Am I the only one to think that the only people getting benefits from such a virus are people selling anti-virus ?
No, of course you're not the only one. But then, there's also plenty of people who think that the government is covering up groups of anal-probing space aliens, or that Bigfoot exists and is touring Las Vegas with Elvis. Not being alone in your belief doesn't mean that your belief has a firm footing in reality. [*]
Seriously, which do you think is more likely to get Joe Sixpack (the guy who can't even invest a few mouseclicks to run Windows Update a couple of times a year) to run out and buy some anti-virus software:
Virus A, which lacks a payload, does no damage, and automatically deactivates after a couple of weeks
...or...
Virus B, which after 2 weeks of spamming everyone in your address book with photos from the goatse.cx site, will go on to randomize your hard drive, nuke your BIOS, unplug the fridge the night after you stock up on ice cream, and finally shave the family dog and spray-paint it hot pink.
If I were an evil marketing person for a virus company, I know which version I'd expect to bring the desperate masses stampeding into the A-V aisle at their local computer store.
[*] I use these two examples because they're obviously inaccurate beliefs. Aliens take peoples' temperatures orally, not rectally...it's more hygenic, especially if you're the alien stuck cleaning up the probes afterwards. And everyone knows that Elvis is touring Des Moines for the next two months. Bigfoot is, of course, in Las Vegas, but he's opening for Siegfried and Roy.
You young whippersnappers! Obviously, you're not old enough to remember punched cards and paper tape! Stores for decades, easily retrievable!
I have to agree. I started transferring all of my favorite shows onto punchcards, confident that I'll be able to watch Junkyard Wars fifty years from now if I so desire.
One of the other advantages you omitted was how easy it is to edit out commercials using punchcard storage -- just pause the deck at the start of the commercial break, then discard the next 1.23 meters of cards per commercial. Try that with those fancy-schmancy DVD discs!
Only downside is that my basement is already 50% full, and I've only finished the first season.
Imagine what this could do for game skinners. Now using an old scanner and some legos you can easily skin in your own face to UT2k3 and other games.
Wouldn't the step where you have to sever your head and rubber-band it to the Lego rotisserie going to discourage all but the most hard-core game skinners?;-)
2. We pay for incoming calls because it is worth it to make it appear as if people want to talk to us. Remember, this is America, where status is much easier to buy.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. But also consider that one of the reasons that telemarketers aren't allowed to call your cell phone is because, under the current model, that would be cost shifting -- i.e., you're paying for the vast majority of the cost of receiving an unsolicited (and generally unwanted) phone call.
I'm currently a telecommuter -- i.e., I put in my 10-12 hrs a day from home now instead of driving to an office to do the same thing.:-) Before I started doing this, I never realized how many calls I got at home during the course of a typical day. Now that I'm home more often, I realize that I get far more telemarketing calls than spam emails on an average day. Enough so that I'm now willing to pay extra for caller ID -- none of the people I actually need to talk to come through with an ID of "unavailable".
Imagine if the caller paid the cost of calling your cell phone. Then it'd no longer be a case of price shifting if someone called you out of the blue with a fascinating deal on residing your home, refinancing your house, etc etc etc.
Having the caller pay the full cost of cellphone calls is a telemarketer's wet dream.
So for some, paying for incoming might be a status symbol. For me, it's a way to keep my cellphone open for its intended purpose -- giving people I want/need to keep in contact with a way to get in touch with me, regardless of whether I'm at home, on the road for work, or just doing a little relaxing rock climbing. My cellphone is most specifically not a way for every blithering idiot with an autodialer to annoy the hell out of me -- that's what my landline's for.;-)
It was starting to piss me off, so I created:
Login: sladotter
Password: slashdot
Feel free to use it.
I think this comes up every time a NY Times article is linked. Okay, my turn to remind people: If you don't want to register with their site, don't bother creating bogus accounts. It's a nice thought, but it's really not necessary.
