Like any entitlement mentality it has to have an excuse to function[...] : the notion that users are either drooling idiots or highly skilled experts with no intermediary states. [...] becoming offended instead of assessing the feasibility of the suggestion. [...] intellectual laziness [...] schooling's lesson that learning is hard and full of toil and cannot be a joyful process of discovery and fascination.
^-- THIS! a perfect example that a statement can hit many nails in the head with the same blow. Since IT is an illogically successful mix of magic and mystery to older people, they think we are all doctors doing things they can't bother to DISCOVER, as you said. When we push and prod them forward with things like "read this and follow the simple steps" and "never use THAT browser or you'll waste yet another afternoon of my time to clean up after you", they're too lazy to listen, and are offended that we're "too smart" and "too educated."
Encouraging them to follow me by saying I'm self-taught and that my degree in CS didn't enhance my career path towards "home desktop support" at all, they only get quiet and confused. They respond that, regardless of the not-so-important education, they "can't be expected" to "know" all this stuff I managed to teach a normal person called "myself" and that I was born specially to fix their problems when they're behaving stupidly by conscious choice. Even the guys in India reading support scripts to handle US tech support calls know that they must accept the script's "material" as true, allowing anyone who has ears to use it as a tool. Average Joes can't even make that step toward understanding their tech. They're disgusted at the thought of having to learn to use MORE tools because in 1st-World countries like the US, you pay laborers to do that for you (3rd-World countries a friend's friend fixes your PC in exchange for food or favors).
To these people IT is just another blue-collar labor to handle those tools. That's not different from the stereotypical bias that that a secretary was the only person expected to touch a typewriter, and that they did nothing else all day. I'm awaiting a similar correction in mainstream mentality akin to whatever suddenly drove everyone to become their own typist, to the point that you're no longer employable in the mainstream USA without both self-typing skills and basic knowledge of Win32 GUIs.
I do miss our now-defunct anti-aliasing effect of scanlines --emulated 8 and 16-bit games even with software scanlines looks more unnatural the bigger your computer screen is. Plus the sprites and backgrounds were too simple until Playstation and PS2 titles started to better use 480i. I once found a site with some very expensive machine with a digital scanline-adder effect, but can't remember it well.
One way to "blur" pixelation and make up for our big screen's lack of the scanlines is to use the RCA cables (YellowRedWhite) instead of the digital cable (YellowGreenBlue.) The downside is that even when you pause a game or any high-res DVD or whatever else you can connect via analog video to your new TV, writing and high-contrast edges show a subtle horizontal wavering. I'm skipping the current gen of consoles, and hope that by the next one all consoles* finally come with native HD outputs.
It's a perineum gangrene (pubic area) acording to the internet. Grangrenes are painful rotting of living tissue and require amputation lest you get infected from the necrotic tissue; I suppose its picture has lots of black tissue where you expect skin colors, pus, gore, lots of rotting and hanging skin, and unkempt pubic hairs, and badly decayed sexual organs; male and female.
We see tons of hearts on TV, and they're beating --not rotting-- while being operating on, unhealthy as they may be at the moment. No, there's no need to see a picture of your proposed comparison to sober up. But thanks for letting us inspect how bad things can get.
This is like the sun's gas cycle of compressing and expanding itself. I wonder how many times uses will jump in and out harmonically as more companies get the iPhone and AT&T loses and regains its hungrier bandwidth-chewer percentage points
Clearly you, or the people at Intel, haven't listened to the Black Eyed Peas.
*Sigh* Even in the language spoken, there are some pros and cons to every non-technical persons technical venture:) Check this short TV ad in the latest coop between Toshiba USA and rapper T-Pain.
The end result? I'll get in line to buy that "Megagigabyte" hexacore product with his face on it, whenever it's ready.
I know some people that will tag someone not in the picture as a way of telling that person that they should look at it and like you pointed out people will tag pictures without people even in it.
