Definitely, install from DVD, and copy the distribution RPM archive to the drive after and adjust the repo pointer.
Uh oh... manually copy files from a DVD and adjust a pointer?
They fail ease-of-use.
When using Ubuntu, you can add software without any of that foolishness,
using synaptic package manager or apt-get from the
command line.
You get the latest version too, which is important, because almost any package is going to have had an update since the release (by the time you get around to installing it) -- and some of the updates to some packages will be critical security updates.
Having to go back to original install media and install the old version that was out at time of your OS release is ridiculous.
Also, YaST on SuSE sucks at installing packages from the command line.
And the installation process to perform an install of a few packages or a system update is much slower than with apt-get/dpkg
or even yum / rpm on ther OSes
Okay. The brands probably are phoning home to report information such as usage statistics and othe data.
What they are probably not doing is uploading your confidential web site logins, banking passwords, account numbers, etc.
The liability would be too much if they got caught. And it would tarnish their brand.
The brand name companies definitely have a lot to lose.
The companies are on the record, on the up-and-up: if they do anything really bad, and get found out, they can be held accountable.
If someone finds out a fake iPhone was spying on their every move, logging every keystroke, uploading every password, there's not a thing they can do, no company they can sue, etc.
Their only mitigation is to attempt to change all passwords (if they discover early enough, and not through abuse of said passwords to further unsolicited mail, steal their ID, or steal funds).
This doesn't seem like any more of a problem than someone jacking in to an empty ethernet port on your network
Unused ports are left unusable.
Assigned to a 'quarantine VLAN' which has only an IDS on it designed to set off alarms if anything sends traffic to it.
Ports that are in use, have port security enabled with sticky MAC address, and thus an alarm is also set off on violation.
but you must assume users are clever enough to get it working (not to mention booting from a LiveCD bypasses every protection known, except complete Windows software compatibility.
802.1X authentication required to bring up the wired network port.
The certificate is installed and available to Windows, but rebooting the machine would cause connection to be lost, and the Live CD distribution would be unable to re-authenticate and gain access (since Linux has no access to Windows' secure crypto keystores).
So, you see.. This Windows 7 problem is much harder to address, and a much bigger risk than other issues such as LiveCDs or unused ports which are very easily made basically non-risks.
The humidity rating as given for the iPhone IS the range of the noncondensing humidity. As in, the percentage of moisture in the air that is non-condensed.
noncondensing means the "condensing portion" is excluded.
The fact that some condensation is occuring does not mean you are outside the operational humidity specification.
If they didn't say noncondensing, then it would mean the humidity exposure would have to be considered 100% when condensation is occuring.
By saying "condensation", in fact, the humidity can be 95% or less and considered within specification, even as condensation is occuring.
Does the official Beijing Fake market have a website of some sort?
I mean.. if it's necessary to travel to China to reliably find a certain one of these nice phones, the trip itself could easily be more costly than the phone.
It would also be nice if there were a listing of the different "fakes" available, their characteristics, and how to most easily obtain the best ones.
I'm sure there's more than one "fake" modeled/skinned after the same branded model, and variation of quality fr. maker to maker....
All of planet earth got sucked into a void, Futarama-style.
Stephen Hawking: "Great. The entire universe was destroyed."
Him: "Destroyed? Then where are we now?"
Al Gore: "I don't know. But I can darn well tell you where we're not: The universe!"
"Anyone wanna play Dungeons & Dragons for the next quadrillion years?"
Stephen Hawking: "Yes, please."
Deep Blue: "Pawn to rook A."
Al Gore: "I'm a tenth level vice president!"
With no brand... how much can you trust that they don't have a pile of software on that thing spying on you?
For example, to collect information about you to sell to ID thiefs: or if you are foolish enough to login to a banking website on the device....
Counterfeit device, unknown software, no company to shutdown... basically means they could be doing whatever they want (as long as they can do some basic coding)
I could see a market for this in high schools and on college campuses everywhere.
And in convenience stores... they can put the cheap softcore porn device right by the dirty magazines.
And there'd probably be a market among slashdot readers too, they could do online sales and sponsor slashdot with ads, they'd probably sell out very quickly...
