Adobe can retaliate and abandon Mac platform. Designers and developers who need Adobe's products will move to Windows.
Except with the imminent death of Flash due to the ubiquitous adoption of the iP[hone|ad|od Touch], Photoshop is the major product Adobe is making money with, and that's primarily on Macs. Could they afford to abandon the platform is the real question.
But yeah, this is an elegant solution. If Photoshop were Windows only, a lot of graphic designers would end up abandoning Macs in the long run.
Can this robot hold a position, or return to a position upon surfacing and learning its position? Or is at the mercies of the ocean currents as to where it ends up?
Turning down the money is irresponsible (unless it's truly vastly undervalued, which is possible.)
The only reason not to sell it for a price like that is if he already has enough money and is running it as a hobby. If that's the case, it can make or lose some amount of money without it really affecting him. But just because Top Honcho has $XM in the bank already doesn't mean his employees have equal resources. If it starts losing money and he gets bored, who is going to keep all those employees in paychecks?
Worse, what if his current employees are working for options? "Hey, everybody, guess what? Yahoo would have made you all millionaires, except I turned them down. Back to work!"
If you want to experience behind-the-wheel problem driving in a controlled environment, look up an organization that offers Winter Driving Skills training. One group around here does it by taking a front-wheel drive vehicle and replacing the rear wheels with pivoting casters. I've never taken their course (having grown up driving on icy country roads) but it looks very interesting.
I still credit the training I received for playing long hours of Night Driver with saving my life in 1981. I was cresting a hill late at night on a two-lane country road when I was suddenly faced with an oncoming car in my lane. Using the exact same right-left swerve that I practiced so many times in the video game, I avoided a head-on collision by hitting the shoulder just in time, and got off the shoulder before sliding down the ditch.
The real question should be "Would I have still missed him had I not played so much Night Driver?" There's no way to answer that, of course, but for now I'll stick with the "my anecdotal evidence runs counter to your theory" attitude.
I'm still not sure how that makes me feel. I was a college student and not *remotely* qualified to do that.
You shouldn't feel bad about it. It sounds like you were certainly qualified to do the computation. Once you documented your answer, the engineer was able to check your work and confirm it met their specs. He or she then certified that your math was an accurate representation of the volume.
Being in school or not, being a trained surveyor or not, doesn't matter. Your answer was based on math, which is the same regardless of who you are. Asking a kid to count apples in two boxes and tell you how many apples there are by adding the numbers doesn't invalidate addition just because you asked a kid to do it. Same thing here, only you're talking about calculus and the containment of a toxic gas where a mistake could mean environmental disaster.:-)
Also, consider that your math was within 0.5% of his rough estimate. The engineering firm might have been hoping you'd come up with a dramatically "bigger" estimate than his simple cubic volume, which might have saved the firm $$$ when it came time to dig out the extra dirt to meet the new volume requirement. As it is, since you came up with a number that was so close to his estimate, the firm was probably just as pleased to know that applying calc to future similar problems was not worth the extra effort. So if nothing else you validated their estimating methods.
First, you'd have to recognize the microphone for what it is. It's not like a boom mic being steered by a grip. It's a tiny little device that could be mounted anywhere from lampposts and stoplights to rooftops, sign posts and building fascias. They're very easily hidden.
Assuming you could find and identify it, you'd have to be a marksman to hit the tiny thing from a distance. Have you seen these idiots with the guns? No training, no ability. Many don't understand the concept of sights. And even if they did, many of the guns they're using are of such low quality that they probably wouldn't be able to hit it even if they knew how to sight it in.
Normally in use the gun just has to look menacing to get a victim to cower, but you can't menace a chunk of hardware into submission.
Oh, and before anyone makes the incorrect assumption, no, I do not have nor have I ever owned any guns myself. I don't hunt. And I do not belong to the NRA. I just look at the crap going on in the urban areas, and can see that gun restrictions are completely failing our society.
imo its a shame a lot of american citizens think like that.. with the response time and technology of the police nowadays that section of your constitution doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me.. how could the solution to a gun crime problem involve more guns.. id have thought a better solution is to ban guns nation wide effectively making it easier to spot them and prosecute violations.. if anyone uses "hunting" as an argument against it, theyre sadistic rednecks, so you can disregard w/e they say.
Because the idea of "spot and prosecute violations" is all based on the noble idea of playing fair. You seem to embrace the notion that our criminals run around like they are up against some Victorian-era detective like Sherlock Holmes, and will logically surrender when ordered to do so by police.
