should when on the train with lots of ambient noise....in practice it should lower the volume if I leave my earphones stuffed into my head for an entire afternoon.
Humans perceive relative volume. I've often gotten in the car and turned on the radio only to discover that I had left it set unreasonably loud. Of course, when I was listening to it before, it was on the freeway with lots of background noise, and now I've spent the last 30 seconds walking through a parking lot.
Back in our college days, my then-girlfriend (now wife) remarked that DJs were aware of this and would slowly increase the volume over the course of a dance or party as people got acclimated to the louder sound. They had to keep the music not just loud, but sounding loud. Unfortunately, they all too often started out at the top of the range they should have. By the end of the evening, it would be maximum strength plus 10%.
"Best" implies that nothing else meets or exceeds the item being described. What the submitter actually wrote was "one of the best," which indicates that he considers it to be in the top tier of distributions. It makes no statement as to whether Fedora Core (or FC5 specifically) is better than Gentoo, Mandriva, etc. -- for all we know, he could consider them also to be in the top tier. (Have you ever tried to count the number of Linux distributions out there? There's plenty of room at the top.)
For anyone trying to use the Flash plugin on Fedora Core 5, you may have noticed that it only shows images, not text.
It turns out that Flash has hard-coded the font paths and is still looking in/usr/X11R6/lib, but the new R7 X server doesn't use the X11R6 paths anymore. (The same problem will happen with any distro that uses X.org's new modular X server)
You can work around the problem by creating/usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and symbolically linking to/etc/X11/fs and/usr/share/X11/fonts.
Also, if you have SELinux running in enforcing mode, you need to allow text relocations on the Flash library.
chcon -t texrel_shlib_t/path/to/libflashplayer.so
With any luck, Macrodobe will fix both of these in an upcoming version of the plugin.
I found the solution in the comments on a Mozilla bug report. Remember, Bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot, so if you really need to read the bug discussion, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and search for bug 317655.
Last summer I saw a production of the parody, Fellowship!. It parodies the movie, and uses all the usual musical theater tropes. There's the big 4+part act I closing song, moments where the action stops and characters step out of place to sing (Gimli and Legolas have a duet in Moria where they start to think, maybe this elf/dwarf isn't so bad after all). Arwen and Aragorn sing karaoke in Rivendell.
It looks like the tour's done, but if they start one up again, it's worth seeing.
Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns?
Not necessarily, but the investors providing the payload will be motivated to minimize their risk. If it's cheaper to improve the launch vehicle's reliability than to replace a lost satellite, you bet they'll work on improving reliability.
Eventually the system reaches a point where the rocket is safe enough that the chances of losing one's investment are very small.
Of course, once it's cheaper to just fly instead of improving safety, the corner cutting will start. But even that is self-correcting in the long run, given sufficient public awareness. Think Upton Sinclair and the meat-packing industry, for instance. Or to use your drug company example, look at all the drugs being pulled from the shelf as evidence comes in that things have slipped through.
Good one! I keep all my tools in a toolbox (the ones that fit, anyway), except for the appropriatelky-sized Phillips screwdriver. That one sits on my desk next to my monitor.
It all comes down to the fact that most people would rather stick with the inconvenience they know than risk starting over on something that might not be worth the effort.
In other words, whatever they're switching from has to get really bad, and whatever they're switching to has to offer a major improvement.
You could look at it in terms of neophobes and neophiles, or the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know, or just plain inertia.
Oddly, this is the first security fix I can remember for Sendmail in about two years. Just to check my memory, I looked at Secunia's report and they only list 5 vulnerabilities since January 2003.
2 in March 2003 1 in August 2003 1 in September 2003 1 in March 2006
2.5 years between vulnerabilities? Not too shabby, IMHO.
There is, however, one unpatched vulnerability, though the worst it can do is hide details from the log.
I'm sure I'm about to burn karma with this... but in KDE, Konqueror acts as both web browser and file manager. At least it's entirely userspace, but does anyone know how closely the file managing and web browsing aspects of Konqueror are tied?
Good point. People are quickest to blame the most visible target.