The iPony is the only farm animal that comes complete with a beautiful white embossed iApple logo, and a USB port for syncing your ride data and loading playlists for listening while you are driving around in your iPony
reMail provided a capability similar to Gmail's search that worked with IMAP accounts and
mail providers other than Gmail
Since part of Gmail's competitive edge is good search technology, reMail was a substantial competitive threat.
Now by buying and killing them, their search capability is no longer available on the mobile platform.
iPhone users will have to use gmail and Google's built-in search instead of a third-party IMAP provider in order to get a decent search experience.
Killing this competitor protects Google's monopoly on search, and on e-mail search in particular.
Deleting a tweet draws even more attention to its text when just one of the >100,000 followers noticed the tweet went away
There are entire websites already dedicated to archiving all deleted tweets
I'd be far more concerned about integrity of the message.
For example, what happens if Twitter.com admins decide to alter the text of a tweet during posting, or shortly after it is posted?
Such as to censor bad words, block certain tweets from being published (spam filter), or alteration for selfish commercial purposes (such as adding ad placement to their tweet)
Then the "archived" tweet might not even actually be close to what got published, or might not reflect the version that was the most widely disseminated.
Tweets are public in the first place, and can't really be withdrawn.
They aren't tweets until displayed by third-party servers. And displaying them means that they are published...
And anyone can archive them already.
So I question whether it's an efficient use of government resources.
When a politician is answering questions at a press conference... is an archivist scrupulously keeping their own record to be stored in the presidential archives?
Including requiring all members of the press to
have their video and notes run through a machine to "archive" it, before they're allowed to leave.
And also... that all articles published also get archived.....
It seems like the things most important to
require be archived carefully are the things that aren't published, or contain elements
that were not made public at the time.
Or no other qualified candidates in that area who wanted to work for Google and applied for a job they were qualified for and happened to get hired to it?
Yeah an entire workforce of white males would be very fishy, but anything short of that would be that way for unclear reason.
EVERYTHING can be rationalized as something that can happen with global warming.
Everything and anything, no matter how absurd that happens, can be used to substantiate
rogue pseudo-theories like global warming, which are intentionally vague, and fail to make specific falsifiable predictions about what should happen and what should not happen and when.
If it were a real scientific theory, there would be no room for ad hoc explanations as events occur, that they somehow "further solidify" the proposition.
If global warming were proper valid theory, these things would already have been predicted as things that would happen, as results of the theory.
Global warming can mean colder winters and less heat during summers.
Global warming can mean oceans freezing.
Global warming can mean an ice age.
Global warming can mean hell freezes.
Global warming can mean record low temperatures
Global warming can mean higher crime rates
Global warming can mean more sex
Global warming can mean higher unemployment
Global warming can mean more recessions
Global warming can mean more housing meltdowns
Global warming can mean higher gas prices
Global warming can mean more militant terrorists
Global warming can mean more wars
Global warming can mean nuclear proliferation
Global warming can mean more violence in schools
Global warming can mean pigs fly.
Global warming can mean earth spontaneously implodes.
Global warming can mean more blackholes
Global warming can mean more attention from extraterrestrials
Global warming can mean increased cockroach populations
Global warming can mean monkeys conquer humans for world domination
That depends on what version of flash you're running, how many unpatched 0-day vulnerabilities it contains, and if the person who constructed the.swf for you knew about them.
On the other hand... by sheer numbers, there are probably more dangerous.EXE files in circulation than.SWF files, numerically speaking.
The suspicious.EXE file almost certainly is highly dangerous...
the suspicious.SWF might be (under certain conditions), when not run in a proper sandbox, or with additional precautions such as IDS to jail flash or the browser from running or installing arbitrary code.
You have a much better shot viewing a flash file when running MSIE 8 in Protected mode on Windows 7, than clicking 'run' on a susupicious.EXE file on your windows system, or even suspicious.SH file on your Linux system.
You can't actually test the theory to see how valid or reliable it is.
Like all theories in science, it leads to certain predictions, which are falsifiable through experiment. It is testable -- it's just not necessarily cheap simple, or necessarily worthwhile to test such an informal proposition, but there are ways to show it likely to be false (or in need of revision), by showing predictions that follow from it do not hold up in experiments.
