Kurt Vonnegut sort of agrees (about the reduced defenses) : "Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward â" and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."
Laughter is certainly not always pleasant, as anyone who's laughed to much will tell you. You know the laughter that borders on hysteria and sometimes ends in tears. It IS a cleansing experience though, your body's safety valve for letting out stored up emotion and frustration.
And it does make sense for two reasons:
1) Windows has to lock the drive anyways, so its better to get it done fast.
2) You CAN spend RAM. If the whole RAM isn't used, you're just wasting it. In this case chkdsk.exe will use dynamically what there is left, making the process faster. How is this a bad thing?
Rather than a bug or memory leak, this seems like an optimization.
Here's what I wonder when people advocate using all available RAM for running programs: what happens when I try to launch another program ? Parts will have to be swapped out, and again when the new program has a genuine need for more memory. You might say RAM is cheap, but swapping is still going to be slower than being frugal with memory in the first place. Keep mine lean and mean please, especially the recovery tools because I don't know what my system is going to look like when I need those.
Yeah, why the hell would Microsoft want to include proper drivers for the vendor that has 91% of the >$1000 PC market ? It's almost like they want only the vendors they can bully, like Dell, to succeed. Nah, surely not.
Yep, and "consumer" diamonds are a scam, only valuable because they're controlled by a cartel. This guy has a very nice write up about it. Most interesting about the whole thing is how the resell value is just really low.
This guy says it better than I could : "I can barely remember anything from the movie aside from the heinous product placement; the experience was equivalent to bending over and getting roughly bummed by Mr. Corporation, and being charged £7 for the privilege." ("Top 10 Worst Movies For Product Placement" - iRobot unsurprisingly taking the top spot)
They're not only evil. To add insult to insure they're also completely incompetent. As usual the Onion is spot on ("sony releases new stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work").
It's already ruined movies ("I-robot" was a string of commercials interrupted by what they claimed was a plot), music videos (looking at you "Black Eyed Peas") and now finally games. Hopefully it'll be a while before they reach books.
Actually Microsoft went in the opposite direction, hanging onto IBM's coattails which grew dominant in the office while Atari and Commodore were dominant at home (from 1980 to 1986). Then people started saying, "I want to bring my work to my home", and so they went and bought IBM PCs which became dominant from 1987 onward.
And yet the only reason they were there to be noticed by IBM at all was because their BASIC was on all the home computers including those very Atari's and Commodores. And the C64's BASIC was essentially the computer's OS (to the user at least).
We'll see how he'll like it once one of the components he's using gets dumped for a complete rewrite coming "real soon now"(TM), just use this 0.1.12alpha release in the meantime. And oh, you'll need to compile these parts from source 'cause there's no packages yet and now nothing works because the package manager just updated half the system and it can't find libc.so.5.
I mean really, he writes "mprove and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use." Was I ever that naive ? I might have been.
MS got there with pure dumb luck, shady business tactics and buying out potential competitors.
Yeah it was dumb luck that put MS BASIC on every home computer in the 80's. Then they just stumbled into the professional markets with COBOL and XENIX and DOS on the IBM. We should all be so dumb.
And yes, it's lazyness: he's a sysadmin, and he knows the security implications. He just chooses not to care.
He cares, he points it out to his clients and then he'll roll out what they tell him too. Just like we all do. It's really an opportunity for Google, they could just offer a security and confidentiality guarantee for a low monthly fee. No less risky than trusting the consultant who comes to set up your shop.
Lazy sysadmin wants to compromise his company to work less. News at 11.
Come on it's not just laziness. People use the Google apps at home, they do the job. It's no wonder they say "Why not use the same stuff at the office?" That's how MS got where they are after all, it also might be why they've got their panties in a twist over Google.
To these kinds of people alterations done to electrical equipment not done by a certified electrician could potentially cause short-circuits and fire. IIRC electrical fires are the main cause of home fires.
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
Um no. The most susceptible are killed off first and the more resistant or immune hosts survive and that limits the havoc the virus can cause. Like the village in England where descendants of the original inhabitants are immune to the black plague or the women in Africa who are HIV-immune. You don't have to shoot friggin' lazerbeams from your eyes to have a useful mutation:-) Sadly the inverse is true too: the "mild" european viruses were a disaster for the american indian after the white man came for example.
Is this type of attack only limited to trucrypt or can it affect other product?
From what I understand it could potentially affect other products unless they (properly) use TPM to avoid this kind of attack by checking MBR against a checksum.
is there a way to prevent it?
Get a mac! Not trolling, from TFA: "The attack is unsuccessful when the BIOS successor the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is at work on the motherboard." AFAIK Apple are the only vendor using EFI on their entire range at the moment. I guess mounting everything read-only, or using a BSD with the file immutable bit set on all system files would work too.
Have you read what I quoted? He issued this decree to kill the remnants of 'paganism' - a religious reason. The use of Christianity to solidify personal power is even more telling of the nature of religion.