Windows crashes daily? It must be Microsoft's fault. Of course, it could turn out to be the badly-written driver for your scanner, or some software surreptitiously installed by a Sony CD. But while some of us will dig deeper, looking for the cause, most people are just going to see that Windows is crashing, and why the hell would Microsoft write such shoddy software anyway.
Similarly, people will try out Firefox, go to their favorite "designed"-for-IE site, and blame Firefox for displaying it incorrectly, not the site for using the HTML equivalent of spit and bailing wire that just happens to look OK in MSIE 6.0.
So even if the software is completely unaltered, just aftermarket in a way that violates the license, anything that goes wrong (like not being able to activate it because the key is known to have been stolen) is probably still going to get Microsoft blamed rather than the seller.
don't say something, anything, won't happen when it's could merely be delayed.
Yep. One of my favorite quotes on science is from Arthur C. Clarke:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
As I recall, one of the key issues in switching from a geocentric to a heliocentric model was explaining retrograde motion of planets. With an earth-centric model, they had to tack on epicycles to the orbits to explain why sometimes a planet would seem to move backwards. If you assume instead that both the Earth and the other planet revolve around the sun, then the apparent motion can be explained with simple, circular orbits instead of complex epicycles-on-epicycles.
Of course even that wasn't quite right, but once they were working with a solar system model, it was possible to switch from circular orbits to elliptical orbits, making the calculations fit actual observations almost perfectly. It took later, more accurate observations to notice more discrepancies, and Newtonian physics to explain them.
Since then the basic concept hasn't changed much -- everything we've seen shows that the planets really do orbit the sun in roughly elliptical orbits. We have, however, gone through several changes in our understanding of *why* the planets move that way.
I could also swear I once saw a screenshot of someone running a DOS box inside a virtual Windows session inside a virtual Linux session on a Mac host, or some permutation thereof, but I couldn't begin to guess where to find it.
OpenSuSE aside, will they actually call anything SuSE Linux 10?
Products seem to jump away from version numbers right around the time they hit that second digit. Red Hat renamed their main distro as Fedora Core and started over at 1 rather than release a Red Hat 10. Mandrake and Conectiva got up to 10, merged, renamed themselves Mandriva, then switched over to yearly vintages.
And let's not even get started on Mac OS X, which technically has a version number (two of them if you count "X"), but hides it in the fine print behind names of cats.
Anyway, I'd argue that Thunderbird needs it much more than Firefox. Most phishing starts with the inbox. Links in email that use dodgy hex encoding, raw IPs, IPv6, point to domains that differ than the anchor text etc. should be highlighted.
Thunderbird 1.5 doesn't highlight the individual links, but those are its exact criteria for scam detection (plus embedded forms in HTML). It puts a warning bar at the top of the message that "Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam."
Unfortunately the false positive rate is annoyingly high, especially with mailings that include feedback forms. I think your idea of specifically identifying popular targets would be much more effective.
According to the article, they haven't yet decided on the approach. Even if they do take a whitelist/blacklist approach, they could conceivably take the route that Netscape does, IIRC periodically downloading an updated list of known bad/good sites and only checking the current URL against the local copy.
(And FWIW, IE7, at least in the beta, ships with their phishing detection turned off. It offers to turn it on the first time you use it.)
I dunno about you but, phishing always seems so easy to identify.
You haven't been paying attention over the past year, then. Phishing sites are becoming better and better at imitating the look and feel of the banks, stores, etc. that they're imitating, and they've gotten very polished, sometimes even using SSL certs to trigger "security" indicators. Add in the use of browser and email client vulnerabilities to disguise the location of the website and links, and unless you're fluent in HTML+Javascript, it gets down to one question:
Would PayPal/Amazon/my bank actually be asking me for this information?
The days of "Plees giv us yore passwerd and soshul" are long over.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, if you can avoid 20+ minutes of annoying ads followed by 15 minutes of previews. And if you manage to get an audience where people don't spend the entire movie yakking on cell phones or narrating the action to their friends "Later in the movie you find out that 'Rosebud' is his sled. But this is the part where..."
A good trip to the movie theater is much better than just watching TV because it's a communal experience. It's the modern equivalent of sitting around a campfire listening spellbound to a good storyteller. When you interfere with that experience -- by playing obnoxious ads or by talking -- you make it worse than the solitary experience of the living room. People are less inclined to go to the effort to risk all that frustration.