FB should completely throw out, or weigh significantly fewer pictures that their database is fully aware are "tagged by your friends." Obviously YOU have better pictures of yourself tagged by you. Perhaps FB's own research revealed a lot of lurkers and dangerously favors the potential of truth in their "crowdsourcing" the work of authenticating those faceless lurkers. But even that can be corrected by analyzing the special cases and reducing the problem to just those who hide their personal face. So... why all of us? lazyness / chaos in planning / low IQ or low budget
That is a Facebook coder crime: they have code that detects human faces that is not being used nearly enough. That code even nags when too many of your pictures remain untagged. It's silly that they don't use it in this important security check, since all your FB friends must have human faces... unless they used said cartoon profiles or you've friended someone's pet;)
I see the value of this, but doubt that anyone but the RIAA and advertisers really go through the trouble of making IP databases. Furthermore, our currently poor geolocation means that if your local mom-pops coffeeshop has WIFI, they'll be using DSL or cable dynamic IP's. Geolocation services in big cities like New York give you nothing more than a city address faaar from your real place. I would imagine that Starbucks internet nats wifi users behind some concentrator's address, and generates a similar tracking problem.
That's another reason why FB doesn't make a "permanent HTTPS" choice the default. Besides, https won't work under strict port-80 filtering rules. A FF plugin forces HTTPS on hotmail, gmail and a few predefined others, if you're interested. The problem of FF is having to install once per username per OS partition, unless you mess with registry keys and other geek file link magic.
I think that's right. The problem is that normally pictures come in groups, and they can just as easily tag you in the next photo from that shoot.
My mother learned the value of not discouraging ( funny | political | informational purposes ) tagging when the profile changed recently, and there were "troublesome" randomly selected pictures in her top 5 preview*.
To fix it, she showed me her "others tagged me" list and there were 90 pictures that she then choose to not bother fixing --typical of non-geeks who bear with it when you explain a technical solution to a social problem they are experiencing.
* No picture there had her in it. Besides the usual problem that some picture can bring doubt to married couples, there was a bottle of beer, a flag and other random stuff simply because she knows a joker or two who find that it's easier to tag a photo and write your name than it is to draft an e-mail for a private chuckle, paste links and title it "this is you! LULZ." Some day when the "share" button is made more practical, people will stop tagging beaches with your name because the people wanted you to basically see a picture URL.
They won't keep your wife from guessing and breaking into your account. There's an equally reasonable chance that besides her, our "friends" trying to log in as us notice our public "wall" activity with that person enough to have seen their name exploiting the "allow anyone in the world to see their full name... and friends-of-friends to even hear their interactions" defaults.
That's as "obscure" as organizations "protecting" our credit card from dedicated scammers behind "secure" questions regarding public knowledge items: your maternal grandfather's lastname, your public street address/zip code, and even guessing your favorite color. Some times their solutions make it so you can't pick any question both applicable to you and sensibly obscure to your acquaintances. Because "name your first pet" only applies to pet owners, and besides, your siblings and parents will easily impersonate you if that's all it takes to prove your identity. We need more custom question/answer pairs, voluntary ID card numbers (not US SSN) and depending on paranoia levels, allow for unpopular-on-the-web biometrics for banks and important transactions --difficulty implementing and advertising the latter is what's stopping them.
Can't we just try to work with the rest of the world to try to make things better for everyone?
Interesting. It's a matter of economically-useless nationalism and more importantly, lack of logistics savings. The US has no land-reachable superpower nearby to export cheaper goods than China's own. Brazil is economically growing, but it is no power like the EU and is halfway across the continent; it also doesn't speak English very well, so it's not an outsource-ready territory. If Mexico next door weren't a political mess (drugs cartels assassinating their cops, and illegal migration to the US.,) USA would save some money through shorter import routes... corps might even set shops there and move jobs they can't pay for on US soil. The English-indoors, Spanish-outdoors language barrier is still something of a problem with all of Latin America, and most English-speaking populations have strong Caribbean accents (think Jamaica) that are not friendlier than India's now-better-trained-to-imitate-English callcenters.
So working with the rest of the world means going to Europe, wait, their EU competes with them. What about Asia? population density, predominantly non-occidental views and extremely different wages make it harder to ally with beyond unfair advantage of foreign-manufacturing and outsourcing rates. What does the US have left? Africa.
Ugh. Looks like Uncle Sam will be going it alone till Latin America somehow yields a China-like superpower, forcing the US to cooperate with it. If that doesn't happen in a year or two, the recession pains and need to work together will stop being important. Worst case scenario, as China keeps rising, the US will be forced into cooperating more with it to catch proverbial breadcrumbs off their table (e.g: bending over backwards politically to push China's trade influence into less-cooperating territories like Europe and the Middle East.) Oh, forgot to mention how the US can't count on the Middle East for help either. It's over for them.