Instead, just go to their archives section, where the articles are available without the need for an account. Just replace "www" with "archives" in the link. Example for this article:
Oddly enough, few of the original posters put up retractions or apoligies for their initial flaming.
Figures... Everyone is "uber-l33t" and quick to jump on a new poster, but few are man enough to stand up and offer apologies when they're forced to eat their words.
Yeah, silly forum posters. Fortunately behavior like that never happens with the people here on/.
Learn more about the benefits of being a Red Hat Network Subscriber:
http://redhat.chtah.com/
To purchase a Red Hat Network subscription:
http://redhat.chtah.com/
Okay. So suddenly a company (CheetahMail, aka chtah.com) selling "email marketing" services has transmogrified into the subscription purchase site for Red Hat Network?
Yeah. Right. Oh, please PLEASE let me enter my credit card information onto this random web site now. Pretty please with spam on top? (Oh wait...those mystery-meat redhat.chtah.com URLs don't actually seem to be working. Too bad.)
See, the funny thing is that I too got an email from Red Hat about the upcoming release. And my email was almost word-for-word the same as what you've posted.
The minor difference being that all the links point back to REDHAT.COM Just like they always have for every official Red Hat message that I've ever received.
And the RHN-specific URLs in my copy of the email use https, not http. Just as they have for every RHN URL I've ever received.
So here's the links from my copy of the email:
For more
information about the benefits of being a Red Hat Network Subscriber,
go to:
Now maybe there's a difference between the mails that got sent to RHN subscribers and people who aren't currently using RHN. Personally, I'd be a little suspicious of a supposedly official Red Hat offer that sent me to a non-RH domain. But that's just me...
The new finding is based on analysis of Mars Observer readings [...]
Forgive the nitpick, but the Mars Observer wasn't involved in this. It was a combination of data from Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor. Observer isn't even mentioned in the article...gotta proof-read those submissions, folks.:-)
Contact was lost with Observer shortly before it was to enter orbit around Mars.
Isn't this the same thing
we criticised when Microsoft was certified and said that if they made it through, it must be hopelessly inadequate certification process? Now the Linux is involved, it's suddenly a good thing?
The answer remains unchanged 24 hours later. No, it's not the same certification.
A bit of MS bashing is fine, but this is taking it a bit far for me.
Hmmmm...duped question for a duped article from someone thinking that there's such a thing as "taking it a bit too far" when it comes to MS bashing on SlashDot.
Dude, stop drinking that decaf stuff -- it's obviously slowing your cognitive processes down. Take two expressos and try again in the morning. (If you're lucky, this article'll be posted for the third time by then.:-)
The sig comes from Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time", but the attribution was truncated. I apologize with all appropriate sincerity for the mental anguish this has obviously caused you.
Do not try to understand the sig. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
There is no sig.
If it WAS let out during business hours, whould it have gotten so far? would it have caused much dammage at all?
If you read some of the other threads, you'll see that most of the machines that could have become infected were infected...within 10 minutes of the worm's release.
Even the best admin wouldn't have been able to do much in that timespan. It would have gone something like this:
Whoa -- willya look at that traffic spike!
Someone get me a fresh cup of coffee while I look into whatever this....oh damn, never mind.
Okay, new plan. Someone start hauling out the backup tapes. I'm gonna go yank the network cable out of the wall.
(This is the usual place to make the point that the best admins would have already gone through the pain and agony of applying the six-month-old patch and/or properly securing their perimeter firewalls well before the worm was released, and should have been home all snug and cozy in their beds, sleeping the sleep of the righteous. But that point's kinda been done to death already, so I won't mention it here.;-)
Well, one of the main problems is preserving a method to read the data, not just preserving the data. How are you going to preserve the method of reading the data from the DNA, and interpreting it?
Silly person! As long as you're altering the DNA to store the data, you might as well tweak it a little more so the critter contains the decoding instructions.
