Plus they also tried to turn IE into a platform for intranet applications that *require* more access to the machine than they should have from within a browser.
You're not kidding. The place where I work has many intranet applications that require IE use, and also require that you eliminate just about every security mechanism that IE has in order for them to work. Siebel is the biggest offender. You practically have to mount a "please hack me" sign on your workstation after you set up IE to make Siebel work.
Preachy 'I always look for new Baen titles in the bookstore' comments don't mean very much. You don't find many, do you?
Why yes, I do find quite a few Baen titles in bookstores. As one of the other posters said, they are quite big in SF and fantasy. Because Jim Baen was willing to take a chance on publishing books for free on his website, I've become a fan of several authors that I'd probably never had looked at before. This is something that other publishers will eventually realize. I believe TOR books has started offering some of their books online as well. I imagine that others will follow, as it is a demonstrated money maker. The linked article indicated that other publishers are finding this to be true as well with what Google is doing. I can tell you that Baen and TOR (and probably others I'm not aware of) are not doing this out of some altruistic ideal. They are doing it to make money, and it appears to be working for them. Hmmmm... Doing well while doing good. Sounds like a plan.
There are a few publishers that get the potential of online books. See, for example Baen Publishing. They have quite a few of their books available at the Baen Free Library. Amazingly, the publisher has found, that by making the books freely available to anyone who wants them in formats convienient to the reader, that sales of those books and authors have increased substantially. Jim Baen, God rest his soul, was a visionary. When I go to a bookstore, I always look for new Baen titles, because I really like doing business with folks that don't think I'm a criminal.
So, to discover the top ten words in the King James Bible:
$ cat bible11.txt | tr "[:space:]" "\n" | \
sort | awk 'length($0)>0' | uniq -c |sort -nr | head -10
62128 the
38617 and
34436 of
13412 to
12735 And
12467 that
12189 in
9760 shall
9509 he
8930 unto
Not entirely impossible. A year or so ago here on/. someone posted a link to a fellow who'd made logic gates out of Lego. (i.e., and, not, or, nor, nand).
The basic problem with making a computer out of the gates was basically twofold. Size is an issue (you'd need acres just for a for-banger calculator), and energy requirements to turn all of those parts.
As a result of fear from Sarbanes-Oxley, our IT folks have instituted fairly stringent password requirements.
8 char minimum
at least 1 lowercase
at least 1 uppercase
at least 1 digit
at least 1 punctuation char.
no dictionary words
The really ironic part? Well, most of the boxes I login on every day are Sun Solaris. When I was last forced to change my password, the new rules went into effect, so I made my password something similar to "matlegpqW1#". However, when I login, I enter "matlegpq", and it works because Solaris only cares about the first 8 characters!
Moral: The best laid plans of mice and men are for naught if you don't know the limitations of your software.
When I quit the last job I had, I probably was more busy the last two weeks after having given them my notice than I had been in quite a while. There was a lot of stuff to transition, and they definately got their money's worth for those last two weeks. The only real break was the last day when I wiped my workstations and installed fresh images on them for the next person. Most of that day was just sent with me sitting around and folks picking my brain for things I had forgotten to mention that were a part of my normal routine.
While I would have liked to have had a little time off during the transition between jobs, I was happy that my superiors thought enough of me to not revoke my access and escort me out when I gave notice even though I had direct root access to hundreds of some rather large systems that made tons of money. They gained because they had two weeks of extensive brain dump for the rest of the team. I feel I gained because everything was open and friendly the whole time. Because of the way I was treated, I had no problems with passing along things that came to me over the next few weeks, or answering any questions anyone had.
Bottom line: everyone wins when you treat people like human beings. Anyone who thinks that by locking someone out when they give notice that they are really protecting themselves is not thinking clearly IMO. There may be individual cases where that is advisable, but I generally think most folks are honest, and aren't going to be doing things like sabotaging systems, or planting timebombs just because they are a short-timer. Besides, anyone who would do that would have more than enough opportunuty before they let their employer know they were leaving.