This judgemental attitude is also specially true of anime, because our parents grew up on western cartoons, clearly aimed at juveniles, and they just do not know that there are more mature issues, lots of blood, killing, sex and all in today's anime because we wouldn't normally show it to them, and they ain't gonna see that on primetime TV. Anime is becoming a hit with kids in the US thanks to US networks' cementing it this past decade, and it will take very long before those kids realize that the shows aren't as normal/mainstream once they leave middle-school, as we all think during childhood.
Time spent in front of computers is another one. Being the only computer geek in the family, I put up with my parents asking how I could stand sitting still for hours in front of a small screen (without understanding their 4:3 TV's did the same to their mobility back then). Eventually my blue collar parents took computer classes and started spending their free time on them, and one of them joined FB. Now they understand computer attachments better. I wish the same would happen with cartoons, games and anime, but it's asking for too much.
this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box
I meant to say "the Windows box". On second thought, neither windows nor linux did give me more than ordinary trouble with dangling lock-files (must delete by hand to gain write-access even though the file is 5 days old) conversion, auto-save (the DB randomly fails to do the usual disk-writing of changed records while switching out of it, even though they disable any and all Save shortcuts and icons, and the expected on-program-exit prompt) in the past.
I would wager something got messed up with all the rebranding of OO to Oracle motifs, since I've seen no other new features on top of "the hood."
I'm using Ubuntu 10.10. When exporting my resume's changes, I can read it fine in Ubuntu's OO, including the 9.04 partition with 3.1. Recently my ODT to DOC exports have been a pain because the document is not legible under Windows; perhaps a Q3 update added some odd CR-LF conversion bug and killed it or something; dunno because the preview feature shows binary anyway. I can't force-open it with any converter in Windows.
Anyone else see this? I can't be the only one looking to send resumes to non-linux-using HR officers;) As another note, OO databases seem to stop auto-saving and I've lost many-a-page; it doesn't help that the lock files are also rarely deleted. In comparison, this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box. I'm going to try LibreOffice and see if the bugs aren't there... how do I get it in the Ubuntu Package managers?
Heh. Your question is hard to answer for USA, as nobody is truly offering it officially; it's like winning the lottery or finding printed on the box or final-wireless N support. This all means that we're mostly stuck running tunnels even from a supported router, and my personal experience is like drinkypoo's... more specifically: random DNS slowdowns that bleed into v4 traffic, ipv6-specific pings are higher and there's random unreachability to any site (the tunnel probably short circuits.)
That said, there's a couple ISP's running trials: Verizon (only the $$$ fiber-tier) and Comcast. I'll be happy when my ISP offers DHCPv6 and stop setting up manual tunnels on my router for halfway-around-the-country native DNSv6 servers.
I'm not writing NSA code here; just keeping the annoying flies away and showing them that only hackers should be breaking in, anyway.
The encrypted data is still encrypted and they can read the key all they want, but nobody without detailed analysis (read as DMCA-circumventions) will know the encryption and decryption algorithms, aka "where in your code the actual door is for that key." Feeble as this be since I'm not a coder, it can be strengthened by actual cryptographers and WinAPI experts.
Most importantly, circumventing encryption is illegal in the US AFAIK, thus legit companies will stop messing around with unattended addins. The whole point of this/. story was that legit guys think they can just waltz in. Hackers will always hack around any and all our hurdles, but we don't need the money-grubbers to do it for free.
Thanks. You seem more reasonable than the other reply; I'll answer his question here: As a disclaimer to any encryption or "hiding" scheme, yes, man#1 hides and man#2 will figure out how to unhide, and thus no human obfuscation system is 100% unhackable. In the absense of DRM-like things (or deeper knowledge of Win32 API that must exist to undermine* 0123456's rebuttal) then Whac-a-mole what we'd end up playing with the hiders... a game where we win if we don't get tired of finding some new place that "they" can't think of hitting. In my primitive awareness, I would say 'have FF set up a new Windows system user like Microsoft's service named similarly to "RemoteLogin Helper object[random4digitID#]"' and remove rights to read that key except for that installer. To read the Firefox Key, FF can talk this custom engineered randomly-named service that would refuse to respond to anything but FF; many programs already use helper services like that.
