Seriously: can someone explain wtf a "Samuel L. Jackson-esque wallet" is? I know who Mr. Jackson is, and I know what a a wallet is, but I'm clearly missing something here.
My desktop is by no means new (dual core 1.6GHz, 3Gb ram), but running nothing but Debian stable with gnome as my desktop and Iceweasel open with a single tab containing this new homepage: I walked away for 5 min, came back and my 5 min load avg is 0.87.
I decided to do this test after my first, accidental, exposure to this new site design: I innocently opened/. in a tab and had to force quit Iceweasel and close down vmware. I guess my choice now is, I can do all the things I've grown accustomed to doing on this computer, or I can read slashdot.
Perhaps one solution to consider would be the ability to put the device into a state where nothing but the phone is running - i.e. all other apps are just blocked until the call is released. Alternatively, the phone data in / out could be sandboxed from the rest of the OS. This would be a special mode since there are legitimate uses for this (tone dialing, call recording, etc.), but should be available to switch on when needed (or take the reverse approach and have it on by default, switched off when desired).
I'm not sure if the Android API would allow building an app for this, or if something at a lower-level would be required.... Anyway, feel free to implement this and send me the royalty cheques if you can. Just google for my banking info.
While "Hardware Controls" seems intuitive for the stated purpose, "Read Phone State and Identity" is fairly common, too. Almost every application will do things differently - whether operating in the foreground or background - depending on whether you are using the phone at the time. E.g. whether to play a sound or ring an alarm. This is one permission I (and I hate to admit it) would barely think twice before granting to just about any app.
On edit, I have to add that I think another factor here is that the w3c purist types see JS as a core web technology, and a better choice for implementing a feature (e.g. animation) than, say Flash (or, worse, an ActiveX control). As CSS and libraries such as JQuery mature, there is a tendency to do things that way rather than relying on an external plugin to execute some functionality. The more this happens, especially in a multi-tabbed browser world, the more JS engine performance counts.
YOU might not want to do FFT in your browser, but there are a lot of companies / coders building websites that want you to. I couldn't tell whether AC was joking about the "cloudscope space is universal" (did AC mean "cloudscape"?), but there's something there. I don't like it either, but ever since Web 2.0 got rolling, the effort has been to offload processing from servers while centralizing control of the data. It's part of the new way, brother.
Would there be a benefit to putting the fastest computer in the fastest train?
Hmmm.... if the train was going fast enough for relativistic effects to kick in, then this would make the computer *even faster*. You, sir / ma'am, are brilliant!
Yes, but if we're going to parse the words that closely, I'll jump in on the side of the OP. Perhaps it's true to say, strictly speaking, that the WAP itself is "unsecured". But if the WAP is unsecured by design (i.e. the design of the *network*), than I'd say it's inaccurate to say that "the network is unsecured".
I leave my AP open to the public on purpose. I have no less fear of an attack on one of the machines hosted on that network through the wireless interface on the router than I do through the WAN interface. The only part of the network that would be "unsecured" due to the AP being open would be a box (ahem, windows) that was connected to it without my knowledge and is listening for connections.
Oh, what? MitM attacks? Puh-lease. Again, the network is no less secure through the open WAP than it is through the WAN interface.
I wish I could give mod points to whoever tagged this story "tuttle". That was the first thought that popped into my head. If you're on/. you should already know, but for the youngun's out there:
As a sysadmin, the points about maintenance and downtime really resonate with me. And then there's crap like having a team of 10 to 20 staff (many of them very senior) standing around scratching themselves due to some bug or shortcoming (often just in the UI) that would've taken an hour or two to implement. The cost of *not* writing software can be astronomical. As a more concrete example, I worked in a shop that used LDAP to authenticate a myriad of services (desktop signon, shared volumes, shell access, web applications, mail, etc.), but there were some "glitches" in the LDAP schema and the clients weren't always properly configured to use them anyway. Fixing the issue completely would've taken maybe 30 hours. Writing our own web app to create/modify accounts with a step-by-step set of screens that implemented our business logic for new accounts might've taken 150 hours. But doing something like that would be too costly. Better to eat up an average of 5 hours per week of sysadmins time diagnosing trouble with sign-in to individual services, another 5 hours of the staff's time who were trying to sign in, and the occasional 5-10 hour patch of yak shaving when someone stumbled into the thicket accidentally once a month. And on top of *that* are all the dirty little secrets of employee behaviour to work around the shortcomings of the system.
Thank you for saying this! You're exactly right: A GUI only sysadmin is like a tone-deaf recording engineer. Sure, their face doesn't go on the cover of the album, but if they don't understand what they're handling, they can wreck the entire product.
