Well, Firefox does, although it's off by default and requires a site to be whitelisted. Globally allowing silent access to the clipboard is shockingly bad, though, even if in the vast majority of cases the contents will be perfectly benign; it speaks volumes about the general attitude towards security.
Microsoft (and other software companies, but MS gets the most attention for it) spent years working under the paradigm where making things more convenient and/or more powerful for the user was the most important thing you could do to get people to use and buy your product.
When the first version of this book appeared in 1991, many people thought that the words "UNIX security" were an oxymoron-two words that appeared to contradict each other, much like the words "jumbo shrimp" or "Congressional action." After all, the ease with which a UNIX guru could break into a system, seize control, and wreak havoc was legendary in the computer community. Some people couldn't even imagine that a computer running UNIX could be made secure.
The various flavours of UNIX have come a long, long way since 1991. So have MS; but they have had farther to go, started later and have not been travelling nearly as fast. A modern Windows PC in skilled/sensible hands is safe enough, but so many are in less than optimal hands...
Other businesses have the privilege of deciding where to do business and open/close stores. Telecoms deserve the same right!
Any company that has a (local) monopoly or near-monopoly on an essential service does not deserve that right. Your comparison to other businesses is a red herring, unless those businesses also provide essential services. Utility companies should be compelled to offer service to all in a serviced area; some things are more important than maximising profit.
If they logged in, that should be recorded; if the user let them use their own account, they will know who it was.
maybe they had the user's password
Password sharing should probably be a disciplinary offence, precisely because it allows users to act maliciously then plausibly deny their actions - "It wasn't me, but a few people know my password..."
often no one logged off so ANYONE could install stuff on the computer
Again, leaving your machine logged in, unlocked and unattended for significant periods of time should be a disciplinary offence, for the same reason as password sharing. Where I work policy is that the screensaver should kick in after 2 minutes and require a password; I personally almost never leave my desk without hitting winkey-L (lock screen).
I do appreciate what you're saying, but to my mind if a user allows or fails to take reasonable steps to prevent someone else from screwing their machine up, then they deserve admin access even less than if they screwed it up themselves...
At the end of the day though, I don't admin PCs, I'm a programmer, so I can talk all I want but ultimately I don't know shit. All I know is that my job is easier having local admin access, and I'd fight to keep it if necessary (and have done so in the past, successfully), and that denying it to trustworthy users because of a few idiots doesn't seem fair. (Although I certainly appreciate that a blanket deny is easier for the IT support folk)
It "recycles" the + operator (which usually is used for adding numbers) to concatenate strings.
The technical term for that is "overloads".
JavaScript runs on the client side -- meaning no webmaster can ever know for sure what JavaScript engine is in use.
There are some tricks that you can perform to try to work it out. You could also do something server-side by sniffing the user-agent header and comparing it to a list to take an educated guess at the likely level of support.
Of course, given that (according to the linked page) not all browsers respect the language attribute and of course user-agent headers can be faked or missing, you can't rely on it. The usual method to ensure compliance is simply to test against a specified subset of browsers and support only them; that doesn't necessarily mean locking out all other browsers, but you should at least make users aware that they may experience some turbulence...
Well, I'm not wrong about the article summary being wrong, and I'm not wrong about not everyone having a computer with a USB port (and I never even mentioned laptops), so at best I'm wrong about the need for such a computer in order to charge via USB, which was implied. So, I'm 66% right; not entirely sure that constitutes being "so wrong".
The summary says that phones "must use USB for charging". The fine article, however, says that "handsets sold there should be able to charge via USB".
There is a lot of difference between those two statements; the former makes absolutely no sense, as not every mobile phone user has a computer (or one with a USB port). The latter is a wonderful idea that frankly should be implemented as soon as humanly possible.
If you're worried about near computer-illiterates fubaring their machines, why not simply have a "one strike and you're out" sort of policy? Everyone gets a liberal security policy to start with - maybe even full local admin access. The first time you screw your machine up, it gets reimaged and locked down on the grounds that you can't be trusted not to screw it up again.