Your run-of-the-mill company would NOT chase after fruit hanging that much higher than Mozilla's current model of "hey, someone left the door wide open, so we can't guess the neighbors left were the ones who put a newly hacked component here because we do no auditing and signed logging / tracking of our own." This is not making some NSA-level scheme; and we can claim that anyone still screwing with our 'encryption' is curcumventing DMCA and can be threatened with the feds. Though hackers will continue to break through like with any other browser, we'll ward off the legit intruders who currently think they're doing you a favor because the extension model is not yet turnkey-based. So we're making our own Apple-like walled garden. That works for them!
* Like what commercial Antivirus programs have been doing for years regardless of the yearly creation of thousands of new malicious programs. If AVs can to protect themselves against rogue programs, specifically meant to shut down and uninstall them prior to running amok, then somewhere in Windows there are APIs for that that you can be sure enforce Windows' own license integrity and validation. QED.
Copy from Vista's security model: it already treats even admin users in hostilely and sets Command line and file operation warnings so that you must "elevate" manually. A simple implementation for Firefox is a concept like a "Disk firewall" some company already sales: Encrypt your config folders and/or files so that the files aren't intelligible to anything else.
Like paranoid applications that only trust the Windows registry, put decryption keys, checksums and whatever in undocumented binary bitmaps and checksum even those registry keys somewhere else. Done... random programs mustn't be snooping beyond Firefox's addin API and must ask user nicely for the right^Wprivilege to install. We're tired of Antiviruses, Adobe download managers, HP printers and even random websites easily bundling unannounced toolbars that nobody removes later on.
However, any attempts would block a particularly useful shortcut for extension devs who must constantly uninstall and reinstall after every XPI "compile"
Is it just me or do companies not realize that these practices usually make the customer angry?
The sad reality is that they do all the math in advance and it works for them to use this formula: take_advantage_of_customer() until ( angry_customer_count >= oblivious_customers_count )
Bold company complacency creates user distrust, boredom and other such "customer classes" who become very vocal online. Some major complaint convinces a class or two to riducule or vouch against the company, and suddenly you have the next AOL, who has gone from 20 million users to 5 after y2k.
Unfortunately, that's an exception and most companies can do what they like, especially for free services. See Facebook.
It is a sad day when all the companies selling us products consider us less than office users: you may think you "own" that desk and nobody "local" messes with "your" machine, but the IT ninjas can walk in to install software and hardware locks, put in more restrictive OSs and programs and take away your PC any time they want... nothing in that office was paid for by the user, though it's annoying.
It's very much like all those recent years of at-will employment contracts, or more importantly, EULAs stating we only license --not "own," the software and OS already paid for, and cable companies refusing to sell their boxes, forcing a pay-it-in-full and then some model have made us dormant. And now, they get to test murky waters by saying "we can pave our walled guarden halfway into your living room, and you WILL like it!!" and force us to pay more.
If this iPhone 4 is the only one getting penta[mumble, arrrgh] screws, we're unlikely to see complaining now... just wait 18 months till the new batteries start aging the phone beyond wire-free usability and from then cue the class action lawsuits in 5, 4, 3, 2...
Forget backups and security in my case... out of lacking patience and space for a flatbed scanner, I use a 7MP camera to "scan" old notes, some important mail, printed howtos. That's not what OP would do to get 150 pics per day, but it's easy to get that high in my case: my remaining shoeboxes' worth of letter-sized "memories" could be scanned in by a dedicated unemployed teen in a few days or hours.
There is a deeper problem, when you look at thousands of DSCN####.jpg files. Too bad photo tagging didn't get at-home popularity and thus simple integration or... AI-based tagging; my PC already has thousands of pictures of other people's vacations and parties.
Adding plain white scans would just be making things harder to search for by name after removing my current physical reference points, as in "I knew that yellow sheet was in the big yellow container behind the bed."
Since you're on the topic, is there any off-the-shelf home router* sharing USB hard/flash drives without Windows-only utilities and the pesky one-on-one limits my dlink came with?
I mean, they could put a chip on the router whose purpose is to pretend to be yet another SMB PC, but they haven't.
* Tomato and DD-WRT probably provide modules, but I want something I can tell my friends about without showing up and going full geek on them.
Slashdot Mirror
A good laugh... :)
Mod parent up, please!
10 years ago, this would already be up thru the clouds. What's happened?!
Alright... we're doubly curious now:
[Citation needed] for both you and GP.