Hmmm... maybe we should ask Mr. Gathered Mass why he keeps changing his mind. Oh, what's that? You're talking about millions of *different* people holding *different* opinions? Wow, who would've thought! I think you've found the real story in all of this: apparently, not everybody feels the exact same way about different, although similar, events. Thanks for sharing this insight - you just blew my mind.
Hey Mods! I'm getting modded funny here, but I'm not kidding - I still can't check my email and this is frustrating, not funny at all. I didn't feel like gogling this for my original post, but to make this one worthwhile, I present Exhibit A: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392
Ironically, I came to read the comments here while waiting for my webmail to load. By the time I finished reading these comments, the spinner on my other tab had stopped. The result?
Request Timed Out.... Version Information: Microsoft.NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3607; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3614
The parent is right. I try not to get involved in platform wars, but the same hardware running windows + mssql + iis + asp.net simply cannot keep up with any *nix + mysql + apache + php stack. Not to mention the security vulnerabilities. The only reason msft products are as popular as they are is because msft spent decades perfecting a business model that involved cultivating relationships with consultants and resellers who would do *whatever it takes* to convince their customer to buy a msft solution. Second biggest reason for their success was enterprise purchasing policies whereby the company would rather buy the crap they knew than take a risk on an unknown. Third was msft purchasing products that actually were well-made (and eventually turning them into pulp - even Excel is starting to go that way).
During that same time, a New Zealand engineer developed a home-made cruise missile using off-the-shelf parts, a Scottish rocket club built a flying waverider airframe, the Swedish navy were designing stealth ships that were invisible to Radar and nuclear weapons research continued unabated in the Indian subcontinent.
Wow, to hear you tell the story, I'd say ITAR is doing a great job at driving innovation. I say keep it in place! Of course, I'm not american, either.
All kidding aside, I think it would be helpful to americans if they could distinguish between what helps their country and what helps certain powerful interests in their country. I don't see much evidence that many of you folk can.
As a member of my school's logo team from grades 5 through 7, I wanted to thank you for bringing back some really fond memories. They only taught it for one week in class, but for those of us who kept playing with it outside the classroom, it taught so many skills - and things like geo-spatial visualization are valuable outside of strict IT.
Even if they updated the code, though, I don't think many computers these days have a cassette deck for loading the program anyway.:P
I have to wonder if the founders of google have spent most of the last decade having laughing fits over their motto, which makes a promise through negation of a subjective term.
Do no evil.
What does that even mean? Oh, they're going to thump their chests toward China? (admittedly, that's more than most western governments are willing to do these days, but I digress...)
What about the company's mission statement:
To organize the world's information.
Well, it would be difficult to argue the case that this is, in and of itself, evil, but when you consider what "the world's information" encompases, and what controlling that means, it's hard to think otherwise.
Now, a little more on topic, it's clear that google's amassed an army of lawyers and PR Flacks to rival their army of programmers. Makes me wonder whether their business model / management style is just to ensure they are the employer for all the world's language masters - be it natural or artificial. But, hey - free webmail!
The part of the picture which I think you're missing is this: the copies may be missing information that the originals contain. This is certainly the case if WikiLeaks is editing them (redacting text) before releasing them. If the files have been tampered with, they may not be admissible as evidence in a court, or they may not be as compelling to a jury, even if they are. There are legal standards for admitting digital evidence, and then there are the forensic experts, of course. Telling a court, "here's a file I downloaded from bittorrent, and it looks pretty legit" isn't going to cut it. If the pentagon manages to get the originals back, they might just save Cheney, Powell, Rice, Bush, Wolfowitz, etc. from a public hanging.
Quick Julian! Get a copy of those files over to The Hague ASAP. Then you can hand back the originals to avoid the full force of the US government coming at you. Don't worry - the statute of limitations for war crimes never expires. If there is justice in this world, everyone who's touched the US's dirty wars - from Colin Powell to Barack Obama, will be imprisoned for life (or worse - I'm looking at you Herr Cheney!).
As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest news of my week. Bigger than Old Spice guy. Bigger than jive. I support the GPL and the developers of WordPress, but I also feel some sympathy for those who want to get paid to come up with beautiful styles for WordPress blogs. I think Mark's post addresses that pretty well, though.
What I'm wondering, though, is this: do WP theme developers such as the Thesis folks have any other protection for their product? That is, can they argue that their code is GPL, but the visual result is something they own the copyright on? Or, can the resulting aesthetic effect be looked at as an unregistered trademark, which only the creator can license for re-use, regardless of whether the html / css / js code is freely redistributable under the GPL?
Slashdot Mirror
Relevant, recent:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/gsp7o/where_does_good_come_from_edward_o_wilson_tries/
Seriously: can someone explain wtf a "Samuel L. Jackson-esque wallet" is? I know who Mr. Jackson is, and I know what a a wallet is, but I'm clearly missing something here.