Jezza, this is not intended to be a personal slam on you. It's more of a general comment.
This is very true - very little Windows software can cope like this, now Windows Vista (aka Longhorn) will work like this by default, so I expect LOTS of software to fail for this reason alone. Hopefully once everything get updated for Vista we can run our XP boxes in this mode too (which will be much better.
Hope seems to spring eternal in the MS windows world. I've been hearing people say essentially the same thing since NT3.5. It hasn't happened yet, and unfortunately I don't believe it's going to happen with "vista" either. I just want to know how long people are going to fall for this "the next version will fix everything" line we constantly hear from microsoft apologists.
I have nothing but Linux running in my household (1 desktop and 3 laptops). Sometimes my wife is annoyed that she can't do something right out of the box that windows lets you do, but Linux does not. This especially true of permissions issues. What she doesn't realize is that many times, what she'd wanted to do wouldn't have been possible for a user under windows either, but since she's never not been administrator on windows, she doesn't realize it.
My point is, it is going to be really hard for windows users to change their ways from having administrative rights (and all the horrible pitfalls that entails), to just being a user even if more of the software actually supports user mode correctly.
Acually, we're not quite as much of a minority as you might think. THink about it. How many times over the past couple of years has someone asked for your recommendation of what computer to buy? Same goes when people are thinking of upgrading their CDROM or other similar hardware. If it's "tech" many people don't feel comfortable enough about making mkajor purchases without at least consulting with their resident Geek.
You don't have to tell them why they shouldn't by the Sony product. Just recommend something else and if asked, about a Sony PC, just say something about hardware compatability issues. Geeks can have a bigger effect on such things than their raw numbers might indicate.
I was a heavy user of DR DOS when Microsoft was struggling to close the gap between ms dos 4.1 & dr dos 5.0. And got to watch first hand as Microsoft killed a superior product.
Yah. I was right there with you, but I eventually dumped DR-DOS 6 for PC-DOS-7, which had REXX support. I was happy to finally get a real batch language for DOS.
The allegation that the memos came from Karl Rove is absolutely laughable. Mr. Rove may be a Machiavellian manipulator, but all of the people involved in bringing this story out are absolute leftists. They admittedly worked this AWOL story for 5 years and were so desperate to believe anything that would back up their story at that late date that they let themselves get suckered by a really amateur forgery attempt. Even when they discovered the docs were fake, they thought they could bluff it through by virtue of their media power. Given the history of some of the stuff the media has gotten away with in the past, this wasn't an entirely unreasonable assumption.
What I really want to know is exactly where these documents did come from. I think it's amazing that the CBS report doesn't even attempt to answer who it was that falsified these docs. They spent more than 2 months investigating and just completely glossed over one of the most important points of the whole thing. If it was Rove that provided them, that's big news that needs to get out. It is much more likely that this came from a partisan from the other side though. It would appear that CBS is not interested in finding out for sure. (I suspect they know exactly who it is, but are willing to swallow the hit to protect whoever it is.
Or just maybe it implies that the model of global warming is flawed? Perhaps the ecosystem is a bit more complex than any of us realize, and perhaps this is a natural phenomenon?
Ya. I think it is funny that a bunch of folks who can't give me a local weather forcast for more than 3 days into the future that is in any way accurate can tell me about weather predictions for the next 100 years.
The earth is a much more complex model than we can yet simulate with computers. In order to make it feasable to run simulations, you have to simplify your assumptions right out of reality.
I see. The tool wasn't designed for use. They just made it available for download so we could all see what a tool would look like if one were available.
Yours is definitely the best reply so far. You comment actually had a Douglas Adams flavor to it. Thanks!
...same party that filibustered for segregation...
I just know I'm going to regret jumping in here, but if you look at the actual record of the votes for such legislation as the 'civil rights act', you'll find that more republicans voted for them than democrats did.
Personally, I think both major parties are evil and want to restrict our rights and liberty. They just each go after a different subset of them.
allows you to run VMWare on several machines and transparently move system images between physical hosts without taking any (perceivable) downtime.