That lets those of us who know what we're doing and have never needed to call the support desk for anything other than hardware failure get on with our jobs with the minimum of inconvenience, while protecting those that clearly need to be hand-held.
Differently-sized objects being infinite in extent is actually (imho) an easy concept to grasp, if you think about it the right way. Consider the set of integers, for instance. Clearly infinite, you can count forever and never run out. Now consider the set of real numbers; also clearly infinite. However, you can also count forever between two integers - eg 2.000001, 2.000002, 2.000003, etc - just by making your increments arbitrarily small. Therefore, there is an infinite number of real numbers "between" each integer. Thus, while both the set of integers and the set of real numbers are infinite, the set of real numbers is bigger than the set of integers.
At least, it seems easy enough to me, but then I have a degree in physics, with all the attendance of quantum mechanics and relativity lectures that that implies...
It's late, and I just got back from drinking a lot of wine at my office Christmas party, so maybe I'm missing something, but bear with me and point it out politely, but as I see it we have the following:
1) MS do nothing about phishing, and are lambasted about a lack of security, not addressing the problem, etc
2) MS do something about phishing, and are lambasted about making it harder for unknown/sole traders to set up "trusted" websites
Do I have that right? MS do nothing, get slated, do something, get slated from the other direction? I mean, I hate M$ as much as the next frothing at the mouth Linux fanboi, but this really does strike me as a "can't win" situation for them...
Of course copyright owners have rights too: those rights are protected by a thing called "copyright".
And yet, a great many people here act as though they do not.
Copyright is a bargain, an agreement between Us (the non-creators) and Them (the creators). We started to break that agreement (by infringing copyright) long before They did (by implementing DRM). Now I'm not arguing whether or not Their response has on the whole been disproportionate, but We certainly seem to have brought it upon Ourselves.
If you read my post really, really carefully, you'll see that the only thing that I deny is that zealotry is unique to Linux fans; I say nothing about any bias that I may exhibit (and I surely do; I catch myself doing it sometimes, fate knows how many times I miss it). It's also the first I made in this particular thread; I used the word "zealot" merely to answer the question that was posed, nothing more or less.
Besides, although I personally do it rarely, I call people zealot when it seems to fit; the term has no particular negative connotations. From Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a zealot is
a person who has very strong opinions about something, and tries to make other people have them too
Nothing inherently negative in that; perhaps you should check your own bias. Given that definition (the only one listed, incidentally), in what way is RMS, Jobs, Gates or any similarly opinionated, outspoken person *not* a zealot?
Assuming that you're spending money heating your house in the winter, isn't it effectively impossible to "waste" electricity?
No - you could make your house hotter than it needs to be. Unlikely perhaps (if you're sensible), but certainly not impossible.
minus an irrelevant amount as light and kinetic energy
Which will end up as...? Some of the light will escape through the windows; the rest becomes heat. Friction will ultimately claim the kinetic energy, generating heat.
Why do you care? Yes, you, reading this comment now - you clicked through to the discussion; why? Me, I came in to ask this - I have zero interest in the Zune or its sales figures. I have a media player and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Your turn - why do you care how well or badly the Zune is faring? Unless you own stock, I don't see the relevance.
But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable
Which is precisely why the summary here (which let's face it is all a lot of people are going to read) being so unfavourable is so disappointing.
I appreciate that this is essentially Taco and Malda's hobby writ large, but even just a passing nod towards reality in the headlong rush to rubbish Vista as much as possible would be nice once in a while.
"Linux zealot," What is that and why would you bother to interview one?
You're new here, aren't you? Read any story here about Linux, OS X, BSD or Windows and you'll see plenty of ill-informed, poorly-reasoned, frothing at the mouth comments from people either supporting Linux or denigrating Windows, all based on incorrect supposition, out of date information that is no longer true, logical fallacies and a hefty sprinkling of FUD.
Not to say that you don't also get Windows zealots, OS X zealots, BSD zealots, Java zealots, C zealots, PHP zealots, perl zealots, Ruby zealots, and so on, all of whom act in the same way about their chosen irrational obsession, but you asked specifically about Linux zealots.