I read it. It's just naive to accept the stated objective of those in power as fact (see "Operation Iraqi Freedom".) There's always a convenient excuse (values to be promoted, wrongs to be righted, etc) and religion has played that part often in history. Personally I believe this illustrates the mechanics of power more than those of religion. But I have to say I otherwise agree with with you saying religion has held science back.
A roman emperor decree is hardly "christians", it was probably more about solidifying his hold on a crumbling empire than about religious dogmatism. And it's equally unclear how destructive that decree was for the library ("The Serapeum once housed part of the Great Library, but it is not known how many, if any, books were contained in it at the time of destruction".)
I had always been taught the final destruction probably took places under the muslim rule, who had their fair share of "intellectual masturbation" periods (which was what I tried to illustrate with the quote). But at the very least the article shows that there is debate concerning the who and why of the destruction and if it was a single event. Definitely more nuanced than "christians did it."
But scholars at these universities only engaged in intellectual masturbation (i.e. religion). They produced ZERO useful results. Literally zero. Oh, and they even failed to preserve antic texts, overwriting old parchments with stupid prayers.
And what about the Library of Alexandria? It was destroyed by Christians.
Incorrect :
"Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria:
Julius Caesar's Fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BC
The attack of Aurelian in the third century AD;
The decree of Theophilus in AD 391;
The Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter."
Also remember that while the arabs kept copies of the classical greek and roman texts they did not incorporate them in there body of knowledge (especially the philosophical works) like the medieval scholars of europe did when they were rediscovered. From the same wikipedia page : "Several historians told varying accounts of an Arab army led by Amr ibn al 'Aas sacking the city in 642 after the Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of Heliopolis. Some historians, including Alfred J. Butler, argue that, when the commander Amr ibn al-Aas asked the Caliph Umar on what to do with the library he gave the famous answer: "They will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, in which case they are superfluous." It is said that the Arabs subsequently burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers"
My tax dollars are being used for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate subversive books? Is this a repeat from the 60s?
More like the 1800's:
"The fears of slave insurrections and the spread of abolitionist materials and ideology led to radical restrictions on gatherings, travel, and - of course -literacy. The ignorance of the slaves was coidered necessary to the security of the slaveholders (Albanese 1976). Not only did owners fear the spread of specifically abolitionist materials, they did not want slaves to question their lot; thus, reading and reflection were to be prevented at any cost."
Slashdot Mirror
Kurt Vonnegut sort of agrees (about the reduced defenses) : "Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward â" and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."
Laughter is certainly not always pleasant, as anyone who's laughed to much will tell you. You know the laughter that borders on hysteria and sometimes ends in tears. It IS a cleansing experience though, your body's safety valve for letting out stored up emotion and frustration.
And it does make sense for two reasons: 1) Windows has to lock the drive anyways, so its better to get it done fast. 2) You CAN spend RAM. If the whole RAM isn't used, you're just wasting it. In this case chkdsk.exe will use dynamically what there is left, making the process faster. How is this a bad thing?
Rather than a bug or memory leak, this seems like an optimization.
Here's what I wonder when people advocate using all available RAM for running programs: what happens when I try to launch another program ? Parts will have to be swapped out, and again when the new program has a genuine need for more memory. You might say RAM is cheap, but swapping is still going to be slower than being frugal with memory in the first place. Keep mine lean and mean please, especially the recovery tools because I don't know what my system is going to look like when I need those.
Yeah, why the hell would Microsoft want to include proper drivers for the vendor that has 91% of the >$1000 PC market ? It's almost like they want only the vendors they can bully, like Dell, to succeed. Nah, surely not.
I don't blame the MacBook. Having to use Windows drains my battery too.
If internet addition is now punishable by death, Slashdot is going to become a very, very lonely place.
*checks friends list* "You are alone in the world."
Bawww ?
Yep, and "consumer" diamonds are a scam, only valuable because they're controlled by a cartel. This guy has a very nice write up about it. Most interesting about the whole thing is how the resell value is just really low.
This guy says it better than I could : "I can barely remember anything from the movie aside from the heinous product placement; the experience was equivalent to bending over and getting roughly bummed by Mr. Corporation, and being charged £7 for the privilege." ("Top 10 Worst Movies For Product Placement" - iRobot unsurprisingly taking the top spot)
They're not only evil. To add insult to insure they're also completely incompetent. As usual the Onion is spot on ("sony releases new stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work").
It's already ruined movies ("I-robot" was a string of commercials interrupted by what they claimed was a plot), music videos (looking at you "Black Eyed Peas") and now finally games. Hopefully it'll be a while before they reach books.
Personally I'm of the David Lynch school on product placement.
Actually Microsoft went in the opposite direction, hanging onto IBM's coattails which grew dominant in the office while Atari and Commodore were dominant at home (from 1980 to 1986). Then people started saying, "I want to bring my work to my home", and so they went and bought IBM PCs which became dominant from 1987 onward.
And yet the only reason they were there to be noticed by IBM at all was because their BASIC was on all the home computers including those very Atari's and Commodores. And the C64's BASIC was essentially the computer's OS (to the user at least).
