The good thing about passwords is that they can be changed if forgotten or compromised. If a system that uses biometric information is compromised, you don't have that option - I can't change my retinal pattern or finger prints.
I can think of a need for it - I spend somewhere in the region of 10-12 hours a day staring at my monitor (7-8 of them due to work). Given that I'm spending that long looking at it, what I'm looking at had better be pleasing to my eye.
That's part of the reason why I switched from Mandrake to XP - after a month or so of using XP, 'drake just looked plain and flat in comparison. A small thing, but important to me, all other things being pretty-much equal.
You're not the intended recipient of this sort of computer, though, and you're far from an average user.
I could read the post using telnet if I had to, but that doesn't mean that I'd want to, and it doesn't meant that other people should be able to or have to.
That really depends on what you're doing with your machine. For the type of work I do (server-side Java stuff) and the way I do it (using an IDE rather than vi and ant) there's no way I'd get acceptable performance using a thin client connecting to a shared server.
As in all things, there is no silver bullet, no one right way to do it. Thin clients have their place, but so do hulking great workstations.
For what it's worth, I use a 3GHz Dell with a gig of RAM, and that's silent too, unless something is eating the processor (as Word tends to do at times...).
ProPlus is the main (only?) brand of caffeinated pep-pills here in the UK; their tag-line is "for relief of temporary tiredness" or somesuch.
Sure enough, in the results they show that I never even make it as awake as "little sleepy", let alone "alert". If that were true, I'd have been out of a job (or dead from lack of attention when crossing the road) a long, long time ago. Funny then that I spend most of my Saturdays dancing from around midnight til 7:30am, and all without any chemical assistance...
Yes - due process is due process, no matter what a person is accused of.
People involved in creating kiddie porn are scum, but that's no reason to treat them differently, especially before their guilt has been proved. In fact, if anything given the general attitude towards crimes of this type, even more care should be taken.
A few years ago here in the UK, there was general outcry after a little girl was abused and murdered; it sparked off a number of demonstrations by people demanding that the public be made aware of the locations of known sex offenders. During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia.
It's a highly emotive issue, and so you have to be very careful. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person "because it's kiddie porn" may well get innocent people killed.
the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back
Assuming we're thinking of the same report, that was a report of speculation from another site as to what MS was going to recommend by way of specs for Longhorn.
I don't recall having seen any confirmed official specs yet. It's funny how these things get accepted as fact without any substantiation...
*All* my spam still quotes prices in USD, and are written in English. The companies doing the spamming, and those they are spamming for, are most likely American.
Take them down, and you'll get some results. Start blocking IP addresses and eventually, you'll just be talking to yourself.
That hardly seems fair; there's no way that every single employee would be responsible. Hell, in any given company, the vast majority of employees don't even know everything that's going on. They just do their bit and go home.
You would apparently have the canteen staff and the receptionists thrown in jail because one high-level manager hushed up a report and so caused some deaths...
It's more like them not allowing people to sit at home and read their catalogue wearing glasses that occasionally display adverts to the wearer.
I can understand why they'd want to prevent this, but really, it's my PC. If I want to install software on it that pops up ads for competitors while browsing certain websites, I should be allowed to do so.
Think of it this way - what if it wasn't ads, but price comparison information? Or third-party reviews of the products you're browsing? No doubt a lot of retailers would prefer that not to happen too, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent me from accessing that sort of information at the same time, even if it is retrieved automatically on accessing their website.
It's my PC, my bandwidth, my choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.
That's argument by appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. Many inteliigent, respected people have believed many things throught history, and have been wrong.
Until a court in your jurisdiction rules otherwise, it's safest to assume that the licence is binding, and act accordingly. No-one is going to be taken to court for doing this sort of thing - there's absolutely nothing to be gained from it.
Intent does, and I don't think you'd get very far at all playing semantic games like that, were it to come to a court. The intent of the licence, that you can only run OS X on Apple hardware, is clear.
