Don't worry so much about keeping your valuables safe. Keep yourself safe, keep your data safe, and protect your investment in those valuables.
Plenty of people have covered the "don't look like a target" angle. So let's address some other things you should do:
Find the local police's web site and read their advice on how to avoid getting mugged. Look at their crime statistics and figure out where the *truly* dangerous parts of town are (for mugging) as opposed to the places where you currently don't feel safe.
Get a laptop lock (if you don't have one already). Lock it to your desk at work, and to something immobile if you're at a hotel that doesn't have a safe in the room.
Prepare for the worst. No, that doesn't mean arming yourself with all sorts of weapons. You are not your laptop's bodyguard; you don't need to take a bullet (or knife wound or whatever) for it. You can't keep it on your person at all times. What if somebody steals it from your apartment, your luggage, your desk, etc.? (You don't take it with you to the bathroom do you?) What if it gets damaged in an accident? Are you going to use your pepper spray to help you rescue it from a burning building?
Get insurance (renter's or homeowners) and cover all your stuff. Do the math and set the deductible to a reasonable level like $250 or $500 so you're not paying a high premium just in case your iPod gets stolen. Write down the serial numbers of your equipment so that the police (and eBay, etc.) can be on the lookout for your stuff.
Do backups periodically. An external hard drive or CD/DVD burner isn't that expensive compared to how much it would cost to replace your data. Get in the habit of backing up your valuable stuff. Don't procrastinate backups until you have the ultimate automated backup solution in place; just set aside a time every week to do it manually if that's what it takes. Get in the habit of separating your vital data that needs frequent backups from your less important data (MP3s) that don't need to be backed up constantly. Theft and damage aren't the only risks to data - hard disks WILL crap out after a few years; it's just a matter of when, and carrying them around with you everywhere puts them at additional risk due to wear and tear, unstable temperature and humidity, not-necessarily-clean power, etc.
Use encryption where it makes sense. If somebody gets their hands on your laptop and has hours and hours to look through your files, is there anything on there that you need to protect? There probably is. The whole hard disk doesn't have to be encrypted but maybe a couple of folders do, or maybe your whole documents directory (the one that gets backed up most often and doesn't include huge files like music and movies and downloads). If you use a modern OS there is probably a really easy way to get an encrypted disk image or home directory set up that is mostly transparent when you use it.
Look into software that helps with stolen computer recovery. There are apps that will install in a very stealthy fashion that will phone home via modem or internet to the vendor. Report your laptop stolen and when it checks in, the vendor will figure out where the laptop is (via IP or phone lookup) and contact the police. There are things you can do (such as setting a BIOS password, and setting the boot order so that the hard disk boots before the CD) to make it really difficult to reinstall the OS on the computer so that these apps have a better chance of doing their job.
Re:It's overused because everything's in beta
on
Mo' Beta Testing Blues
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Beta testing doesn't mean "under development", it means "in a testing phase that includes customers / users". So, saying that software is always in beta because it's always in development is incorrect. Also, software is not always in development. Plenty of software apps are abandoned or put on life support (bug fixes only but no new features) by their owners.
A project that always adds features and fixes bugs at the same time is a very badly managed project. Beta testing is a phase in the software development lifecycle. It's a cycle for a reason: people want features and don't want bugs, but new features introduce new bugs. Every time you add features, you have to text and fix and get it back to a point of stability.
Any decently managed project has a cutoff period where new features are not allowed, so that bugs can be fixed to a point where the team decides that it's OK to release the software. Sometimes this is an ad-hoc decision balancing bug counts with market pressure, and sometimes it's just a threshold of bug counts of various severities. Then, when the release is done, the feature wish list is examined and the feature list for the next release is set.
Open source projects that rely mainly on code donors still do this, but they don't necessarily know exactly what features are going into the next version since they can't predict what code will be donated. Still, the folks managing the project must at some point decide that a release is needed, and work toward a stable, release-worthy point, or else the project will just be an ongoing death march of brokenness and half-completed features.