I've seen this in action, and it is very impressive. Imagine, if you will a MS-SQL (ugh) database running in a VMWare session. Let's say you need to perform some hardware maintenance on the system it is running one. Using their control console, you can "migrate" the entire emulated session while it is still taking transactions to another system with a barely perceptable pause (a second or so) between when one server stops executing and the next server starts.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with VMWare other than the fact that I use it.
So, who would one go after if the plumbing job sprung a leak and ruined twenty grand worth of housing?
This is a completely bogus argument that I am sick to death of hearing. Show me one single company anywhere in the world that has managed to squeeze a thin dime out of microsoft because of losses resulting from defective microsoft products.
make me wonder, what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve? (Other than continued 'integration' with their operating systems.) They cornered the browser market and now they'll give it up without a fight? Why should they make an effort to clean up their legal image when it didn't seem to phase them for such a long time?
They don't have anything up their sleeves. Microsoft saw Netscape (and other browsers in general) as a threat because of the hype surrounding concepts of the 'browser being the platform'. They feared (rightly) that if true system independence were to come about due to people using a browser as their portal to software, that their windows monopoly would be threatened in some way.
When microsoft sees a threat, no matter how small to it's cash cow of windows, it reacts violently. Now that they feel (again probably rightly) that browsers are not a threat to them, they won't waste a moment of a programmer's time to fix IE defects because they understand that it no longer matters. The majority of uninformed users will continue to use IE no matter how ancient and clunky it gets compared to other browsers out there because the vast majority don't have any idea that Mozilla or Opera even exist, much less how massively superior to microsoft's offerings they are.
Of course, what is really funny about your post is that it is pretty much true. After you're done changing out the transmission, you can stretch out and take a nap 'til the rain stops.
Yes. You are missing something. The fundamental problem with internet voting is that it needs to be able to assure three things:
First, that the person voting is eligible to vote. This is not too hard to do. We know how to verify identity, though there are a few issues with this that are not present in a financial relationship.
Second, that the person's vote is anonymous. Anonymous voting is trivially implmented. There is a problem when you combine the above verification requirement with the need to keep a given person's vote secret.
Third, that the election be auditable. THere was yeling and finger-pointing in the last American presidential election. Could you imagine what it would be like if votes just suddenly marterialized out of the ether with no way to audit them?
Combine all three of the above requirements and you have a very tough problem at hand. We don't want to be able to have some political hack analyze the raw vote data and b able to say "Joe Blow voted for candidate X, as this could, for various reasons result in repercussions of one kind or another on Joe, thus allowing others to intimidate his vote.
This is one reason why I really dislike mail-in ballots. Mail ballots allow an agent of Party y to hand an absentee ballot to Joe, make sure he marks for the 'correct' candidate, and then mail it in, assured of the vote rendered. It is a also a sitation custom made for fraud on a massive scale. With in-person voting, party X can pay Joe $5 dollars to vote, but when Joe deposits the ballot in the box, there is no way to guarantee that Joe voted "correctly".
Now, there some bright fellows have proposed cryptographic protocols that solve the problems mentioned above. Unfortunately, you are dealing with an electorate too stupid to figure out how to punch holes in a ballot reliably. The Protocols for secure, anonymous internet voting are far too complex to ever be used in the real world.
My first aim is not to compete with passwd, but rather to be able to
replace it on my own systems. At a later date, who knows?
==end snip=
Sounds like excellent tools to me. I've used similar ones on other Unixes, and would like to see them incorporated into Linux distributions. He's looking for testers.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus they also tried to turn IE into a platform for intranet applications that *require* more access to the machine than they should have from within a browser.
You're not kidding. The place where I work has many intranet applications that require IE use, and also require that you eliminate just about every security mechanism that IE has in order for them to work. Siebel is the biggest offender. You practically have to mount a "please hack me" sign on your workstation after you set up IE to make Siebel work.