For instance, ever see one of those butterflies with circular wing markings that supposedly look like a large eye? And some scientist told you this was supposed to frighten off predators?
Nope. Those wing patterns are actually tiny little CD-ROMs. If you pop one of these butterflies into your CD drive, you'll see that the disc contains a PDF file with details on how to decode the main message in the critter's DNA. (Turns out it's the missing 18 1/2 minutes from Nixon's Watergate tapes.)
What story is that? I have the complete works of PKD, and I don't remember it. It also doesn't sound particularly PKD. Another author?
Hate to break the news to you, but perhaps your "complete" collection is missing a volume.:-) It's a collection of 15 Philip K. Dick short stories. No longer in print, but available used. I can't remember if Amazon is evil or good this week, but here's a link if you're interested:
Why is it that everybody assumes that just because you put something on the Internet that everybody is going to abandon tradition means and jump to the site in droves?
You're new here, aren't you?:-)
Putting anything on the Internet pretty much guarantees that people will jump to your site in droves, provided you get your site linked somewhere here on SlashDot.
If you don't get enough people flocking to your site, we have a courtesy service that'll repost the link again later the same week (sometimes even the same day).
This is the same mentality that cause the whole dot-com boom/bust.
No, this is the same mentality that causes sites to get slashdotted. Your confusion is understandable, since first their site's hit counter goes boom, then their web server goes bust, but those are simply intended to be humorous sound effects, not actual economic theory.
People forget the lesson of the man who died on the cross to preserve the American way of life.
I imagine the "American way of life" round about the time that Christ was crucified consisted mostly of planting maize and hunting down the occasional buffalo. Cell phone use was pretty limited back then.
I mean, come on -- even in Europe I don't think cellular caught on until like the time of the Third Crusade or something. And I'm almost positive that up until 1812 the Cherokee were still known to take any hunter whose ringer caused a buffalo herd to stampede and stake the guy out over an anthill after covering him with honey.
Re:linux on the desktop
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Shrug, keep sending your.doc format. You're missing out on the input of hundreds of very, very talented SUN and other UNIX software engineers.
If only those very talented Sun engineers had access to some
product
that could enable them to read MS Word. The other Unix engineers would still be out of luck, unless they too had access to
somekind
of
product
that could do the same.
A nuke going off in space is just a big flash. No real blast. You need
some working mass to convert it to kinetic energy. Using the mass of
the asteroid itself is dangerous because you don't want it to break
into multiple fragments.
Stuff and nonsense. Obviously, you haven't been keeping up with
asteriod demolition research.
I did some back-of-the-Blockbusters-receipt calculations, and came to
the conclusion that one can safely split an asteroid the size of Texas
into two equal halves using a nuke, with each half passing harmlessly
on either side of the Earth. (Admittedly, you have to detonate the
nuke at least four hours before impact for this to work.)
The key, of course, is that you have to drill a hole into the asteroid
and put the nuke inside. This will amplify the force of the
explosion sufficiently to split it in half. Mind you, the hole will
have to be at least 800 feet deep to make effective use of the
explosive force.
Generally speaking, NASA is not the best training grounds for deep
hole-drilling technique. (Yes, there was that minor problem with the
"meters vs feet" whoopsy, but that's not formal training.) Do
your recruiting in the oil industry, since they've had a lot of
experience with drilling. I think it's well-established that anyone
can become an astronaut with about a week's worth of training, whereas
there's just no way you can figure out how to drill a hole without a
lifetime's worth of study.
Hint:Harry S. Stamper is widely acknowledged as the world's
foremost core driller. I'd start with him.
True...how many Windows 95-based web servers are there?
IIRC, the (admittedly cheesy) Microsoft Personal Web Server was shipped with Win95. (Don't have any 95 boxes anymore, so won't swear to it. Win 98 definitely comes with PWS.)
Apache. (They're very open-minded.:-)
Quick check on TuCows shows 9 more web servers supporting 9x.