Beta means that the project team doesn't think that the code is releaseable yet, but it's past the point of feature cutoff, and past the internal testing phase. They're giving the users a chance to beat on the software to find any esoteric bugs that internal testing missed, before telling the world that the software is believed to be stable and correct.
>Name any other mp3 player you've ever seen an _advertisement_ for.
I dunno, do the catalogs that show up in the mail count?
>maybe the iPod sells so well because people don't know that there are other options?
Walk into any consumer electronics store EXCEPT the Apple store, and they have lots and lots of models of MP3 player to choose from.
I haven't seen a TV ad or a bus ad for these things, but it's not as though you have to speak a secret password to a retailer in order to be shown to the back room where the black market non-iPod MP3 players are sold.
I don't know why you single out Safari as being RAM-based, as though that were some revolutionary new idea in browsers. Safari does cache to disk and other browsers use RAM based caching too. Older versions of Netscape Navigator let you separately tune the memory and disk cache sizes. If you wanted a memory-only caching scheme you could just set the disk cache size to zero. You can probably do the same thing in other browsers too, if you think that forcing a network hit instead of a disk hit is somehow going to be faster.
Safari "wastes" (as you call it) plenty of time caching stuff to disk; look in your ~/Library/Caches/Safari folder (try "du -sk ~/Library/Caches/Safari" to see how much stuff is in there, in kilobytes).
For the curious, check out this guy's benchmarks: Mac Browser JavaScript Performance Also, on Apple's main Safari page they list benchmark results in a graph, and at the bottom in small print they refer to ZD's iBench, which might be something you could use if you really wanted to verify this yourself.
Some guy says that he thinks Macs may cost over $10K/yr to support 20 in no specific situation. You take that to be as well researched as a Gartner study.
Wow, that proof is just overwhelming. I can already imagine the hordes of MCSEs trading in their polo shirts and khakis for black mock turtlenecks and jeans.
CORRECT: My friend and I went to the store. The cashier gave me and my friend a funny look.
WRONG: My friend and me went to the store.
("Me went to the store" is wrong.) The cashier gave I and my friend a funny look.
("The cashier gave I a funny look" is wrong.)
>Why more programs aren't written in it is beyond me.
Lots and lots of programs are written in Java. The OSS community hasn't embraced Java, though, because it's not open-source.
Java also doesn't satisfy the "Lookie I can run stuff on my 486!" fetish quite as well as C does.
Based on what I've read about Perl 6 and Mono, I would say that Sun has a limited amount of time to open-source Java before the window of adoption closes as far as the open-source crowd is concerned. Obviously the tools and infrastructure stuff will have to catch up (since Java development tools and app servers etc. are generally fantastic) but I doubt that Java could last forever as an open-source product if IBM or someone of their stature started to support one of those other languages.
>imagine if instead of using google to do a text search for whatever was on your mind, you could >write a sql statement that actually represented the structure of resource web pages on the internet
Gee, I bet that would catch on just as well as end-users doing ad hoc queries in SQL.
Serious question: Who would service this query request? Would that be a new form of search that a search company like Google might provide?
>and brought you to a list of documents relating EXACTLY to the Something-RelatesTo-Something >sentence you had entered as your query!
No, it would bring you a list of documents claiming to be relevant to your query. The addition of structured metadata is nice, but it doesn't suddenly make everybody behave themselves. Porn sites will abuse it just like they abuse current search algorithms that are based on links, content text, and keywords.
Sun's argument is that Microsoft would hijack an open standard for Java.
However, I have yet to see an open standard that Microsoft has successfully hijacked, and they've definitely tried to do so many times. (They have made de facto proprietary standards that others have had to grudgingly support, but that's not the same thing.)
At this point the industry momentum behind Java is so strong that Microsoft could not successfully hijack it. There are too many companies (such as IBM) who have a large financial interest in keeping Java out of Microsoft's back pocket.
Also, Microsoft has committed to a language strategy now, and it would be very unlikely for them to reverse themselves (dropping C# in favor of an open standard Java) now.
Hmm, you've just elaborated on the point I was making, but you phrased it as though you're arguing with me...
so, um, yeah, like I said: the developer resources that are available (Erlang programmers, C++ programmers, etc.) should be factored into the decision of which language to use for a given project.