At some levels we've dropped way beneath that high water mark of civilization. If the criminals believe that they can simply shoot their way out of a situation, then they do. If they believe there will be no retribution for harming someone, then they harm people with impunity. They've realized that laws are ineffective if the risk of penalty is low enough. And criminal gangs demonstrate a military understanding of statistics: if you start with 100 armed criminals, and three get locked up or shot while committing a crime, you still have 97 armed criminals.
You also seem to believe that by outlawing all guns, all guns will suddenly go away. They will not. Guns are precision-built machines that last a hundred years or more. Even if they are outlawed today, our great-grandchildren will still have access to guns. Guns are buried in our psyche: the ancient idea of defending yourself and your family, and providing yourself with food via hunting, are very deeply ingrained in our people. Outlawing guns will simply result in hidden caches of weapons located across the country. It's why even gun registration is so vehemently opposed: if forced to register guns, in many people's minds that's the last step prior to confiscating them when they're banned. And they're not wrong in that assumption.
Couple the "immediacy" of committing armed violence with the interminable legal delays involved in prosecuting a criminal with the high chances of getting off with little to no punishment, and you have created a class of people who believe and act as if they are completely beyond the rules.
Arming the citizenry acknowledges that, while there is no immediate legal punishment for violating the law, the threat of a corporal punishment meted out immediately will still act as a deterrent. This country is filled with empirical proof: Chicago and New York have some of the highest gun crime rates and yet have the most restrictive gun laws. Restrictions simply don't work in our society. Not anymore.
What good would a system telling you where the shot came from do if the officer is the one being shot? I.e., there already?
These were originally developed for the military to identify the location of a sniper. If you were on the ground looking for a gunman you couldn't see, you'd damn well appreciate a system like this.
Well, if the Chicago police are saying "we tried it and it doesn't work", I'd listen to them rather than the company.
I doubt the police have the most informed opinion. RTFA, the city didn't even hook it into the 911 call center, the way the successful cities did.
My guess is the police are looking at the $250,000/square mile cost and saying "We could put 4 more officers on the street for that money." Never mind the misunderstanding of the difference between up front and ongoing costs.
Basing a decision on a flawed study and the opinions of someone who believes they will financially suffer is not a recipe for a good result.
I wouldn't knock what they're doing. As we've recently seen with Adobe, exploits in the payload format can be used to manipulate users and even launch code. And remember how we used to be all panicky about Word macro exploitations until the defaults were changed to shut them off? "Good times", indeed.
Consider that Microsoft dominates the market, and that the ".DOC" format is widely accepted across companies. Nowadays.DOC files are readily passed by email filters, web filters, etc. Office workers open them in previewers and Word without giving a second thought to security.
A buffer overrun or other fault in the handling of.DOC files could offer a hacker a way to deliver a malicious payload through channels that are today trusted worldwide. For all we know, these could already be exploited by phishing attacks.
It's definitely worth Microsoft's time and effort to execute these tests.
What if you included this in your LaTex? \url{file:///C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/cmd.exe} Maybe you could make it work with the \providecommand macro. Or perhaps hack something together in the Form environment.
I don't know, I'm certainly not a LaTeX hacker. But LaTeX can do an awful lot of the things PDFs can do, which means the potential* for misuse is there.
John
*"potential" does not mean security holes exist, but it doesn't mean it's squeaky clean, either.
What dynamic content? This has nothing to do with JavaScript.
Dynamic content != JavaScript.
Dynamic content is a generic name for all manner of executable things, including not only PDFs and JavaScript, but also LaTeX, ActiveX, VBScript, etc. JavaScript is simply one of many different implementations of dynamic content.
In this case it's a "/Launch" command in the PDF syntax that's being exploited.
It may be anti-climactic, but how about anti-climatic? Are anti-pirates good or bad for global warming?
Well, since the number of pirates has gone down as the temperature has gone up (or is that the other way around?), I assume that as the temperature goes down the number of anti-pirates would climb. Or are anti-pirates caused by pirates, and not by global cooling or warming?
I always said he'd come to no good in the end, your Honor. If they'd let me have my way I would have flayed him into shape! But the bleedin' hearts and the artists let him get away with tree climbin'! Let him hang up there today!