CNet's download.com has a whopping 192 entries in their Windows/Web Authoring/Servers area if you filter it down to Win95. But take CNet's count with a grain of salt...they don't seem to differentiate between server-support/test apps and actual servers. But I'm not gonna hunt through a list that size to get a better count.
Anyways, I think it's safe to say that, strange as it may sound, there actually are Win 9x-based servers available.
Okay, but we're starting to wander from the original "Macs are secure because they have no security" topic, which was already wandering pretty far from the "hacker denied 15 seconds of fame" topic.
I'd ask someone to mod me down, but saying "yeah, go ahead, mod this down" always seems to end up with people modding it up to +5 Insightful because it's got that ever-popular angst-driven sound first popularized by Eeyore. (Donkey. 100 Aker Woods. Cristopher Robin. Ah, never mind....)
Ahem... Okay people, listen up! My post is not insightful. It's offtopic! "Offtopic" might look a lot like "Insightful" in the moderator pulldown, but if you look really closely, you'll notice that they're spelled slightly differently. Yes, I know it's subtle...they both start with a big letter and have smaller letters afterwards. Just hang in their, kids...hopefully the next SlashCode release will have a picture-based moderation system.
I have nothing against most of your points, but I have a few little nits to pick:
2> No Root user. All mac developers know their code is always running at root. Nothing is higher (except undocumented microkernel stufff where you pass Gary Davidians birthday into certain registers and make a special call). By always being root there is no false sense of security, and programming is done carefully.
Perhaps this is a philosophical nitpick on my part, but by extension shouldn't this mean that the vast majority of Windows programs should be incredibly secure? Prior to NT, all Windows developers were guaranteed that their code would be running as 'root'. That's a lot of developer-time spent in a world where everything is root. And yet, somehow, Windows still seems to have its share of security problems.
I'm not saying that Macs are as insecure as Windows boxes, just that I'm having trouble following the idea that "always being root" somehow makes programmers more security-conscious.
3> Pascal strings. ANSI C Strings are the number one way people exploit Linux and Wintel boxes. The mac avoids C strings historically in most of all of its OS. In fact even its roms originally used Pascal strings. As you know pascal strings are faster than C (because they have the length delimiter in the front and do not have to endlessly hunt for NULL), but the side effect is less buffer exploits. Individual 3rd party products may use C stings and bind to ANSI libraries, but many do not.
A buffer overflow is a buffer overflow is a buffer overflow.
If you don't check that your destination buffer is big enough to hold the contents of your source buffer, then your code becomes a bug in search of an exploit. Doesn't matter if the length is stored at the beginning, doesn't matter if you count until you find a NUL. If you copy from A to B and sizeof(B) < sizeof(A), you're just looking for trouble.
Yes, ladies and gents, sometimes size does matter...
If you're marketing to me (a developer), make my life easy.
Easy to obtain. I should be able to go to your website, and within a few clicks find a place to download a copy of your software. If your app depends on other applications/libraries/etc, provide links to them on the download page.
I do not have time to go googling around the net trying to find a copy of libfoozlebutt.so.92.7.42.
Easy to install. If you're targeting Windows developers, use InstallShield. If you're targeting Red Hat etc, use RPMs. Especially for Unix systems, do not write some crufty script that scatters files all over the filesystem with no clue as to where things went.
If you use a license of some sort, make it easy to set up. Licenses are fine with me. Spending four hours installing and configuring a license manager just to try and evaluate a product is not fine.
Easy to evaluate. If your product is supposed to slice, dice, and make cross-cut french fries, include Slice.java, Dice.java, and CrossCut.java example programs. If your product is supposed to solve world hunger with drag'n'drop icons, have a chapter in the manual demonstrating what I drag and where I drop it.