>What language should we choose for our new project?
Oh, hey, there you are. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were just looking for you. They said when they catch up with you, they're going to kick you in the nuts and take your computer away.
Oh yeah, and Florence Nightingale said you can just sit there and groan because nobody's going to fix your ruptured nut sack... and Ayn Rand says if you don't like that then SOVIET RUSSIA can just go back to YOU!
>Instead of just sitting there bashing shit cause it's from Microsoft why not try it out... and give it a chance. NTFS is honestly not a bad File System.
I won't try it out because the only implementation of NTFS that actually works is in Windows.
>What more do you want on a file system.
How about a specification document that someone other than the original vendor can read? How about an implementation that doesn't have "EXPERIMENTAL!!!" written all over it, that works on an OS that I actually want to use? You can try and point the finger at the folks who have tried to implement it outside of windows, but how the #@%@#$ are they supposed to know how it actually works without a written spec?
When I've used Windows, of course I used NTFS because it was either that, or FAT, and there's no contest there. I'm glad there was journaling, but if there wasn't, there wouldn't exactly be much I could do about that. With Microsoft, you get only what they give you, and your only choice is whether or not you're happy about it or not.
>>if you choose to measure in terms of total company assets, the way Forbes does when they compile their Global 500 list, Citigroup wins. They've got assets worth over $1 trillion. >Except it isn't a Global 500 list, it only includes US based companies
The Forbes Global 500 list isn't a global 500 list?
>Mizuho is bigger than Citigroup Not according to Forbes' data. You might be right if the exchange rate has changed things that much since they compiled their list.
"Biggest" depends on how you calculate it, of course (assets, sales, profits, market value, etc.) but Citigroup is at the top of Forbes' composite Forbes Global 2000 list. They are also at the top of the list ranked by assets. (Mizuho is #2.) Mizuho is not at the top of any list.
According to Forbes: Wal-Mart has the most sales in the world. ExxonMobil has the largest profits in the world. Microsoft is #6. Citigroup has the most assets in the world. Mizuho is #2; Deutche Bank is #7. General Electric has the highest market value in the world. Microsoft is #2.
>It's the risk-vs.-reward ratio. If you want to make it less attractive, the first thing to do is make it *harder*. When stealing someone's belongings doesn't require any breaking, just entering, it is more likely to happen.
And when it gets really easy to do, people do it so frequently and with so little consequence that they start to argue that it isn't really illegal anyway, or they blame the victim, or try and find some other way of rationalizing the crime.
Why is this so much better than a bunch of additional system memory?
Theoretically if you throw a bunch of RAM into a computer with a remotely modern OS, some of that memory will be used to buffer writes, and performance will improve. An exception would be in cases where applications go out of their way to force writes all the way to disk, such as in databases with their transaction logs.
Is the problem just that there are so many applications that sync() all the time, that a hardware buffering solution such as SSD is required because otherwise the OS's file buffers are constantly being flushed? (Yes I understand that SSD is persistent, or at least much more persistent than plain old RAM that dies when the power goes off.)
I can see the enterprise-friendly angle of "just add this disk and the whole system goes much faster" instead of trying to rewrite existing apps or tune the hell out of the OS. I'm just curious about particular cases where adding RAM doesn't work but SSD works well... are there enough to justify the existence of these devices?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry so much about keeping your valuables safe. Keep yourself safe, keep your data safe, and protect your investment in those valuables.
Plenty of people have covered the "don't look like a target" angle. So let's address some other things you should do:
Find the local police's web site and read their advice on how to avoid getting mugged. Look at their crime statistics and figure out where the *truly* dangerous parts of town are (for mugging) as opposed to the places where you currently don't feel safe.
Get a laptop lock (if you don't have one already). Lock it to your desk at work, and to something immobile if you're at a hotel that doesn't have a safe in the room.