I started by opening the Program Files\Adobe\Reader x.x\ folder. You'll see a folder called plug_ins. Make a new folder called "unwanted_plug_ins". Open the original plug_ins folder and you'll see a bunch of.API files (they're just renamed DLLs.)
I picked through them by name, and got rid of the obvious ones first: SendMail.API, ReadOutLoud.API, weblink.API, etc. I just dragged them to the "unwanted" folder. I then opened Adobe Reader and did some simple viewing tests with an existing PDF to make sure it still worked.
Later, when I opened something from the web that didn't work right, it was pretty obvious that I had removed something it wanted. The error was something like "couldn't verify digital signature" so I restored the original DigSig.api file.
It was just some basic crawling thru their junk and applying common sense, nothing spectacularly innovative.
I still think the bank could have cashiers securely distribute smart cards with their self-signed cert on them and do it with a very high assumption of integrity (after all, they know how to control cashiers handling tens of thousands of dollars daily.) Sure, they could still print their certificate's fingerprint in the window, and you could check the fingerprint yourself on the card whenever you wanted; and for the security-minded paranoiac, they would.
What I'm looking for is to give almost the same amount of security assurance to Joe Sixpack, or his dumber brother-in-law. Making a secure system available to them is just as critical as making one available to you or me, because crooks/con-men/phishermen can obviously manipulate the person almost as easily as their computers.
I completely neutered my copy of Adobe. I removed all the plug-in DLLs that did stuff I don't need or care about, or that were a security threat: accessibility, web linking, etc. I shut off Javascript execution in the preferences panel. And I disabled and removed everything related to Adobe Updater. If I feel like updating it, I will. (Hint: I don't.)
I can still view ordinary documents without trouble. I can't "use" a form in the way that some companies have replaced their web browsers with Adobe front ends, but that's OK by me -- it's not required for my day job, and I certainly don't have to give fools like that my personal business.
As a bonus, Adobe Reader launches much faster than before.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe can retaliate and abandon Mac platform. Designers and developers who need Adobe's products will move to Windows.
Except with the imminent death of Flash due to the ubiquitous adoption of the iP[hone|ad|od Touch], Photoshop is the major product Adobe is making money with, and that's primarily on Macs. Could they afford to abandon the platform is the real question.
But yeah, this is an elegant solution. If Photoshop were Windows only, a lot of graphic designers would end up abandoning Macs in the long run.
Can this robot hold a position, or return to a position upon surfacing and learning its position? Or is at the mercies of the ocean currents as to where it ends up?
You should try to avoid posting about things that you have absolutely no knowledge of.
You must be new here. :-)
One yocto is silly enough.
And 640 yocto ought to be silly enough for anyone.
Turning down the money is irresponsible (unless it's truly vastly undervalued, which is possible.)
The only reason not to sell it for a price like that is if he already has enough money and is running it as a hobby. If that's the case, it can make or lose some amount of money without it really affecting him. But just because Top Honcho has $XM in the bank already doesn't mean his employees have equal resources. If it starts losing money and he gets bored, who is going to keep all those employees in paychecks?
Worse, what if his current employees are working for options? "Hey, everybody, guess what? Yahoo would have made you all millionaires, except I turned them down. Back to work!"
If you want to experience behind-the-wheel problem driving in a controlled environment, look up an organization that offers Winter Driving Skills training. One group around here does it by taking a front-wheel drive vehicle and replacing the rear wheels with pivoting casters. I've never taken their course (having grown up driving on icy country roads) but it looks very interesting.
I still credit the training I received for playing long hours of Night Driver with saving my life in 1981. I was cresting a hill late at night on a two-lane country road when I was suddenly faced with an oncoming car in my lane. Using the exact same right-left swerve that I practiced so many times in the video game, I avoided a head-on collision by hitting the shoulder just in time, and got off the shoulder before sliding down the ditch.
The real question should be "Would I have still missed him had I not played so much Night Driver?" There's no way to answer that, of course, but for now I'll stick with the "my anecdotal evidence runs counter to your theory" attitude.
I'm still not sure how that makes me feel. I was a college student and not *remotely* qualified to do that.
You shouldn't feel bad about it. It sounds like you were certainly qualified to do the computation. Once you documented your answer, the engineer was able to check your work and confirm it met their specs. He or she then certified that your math was an accurate representation of the volume.