Explosion detection is pretty cool, and useful I'm sure. But I was hoping for special ops commandos.
My desktop is by no means new (dual core 1.6GHz, 3Gb ram), but running nothing but Debian stable with gnome as my desktop and Iceweasel open with a single tab containing this new homepage: I walked away for 5 min, came back and my 5 min load avg is 0.87.
I decided to do this test after my first, accidental, exposure to this new site design: I innocently opened /. in a tab and had to force quit Iceweasel and close down vmware. I guess my choice now is, I can do all the things I've grown accustomed to doing on this computer, or I can read slashdot.
Seriously, /. - WTF?
Perhaps one solution to consider would be the ability to put the device into a state where nothing but the phone is running - i.e. all other apps are just blocked until the call is released. Alternatively, the phone data in / out could be sandboxed from the rest of the OS. This would be a special mode since there are legitimate uses for this (tone dialing, call recording, etc.), but should be available to switch on when needed (or take the reverse approach and have it on by default, switched off when desired).
I'm not sure if the Android API would allow building an app for this, or if something at a lower-level would be required.... Anyway, feel free to implement this and send me the royalty cheques if you can. Just google for my banking info.
Article: "People have been known to cut themselves when using these really sharp knives. Maybe they should have additional safety features."
You: "Yeah, but those knives wouldn't even get through the door of the prison I live in. Why doesn't everybody just live in a prison like me?"
While "Hardware Controls" seems intuitive for the stated purpose, "Read Phone State and Identity" is fairly common, too. Almost every application will do things differently - whether operating in the foreground or background - depending on whether you are using the phone at the time. E.g. whether to play a sound or ring an alarm. This is one permission I (and I hate to admit it) would barely think twice before granting to just about any app.
On edit, I have to add that I think another factor here is that the w3c purist types see JS as a core web technology, and a better choice for implementing a feature (e.g. animation) than, say Flash (or, worse, an ActiveX control). As CSS and libraries such as JQuery mature, there is a tendency to do things that way rather than relying on an external plugin to execute some functionality. The more this happens, especially in a multi-tabbed browser world, the more JS engine performance counts.
YOU might not want to do FFT in your browser, but there are a lot of companies / coders building websites that want you to. I couldn't tell whether AC was joking about the "cloudscope space is universal" (did AC mean "cloudscape"?), but there's something there. I don't like it either, but ever since Web 2.0 got rolling, the effort has been to offload processing from servers while centralizing control of the data. It's part of the new way, brother.
Hmmm.... if the train was going fast enough for relativistic effects to kick in, then this would make the computer *even faster*. You, sir / ma'am, are brilliant!
Thread over. We have a winner. OP said s/he wasn't interested in 3d gfx, so the matter is settled. :D
Yes, but if we're going to parse the words that closely, I'll jump in on the side of the OP. Perhaps it's true to say, strictly speaking, that the WAP itself is "unsecured". But if the WAP is unsecured by design (i.e. the design of the *network*), than I'd say it's inaccurate to say that "the network is unsecured".
I leave my AP open to the public on purpose. I have no less fear of an attack on one of the machines hosted on that network through the wireless interface on the router than I do through the WAN interface. The only part of the network that would be "unsecured" due to the AP being open would be a box (ahem, windows) that was connected to it without my knowledge and is listening for connections.
Oh, what? MitM attacks? Puh-lease. Again, the network is no less secure through the open WAP than it is through the WAN interface.
I wish I could give mod points to whoever tagged this story "tuttle". That was the first thought that popped into my head. If you're on /. you should already know, but for the youngun's out there:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
As a sysadmin, the points about maintenance and downtime really resonate with me. And then there's crap like having a team of 10 to 20 staff (many of them very senior) standing around scratching themselves due to some bug or shortcoming (often just in the UI) that would've taken an hour or two to implement. The cost of *not* writing software can be astronomical. As a more concrete example, I worked in a shop that used LDAP to authenticate a myriad of services (desktop signon, shared volumes, shell access, web applications, mail, etc.), but there were some "glitches" in the LDAP schema and the clients weren't always properly configured to use them anyway. Fixing the issue completely would've taken maybe 30 hours. Writing our own web app to create/modify accounts with a step-by-step set of screens that implemented our business logic for new accounts might've taken 150 hours. But doing something like that would be too costly. Better to eat up an average of 5 hours per week of sysadmins time diagnosing trouble with sign-in to individual services, another 5 hours of the staff's time who were trying to sign in, and the occasional 5-10 hour patch of yak shaving when someone stumbled into the thicket accidentally once a month. And on top of *that* are all the dirty little secrets of employee behaviour to work around the shortcomings of the system.