Like any entitlement mentality it has to have an excuse to function[...] : the notion that users are either drooling idiots or highly skilled experts with no intermediary states. [...] becoming offended instead of assessing the feasibility of the suggestion. [...] intellectual laziness [...] schooling's lesson that learning is hard and full of toil and cannot be a joyful process of discovery and fascination.
^-- THIS! a perfect example that a statement can hit many nails in the head with the same blow. Since IT is an illogically successful mix of magic and mystery to older people, they think we are all doctors doing things they can't bother to DISCOVER, as you said. When we push and prod them forward with things like "read this and follow the simple steps" and "never use THAT browser or you'll waste yet another afternoon of my time to clean up after you", they're too lazy to listen, and are offended that we're "too smart" and "too educated."
Encouraging them to follow me by saying I'm self-taught and that my degree in CS didn't enhance my career path towards "home desktop support" at all, they only get quiet and confused. They respond that, regardless of the not-so-important education, they "can't be expected" to "know" all this stuff I managed to teach a normal person called "myself" and that I was born specially to fix their problems when they're behaving stupidly by conscious choice. Even the guys in India reading support scripts to handle US tech support calls know that they must accept the script's "material" as true, allowing anyone who has ears to use it as a tool. Average Joes can't even make that step toward understanding their tech. They're disgusted at the thought of having to learn to use MORE tools because in 1st-World countries like the US, you pay laborers to do that for you (3rd-World countries a friend's friend fixes your PC in exchange for food or favors).
To these people IT is just another blue-collar labor to handle those tools. That's not different from the stereotypical bias that that a secretary was the only person expected to touch a typewriter, and that they did nothing else all day. I'm awaiting a similar correction in mainstream mentality akin to whatever suddenly drove everyone to become their own typist, to the point that you're no longer employable in the mainstream USA without both self-typing skills and basic knowledge of Win32 GUIs.
I do miss our now-defunct anti-aliasing effect of scanlines --emulated 8 and 16-bit games even with software scanlines looks more unnatural the bigger your computer screen is. Plus the sprites and backgrounds were too simple until Playstation and PS2 titles started to better use 480i. I once found a site with some very expensive machine with a digital scanline-adder effect, but can't remember it well.
One way to "blur" pixelation and make up for our big screen's lack of the scanlines is to use the RCA cables (YellowRedWhite) instead of the digital cable (YellowGreenBlue.) The downside is that even when you pause a game or any high-res DVD or whatever else you can connect via analog video to your new TV, writing and high-contrast edges show a subtle horizontal wavering. I'm skipping the current gen of consoles, and hope that by the next one all consoles* finally come with native HD outputs.
* rather than "all but one"
It's a perineum gangrene (pubic area) acording to the internet. Grangrenes are painful rotting of living tissue and require amputation lest you get infected from the necrotic tissue; I suppose its picture has lots of black tissue where you expect skin colors, pus, gore, lots of rotting and hanging skin, and unkempt pubic hairs, and badly decayed sexual organs; male and female.
We see tons of hearts on TV, and they're beating --not rotting-- while being operating on, unhealthy as they may be at the moment. No, there's no need to see a picture of your proposed comparison to sober up. But thanks for letting us inspect how bad things can get.
This is like the sun's gas cycle of compressing and expanding itself. I wonder how many times uses will jump in and out harmonically as more companies get the iPhone and AT&T loses and regains its hungrier bandwidth-chewer percentage points
Clearly you, or the people at Intel, haven't listened to the Black Eyed Peas.
*Sigh* :)
Even in the language spoken, there are some pros and cons to every non-technical persons technical venture
Check this short TV ad in the latest coop between Toshiba USA and rapper T-Pain.
The end result? I'll get in line to buy that "Megagigabyte" hexacore product with his face on it, whenever it's ready.
I know some people that will tag someone not in the picture as a way of telling that person that they should look at it and like you pointed out people will tag pictures without people even in it.