Prepare for the worst. No, that doesn't mean arming yourself with all sorts of weapons. You are not your laptop's bodyguard; you don't need to take a bullet (or knife wound or whatever) for it. You can't keep it on your person at all times. What if somebody steals it from your apartment, your luggage, your desk, etc.? (You don't take it with you to the bathroom do you?) What if it gets damaged in an accident? Are you going to use your pepper spray to help you rescue it from a burning building?
Get insurance (renter's or homeowners) and cover all your stuff. Do the math and set the deductible to a reasonable level like $250 or $500 so you're not paying a high premium just in case your iPod gets stolen. Write down the serial numbers of your equipment so that the police (and eBay, etc.) can be on the lookout for your stuff.
Do backups periodically. An external hard drive or CD/DVD burner isn't that expensive compared to how much it would cost to replace your data. Get in the habit of backing up your valuable stuff. Don't procrastinate backups until you have the ultimate automated backup solution in place; just set aside a time every week to do it manually if that's what it takes. Get in the habit of separating your vital data that needs frequent backups from your less important data (MP3s) that don't need to be backed up constantly. Theft and damage aren't the only risks to data - hard disks WILL crap out after a few years; it's just a matter of when, and carrying them around with you everywhere puts them at additional risk due to wear and tear, unstable temperature and humidity, not-necessarily-clean power, etc.
Use encryption where it makes sense. If somebody gets their hands on your laptop and has hours and hours to look through your files, is there anything on there that you need to protect? There probably is. The whole hard disk doesn't have to be encrypted but maybe a couple of folders do, or maybe your whole documents directory (the one that gets backed up most often and doesn't include huge files like music and movies and downloads). If you use a modern OS there is probably a really easy way to get an encrypted disk image or home directory set up that is mostly transparent when you use it.
Look into software that helps with stolen computer recovery. There are apps that will install in a very stealthy fashion that will phone home via modem or internet to the vendor. Report your laptop stolen and when it checks in, the vendor will figure out where the laptop is (via IP or phone lookup) and contact the police. There are things you can do (such as setting a BIOS password, and setting the boot order so that the hard disk boots before the CD) to make it really difficult to reinstall the OS on the computer so that these apps have a better chance of doing their job.
Beta testing doesn't mean "under development", it means "in a testing phase that includes customers / users". So, saying that software is always in beta because it's always in development is incorrect. Also, software is not always in development. Plenty of software apps are abandoned or put on life support (bug fixes only but no new features) by their owners.
A project that always adds features and fixes bugs at the same time is a very badly managed project. Beta testing is a phase in the software development lifecycle. It's a cycle for a reason: people want features and don't want bugs, but new features introduce new bugs. Every time you add features, you have to text and fix and get it back to a point of stability.
Any decently managed project has a cutoff period where new features are not allowed, so that bugs can be fixed to a point where the team decides that it's OK to release the software. Sometimes this is an ad-hoc decision balancing bug counts with market pressure, and sometimes it's just a threshold of bug counts of various severities. Then, when the release is done, the feature wish list is examined and the feature list for the next release is set.
Open source projects that rely mainly on code donors still do this, but they don't necessarily know exactly what features are going into the next version since they can't predict what code will be donated. Still, the folks managing the project must at some point decide that a release is needed, and work toward a stable, release-worthy point, or else the project will just be an ongoing death march of brokenness and half-completed features.
Beta means that the project team doesn't think that the code is releaseable yet, but it's past the point of feature cutoff, and past the internal testing phase. They're giving the users a chance to beat on the software to find any esoteric bugs that internal testing missed, before telling the world that the software is believed to be stable and correct.
>In the operating system business, we all know how much they are behind technologically.
Really? Behind who, and in what ways? Please, enlighten us.
>Name any other mp3 player you've ever seen an _advertisement_ for.
I dunno, do the catalogs that show up in the mail count?
>maybe the iPod sells so well because people don't know that there are other options?
Walk into any consumer electronics store EXCEPT the Apple store, and they have lots and lots of models of MP3 player to choose from.
I haven't seen a TV ad or a bus ad for these things, but it's not as though you have to speak a secret password to a retailer in order to be shown to the back room where the black market non-iPod MP3 players are sold.