Like other theories, it's plausible and based on a person's objective observations, which could be wrong, but have been repeated by others.
You can create an experiment by getting 10 teams of sequestered developers, 3 people per team randomly assigned, from a pool of developers with approximate the same skill level and experience to write software to do a specified thing in a clean-room setting.
And get 50 randomly assigned developers (5 per software project) to be "users" and "testers" of the software, drawn from the pool of developers.
And randomly select which 5 programs will be open source and which 5 projects will be closed source.
All 10 projects having the same objective, but only the developers and users assigned to the same project are able to communicate with each other (no communications between projects, no communications with the outside world), and only through private e-mail lists and a forum site assigned on each project's intranet.
In the open-sourced projects' forums, the users see source code at every step of the way through "Trac", every single commit (if they want), the closed-sourced ones are identical, except in what the developers may post is limited.
In the closed projects (as is the custom of closed-source developers), the developers are not allowed to provide any proprietary information. They can only post official documentation, and discuss the elements of the program that are user-visible (no discussion of data structures or program internals).
All users have access to debuggers, and standard tools on a "test" machine. But their task has to be completed on a "production computer" that can only run the program binary.
(Meaning each user has two machines to run the software on: a 'clean' machine they have to do the task on using only the "stable" release binary signed by the devs, without the benefit of a debugger. And a test machine they can perform debugging on.)
Oh yes... and there is an elaborate task each user is required to utilize the software to perform.
Every user to finish their task gets a nice cash reward.
The project where 50% of the users finish the task first accurately, with no errors gets rewarded, and so do the developers.
The task is hard enough that it takes a while, and requires the software to be reliable.
Also, the task must be performed on the "clean" machine, and only 3 attempts are allowed.
They may test the binaries as much as they want on the test machine. But they have only 3 attempts to complete the task on the test machine (without the software crashing or failing), before the user is disqualified.
Also, the 'tasks' are randomly assigned, and if multiple attempts are made, the task will be different each time.
If the software works perfectly, then the task should not be too difficult.
Also, each project is only allowed 3 stable releases. If the developers make a 3rd stable release, they can no longer do anything more.
They can each make a maximum of 10 beta releases between each stable release.
As is the custom of closed-source projects: binaries are only available for beta or stable releases.
Open source projects may release hourly builds, but they will have to do this manually, and it will consume allowed development time.
Anyways, if the Open source projects do no better under these conditions, then Linus' theory should be considered likely to be false.
A quick and dirty hack is not shitty coding, but inadequate design. The code probably does exactly what the (inadequate, informal) design said it ought to. which makes the code itself high quality, even if the design using it sucks:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok... what gives.. what's that last 5% exactly, and what can we do to fix that?
They ought to be able to run $LATEST_WINDOWS_GAME. There is software to allow this called Wine
Definitely, install from DVD, and copy the distribution RPM archive to the drive after and adjust the repo pointer.
Uh oh... manually copy files from a DVD and adjust a pointer? They fail ease-of-use.
When using Ubuntu, you can add software without any of that foolishness, using synaptic package manager or apt-get from the command line.
You get the latest version too, which is important, because almost any package is going to have had an update since the release (by the time you get around to installing it) -- and some of the updates to some packages will be critical security updates.
Having to go back to original install media and install the old version that was out at time of your OS release is ridiculous.
Also, YaST on SuSE sucks at installing packages from the command line. And the installation process to perform an install of a few packages or a system update is much slower than with apt-get/dpkg or even yum / rpm on ther OSes
Okay. The brands probably are phoning home to report information such as usage statistics and othe data.
What they are probably not doing is uploading your confidential web site logins, banking passwords, account numbers, etc.
The liability would be too much if they got caught. And it would tarnish their brand. The brand name companies definitely have a lot to lose.
The companies are on the record, on the up-and-up: if they do anything really bad, and get found out, they can be held accountable.
If someone finds out a fake iPhone was spying on their every move, logging every keystroke, uploading every password, there's not a thing they can do, no company they can sue, etc.