What can theaters do?
And if rude audience members would just be a little more polite, and studios would make better movies, the rest of us would be more inclined to go in the first place.
I often crank my iPod higher than I should when on the train with lots of ambient noise....in practice it should lower the volume if I leave my earphones stuffed into my head for an entire afternoon.
Humans perceive relative volume. I've often gotten in the car and turned on the radio only to discover that I had left it set unreasonably loud. Of course, when I was listening to it before, it was on the freeway with lots of background noise, and now I've spent the last 30 seconds walking through a parking lot.
Back in our college days, my then-girlfriend (now wife) remarked that DJs were aware of this and would slowly increase the volume over the course of a dance or party as people got acclimated to the louder sound. They had to keep the music not just loud, but sounding loud. Unfortunately, they all too often started out at the top of the range they should have. By the end of the evening, it would be maximum strength plus 10%.
If someone looking at the machines causes them to be compromised
I've heard people describe machines that "fall apart when you look at them," but I always thought it was hyperbole...
"Best" implies that nothing else meets or exceeds the item being described. What the submitter actually wrote was "one of the best," which indicates that he considers it to be in the top tier of distributions. It makes no statement as to whether Fedora Core (or FC5 specifically) is better than Gentoo, Mandriva, etc. -- for all we know, he could consider them also to be in the top tier. (Have you ever tried to count the number of Linux distributions out there? There's plenty of room at the top.)
It turns out that Flash has hard-coded the font paths and is still looking in
You can work around the problem by creating
I found the solution in the comments on a Mozilla bug report. Remember, Bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot, so if you really need to read the bug discussion, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and search for bug 317655.
Last summer I saw a production of the parody, Fellowship!. It parodies the movie, and uses all the usual musical theater tropes. There's the big 4+part act I closing song, moments where the action stops and characters step out of place to sing (Gimli and Legolas have a duet in Moria where they start to think, maybe this elf/dwarf isn't so bad after all). Arwen and Aragorn sing karaoke in Rivendell.
It looks like the tour's done, but if they start one up again, it's worth seeing.
This is one of my gripes about the movies by the way, no singing.
Check out the extended versions. It's not wall-to-wall singing, but there's at least one per movie that didn't make it into the theatrical cut.
Wait..you're saying private investors are more likely to have safety concerns?
Not necessarily, but the investors providing the payload will be motivated to minimize their risk. If it's cheaper to improve the launch vehicle's reliability than to replace a lost satellite, you bet they'll work on improving reliability.
Eventually the system reaches a point where the rocket is safe enough that the chances of losing one's investment are very small.
Of course, once it's cheaper to just fly instead of improving safety, the corner cutting will start. But even that is self-correcting in the long run, given sufficient public awareness. Think Upton Sinclair and the meat-packing industry, for instance. Or to use your drug company example, look at all the drugs being pulled from the shelf as evidence comes in that things have slipped through.
Good one! I keep all my tools in a toolbox (the ones that fit, anyway), except for the appropriatelky-sized Phillips screwdriver. That one sits on my desk next to my monitor.
It all comes down to the fact that most people would rather stick with the inconvenience they know than risk starting over on something that might not be worth the effort.
In other words, whatever they're switching from has to get really bad, and whatever they're switching to has to offer a major improvement.
You could look at it in terms of neophobes and neophiles, or the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know, or just plain inertia.
Oddly, this is the first security fix I can remember for Sendmail in about two years. Just to check my memory, I looked at Secunia's report and they only list 5 vulnerabilities since January 2003.
2 in March 2003
1 in August 2003
1 in September 2003
1 in March 2006
2.5 years between vulnerabilities? Not too shabby, IMHO.
There is, however, one unpatched vulnerability, though the worst it can do is hide details from the log.
I'm sure I'm about to burn karma with this... but in KDE, Konqueror acts as both web browser and file manager. At least it's entirely userspace, but does anyone know how closely the file managing and web browsing aspects of Konqueror are tied?
Maybe the people that complained about this show should set their v-chips to TV-G; they'll never be offended again.
Ah, but it's not enough for them to not see it. They have to make sure no one else sees it, either.
Good point. People are quickest to blame the most visible target.