I don't know why you single out Safari as being RAM-based, as though that were some revolutionary new idea in browsers. Safari does cache to disk and other browsers use RAM based caching too. Older versions of Netscape Navigator let you separately tune the memory and disk cache sizes. If you wanted a memory-only caching scheme you could just set the disk cache size to zero. You can probably do the same thing in other browsers too, if you think that forcing a network hit instead of a disk hit is somehow going to be faster.
Safari "wastes" (as you call it) plenty of time caching stuff to disk; look in your ~/Library/Caches/Safari folder (try "du -sk ~/Library/Caches/Safari" to see how much stuff is in there, in kilobytes).
For the curious, check out this guy's benchmarks: Mac Browser JavaScript Performance
Also, on Apple's main Safari page they list benchmark results in a graph, and at the bottom in small print they refer to ZD's iBench, which might be something you could use if you really wanted to verify this yourself.
Some guy says that he thinks Macs may cost over $10K/yr to support 20 in no specific situation. You take that to be as well researched as a Gartner study.
Wow, that proof is just overwhelming. I can already imagine the hordes of MCSEs trading in their polo shirts and khakis for black mock turtlenecks and jeans.
Stupid author, not covering important topics like X11 configuration on SE/30's. That market keeps getting overlooked, I don't understand...
I'm not sure why something like a virtual desktop is a Mac specific topic, though.
No, no, Lojban !
It's Esperanto ^ 2.
And we'll type it on a FrogPad.
"gave my wife and I" =~ "gave I" = Wrong.
CORRECT:
My friend and I went to the store.
The cashier gave me and my friend a funny look.
WRONG:
My friend and me went to the store.
("Me went to the store" is wrong.)
The cashier gave I and my friend a funny look.
("The cashier gave I a funny look" is wrong.)
>Why more programs aren't written in it is beyond me.
Lots and lots of programs are written in Java. The OSS community hasn't embraced Java, though, because it's not open-source.
Java also doesn't satisfy the "Lookie I can run stuff on my 486!" fetish quite as well as C does.
Based on what I've read about Perl 6 and Mono, I would say that Sun has a limited amount of time to open-source Java before the window of adoption closes as far as the open-source crowd is concerned. Obviously the tools and infrastructure stuff will have to catch up (since Java development tools and app servers etc. are generally fantastic) but I doubt that Java could last forever as an open-source product if IBM or someone of their stature started to support one of those other languages.
(Yes, I know Mono is not a language.)
And you will continue to hear about this vulnerability on Slashdot for several months, again and again, as though it's new information each time.
>by what criterium would you give out privileges to single users and restricted file sets?
Well, I wouldn't use any race involving many laps around a short track at all.
The singular of "criteria" is "criterion".
>imagine if instead of using google to do a text search for whatever was on your mind, you could
>write a sql statement that actually represented the structure of resource web pages on the internet
Gee, I bet that would catch on just as well as end-users doing ad hoc queries in SQL.
Serious question: Who would service this query request? Would that be a new form of search that a search company like Google might provide?
>and brought you to a list of documents relating EXACTLY to the Something-RelatesTo-Something
>sentence you had entered as your query!
No, it would bring you a list of documents claiming to be relevant to your query. The addition of structured metadata is nice, but it doesn't suddenly make everybody behave themselves. Porn sites will abuse it just like they abuse current search algorithms that are based on links, content text, and keywords.
>It also has a reputation for DRM
That's a strange way to put it. It's not just a reputation... rhe iTunes Music Store actually does use DRM.
Sun's argument is that Microsoft would hijack an open standard for Java.
However, I have yet to see an open standard that Microsoft has successfully hijacked, and they've definitely tried to do so many times. (They have made de facto proprietary standards that others have had to grudgingly support, but that's not the same thing.)
At this point the industry momentum behind Java is so strong that Microsoft could not successfully hijack it. There are too many companies (such as IBM) who have a large financial interest in keeping Java out of Microsoft's back pocket.
Also, Microsoft has committed to a language strategy now, and it would be very unlikely for them to reverse themselves (dropping C# in favor of an open standard Java) now.