Thank you for saying this! You're exactly right: A GUI only sysadmin is like a tone-deaf recording engineer. Sure, their face doesn't go on the cover of the album, but if they don't understand what they're handling, they can wreck the entire product.
> All these root operators that have only one site need a good swift kick...
Alright, anonymous coward, I nominate YOU to be the one to go and give the US Army a "good swift kick". See ya when you get back!
Hmmm... maybe we should ask Mr. Gathered Mass why he keeps changing his mind. Oh, what's that? You're talking about millions of *different* people holding *different* opinions? Wow, who would've thought! I think you've found the real story in all of this: apparently, not everybody feels the exact same way about different, although similar, events. Thanks for sharing this insight - you just blew my mind.
Hey Mods! I'm getting modded funny here, but I'm not kidding - I still can't check my email and this is frustrating, not funny at all. I didn't feel like gogling this for my original post, but to make this one worthwhile, I present Exhibit A: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392
Ironically, I came to read the comments here while waiting for my webmail to load. By the time I finished reading these comments, the spinner on my other tab had stopped. The result?
The parent is right. I try not to get involved in platform wars, but the same hardware running windows + mssql + iis + asp.net simply cannot keep up with any *nix + mysql + apache + php stack. Not to mention the security vulnerabilities. The only reason msft products are as popular as they are is because msft spent decades perfecting a business model that involved cultivating relationships with consultants and resellers who would do *whatever it takes* to convince their customer to buy a msft solution. Second biggest reason for their success was enterprise purchasing policies whereby the company would rather buy the crap they knew than take a risk on an unknown. Third was msft purchasing products that actually were well-made (and eventually turning them into pulp - even Excel is starting to go that way).
Wow, to hear you tell the story, I'd say ITAR is doing a great job at driving innovation. I say keep it in place! Of course, I'm not american, either.
All kidding aside, I think it would be helpful to americans if they could distinguish between what helps their country and what helps certain powerful interests in their country. I don't see much evidence that many of you folk can.
As a member of my school's logo team from grades 5 through 7, I wanted to thank you for bringing back some really fond memories. They only taught it for one week in class, but for those of us who kept playing with it outside the classroom, it taught so many skills - and things like geo-spatial visualization are valuable outside of strict IT.
Even if they updated the code, though, I don't think many computers these days have a cassette deck for loading the program anyway. :P
I have to wonder if the founders of google have spent most of the last decade having laughing fits over their motto, which makes a promise through negation of a subjective term.
Do no evil.
What does that even mean? Oh, they're going to thump their chests toward China? (admittedly, that's more than most western governments are willing to do these days, but I digress...)
What about the company's mission statement:
To organize the world's information.
Well, it would be difficult to argue the case that this is, in and of itself, evil, but when you consider what "the world's information" encompases, and what controlling that means, it's hard to think otherwise.
Now, a little more on topic, it's clear that google's amassed an army of lawyers and PR Flacks to rival their army of programmers. Makes me wonder whether their business model / management style is just to ensure they are the employer for all the world's language masters - be it natural or artificial. But, hey - free webmail!
The part of the picture which I think you're missing is this: the copies may be missing information that the originals contain. This is certainly the case if WikiLeaks is editing them (redacting text) before releasing them. If the files have been tampered with, they may not be admissible as evidence in a court, or they may not be as compelling to a jury, even if they are. There are legal standards for admitting digital evidence, and then there are the forensic experts, of course. Telling a court, "here's a file I downloaded from bittorrent, and it looks pretty legit" isn't going to cut it. If the pentagon manages to get the originals back, they might just save Cheney, Powell, Rice, Bush, Wolfowitz, etc. from a public hanging.
Quick Julian! Get a copy of those files over to The Hague ASAP. Then you can hand back the originals to avoid the full force of the US government coming at you. Don't worry - the statute of limitations for war crimes never expires. If there is justice in this world, everyone who's touched the US's dirty wars - from Colin Powell to Barack Obama, will be imprisoned for life (or worse - I'm looking at you Herr Cheney!).
As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest news of my week. Bigger than Old Spice guy. Bigger than jive. I support the GPL and the developers of WordPress, but I also feel some sympathy for those who want to get paid to come up with beautiful styles for WordPress blogs. I think Mark's post addresses that pretty well, though.
What I'm wondering, though, is this: do WP theme developers such as the Thesis folks have any other protection for their product? That is, can they argue that their code is GPL, but the visual result is something they own the copyright on? Or, can the resulting aesthetic effect be looked at as an unregistered trademark, which only the creator can license for re-use, regardless of whether the html / css / js code is freely redistributable under the GPL?
Anyone get what I mean? Bruce, you there? ;)