We'll see how he'll like it once one of the components he's using gets dumped for a complete rewrite coming "real soon now"(TM), just use this 0.1.12alpha release in the meantime. And oh, you'll need to compile these parts from source 'cause there's no packages yet and now nothing works because the package manager just updated half the system and it can't find libc.so.5.
I mean really, he writes "mprove and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use." Was I ever that naive ? I might have been.
MS got there with pure dumb luck, shady business tactics and buying out potential competitors.
Yeah it was dumb luck that put MS BASIC on every home computer in the 80's. Then they just stumbled into the professional markets with COBOL and XENIX and DOS on the IBM. We should all be so dumb.
And yes, it's lazyness: he's a sysadmin, and he knows the security implications. He just chooses not to care.
He cares, he points it out to his clients and then he'll roll out what they tell him too. Just like we all do. It's really an opportunity for Google, they could just offer a security and confidentiality guarantee for a low monthly fee. No less risky than trusting the consultant who comes to set up your shop.
Lazy sysadmin wants to compromise his company to work less. News at 11.
Come on it's not just laziness. People use the Google apps at home, they do the job. It's no wonder they say "Why not use the same stuff at the office?" That's how MS got where they are after all, it also might be why they've got their panties in a twist over Google.
To these kinds of people alterations done to electrical equipment not done by a certified electrician could potentially cause short-circuits and fire. IIRC electrical fires are the main cause of home fires.
The story made me think of this comic. "Your quota today is 5 pounds."
I read somewhere that Apple also has a line in consumer PC hardware.
Lies! They make luxury computing products for the discerning customer. ;-)
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
Um no. The most susceptible are killed off first and the more resistant or immune hosts survive and that limits the havoc the virus can cause. Like the village in England where descendants of the original inhabitants are immune to the black plague or the women in Africa who are HIV-immune. You don't have to shoot friggin' lazerbeams from your eyes to have a useful mutation :-) Sadly the inverse is true too: the "mild" european viruses were a disaster for the american indian after the white man came for example.
Is this type of attack only limited to trucrypt or can it affect other product?
From what I understand it could potentially affect other products unless they (properly) use TPM to avoid this kind of attack by checking MBR against a checksum.
is there a way to prevent it?
Get a mac! Not trolling, from TFA: "The attack is unsuccessful when the BIOS successor the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is at work on the motherboard." AFAIK Apple are the only vendor using EFI on their entire range at the moment. I guess mounting everything read-only, or using a BSD with the file immutable bit set on all system files would work too.
Have you read what I quoted? He issued this decree to kill the remnants of 'paganism' - a religious reason. The use of Christianity to solidify personal power is even more telling of the nature of religion.
I read it. It's just naive to accept the stated objective of those in power as fact (see "Operation Iraqi Freedom".) There's always a convenient excuse (values to be promoted, wrongs to be righted, etc) and religion has played that part often in history. Personally I believe this illustrates the mechanics of power more than those of religion. But I have to say I otherwise agree with with you saying religion has held science back.
A roman emperor decree is hardly "christians", it was probably more about solidifying his hold on a crumbling empire than about religious dogmatism. And it's equally unclear how destructive that decree was for the library ("The Serapeum once housed part of the Great Library, but it is not known how many, if any, books were contained in it at the time of destruction".)
I had always been taught the final destruction probably took places under the muslim rule, who had their fair share of "intellectual masturbation" periods (which was what I tried to illustrate with the quote). But at the very least the article shows that there is debate concerning the who and why of the destruction and if it was a single event. Definitely more nuanced than "christians did it."
Yes, the church built several universities.
But scholars at these universities only engaged in intellectual masturbation (i.e. religion). They produced ZERO useful results. Literally zero. Oh, and they even failed to preserve antic texts, overwriting old parchments with stupid prayers.
And what about the Library of Alexandria? It was destroyed by Christians.
Incorrect : "Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria: Julius Caesar's Fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BC The attack of Aurelian in the third century AD; The decree of Theophilus in AD 391; The Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter."
Also remember that while the arabs kept copies of the classical greek and roman texts they did not incorporate them in there body of knowledge (especially the philosophical works) like the medieval scholars of europe did when they were rediscovered. From the same wikipedia page : "Several historians told varying accounts of an Arab army led by Amr ibn al 'Aas sacking the city in 642 after the Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of Heliopolis. Some historians, including Alfred J. Butler, argue that, when the commander Amr ibn al-Aas asked the Caliph Umar on what to do with the library he gave the famous answer: "They will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, in which case they are superfluous." It is said that the Arabs subsequently burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers"
My tax dollars are being used for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate subversive books? Is this a repeat from the 60s?
More like the 1800's :
"The fears of slave insurrections and the spread of abolitionist materials and ideology led to radical restrictions on gatherings, travel, and - of course -literacy. The ignorance of the slaves was coidered necessary to the security of the slaveholders (Albanese 1976). Not only did owners fear the spread of specifically abolitionist materials, they did not want slaves to question their lot; thus, reading and reflection were to be prevented at any cost."
We've tried tracking them with satellite imagery but that only shows they aren't on the roof of their house.
Could be just inflation, but that's just my 5 cents