Preachy 'I always look for new Baen titles in the bookstore' comments don't mean very much. You don't find many, do you?
Why yes, I do find quite a few Baen titles in bookstores. As one of the other posters said, they are quite big in SF and fantasy. Because Jim Baen was willing to take a chance on publishing books for free on his website, I've become a fan of several authors that I'd probably never had looked at before. This is something that other publishers will eventually realize. I believe TOR books has started offering some of their books online as well. I imagine that others will follow, as it is a demonstrated money maker. The linked article indicated that other publishers are finding this to be true as well with what Google is doing. I can tell you that Baen and TOR (and probably others I'm not aware of) are not doing this out of some altruistic ideal. They are doing it to make money, and it appears to be working for them. Hmmmm... Doing well while doing good. Sounds like a plan.
There are a few publishers that get the potential of online books. See, for example Baen Publishing. They have quite a few of their books available at the Baen Free Library. Amazingly, the publisher has found, that by making the books freely available to anyone who wants them in formats convienient to the reader, that sales of those books and authors have increased substantially. Jim Baen, God rest his soul, was a visionary. When I go to a bookstore, I always look for new Baen titles, because I really like doing business with folks that don't think I'm a criminal.
Sadly, the name doesn't appear to exist in Celestia, so I can't easily travel to it to check it out.
So, to discover the top ten words in the King James Bible:
$ cat bible11.txt | tr "[:space:]" "\n" | \
sort | awk 'length($0)>0' | uniq -c |sort -nr | head -10
62128 the
38617 and
34436 of
13412 to
12735 And
12467 that
12189 in
9760 shall
9509 he
8930 unto
Fun for the whole family.
Not entirely impossible. A year or so ago here on /. someone posted a link to a fellow who'd made logic gates out of Lego. (i.e., and, not, or, nor, nand).
The basic problem with making a computer out of the gates was basically twofold. Size is an issue (you'd need acres just for a for-banger calculator), and energy requirements to turn all of those parts.
As a result of fear from Sarbanes-Oxley, our IT folks have instituted fairly stringent password requirements.
The really ironic part? Well, most of the boxes I login on every day are Sun Solaris. When I was last forced to change my password, the new rules went into effect, so I made my password something similar to "matlegpqW1#". However, when I login, I enter "matlegpq", and it works because Solaris only cares about the first 8 characters!
Moral: The best laid plans of mice and men are for naught if you don't know the limitations of your software.
When I quit the last job I had, I probably was more busy the last two weeks after having given them my notice than I had been in quite a while. There was a lot of stuff to transition, and they definately got their money's worth for those last two weeks. The only real break was the last day when I wiped my workstations and installed fresh images on them for the next person. Most of that day was just sent with me sitting around and folks picking my brain for things I had forgotten to mention that were a part of my normal routine.
While I would have liked to have had a little time off during the transition between jobs, I was happy that my superiors thought enough of me to not revoke my access and escort me out when I gave notice even though I had direct root access to hundreds of some rather large systems that made tons of money. They gained because they had two weeks of extensive brain dump for the rest of the team. I feel I gained because everything was open and friendly the whole time. Because of the way I was treated, I had no problems with passing along things that came to me over the next few weeks, or answering any questions anyone had.
Bottom line: everyone wins when you treat people like human beings. Anyone who thinks that by locking someone out when they give notice that they are really protecting themselves is not thinking clearly IMO. There may be individual cases where that is advisable, but I generally think most folks are honest, and aren't going to be doing things like sabotaging systems, or planting timebombs just because they are a short-timer. Besides, anyone who would do that would have more than enough opportunuty before they let their employer know they were leaving.
Jezza, this is not intended to be a personal slam on you. It's more of a general comment.
This is very true - very little Windows software can cope like this, now Windows Vista (aka Longhorn) will work like this by default, so I expect LOTS of software to fail for this reason alone. Hopefully once everything get updated for Vista we can run our XP boxes in this mode too (which will be much better.