Easy to learn. I don't mean that I expect you to come up with a magical way for me to learn all the ins and outs of your product in 10 minutes. If it's that trivial, there's probably already an emacs mode that does the same thing. What I mean is: give me documentation. Give me lots of it.
I can always choose to not read something that you've included.
I can't read something that you haven't included.
Give me space. If a sales rep starts calling me 4 times a day to "just see how it's going", the answer is that it's not going anywhere, since I'm on the phone with the sales rep. If I like the product, I promise that I'll call back and place my order. Honest!
Do make it easy to get support for your product. A 24x7 tech support staff supporting evaluators isn't always feasible. But a searchable database of problems & solutions is there anytime I need it. Email support can let me ask a question during my normal working hours, and let you answer it during your normal working hours.
I'm a developer. I work odd hours.
Really odd hours.
No, even odder than that.
If I'm not evaluating your product for personal pleasure, then I'm evaluating it out of pure desperation. It'll be late at night. On a weekend. I'm sure it'll be raining. I'm going to be tired and cranky, and that's before I start evaluating your product.
If I can get my question answered at 4 am on a Sunday morning, whether it's via a person or a search engine, I'm happy. Please make me happy.
If I do like the product, make sure I can get hold of the sales rep. Quickly. Easily. If the rep's off on a two-week vacation, road trip, or drinking binge, arrange a backup rep who answers the main rep's phone and mail.
Easy to uninstall. Whether or not I like the demo version, I'm going to want to get rid of it at some point. Test the uninstaller. If it leaves files behind, tell me where. Better yet, don't leave files behind. See installation comments re: InstallShield/RPM. Whatever you do, don't write a frag-grenade installer, make me clean up the mess, and then hope I'll be favorably disposed to your product.
Lose gracefully. If I don't like the product, make sure the sales rep doesn't keep calling back to try and "understand the problem".
If the product doesn't save me time or make my life easier, I don't want it. Spending time comforting a heart-broken sales rep does not save me time or make my life easier.
I purchased my new AMD XP 2000 just a week ago, and now the price drops. It seems like every time you buy any computer part, the next week prices go down.
Seems like every time I pick up a rock and drop it, it falls down.
Seems like every time the sun comes up, it goes down again later.
Seems like every time Winter comes, a few months later it's Spring.
If you haven't noticed recurring trends like this by now, it's time to
stop drinking decaf....
Slashdot Mirror
No, of course you're not the only one. But then, there's also plenty of people who think that the government is covering up groups of anal-probing space aliens, or that Bigfoot exists and is touring Las Vegas with Elvis. Not being alone in your belief doesn't mean that your belief has a firm footing in reality. [*]
Seriously, which do you think is more likely to get Joe Sixpack (the guy who can't even invest a few mouseclicks to run Windows Update a couple of times a year) to run out and buy some anti-virus software:
- Virus B, which after 2 weeks of spamming everyone in your address book with photos from the goatse.cx site, will go on to randomize your hard drive, nuke your BIOS, unplug the fridge the night after you stock up on ice cream, and finally shave the family dog and spray-paint it hot pink.
If I were an evil marketing person for a virus company, I know which version I'd expect to bring the desperate masses stampeding into the A-V aisle at their local computer store.[*] I use these two examples because they're obviously inaccurate beliefs. Aliens take peoples' temperatures orally, not rectally...it's more hygenic, especially if you're the alien stuck cleaning up the probes afterwards. And everyone knows that Elvis is touring Des Moines for the next two months. Bigfoot is, of course, in Las Vegas, but he's opening for Siegfried and Roy.
I have to agree. I started transferring all of my favorite shows onto punchcards, confident that I'll be able to watch Junkyard Wars fifty years from now if I so desire.
One of the other advantages you omitted was how easy it is to edit out commercials using punchcard storage -- just pause the deck at the start of the commercial break, then discard the next 1.23 meters of cards per commercial. Try that with those fancy-schmancy DVD discs!
Only downside is that my basement is already 50% full, and I've only finished the first season.