(Insert disclaimer about such licences not having been tested fully in court, yadda yadda)
Inconvenience to me of leaving my phone in the car when filling up: essentially zero.
Inconvenience to me of going up in a ball of flames if it turns out the stories are true: potentially life-altering.
Really, as far as risk management goes, this one seems to me to be a no-brainer. I don't need to make or take a call while filling up my car; if the call is that urgent, the car can wait, and vice-versa.
Re:Actually sounds like somebody trying to fix thi
on
A Worm's Worm
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· Score: 1
Which is exactly what the military does with some of its really secure stuff.
My company has done a little work for a couple of UK governmental departments, and they do exactly this too. I can't go into details (and don't really know all that much), but they have some very strict rules about what can and cannot be connected to the internet, and what can and cannot access their secure network. For example, one particular feature required a data feed from a third party.
It actually made deployment and testing of the website we were developing a bit of a pain at times, as we could only access it from a secured room, which had no access to the rest of our network (and which itself was accessed by swipe card and pin code)
Re:OS Popularity?
on
A Worm's Worm
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
On the other hand, though, I'd be utterly amazed if worm writers don't take apart existing worms when preparing to write a new one. Learn from what has gone before and all that. I'd expect that what's happened is not just that Sasser is so widespread that someone decided to exploit it, but that someone was studying it, noticed the exploit, and went for a quick and easy route to write a new worm.
Also, iirc a program I saw a couple of months ago, famously one prisoner refused his last drink (as some did), and so was hanged earlier than he might have been. Had he accepted the drink, his stay of execution would have arrived at Tyburn before him, and he would have lived.
Apparently, after that, very few prisoners refused the drink.
1) so they can sell new versions 2) so they can stop supporting old ones
The more products you have to support, the more support staff you have to pay. If you're not charging for that support (and patches, updates, etc are free and included in this definition of support) then as your support team grows, so do your costs, with no (direct) increase in revenue to fund them.
The difference here is if I contact MS and offer them, say $10m/year to provide on-demand support for me for my machines running NT4, then
1) that more than pays for a dedicated team 2) the price I'm paying far more than offsets my not purchasing a newer version of Windows
In general yes, of course MS want people to upgrade. But for specific, exceptional cases, it may well be in their interests to come to an arrangement of some kind. It just depends on the money.
I'd imagine that if yo wave enough money at the right person at Microsoft, you'd buy yourself as much support for whatever product of theirs as you liked.
I can't think of a single company that wouldn't keep a dedicated team employed if paid to do so. All you have to do is cover the costs plus some profit - I can't think of a reason not to.
As long as Bill Gates isn't using all of his money to buy all the slashdot virgins blowjobs from Carmen Electra, they can't do anything right.
You're not being imaginative enough - even if he did that, you'd hear complaints from the non-virgin slashdotters, the gay and straight female ones, the ones that prefer other acts to oral sex, the attached ones, and the ones that just plain don't fancy Carmen Electra.
Hell, when they included a firewall in XP they got bashed for encroaching on the third-party firewall market, for not enabling it by default, and for not making it good enough.
Nothing short of open sourcing their entire codebase under the GPL would satisfy the slashdot collective - and even that would get them bashed for allowing crackers and script kiddies to see all the so-far undiscovered security holes.
God didn't create the Earth in seven days, He created *everything* in seven days; the earth took the last few of them. Before starting on the Earth, He created everything else - Gamma Epsilon 7 would, presumably, have been created then.
[Disclaimer: I am not a Christian, I've never even read the Bible, etc]
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing about passwords is that they can be changed if forgotten or compromised. If a system that uses biometric information is compromised, you don't have that option - I can't change my retinal pattern or finger prints.
I can think of a need for it - I spend somewhere in the region of 10-12 hours a day staring at my monitor (7-8 of them due to work). Given that I'm spending that long looking at it, what I'm looking at had better be pleasing to my eye.