FB should completely throw out, or weigh significantly fewer pictures that their database is fully aware are "tagged by your friends." Obviously YOU have better pictures of yourself tagged by you. Perhaps FB's own research revealed a lot of lurkers and dangerously favors the potential of truth in their "crowdsourcing" the work of authenticating those faceless lurkers. But even that can be corrected by analyzing the special cases and reducing the problem to just those who hide their personal face. So... why all of us? lazyness / chaos in planning / low IQ or low budget
Next photo is an inanimate object
That is a Facebook coder crime: they have code that detects human faces that is not being used nearly enough. ;)
That code even nags when too many of your pictures remain untagged. It's silly that they don't use it in this important security check, since all your FB friends must have human faces... unless they used said cartoon profiles or you've friended someone's pet
I see the value of this, but doubt that anyone but the RIAA and advertisers really go through the trouble of making IP databases. Furthermore, our currently poor geolocation means that if your local mom-pops coffeeshop has WIFI, they'll be using DSL or cable dynamic IP's. Geolocation services in big cities like New York give you nothing more than a city address faaar from your real place. I would imagine that Starbucks internet nats wifi users behind some concentrator's address, and generates a similar tracking problem.
That's another reason why FB doesn't make a "permanent HTTPS" choice the default. Besides, https won't work under strict port-80 filtering rules. A FF plugin forces HTTPS on hotmail, gmail and a few predefined others, if you're interested. The problem of FF is having to install once per username per OS partition, unless you mess with registry keys and other geek file link magic.
I think that's right. The problem is that normally pictures come in groups, and they can just as easily tag you in the next photo from that shoot.
My mother learned the value of not discouraging ( funny | political | informational purposes ) tagging when the profile changed recently, and there were "troublesome" randomly selected pictures in her top 5 preview*.
To fix it, she showed me her "others tagged me" list and there were 90 pictures that she then choose to not bother fixing --typical of non-geeks who bear with it when you explain a technical solution to a social problem they are experiencing.
* No picture there had her in it. Besides the usual problem that some picture can bring doubt to married couples, there was a bottle of beer, a flag and other random stuff simply because she knows a joker or two who find that it's easier to tag a photo and write your name than it is to draft an e-mail for a private chuckle, paste links and title it "this is you! LULZ." Some day when the "share" button is made more practical, people will stop tagging beaches with your name because the people wanted you to basically see a picture URL.
They won't keep your wife from guessing and breaking into your account. There's an equally reasonable chance that besides her, our "friends" trying to log in as us notice our public "wall" activity with that person enough to have seen their name exploiting the "allow anyone in the world to see their full name... and friends-of-friends to even hear their interactions" defaults.
That's as "obscure" as organizations "protecting" our credit card from dedicated scammers behind "secure" questions regarding public knowledge items: your maternal grandfather's lastname, your public street address/zip code, and even guessing your favorite color. Some times their solutions make it so you can't pick any question both applicable to you and sensibly obscure to your acquaintances. Because "name your first pet" only applies to pet owners, and besides, your siblings and parents will easily impersonate you if that's all it takes to prove your identity. We need more custom question/answer pairs, voluntary ID card numbers (not US SSN) and depending on paranoia levels, allow for unpopular-on-the-web biometrics for banks and important transactions --difficulty implementing and advertising the latter is what's stopping them.
Can't we just try to work with the rest of the world to try to make things better for everyone?
Interesting. It's a matter of economically-useless nationalism and more importantly, lack of logistics savings. The US has no land-reachable superpower nearby to export cheaper goods than China's own. Brazil is economically growing, but it is no power like the EU and is halfway across the continent; it also doesn't speak English very well, so it's not an outsource-ready territory. If Mexico next door weren't a political mess (drugs cartels assassinating their cops, and illegal migration to the US.,) USA would save some money through shorter import routes... corps might even set shops there and move jobs they can't pay for on US soil. The English-indoors, Spanish-outdoors language barrier is still something of a problem with all of Latin America, and most English-speaking populations have strong Caribbean accents (think Jamaica) that are not friendlier than India's now-better-trained-to-imitate-English callcenters.
So working with the rest of the world means going to Europe, wait, their EU competes with them. What about Asia? population density, predominantly non-occidental views and extremely different wages make it harder to ally with beyond unfair advantage of foreign-manufacturing and outsourcing rates. What does the US have left? Africa.
Ugh. Looks like Uncle Sam will be going it alone till Latin America somehow yields a China-like superpower, forcing the US to cooperate with it. If that doesn't happen in a year or two, the recession pains and need to work together will stop being important. Worst case scenario, as China keeps rising, the US will be forced into cooperating more with it to catch proverbial breadcrumbs off their table (e.g: bending over backwards politically to push China's trade influence into less-cooperating territories like Europe and the Middle East.) Oh, forgot to mention how the US can't count on the Middle East for help either. It's over for them.