Wouldn't the step where you have to sever your head and rubber-band it to the Lego rotisserie going to discourage all but the most hard-core game skinners? ;-)
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. But also consider that one of the reasons that telemarketers aren't allowed to call your cell phone is because, under the current model, that would be cost shifting -- i.e., you're paying for the vast majority of the cost of receiving an unsolicited (and generally unwanted) phone call.
I'm currently a telecommuter -- i.e., I put in my 10-12 hrs a day from home now instead of driving to an office to do the same thing. :-) Before I started doing this, I never realized how many calls I got at home during the course of a typical day. Now that I'm home more often, I realize that I get far more telemarketing calls than spam emails on an average day. Enough so that I'm now willing to pay extra for caller ID -- none of the people I actually need to talk to come through with an ID of "unavailable".
Imagine if the caller paid the cost of calling your cell phone. Then it'd no longer be a case of price shifting if someone called you out of the blue with a fascinating deal on residing your home, refinancing your house, etc etc etc.
Having the caller pay the full cost of cellphone calls is a telemarketer's wet dream.
So for some, paying for incoming might be a status symbol. For me, it's a way to keep my cellphone open for its intended purpose -- giving people I want/need to keep in contact with a way to get in touch with me, regardless of whether I'm at home, on the road for work, or just doing a little relaxing rock climbing. My cellphone is most specifically not a way for every blithering idiot with an autodialer to annoy the hell out of me -- that's what my landline's for. ;-)
Just do what I do, and destroy the RFID tag by microwaving all your tinfoil first.
(whooop whooop whooop)
Ooops, gotta run -- damned microwave's set off the fire alarm again...
I think this comes up every time a NY Times article is linked. Okay, my turn to remind people: If you don't want to register with their site, don't bother creating bogus accounts. It's a nice thought, but it's really not necessary.
Instead, just go to their archives section, where the articles are available without the need for an account. Just replace "www" with "archives" in the link. Example for this article:
http://archives.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/technology
Yeah, silly forum posters. Fortunately behavior like that never happens with the people here on
Okay. So suddenly a company (CheetahMail, aka chtah.com) selling "email marketing" services has transmogrified into the subscription purchase site for Red Hat Network?
Yeah. Right. Oh, please PLEASE let me enter my credit card information onto this random web site now. Pretty please with spam on top? (Oh wait...those mystery-meat redhat.chtah.com URLs don't actually seem to be working. Too bad.)
See, the funny thing is that I too got an email from Red Hat about the upcoming release. And my email was almost word-for-word the same as what you've posted.
The minor difference being that all the links point back to REDHAT.COM Just like they always have for every official Red Hat message that I've ever received.
And the RHN-specific URLs in my copy of the email use https, not http. Just as they have for every RHN URL I've ever received.
So here's the links from my copy of the email:
Now maybe there's a difference between the mails that got sent to RHN subscribers and people who aren't currently using RHN. Personally, I'd be a little suspicious of a supposedly official Red Hat offer that sent me to a non-RH domain. But that's just me...
Cool -- I'm my own personal Beowulf cluster! ;-)
Forgive the nitpick, but the Mars Observer wasn't involved in this. It was a combination of data from Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor. Observer isn't even mentioned in the article...gotta proof-read those submissions, folks. :-)
Contact was lost with Observer shortly before it was to enter orbit around Mars.
See JPL/NASA for more information on the 2001 Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor
Isn't this the same question that someone asked when the same story was posted yesterday?
The answer remains unchanged 24 hours later. No, it's not the same certification.
Hmmmm...duped question for a duped article from someone thinking that there's such a thing as "taking it a bit too far" when it comes to MS bashing on SlashDot.
Dude, stop drinking that decaf stuff -- it's obviously slowing your cognitive processes down. Take two expressos and try again in the morning. (If you're lucky, this article'll be posted for the third time by then. :-)
The sig comes from Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time", but the attribution was truncated. I apologize with all appropriate sincerity for the mental anguish this has obviously caused you.