That's part of the reason why I switched from Mandrake to XP - after a month or so of using XP, 'drake just looked plain and flat in comparison. A small thing, but important to me, all other things being pretty-much equal.
You're not the intended recipient of this sort of computer, though, and you're far from an average user.
I could read the post using telnet if I had to, but that doesn't mean that I'd want to, and it doesn't meant that other people should be able to or have to.
thin clients are the future.
That really depends on what you're doing with your machine. For the type of work I do (server-side Java stuff) and the way I do it (using an IDE rather than vi and ant) there's no way I'd get acceptable performance using a thin client connecting to a shared server.
As in all things, there is no silver bullet, no one right way to do it. Thin clients have their place, but so do hulking great workstations.
For what it's worth, I use a 3GHz Dell with a gig of RAM, and that's silent too, unless something is eating the processor (as Word tends to do at times...).
ProPlus is the main (only?) brand of caffeinated pep-pills here in the UK; their tag-line is "for relief of temporary tiredness" or somesuch.
Sure enough, in the results they show that I never even make it as awake as "little sleepy", let alone "alert". If that were true, I'd have been out of a job (or dead from lack of attention when crossing the road) a long, long time ago. Funny then that I spend most of my Saturdays dancing from around midnight til 7:30am, and all without any chemical assistance...
Yes - due process is due process, no matter what a person is accused of.
People involved in creating kiddie porn are scum, but that's no reason to treat them differently, especially before their guilt has been proved. In fact, if anything given the general attitude towards crimes of this type, even more care should be taken.
A few years ago here in the UK, there was general outcry after a little girl was abused and murdered; it sparked off a number of demonstrations by people demanding that the public be made aware of the locations of known sex offenders. During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia.
It's a highly emotive issue, and so you have to be very careful. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person "because it's kiddie porn" may well get innocent people killed.
the Longhorn minimum standards reported on Slashdot a while back
Assuming we're thinking of the same report, that was a report of speculation from another site as to what MS was going to recommend by way of specs for Longhorn.
I don't recall having seen any confirmed official specs yet. It's funny how these things get accepted as fact without any substantiation...
Yeah, that's right - give them ideas. Oh, you're laughing now, but you won't be when they actually do it!
*All* my spam still quotes prices in USD, and are written in English. The companies doing the spamming, and those they are spamming for, are most likely American.
Take them down, and you'll get some results. Start blocking IP addresses and eventually, you'll just be talking to yourself.
Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church, not the physics community (although I dare say they didn't exactly leap to his defence, either).
That hardly seems fair; there's no way that every single employee would be responsible. Hell, in any given company, the vast majority of employees don't even know everything that's going on. They just do their bit and go home.
You would apparently have the canteen staff and the receptionists thrown in jail because one high-level manager hushed up a report and so caused some deaths...
No - you can also right click "My Computer", choose "Manage", choose "Disk Defragmenter", click "Analyze".
I agree with you about the Start button thing, though...
It's more like them not allowing people to sit at home and read their catalogue wearing glasses that occasionally display adverts to the wearer.
I can understand why they'd want to prevent this, but really, it's my PC. If I want to install software on it that pops up ads for competitors while browsing certain websites, I should be allowed to do so.
Think of it this way - what if it wasn't ads, but price comparison information? Or third-party reviews of the products you're browsing? No doubt a lot of retailers would prefer that not to happen too, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent me from accessing that sort of information at the same time, even if it is retrieved automatically on accessing their website.
It's my PC, my bandwidth, my choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.
That's argument by appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. Many inteliigent, respected people have believed many things throught history, and have been wrong.
Until a court in your jurisdiction rules otherwise, it's safest to assume that the licence is binding, and act accordingly. No-one is going to be taken to court for doing this sort of thing - there's absolutely nothing to be gained from it.