About the one good thing you can say about a zealot is that they make their own bias inescapably clear.
Yes - tin foil. Like the other respondent says, you need to put it in a Faraday cage; that's just an all-encompassing metal cage.
In other words, wrap it in tin foil. (If you want to get fancy, you can buy material with a conductive grid embedded in it, but not having used any I can't vouch for it. Should work in theory.)
The unlicensed ones aren't exactly cheap either, in my experience. Still, I live far enough out (Zone 6 on the District Line) that them not having any idea how to get back to the centre of London is revenge enough for me on those thankfully rare occasions that I have to get a cab home.
Is more tolerance too much to ask from grammar-NAZIS?
Not to mention that while football is by far the most common name here in the UK, we do call it soccer too (where do you think the Yanks got the word from?)
(Oh, and as I'm a grammar nazi too, I feel compelled to point out that "nazi" shouldn't be capitalised like that;) )
The quote says "dynamic laguages ([examples]) and C#" - it doesn't say "dynamic languages ([examples one of which is C#])".
In other words, he's not saying that C# is dynamic, he's saying that Java is losing ground to C# and dynamic languages. (Never mind that there appears to be no proof of that, and that it's not my experience, for what that's worth...)
Maybe you spend all your time salivating over your awesomely pretty menus and scrollbars, but some of us are too busy enjoying our interesting and fulfilling work to care what the menus look like.
And some of us want to be busy enjoying our interesting and fulfilling work in an environment that's pleasing to our eyes. Now that's an entirely subjective thing; what you see as pointless bling I may see as part of a pleasant backdrop. What you see as minimalist and functional I may see as drab and uninviting.
I agree that "grey is for boring people" is rubbish, but so is "pretty is an irrelevant and distracting waste of resources". I really don't see why people care what other people's desktops look like, let alone appear to get so worked up about it. I'm not going to try to force Aero on you if you don't try to force Classic on me; deal?
Slashdot Mirror
They DON'T IMPLEMENT such a stupid idea.
Well, Firefox does, although it's off by default and requires a site to be whitelisted. Globally allowing silent access to the clipboard is shockingly bad, though, even if in the vast majority of cases the contents will be perfectly benign; it speaks volumes about the general attitude towards security.
Don't forget that that includes UNIX; from the preface to O'Reilly's "Practical Unix and Internet Security":
The various flavours of UNIX have come a long, long way since 1991. So have MS; but they have had farther to go, started later and have not been travelling nearly as fast. A modern Windows PC in skilled/sensible hands is safe enough, but so many are in less than optimal hands...
Other businesses have the privilege of deciding where to do business and open/close stores. Telecoms deserve the same right!
Any company that has a (local) monopoly or near-monopoly on an essential service does not deserve that right. Your comparison to other businesses is a red herring, unless those businesses also provide essential services. Utility companies should be compelled to offer service to all in a serviced area; some things are more important than maximising profit.
But someone else may have been on the computer
If they logged in, that should be recorded; if the user let them use their own account, they will know who it was.
maybe they had the user's password
Password sharing should probably be a disciplinary offence, precisely because it allows users to act maliciously then plausibly deny their actions - "It wasn't me, but a few people know my password..."
often no one logged off so ANYONE could install stuff on the computer
Again, leaving your machine logged in, unlocked and unattended for significant periods of time should be a disciplinary offence, for the same reason as password sharing. Where I work policy is that the screensaver should kick in after 2 minutes and require a password; I personally almost never leave my desk without hitting winkey-L (lock screen).
I do appreciate what you're saying, but to my mind if a user allows or fails to take reasonable steps to prevent someone else from screwing their machine up, then they deserve admin access even less than if they screwed it up themselves...
At the end of the day though, I don't admin PCs, I'm a programmer, so I can talk all I want but ultimately I don't know shit. All I know is that my job is easier having local admin access, and I'd fight to keep it if necessary (and have done so in the past, successfully), and that denying it to trustworthy users because of a few idiots doesn't seem fair. (Although I certainly appreciate that a blanket deny is easier for the IT support folk)
It "recycles" the + operator (which usually is used for adding numbers) to concatenate strings.