Thank you!
This judgemental attitude is also specially true of anime, because our parents grew up on western cartoons, clearly aimed at juveniles, and they just do not know that there are more mature issues, lots of blood, killing, sex and all in today's anime because we wouldn't normally show it to them, and they ain't gonna see that on primetime TV. Anime is becoming a hit with kids in the US thanks to US networks' cementing it this past decade, and it will take very long before those kids realize that the shows aren't as normal/mainstream once they leave middle-school, as we all think during childhood.
Time spent in front of computers is another one. Being the only computer geek in the family, I put up with my parents asking how I could stand sitting still for hours in front of a small screen (without understanding their 4:3 TV's did the same to their mobility back then). Eventually my blue collar parents took computer classes and started spending their free time on them, and one of them joined FB. Now they understand computer attachments better. I wish the same would happen with cartoons, games and anime, but it's asking for too much.
this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box
I meant to say "the Windows box". On second thought, neither windows nor linux did give me more than ordinary trouble with dangling lock-files (must delete by hand to gain write-access even though the file is 5 days old) conversion, auto-save (the DB randomly fails to do the usual disk-writing of changed records while switching out of it, even though they disable any and all Save shortcuts and icons, and the expected on-program-exit prompt) in the past.
I would wager something got messed up with all the rebranding of OO to Oracle motifs, since I've seen no other new features on top of "the hood."
I'm using Ubuntu 10.10. When exporting my resume's changes, I can read it fine in Ubuntu's OO, including the 9.04 partition with 3.1. Recently my ODT to DOC exports have been a pain because the document is not legible under Windows; perhaps a Q3 update added some odd CR-LF conversion bug and killed it or something; dunno because the preview feature shows binary anyway. I can't force-open it with any converter in Windows.
Anyone else see this? I can't be the only one looking to send resumes to non-linux-using HR officers ;)
As another note, OO databases seem to stop auto-saving and I've lost many-a-page; it doesn't help that the lock files are also rarely deleted. In comparison, this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box. I'm going to try LibreOffice and see if the bugs aren't there... how do I get it in the Ubuntu Package managers?
Oh and Slashdot, how the heck am I supposed to post on your system when I'm behind my ISP's NAT and someone else has already beat me to it?
/. security is very annoying.
Here are the proposed solutions:
Heh. Your question is hard to answer for USA, as nobody is truly offering it officially; it's like winning the lottery or finding printed on the box or final-wireless N support. This all means that we're mostly stuck running tunnels even from a supported router, and my personal experience is like drinkypoo's... more specifically: random DNS slowdowns that bleed into v4 traffic, ipv6-specific pings are higher and there's random unreachability to any site (the tunnel probably short circuits.)
That said, there's a couple ISP's running trials: Verizon (only the $$$ fiber-tier) and Comcast. I'll be happy when my ISP offers DHCPv6 and stop setting up manual tunnels on my router for halfway-around-the-country native DNSv6 servers.
I'm not writing NSA code here; just keeping the annoying flies away and showing them that only hackers should be breaking in, anyway.
The encrypted data is still encrypted and they can read the key all they want, but nobody without detailed analysis (read as DMCA-circumventions) will know the encryption and decryption algorithms, aka "where in your code the actual door is for that key." Feeble as this be since I'm not a coder, it can be strengthened by actual cryptographers and WinAPI experts.
Most importantly, circumventing encryption is illegal in the US AFAIK, thus legit companies will stop messing around with unattended addins. The whole point of this /. story was that legit guys think they can just waltz in. Hackers will always hack around any and all our hurdles, but we don't need the money-grubbers to do it for free.
Thanks.
You seem more reasonable than the other reply; I'll answer his question here: As a disclaimer to any encryption or "hiding" scheme, yes, man#1 hides and man#2 will figure out how to unhide, and thus no human obfuscation system is 100% unhackable. In the absense of DRM-like things (or deeper knowledge of Win32 API that must exist to undermine* 0123456's rebuttal) then Whac-a-mole what we'd end up playing with the hiders... a game where we win if we don't get tired of finding some new place that "they" can't think of hitting. In my primitive awareness, I would say 'have FF set up a new Windows system user like Microsoft's service named similarly to "RemoteLogin Helper object[random4digitID#]"' and remove rights to read that key except for that installer. To read the Firefox Key, FF can talk this custom engineered randomly-named service that would refuse to respond to anything but FF; many programs already use helper services like that.