Hmm, you've just elaborated on the point I was making, but you phrased it as though you're arguing with me...
so, um, yeah, like I said: the developer resources that are available (Erlang programmers, C++ programmers, etc.) should be factored into the decision of which language to use for a given project.
>What language should we choose for our new project?
That depends on the project, of course.
Oh, hey, there you are. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were just looking for you. They said when they catch up with you, they're going to kick you in the nuts and take your computer away.
Oh yeah, and Florence Nightingale said you can just sit there and groan because nobody's going to fix your ruptured nut sack... and Ayn Rand says if you don't like that then SOVIET RUSSIA can just go back to YOU!
>we do not imbibe computers with a sense of intelligence
/dev/artistic_inspiration /dev/random" if you think that's how it works.
Correct. Any person with a sense of intelligence would know enough not to try and drink a computer.
I will leave it up to the reader to quote Inigo Montoya at this time.
P.S. You can "ln -s
Just once, I would like someone to see someone try to make a convincing argument that Windows is ready for the desktop.
>Instead of just sitting there bashing shit cause it's from Microsoft why not try it out ... and give it a chance. NTFS is honestly not a bad File System.
I won't try it out because the only implementation of NTFS that actually works is in Windows.
>What more do you want on a file system.
How about a specification document that someone other than the original vendor can read? How about an implementation that doesn't have "EXPERIMENTAL!!!" written all over it, that works on an OS that I actually want to use? You can try and point the finger at the folks who have tried to implement it outside of windows, but how the #@%@#$ are they supposed to know how it actually works without a written spec?
When I've used Windows, of course I used NTFS because it was either that, or FAT, and there's no contest there. I'm glad there was journaling, but if there wasn't, there wouldn't exactly be much I could do about that. With Microsoft, you get only what they give you, and your only choice is whether or not you're happy about it or not.
>>if you choose to measure in terms of total company assets, the way Forbes does when they compile their Global 500 list, Citigroup wins. They've got assets worth over $1 trillion.
>Except it isn't a Global 500 list, it only includes US based companies
The Forbes Global 500 list isn't a global 500 list?
>Mizuho is bigger than Citigroup
Not according to Forbes' data. You might be right if the exchange rate has changed things that much since they compiled their list.
"Biggest" depends on how you calculate it, of course (assets, sales, profits, market value, etc.) but Citigroup is at the top of Forbes' composite Forbes Global 2000 list. They are also at the top of the list ranked by assets. (Mizuho is #2.) Mizuho is not at the top of any list.
According to Forbes:
Wal-Mart has the most sales in the world.
ExxonMobil has the largest profits in the world. Microsoft is #6.
Citigroup has the most assets in the world. Mizuho is #2; Deutche Bank is #7.
General Electric has the highest market value in the world. Microsoft is #2.
I'm sure that all the innocent people who have been executed over the years were very thankful that the system was so garsh darn lenient.
>It's the risk-vs.-reward ratio. If you want to make it less attractive, the first thing to do is make it *harder*. When stealing someone's belongings doesn't require any breaking, just entering, it is more likely to happen.
And when it gets really easy to do, people do it so frequently and with so little consequence that they start to argue that it isn't really illegal anyway, or they blame the victim, or try and find some other way of rationalizing the crime.
>You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
Man oh man... what is the world coming to when you can't trust anonymous criminals anymore?
Why is this so much better than a bunch of additional system memory?
Theoretically if you throw a bunch of RAM into a computer with a remotely modern OS, some of that memory will be used to buffer writes, and performance will improve. An exception would be in cases where applications go out of their way to force writes all the way to disk, such as in databases with their transaction logs.
Is the problem just that there are so many applications that sync() all the time, that a hardware buffering solution such as SSD is required because otherwise the OS's file buffers are constantly being flushed? (Yes I understand that SSD is persistent, or at least much more persistent than plain old RAM that dies when the power goes off.)
I can see the enterprise-friendly angle of "just add this disk and the whole system goes much faster" instead of trying to rewrite existing apps or tune the hell out of the OS. I'm just curious about particular cases where adding RAM doesn't work but SSD works well... are there enough to justify the existence of these devices?