The technical term for that is "overloads".
JavaScript runs on the client side -- meaning no webmaster can ever know for sure what JavaScript engine is in use.
There are some tricks that you can perform to try to work it out. You could also do something server-side by sniffing the user-agent header and comparing it to a list to take an educated guess at the likely level of support.
Of course, given that (according to the linked page) not all browsers respect the language attribute and of course user-agent headers can be faked or missing, you can't rely on it. The usual method to ensure compliance is simply to test against a specified subset of browsers and support only them; that doesn't necessarily mean locking out all other browsers, but you should at least make users aware that they may experience some turbulence...
Well, I'm not wrong about the article summary being wrong, and I'm not wrong about not everyone having a computer with a USB port (and I never even mentioned laptops), so at best I'm wrong about the need for such a computer in order to charge via USB, which was implied. So, I'm 66% right; not entirely sure that constitutes being "so wrong".
The summary says that phones "must use USB for charging". The fine article, however, says that "handsets sold there should be able to charge via USB".
There is a lot of difference between those two statements; the former makes absolutely no sense, as not every mobile phone user has a computer (or one with a USB port). The latter is a wonderful idea that frankly should be implemented as soon as humanly possible.
If you're worried about near computer-illiterates fubaring their machines, why not simply have a "one strike and you're out" sort of policy? Everyone gets a liberal security policy to start with - maybe even full local admin access. The first time you screw your machine up, it gets reimaged and locked down on the grounds that you can't be trusted not to screw it up again.
That lets those of us who know what we're doing and have never needed to call the support desk for anything other than hardware failure get on with our jobs with the minimum of inconvenience, while protecting those that clearly need to be hand-held.
Differently-sized objects being infinite in extent is actually (imho) an easy concept to grasp, if you think about it the right way. Consider the set of integers, for instance. Clearly infinite, you can count forever and never run out. Now consider the set of real numbers; also clearly infinite. However, you can also count forever between two integers - eg 2.000001, 2.000002, 2.000003, etc - just by making your increments arbitrarily small. Therefore, there is an infinite number of real numbers "between" each integer. Thus, while both the set of integers and the set of real numbers are infinite, the set of real numbers is bigger than the set of integers.
At least, it seems easy enough to me, but then I have a degree in physics, with all the attendance of quantum mechanics and relativity lectures that that implies...
Ooh, nice unclosed anchor tag there. Teach me to not use the preview button - and to get 3 hours sleep...
I used to hang out on the , and questions about encrypting Java bytecode came up with surprising regularity. The number of people who simply didn't understand that what they wanted - to make it impossible to decompile the bytecode back to Java source - was impossible was quite staggering. All sorts of plausible-sounding solutions were mooted, but they are all ultimately worthless. As long as I control the hardware, there's nothing you can do to prevent me from seeing data processed by it, all you can do is try to make it difficult.
It's late, and I just got back from drinking a lot of wine at my office Christmas party, so maybe I'm missing something, but bear with me and point it out politely, but as I see it we have the following:
1) MS do nothing about phishing, and are lambasted about a lack of security, not addressing the problem, etc
2) MS do something about phishing, and are lambasted about making it harder for unknown/sole traders to set up "trusted" websites
Do I have that right? MS do nothing, get slated, do something, get slated from the other direction? I mean, I hate M$ as much as the next frothing at the mouth Linux fanboi, but this really does strike me as a "can't win" situation for them...
Of course copyright owners have rights too: those rights are protected by a thing called "copyright".
And yet, a great many people here act as though they do not.
Copyright is a bargain, an agreement between Us (the non-creators) and Them (the creators). We started to break that agreement (by infringing copyright) long before They did (by implementing DRM). Now I'm not arguing whether or not Their response has on the whole been disproportionate, but We certainly seem to have brought it upon Ourselves.