Do not try to understand the sig. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
There is no sig.
Errrr...isn't the toilet paper supposed to have those brown streaks on it? ;-)
If you read some of the other threads, you'll see that most of the machines that could have become infected were infected...within 10 minutes of the worm's release.
Even the best admin wouldn't have been able to do much in that timespan. It would have gone something like this:
(This is the usual place to make the point that the best admins would have already gone through the pain and agony of applying the six-month-old patch and/or properly securing their perimeter firewalls well before the worm was released, and should have been home all snug and cozy in their beds, sleeping the sleep of the righteous. But that point's kinda been done to death already, so I won't mention it here. ;-)
Silly person! As long as you're altering the DNA to store the data, you might as well tweak it a little more so the critter contains the decoding instructions.
For instance, ever see one of those butterflies with circular wing markings that supposedly look like a large eye? And some scientist told you this was supposed to frighten off predators?
Nope. Those wing patterns are actually tiny little CD-ROMs. If you pop one of these butterflies into your CD drive, you'll see that the disc contains a PDF file with details on how to decode the main message in the critter's DNA. (Turns out it's the missing 18 1/2 minutes from Nixon's Watergate tapes.)
Hate to break the news to you, but perhaps your "complete" collection is missing a volume. :-) It's a collection of 15 Philip K. Dick short stories. No longer in print, but available used. I can't remember if Amazon is evil or good this week, but here's a link if you're interested:
The Preserving Machine
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
Putting anything on the Internet pretty much guarantees that people will jump to your site in droves, provided you get your site linked somewhere here on SlashDot.
If you don't get enough people flocking to your site, we have a courtesy service that'll repost the link again later the same week (sometimes even the same day).
This is the same mentality that cause the whole dot-com boom/bust.
No, this is the same mentality that causes sites to get slashdotted. Your confusion is understandable, since first their site's hit counter goes boom, then their web server goes bust, but those are simply intended to be humorous sound effects, not actual economic theory.
People forget the lesson of the man who died on the cross to preserve the American way of life.
I imagine the "American way of life" round about the time that Christ was crucified consisted mostly of planting maize and hunting down the occasional buffalo. Cell phone use was pretty limited back then.
I mean, come on -- even in Europe I don't think cellular caught on until like the time of the Third Crusade or something. And I'm almost positive that up until 1812 the Cherokee were still known to take any hunter whose ringer caused a buffalo herd to stampede and stake the guy out over an anthill after covering him with honey.
now we have almost everything we need:
...
[x] Trashcan support
[ ]
[ ] Profit!
Shrug, keep sending your .doc format. You're missing out on the input of hundreds of very, very talented SUN and other UNIX software engineers.
;-)
If only those very talented Sun engineers had access to some product that could enable them to read MS Word. The other Unix engineers would still be out of luck, unless they too had access to some kind of product that could do the same.
Alas, I fear this will never come to pass...
Stuff and nonsense. Obviously, you haven't been keeping up with asteriod demolition research.
I did some back-of-the-Blockbusters-receipt calculations, and came to the conclusion that one can safely split an asteroid the size of Texas into two equal halves using a nuke, with each half passing harmlessly on either side of the Earth. (Admittedly, you have to detonate the nuke at least four hours before impact for this to work.)
The key, of course, is that you have to drill a hole into the asteroid and put the nuke inside. This will amplify the force of the explosion sufficiently to split it in half. Mind you, the hole will have to be at least 800 feet deep to make effective use of the explosive force.
Generally speaking, NASA is not the best training grounds for deep hole-drilling technique. (Yes, there was that minor problem with the "meters vs feet" whoopsy, but that's not formal training.) Do your recruiting in the oil industry, since they've had a lot of experience with drilling. I think it's well-established that anyone can become an astronaut with about a week's worth of training, whereas there's just no way you can figure out how to drill a hole without a lifetime's worth of study.