Being in school or not, being a trained surveyor or not, doesn't matter. Your answer was based on math, which is the same regardless of who you are. Asking a kid to count apples in two boxes and tell you how many apples there are by adding the numbers doesn't invalidate addition just because you asked a kid to do it. Same thing here, only you're talking about calculus and the containment of a toxic gas where a mistake could mean environmental disaster. :-)
Also, consider that your math was within 0.5% of his rough estimate. The engineering firm might have been hoping you'd come up with a dramatically "bigger" estimate than his simple cubic volume, which might have saved the firm $$$ when it came time to dig out the extra dirt to meet the new volume requirement. As it is, since you came up with a number that was so close to his estimate, the firm was probably just as pleased to know that applying calc to future similar problems was not worth the extra effort. So if nothing else you validated their estimating methods.
Doubtful.
First, you'd have to recognize the microphone for what it is. It's not like a boom mic being steered by a grip. It's a tiny little device that could be mounted anywhere from lampposts and stoplights to rooftops, sign posts and building fascias. They're very easily hidden.
Assuming you could find and identify it, you'd have to be a marksman to hit the tiny thing from a distance. Have you seen these idiots with the guns? No training, no ability. Many don't understand the concept of sights. And even if they did, many of the guns they're using are of such low quality that they probably wouldn't be able to hit it even if they knew how to sight it in.
Normally in use the gun just has to look menacing to get a victim to cower, but you can't menace a chunk of hardware into submission.
Oh, and before anyone makes the incorrect assumption, no, I do not have nor have I ever owned any guns myself. I don't hunt. And I do not belong to the NRA. I just look at the crap going on in the urban areas, and can see that gun restrictions are completely failing our society.
imo its a shame a lot of american citizens think like that.. with the response time and technology of the police nowadays that section of your constitution doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me.. how could the solution to a gun crime problem involve more guns.. id have thought a better solution is to ban guns nation wide effectively making it easier to spot them and prosecute violations.. if anyone uses "hunting" as an argument against it, theyre sadistic rednecks, so you can disregard w/e they say.
Because the idea of "spot and prosecute violations" is all based on the noble idea of playing fair. You seem to embrace the notion that our criminals run around like they are up against some Victorian-era detective like Sherlock Holmes, and will logically surrender when ordered to do so by police.
At some levels we've dropped way beneath that high water mark of civilization. If the criminals believe that they can simply shoot their way out of a situation, then they do. If they believe there will be no retribution for harming someone, then they harm people with impunity. They've realized that laws are ineffective if the risk of penalty is low enough. And criminal gangs demonstrate a military understanding of statistics: if you start with 100 armed criminals, and three get locked up or shot while committing a crime, you still have 97 armed criminals.
You also seem to believe that by outlawing all guns, all guns will suddenly go away. They will not. Guns are precision-built machines that last a hundred years or more. Even if they are outlawed today, our great-grandchildren will still have access to guns. Guns are buried in our psyche: the ancient idea of defending yourself and your family, and providing yourself with food via hunting, are very deeply ingrained in our people. Outlawing guns will simply result in hidden caches of weapons located across the country. It's why even gun registration is so vehemently opposed: if forced to register guns, in many people's minds that's the last step prior to confiscating them when they're banned. And they're not wrong in that assumption.
Couple the "immediacy" of committing armed violence with the interminable legal delays involved in prosecuting a criminal with the high chances of getting off with little to no punishment, and you have created a class of people who believe and act as if they are completely beyond the rules.
Arming the citizenry acknowledges that, while there is no immediate legal punishment for violating the law, the threat of a corporal punishment meted out immediately will still act as a deterrent. This country is filled with empirical proof: Chicago and New York have some of the highest gun crime rates and yet have the most restrictive gun laws. Restrictions simply don't work in our society. Not anymore.
What good would a system telling you where the shot came from do if the officer is the one being shot? I.e., there already?
These were originally developed for the military to identify the location of a sniper. If you were on the ground looking for a gunman you couldn't see, you'd damn well appreciate a system like this.
Well, if the Chicago police are saying "we tried it and it doesn't work", I'd listen to them rather than the company.
I doubt the police have the most informed opinion. RTFA, the city didn't even hook it into the 911 call center, the way the successful cities did.
My guess is the police are looking at the $250,000/square mile cost and saying "We could put 4 more officers on the street for that money." Never mind the misunderstanding of the difference between up front and ongoing costs.
Basing a decision on a flawed study and the opinions of someone who believes they will financially suffer is not a recipe for a good result.