Hope seems to spring eternal in the MS windows world. I've been hearing people say essentially the same thing since NT3.5. It hasn't happened yet, and unfortunately I don't believe it's going to happen with "vista" either. I just want to know how long people are going to fall for this "the next version will fix everything" line we constantly hear from microsoft apologists.
I have nothing but Linux running in my household (1 desktop and 3 laptops). Sometimes my wife is annoyed that she can't do something right out of the box that windows lets you do, but Linux does not. This especially true of permissions issues. What she doesn't realize is that many times, what she'd wanted to do wouldn't have been possible for a user under windows either, but since she's never not been administrator on windows, she doesn't realize it.
My point is, it is going to be really hard for windows users to change their ways from having administrative rights (and all the horrible pitfalls that entails), to just being a user even if more of the software actually supports user mode correctly.
We're the minority.
Acually, we're not quite as much of a minority as you might think. THink about it. How many times over the past couple of years has someone asked for your recommendation of what computer to buy? Same goes when people are thinking of upgrading their CDROM or other similar hardware. If it's "tech" many people don't feel comfortable enough about making mkajor purchases without at least consulting with their resident Geek.
You don't have to tell them why they shouldn't by the Sony product. Just recommend something else and if asked, about a Sony PC, just say something about hardware compatability issues. Geeks can have a bigger effect on such things than their raw numbers might indicate.
I was a heavy user of DR DOS when Microsoft was struggling to close the gap between ms dos 4.1 & dr dos 5.0. And got to watch first hand as Microsoft killed a superior product.
Yah. I was right there with you, but I eventually dumped DR-DOS 6 for PC-DOS-7, which had REXX support. I was happy to finally get a real batch language for DOS.
Ha! Worked for me too!
I've already informed my folks and family too that I've performed my last windows repair call. From now on, I upgrade to Linux, or nothing at all.
The allegation that the memos came from Karl Rove is absolutely laughable. Mr. Rove may be a Machiavellian manipulator, but all of the people involved in bringing this story out are absolute leftists. They admittedly worked this AWOL story for 5 years and were so desperate to believe anything that would back up their story at that late date that they let themselves get suckered by a really amateur forgery attempt. Even when they discovered the docs were fake, they thought they could bluff it through by virtue of their media power. Given the history of some of the stuff the media has gotten away with in the past, this wasn't an entirely unreasonable assumption.
What I really want to know is exactly where these documents did come from. I think it's amazing that the CBS report doesn't even attempt to answer who it was that falsified these docs. They spent more than 2 months investigating and just completely glossed over one of the most important points of the whole thing. If it was Rove that provided them, that's big news that needs to get out. It is much more likely that this came from a partisan from the other side though. It would appear that CBS is not interested in finding out for sure. (I suspect they know exactly who it is, but are willing to swallow the hit to protect whoever it is.
Or just maybe it implies that the model of global warming is flawed? Perhaps the ecosystem is a bit more complex than any of us realize, and perhaps this is a natural phenomenon?
Ya. I think it is funny that a bunch of folks who can't give me a local weather forcast for more than 3 days into the future that is in any way accurate can tell me about weather predictions for the next 100 years.
The earth is a much more complex model than we can yet simulate with computers. In order to make it feasable to run simulations, you have to simplify your assumptions right out of reality.
I see. The tool wasn't designed for use. They just made it available for download so we could all see what a tool would look like if one were available.
Yours is definitely the best reply so far. You comment actually had a Douglas Adams flavor to it. Thanks!
I just know I'm going to regret jumping in here, but if you look at the actual record of the votes for such legislation as the 'civil rights act', you'll find that more republicans voted for them than democrats did.
Personally, I think both major parties are evil and want to restrict our rights and liberty. They just each go after a different subset of them.
allows you to run VMWare on several machines and transparently move system images between physical hosts without taking any (perceivable) downtime.