Besides, although I personally do it rarely, I call people zealot when it seems to fit; the term has no particular negative connotations. From Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a zealot is
Nothing inherently negative in that; perhaps you should check your own bias. Given that definition (the only one listed, incidentally), in what way is RMS, Jobs, Gates or any similarly opinionated, outspoken person *not* a zealot?
Assuming that you're spending money heating your house in the winter, isn't it effectively impossible to "waste" electricity?
No - you could make your house hotter than it needs to be. Unlikely perhaps (if you're sensible), but certainly not impossible.
minus an irrelevant amount as light and kinetic energy
Which will end up as...? Some of the light will escape through the windows; the rest becomes heat. Friction will ultimately claim the kinetic energy, generating heat.
Why do you care? Yes, you, reading this comment now - you clicked through to the discussion; why? Me, I came in to ask this - I have zero interest in the Zune or its sales figures. I have a media player and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Your turn - why do you care how well or badly the Zune is faring? Unless you own stock, I don't see the relevance.
So, would it be fair to say that your comment is out of date..?
But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable
Which is precisely why the summary here (which let's face it is all a lot of people are going to read) being so unfavourable is so disappointing.
I appreciate that this is essentially Taco and Malda's hobby writ large, but even just a passing nod towards reality in the headlong rush to rubbish Vista as much as possible would be nice once in a while.
"Linux zealot," What is that and why would you bother to interview one?
You're new here, aren't you? Read any story here about Linux, OS X, BSD or Windows and you'll see plenty of ill-informed, poorly-reasoned, frothing at the mouth comments from people either supporting Linux or denigrating Windows, all based on incorrect supposition, out of date information that is no longer true, logical fallacies and a hefty sprinkling of FUD.
Not to say that you don't also get Windows zealots, OS X zealots, BSD zealots, Java zealots, C zealots, PHP zealots, perl zealots, Ruby zealots, and so on, all of whom act in the same way about their chosen irrational obsession, but you asked specifically about Linux zealots.
About the one good thing you can say about a zealot is that they make their own bias inescapably clear.
Yes - tin foil. Like the other respondent says, you need to put it in a Faraday cage; that's just an all-encompassing metal cage.
In other words, wrap it in tin foil. (If you want to get fancy, you can buy material with a conductive grid embedded in it, but not having used any I can't vouch for it. Should work in theory.)
and legitimate cab fares are sky high
The unlicensed ones aren't exactly cheap either, in my experience. Still, I live far enough out (Zone 6 on the District Line) that them not having any idea how to get back to the centre of London is revenge enough for me on those thankfully rare occasions that I have to get a cab home.
Is more tolerance too much to ask from grammar-NAZIS?
;) )
Not to mention that while football is by far the most common name here in the UK, we do call it soccer too (where do you think the Yanks got the word from?)
(Oh, and as I'm a grammar nazi too, I feel compelled to point out that "nazi" shouldn't be capitalised like that
The quote says "dynamic laguages ([examples]) and C#" - it doesn't say "dynamic languages ([examples one of which is C#])".
In other words, he's not saying that C# is dynamic, he's saying that Java is losing ground to C# and dynamic languages. (Never mind that there appears to be no proof of that, and that it's not my experience, for what that's worth...)
Because I already have a perfectly adequate machine with a Windows licence; why would my employers spend the money to buy me a Mac?
Maybe you spend all your time salivating over your awesomely pretty menus and scrollbars, but some of us are too busy enjoying our interesting and fulfilling work to care what the menus look like.
And some of us want to be busy enjoying our interesting and fulfilling work in an environment that's pleasing to our eyes. Now that's an entirely subjective thing; what you see as pointless bling I may see as part of a pleasant backdrop. What you see as minimalist and functional I may see as drab and uninviting.
I agree that "grey is for boring people" is rubbish, but so is "pretty is an irrelevant and distracting waste of resources". I really don't see why people care what other people's desktops look like, let alone appear to get so worked up about it. I'm not going to try to force Aero on you if you don't try to force Classic on me; deal?