I wouldn't knock what they're doing. As we've recently seen with Adobe, exploits in the payload format can be used to manipulate users and even launch code. And remember how we used to be all panicky about Word macro exploitations until the defaults were changed to shut them off? "Good times", indeed.
Consider that Microsoft dominates the market, and that the ".DOC" format is widely accepted across companies. Nowadays .DOC files are readily passed by email filters, web filters, etc. Office workers open them in previewers and Word without giving a second thought to security.
A buffer overrun or other fault in the handling of .DOC files could offer a hacker a way to deliver a malicious payload through channels that are today trusted worldwide. For all we know, these could already be exploited by phishing attacks.
It's definitely worth Microsoft's time and effort to execute these tests.
sorry, I meant to write that as "you can do an awful lot of the same things in LaTeX as you can in PDFs".
What if you included this in your LaTex? \url{file:///C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/cmd.exe} Maybe you could make it work with the \providecommand macro. Or perhaps hack something together in the Form environment.
I don't know, I'm certainly not a LaTeX hacker. But LaTeX can do an awful lot of the things PDFs can do, which means the potential* for misuse is there.
John
*"potential" does not mean security holes exist, but it doesn't mean it's squeaky clean, either.
One man's feature is another man's defect.
In the case of security "features", one man's feature is EVERYONE's defect.
What dynamic content? This has nothing to do with JavaScript.
Dynamic content != JavaScript.
Dynamic content is a generic name for all manner of executable things, including not only PDFs and JavaScript, but also LaTeX, ActiveX, VBScript, etc. JavaScript is simply one of many different implementations of dynamic content.
In this case it's a "/Launch" command in the PDF syntax that's being exploited.
It may be anti-climactic, but how about anti-climatic? Are anti-pirates good or bad for global warming?
Well, since the number of pirates has gone down as the temperature has gone up (or is that the other way around?), I assume that as the temperature goes down the number of anti-pirates would climb. Or are anti-pirates caused by pirates, and not by global cooling or warming?
They used to post slashvertisements for real products. Now it's slashvertisements for a product that has *not* been released. I feel old.
I think if it hasn't been released yet it's called "slashporware", or "slashspam" or even just simply "Duke Nukem Forever."
I always said he'd come to no good in the end, your Honor. If they'd let me have my way I would have flayed him into shape! But the bleedin' hearts and the artists let him get away with tree climbin'! Let him hang up there today!
I started by opening the Program Files\Adobe\Reader x.x\ folder. You'll see a folder called plug_ins. Make a new folder called "unwanted_plug_ins". Open the original plug_ins folder and you'll see a bunch of .API files (they're just renamed DLLs.)
I picked through them by name, and got rid of the obvious ones first: SendMail.API, ReadOutLoud.API, weblink.API, etc. I just dragged them to the "unwanted" folder. I then opened Adobe Reader and did some simple viewing tests with an existing PDF to make sure it still worked.
Later, when I opened something from the web that didn't work right, it was pretty obvious that I had removed something it wanted. The error was something like "couldn't verify digital signature" so I restored the original DigSig.api file.
It was just some basic crawling thru their junk and applying common sense, nothing spectacularly innovative.
I still think the bank could have cashiers securely distribute smart cards with their self-signed cert on them and do it with a very high assumption of integrity (after all, they know how to control cashiers handling tens of thousands of dollars daily.) Sure, they could still print their certificate's fingerprint in the window, and you could check the fingerprint yourself on the card whenever you wanted; and for the security-minded paranoiac, they would.
What I'm looking for is to give almost the same amount of security assurance to Joe Sixpack, or his dumber brother-in-law. Making a secure system available to them is just as critical as making one available to you or me, because crooks/con-men/phishermen can obviously manipulate the person almost as easily as their computers.
I completely neutered my copy of Adobe. I removed all the plug-in DLLs that did stuff I don't need or care about, or that were a security threat: accessibility, web linking, etc. I shut off Javascript execution in the preferences panel. And I disabled and removed everything related to Adobe Updater. If I feel like updating it, I will. (Hint: I don't.)
I can still view ordinary documents without trouble. I can't "use" a form in the way that some companies have replaced their web browsers with Adobe front ends, but that's OK by me -- it's not required for my day job, and I certainly don't have to give fools like that my personal business.
As a bonus, Adobe Reader launches much faster than before.
... on the Morrisette Irony Scale.
I've got one of those. Mine goes to 10.