Does capitalization have any weight in court?
Intent does, and I don't think you'd get very far at all playing semantic games like that, were it to come to a court. The intent of the licence, that you can only run OS X on Apple hardware, is clear.
(Insert disclaimer about such licences not having been tested fully in court, yadda yadda)
Inconvenience to me of leaving my phone in the car when filling up: essentially zero.
Inconvenience to me of going up in a ball of flames if it turns out the stories are true: potentially life-altering.
Really, as far as risk management goes, this one seems to me to be a no-brainer. I don't need to make or take a call while filling up my car; if the call is that urgent, the car can wait, and vice-versa.
Which is exactly what the military does with some of its really secure stuff.
My company has done a little work for a couple of UK governmental departments, and they do exactly this too. I can't go into details (and don't really know all that much), but they have some very strict rules about what can and cannot be connected to the internet, and what can and cannot access their secure network. For example, one particular feature required a data feed from a third party.
It actually made deployment and testing of the website we were developing a bit of a pain at times, as we could only access it from a secured room, which had no access to the rest of our network (and which itself was accessed by swipe card and pin code)
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
On the other hand, though, I'd be utterly amazed if worm writers don't take apart existing worms when preparing to write a new one. Learn from what has gone before and all that. I'd expect that what's happened is not just that Sasser is so widespread that someone decided to exploit it, but that someone was studying it, noticed the exploit, and went for a quick and easy route to write a new worm.
Also, iirc a program I saw a couple of months ago, famously one prisoner refused his last drink (as some did), and so was hanged earlier than he might have been. Had he accepted the drink, his stay of execution would have arrived at Tyburn before him, and he would have lived.
Apparently, after that, very few prisoners refused the drink.
Not only that, but at one point he speaks of the atoms in the protons (or words to that effect). Sloppy journalism is my guess.
There are two reasons for that:
1) so they can sell new versions
2) so they can stop supporting old ones
The more products you have to support, the more support staff you have to pay. If you're not charging for that support (and patches, updates, etc are free and included in this definition of support) then as your support team grows, so do your costs, with no (direct) increase in revenue to fund them.
The difference here is if I contact MS and offer them, say $10m/year to provide on-demand support for me for my machines running NT4, then
1) that more than pays for a dedicated team
2) the price I'm paying far more than offsets my not purchasing a newer version of Windows
In general yes, of course MS want people to upgrade. But for specific, exceptional cases, it may well be in their interests to come to an arrangement of some kind. It just depends on the money.
I'd imagine that if yo wave enough money at the right person at Microsoft, you'd buy yourself as much support for whatever product of theirs as you liked.
I can't think of a single company that wouldn't keep a dedicated team employed if paid to do so. All you have to do is cover the costs plus some profit - I can't think of a reason not to.
As long as Bill Gates isn't using all of his money to buy all the slashdot virgins blowjobs from Carmen Electra, they can't do anything right.
You're not being imaginative enough - even if he did that, you'd hear complaints from the non-virgin slashdotters, the gay and straight female ones, the ones that prefer other acts to oral sex, the attached ones, and the ones that just plain don't fancy Carmen Electra.
Hell, when they included a firewall in XP they got bashed for encroaching on the third-party firewall market, for not enabling it by default, and for not making it good enough.
Nothing short of open sourcing their entire codebase under the GPL would satisfy the slashdot collective - and even that would get them bashed for allowing crackers and script kiddies to see all the so-far undiscovered security holes.
No, but ridiculing something that some people take seriously enough to shape their whole lives around certainly *is* flamebait.
I may not believe myself, but I certainly wouldn't refer to any religion as a "ludicrous old superstition".
God didn't create the Earth in seven days, He created *everything* in seven days; the earth took the last few of them. Before starting on the Earth, He created everything else - Gamma Epsilon 7 would, presumably, have been created then.
[Disclaimer: I am not a Christian, I've never even read the Bible, etc]