Windows crashes daily? It must be Microsoft's fault. Of course, it could turn out to be the badly-written driver for your scanner, or some software surreptitiously installed by a Sony CD. But while some of us will dig deeper, looking for the cause, most people are just going to see that Windows is crashing, and why the hell would Microsoft write such shoddy software anyway.
Similarly, people will try out Firefox, go to their favorite "designed"-for-IE site, and blame Firefox for displaying it incorrectly, not the site for using the HTML equivalent of spit and bailing wire that just happens to look OK in MSIE 6.0.
So even if the software is completely unaltered, just aftermarket in a way that violates the license, anything that goes wrong (like not being able to activate it because the key is known to have been stolen) is probably still going to get Microsoft blamed rather than the seller.
Yep. One of my favorite quotes on science is from Arthur C. Clarke:
Sounds like the "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" myth.
As I recall, one of the key issues in switching from a geocentric to a heliocentric model was explaining retrograde motion of planets. With an earth-centric model, they had to tack on epicycles to the orbits to explain why sometimes a planet would seem to move backwards. If you assume instead that both the Earth and the other planet revolve around the sun, then the apparent motion can be explained with simple, circular orbits instead of complex epicycles-on-epicycles.
Of course even that wasn't quite right, but once they were working with a solar system model, it was possible to switch from circular orbits to elliptical orbits, making the calculations fit actual observations almost perfectly. It took later, more accurate observations to notice more discrepancies, and Newtonian physics to explain them.
Since then the basic concept hasn't changed much -- everything we've seen shows that the planets really do orbit the sun in roughly elliptical orbits. We have, however, gone through several changes in our understanding of *why* the planets move that way.
It's in #14, lumped in with the numbering system.
You mean #14, which cites not only Arabic numerals, but algebra?
Oddly, it also lists trigonometry as a Muslim invention. I know Pythagoras was ahead of his time, but that seems a bit much...
Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?
I'm reminded of this guy who runs several dozen operating systems on a PowerBook.
I could also swear I once saw a screenshot of someone running a DOS box inside a virtual Windows session inside a virtual Linux session on a Mac host, or some permutation thereof, but I couldn't begin to guess where to find it.
OpenSuSE aside, will they actually call anything SuSE Linux 10?
Products seem to jump away from version numbers right around the time they hit that second digit. Red Hat renamed their main distro as Fedora Core and started over at 1 rather than release a Red Hat 10. Mandrake and Conectiva got up to 10, merged, renamed themselves Mandriva, then switched over to yearly vintages.
And let's not even get started on Mac OS X, which technically has a version number (two of them if you count "X"), but hides it in the fine print behind names of cats.
"SUSE Linux Enterprise What"?
I can think of a whole SLEW of names better than that...
Anyway, I'd argue that Thunderbird needs it much more than Firefox. Most phishing starts with the inbox. Links in email that use dodgy hex encoding, raw IPs, IPv6, point to domains that differ than the anchor text etc. should be highlighted.
Thunderbird 1.5 doesn't highlight the individual links, but those are its exact criteria for scam detection (plus embedded forms in HTML). It puts a warning bar at the top of the message that "Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam."
Unfortunately the false positive rate is annoyingly high, especially with mailings that include feedback forms. I think your idea of specifically identifying popular targets would be much more effective.
According to the article, they haven't yet decided on the approach. Even if they do take a whitelist/blacklist approach, they could conceivably take the route that Netscape does, IIRC periodically downloading an updated list of known bad/good sites and only checking the current URL against the local copy.
(And FWIW, IE7, at least in the beta, ships with their phishing detection turned off. It offers to turn it on the first time you use it.)
I dunno about you but, phishing always seems so easy to identify.
You haven't been paying attention over the past year, then. Phishing sites are becoming better and better at imitating the look and feel of the banks, stores, etc. that they're imitating, and they've gotten very polished, sometimes even using SSL certs to trigger "security" indicators. Add in the use of browser and email client vulnerabilities to disguise the location of the website and links, and unless you're fluent in HTML+Javascript, it gets down to one question:
Would PayPal/Amazon/my bank actually be asking me for this information?
The days of "Plees giv us yore passwerd and soshul" are long over.