I've seen this in action, and it is very impressive. Imagine, if you will a MS-SQL (ugh) database running in a VMWare session. Let's say you need to perform some hardware maintenance on the system it is running one. Using their control console, you can "migrate" the entire emulated session while it is still taking transactions to another system with a barely perceptable pause (a second or so) between when one server stops executing and the next server starts.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with VMWare other than the fact that I use it.
So, who would one go after if the plumbing job sprung a leak and ruined twenty grand worth of housing?
This is a completely bogus argument that I am sick to death of hearing. Show me one single company anywhere in the world that has managed to squeeze a thin dime out of microsoft because of losses resulting from defective microsoft products.
make me wonder, what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve? (Other than continued 'integration' with their operating systems.) They cornered the browser market and now they'll give it up without a fight? Why should they make an effort to clean up their legal image when it didn't seem to phase them for such a long time?
They don't have anything up their sleeves. Microsoft saw Netscape (and other browsers in general) as a threat because of the hype surrounding concepts of the 'browser being the platform'. They feared (rightly) that if true system independence were to come about due to people using a browser as their portal to software, that their windows monopoly would be threatened in some way.
When microsoft sees a threat, no matter how small to it's cash cow of windows, it reacts violently. Now that they feel (again probably rightly) that browsers are not a threat to them, they won't waste a moment of a programmer's time to fix IE defects because they understand that it no longer matters. The majority of uninformed users will continue to use IE no matter how ancient and clunky it gets compared to other browsers out there because the vast majority don't have any idea that Mozilla or Opera even exist, much less how massively superior to microsoft's offerings they are.
I am SO glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read your post.
Of course, what is really funny about your post is that it is pretty much true. After you're done changing out the transmission, you can stretch out and take a nap 'til the rain stops.
Worry when they outlaw the countermeasures.
You mean like in several states where they already outlaw radar detectors?
What is the technical name for @
There is none.
Strange, but true. I've always thought it was weird that the symbol didn't have an actual name.
Yes. You are missing something. The fundamental problem with internet voting is that it needs to be able to assure three things:
First, that the person voting is eligible to vote. This is not too hard to do. We know how to verify identity, though there are a few issues with this that are not present in a financial relationship.
Second, that the person's vote is anonymous. Anonymous voting is trivially implmented. There is a problem when you combine the above verification requirement with the need to keep a given person's vote secret.
Third, that the election be auditable. THere was yeling and finger-pointing in the last American presidential election. Could you imagine what it would be like if votes just suddenly marterialized out of the ether with no way to audit them?
Combine all three of the above requirements and you have a very tough problem at hand. We don't want to be able to have some political hack analyze the raw vote data and b able to say "Joe Blow voted for candidate X, as this could, for various reasons result in repercussions of one kind or another on Joe, thus allowing others to intimidate his vote.
This is one reason why I really dislike mail-in ballots. Mail ballots allow an agent of Party y to hand an absentee ballot to Joe, make sure he marks for the 'correct' candidate, and then mail it in, assured of the vote rendered. It is a also a sitation custom made for fraud on a massive scale. With in-person voting, party X can pay Joe $5 dollars to vote, but when Joe deposits the ballot in the box, there is no way to guarantee that Joe voted "correctly".
Now, there some bright fellows have proposed cryptographic protocols that solve the problems mentioned above. Unfortunately, you are dealing with an electorate too stupid to figure out how to punch holes in a ballot reliably. The Protocols for secure, anonymous internet voting are far too complex to ever be used in the real world.
I thought one of the most interesting things in the articles is a collection of tools he mentioned for passwd/group management.
==snip==
A lot is left to be done; so far I'm only at v0.1.1, and the following commands have been implemented (complete with manual-pages):
{ls,ch,mk,rm}user
{ls,ch}age
{ls,ch,mk,rm}group
chgrpmem
{vi,cp}pw
chfn
chsh
My first aim is not to compete with passwd, but rather to be able to replace it on my own systems. At a later date, who knows?
==end snip=
Sounds like excellent tools to me. I've used similar ones on other Unixes, and would like to see them incorporated into Linux distributions. He's looking for testers.