Your run-of-the-mill company would NOT chase after fruit hanging that much higher than Mozilla's current model of "hey, someone left the door wide open, so we can't guess the neighbors left were the ones who put a newly hacked component here because we do no auditing and signed logging / tracking of our own." This is not making some NSA-level scheme; and we can claim that anyone still screwing with our 'encryption' is curcumventing DMCA and can be threatened with the feds. Though hackers will continue to break through like with any other browser, we'll ward off the legit intruders who currently think they're doing you a favor because the extension model is not yet turnkey-based. So we're making our own Apple-like walled garden. That works for them!
* Like what commercial Antivirus programs have been doing for years regardless of the yearly creation of thousands of new malicious programs. If AVs can to protect themselves against rogue programs, specifically meant to shut down and uninstall them prior to running amok, then somewhere in Windows there are APIs for that that you can be sure enforce Windows' own license integrity and validation. QED.
Copy from Vista's security model: it already treats even admin users in hostilely and sets Command line and file operation warnings so that you must "elevate" manually. A simple implementation for Firefox is a concept like a "Disk firewall" some company already sales:
Encrypt your config folders and/or files so that the files aren't intelligible to anything else.
Like paranoid applications that only trust the Windows registry, put decryption keys, checksums and whatever in undocumented binary bitmaps and checksum even those registry keys somewhere else. Done... random programs mustn't be snooping beyond Firefox's addin API and must ask user nicely for the right^Wprivilege to install. We're tired of Antiviruses, Adobe download managers, HP printers and even random websites easily bundling unannounced toolbars that nobody removes later on.
However, any attempts would block a particularly useful shortcut for extension devs who must constantly uninstall and reinstall after every XPI "compile"
Is it just me or do companies not realize that these practices usually make the customer angry?
The sad reality is that they do all the math in advance and it works for them to use this formula:
take_advantage_of_customer() until ( angry_customer_count >= oblivious_customers_count )
Bold company complacency creates user distrust, boredom and other such "customer classes" who become very vocal online. Some major complaint convinces a class or two to riducule or vouch against the company, and suddenly you have the next AOL, who has gone from 20 million users to 5 after y2k.
Unfortunately, that's an exception and most companies can do what they like, especially for free services. See Facebook.
It is a sad day when all the companies selling us products consider us less than office users: you may think you "own" that desk and nobody "local" messes with "your" machine, but the IT ninjas can walk in to install software and hardware locks, put in more restrictive OSs and programs and take away your PC any time they want... nothing in that office was paid for by the user, though it's annoying.
It's very much like all those recent years of at-will employment contracts , or more importantly, EULAs stating we only license --not "own," the software and OS already paid for, and cable companies refusing to sell their boxes, forcing a pay-it-in-full and then some model have made us dormant. And now, they get to test murky waters by saying "we can pave our walled guarden halfway into your living room, and you WILL like it!!" and force us to pay more.
If this iPhone 4 is the only one getting penta[mumble, arrrgh] screws, we're unlikely to see complaining now... just wait 18 months till the new batteries start aging the phone beyond wire-free usability and from then cue the class action lawsuits in 5, 4, 3, 2...
Forget backups and security in my case... out of lacking patience and space for a flatbed scanner, I use a 7MP camera to "scan" old notes, some important mail, printed howtos. That's not what OP would do to get 150 pics per day, but it's easy to get that high in my case: my remaining shoeboxes' worth of letter-sized "memories" could be scanned in by a dedicated unemployed teen in a few days or hours.
There is a deeper problem, when you look at thousands of DSCN####.jpg files. Too bad photo tagging didn't get at-home popularity and thus simple integration or ... AI-based tagging; my PC already has thousands of pictures of other people's vacations and parties.
Adding plain white scans would just be making things harder to search for by name after removing my current physical reference points, as in "I knew that yellow sheet was in the big yellow container behind the bed."
Since you're on the topic, is there any off-the-shelf home router* sharing USB hard/flash drives without Windows-only utilities and the pesky one-on-one limits my dlink came with?
I mean, they could put a chip on the router whose purpose is to pretend to be yet another SMB PC, but they haven't.
* Tomato and DD-WRT probably provide modules, but I want something I can tell my friends about without showing up and going full geek on them.