Hint:Harry S. Stamper is widely acknowledged as the world's foremost core driller. I'd start with him.
IIRC, the (admittedly cheesy) Microsoft Personal Web Server was shipped with Win95. (Don't have any 95 boxes anymore, so won't swear to it. Win 98 definitely comes with PWS.)
Apache. (They're very open-minded. :-)
Quick check on TuCows shows 9 more web servers supporting 9x.
CNet's download.com has a whopping 192 entries in their Windows/Web Authoring/Servers area if you filter it down to Win95. But take CNet's count with a grain of salt...they don't seem to differentiate between server-support/test apps and actual servers. But I'm not gonna hunt through a list that size to get a better count.
Anyways, I think it's safe to say that, strange as it may sound, there actually are Win 9x-based servers available.
Okay, but we're starting to wander from the original "Macs are secure because they have no security" topic, which was already wandering pretty far from the "hacker denied 15 seconds of fame" topic.
I'd ask someone to mod me down, but saying "yeah, go ahead, mod this down" always seems to end up with people modding it up to +5 Insightful because it's got that ever-popular angst-driven sound first popularized by Eeyore. (Donkey. 100 Aker Woods. Cristopher Robin. Ah, never mind....)
Ahem... Okay people, listen up! My post is not insightful. It's offtopic! "Offtopic" might look a lot like "Insightful" in the moderator pulldown, but if you look really closely, you'll notice that they're spelled slightly differently. Yes, I know it's subtle...they both start with a big letter and have smaller letters afterwards. Just hang in their, kids...hopefully the next SlashCode release will have a picture-based moderation system.
2> No Root user. All mac developers know their code is always running at root. Nothing is higher (except undocumented microkernel stufff where you pass Gary Davidians birthday into certain registers and make a special call). By always being root there is no false sense of security, and programming is done carefully.
Perhaps this is a philosophical nitpick on my part, but by extension shouldn't this mean that the vast majority of Windows programs should be incredibly secure? Prior to NT, all Windows developers were guaranteed that their code would be running as 'root'. That's a lot of developer-time spent in a world where everything is root. And yet, somehow, Windows still seems to have its share of security problems.
I'm not saying that Macs are as insecure as Windows boxes, just that I'm having trouble following the idea that "always being root" somehow makes programmers more security-conscious.
3> Pascal strings. ANSI C Strings are the number one way people exploit Linux and Wintel boxes. The mac avoids C strings historically in most of all of its OS. In fact even its roms originally used Pascal strings. As you know pascal strings are faster than C (because they have the length delimiter in the front and do not have to endlessly hunt for NULL), but the side effect is less buffer exploits. Individual 3rd party products may use C stings and bind to ANSI libraries, but many do not.
A buffer overflow is a buffer overflow is a buffer overflow.
If you don't check that your destination buffer is big enough to hold the contents of your source buffer, then your code becomes a bug in search of an exploit. Doesn't matter if the length is stored at the beginning, doesn't matter if you count until you find a NUL. If you copy from A to B and sizeof(B) < sizeof(A), you're just looking for trouble.
Yes, ladies and gents, sometimes size does matter...
Easy to uninstall. Whether or not I like the demo version, I'm going to want to get rid of it at some point. Test the uninstaller. If it leaves files behind, tell me where. Better yet, don't leave files behind. See installation comments re: InstallShield/RPM. Whatever you do, don't write a frag-grenade installer, make me clean up the mess, and then hope I'll be favorably disposed to your product.
Lose gracefully. If I don't like the product, make sure the sales rep doesn't keep calling back to try and "understand the problem".
Seems like every time I pick up a rock and drop it, it falls down.
Seems like every time the sun comes up, it goes down again later.
Seems like every time Winter comes, a few months later it's Spring.
If you haven't noticed recurring trends like this by now, it's time to stop drinking decaf....