Their only mitigation is to attempt to change all passwords (if they discover early enough, and not through abuse of said passwords to further unsolicited mail, steal their ID, or steal funds).
This doesn't seem like any more of a problem than someone jacking in to an empty ethernet port on your network
Unused ports are left unusable. Assigned to a 'quarantine VLAN' which has only an IDS on it designed to set off alarms if anything sends traffic to it.
Ports that are in use, have port security enabled with sticky MAC address, and thus an alarm is also set off on violation.
but you must assume users are clever enough to get it working (not to mention booting from a LiveCD bypasses every protection known, except complete Windows software compatibility.
802.1X authentication required to bring up the wired network port. The certificate is installed and available to Windows, but rebooting the machine would cause connection to be lost, and the Live CD distribution would be unable to re-authenticate and gain access (since Linux has no access to Windows' secure crypto keystores).
So, you see.. This Windows 7 problem is much harder to address, and a much bigger risk than other issues such as LiveCDs or unused ports which are very easily made basically non-risks.
Only the impurities in the water conduct electricity and cause damage.
The phone itself surely contains many impurities that would be almost immediately dissolved in any water entering the phone.
I'm surprised the phone manufacturers haven't gotten a law passed against that.
I do know that some of the manufacturers have indicated they hide multiple sensors inside the phones though.
Some of the sensors intentionally placed in positions where the consumer cannot access them (without destroying the phone)
One sensor to allow easy initial warranty rejections. And one buried sensor to allow rejections at a later stage of inspection.
The humidity rating as given for the iPhone IS the range of the noncondensing humidity. As in, the percentage of moisture in the air that is non-condensed.
noncondensing means the "condensing portion" is excluded.
The fact that some condensation is occuring does not mean you are outside the operational humidity specification.
If they didn't say noncondensing, then it would mean the humidity exposure would have to be considered 100% when condensation is occuring.
By saying "condensation", in fact, the humidity can be 95% or less and considered within specification, even as condensation is occuring.
The sensor trips, even if the phone is not being operated (e.g. it's powered off) when these conditions are encountered.
It's not what it does that's at issue, it's what it will be used for.
It's basically a litmus test. If it's red, your warranty service will be refused, even if what the sensor indicates is an error.
You may have received the laptop with the sensor already triggered.
Some condition (other than you dunking or getting the PC weight), such as the one described in the article might have triggered it.
Anyways, if you have a problem, your warranty service gets refused as if you dunked it, even though you did not.
The CSR will just assume you're lying, since the "sensor" proves you dunked it. That's what's sort of Orwellian [mechanism above human].
Does the official Beijing Fake market have a website of some sort?
I mean.. if it's necessary to travel to China to reliably find a certain one of these nice phones, the trip itself could easily be more costly than the phone.
It would also be nice if there were a listing of the different "fakes" available, their characteristics, and how to most easily obtain the best ones.
I'm sure there's more than one "fake" modeled/skinned after the same branded model, and variation of quality fr. maker to maker....
I don't know.. but it sounds like he got something (slightly) more useful than what is normally sold at a bar :)
Liquor and electronics are just different ways of disposing of cash... the latter at least can have a more lasting benefit.
Whereas $50 spent on mixed drinks is a sunk cost that provides brief pleasure for one night, and then goes away.
The button jumped to the other side of the phone as he tried to press it.
With no brand... how much can you trust that they don't have a pile of software on that thing spying on you?
For example, to collect information about you to sell to ID thiefs: or if you are foolish enough to login to a banking website on the device....
Counterfeit device, unknown software, no company to shutdown... basically means they could be doing whatever they want (as long as they can do some basic coding)
I could see a market for this in high schools and on college campuses everywhere.
And in convenience stores... they can put the cheap softcore porn device right by the dirty magazines.
And there'd probably be a market among slashdot readers too, they could do online sales and sponsor slashdot with ads, they'd probably sell out very quickly...
I see your iPhoney and raise you an iPony.
The iPony is the only farm animal that comes complete with a beautiful white embossed iApple logo, and a USB port for syncing your ride data and loading playlists for listening while you are driving around in your iPony
reMail provided a capability similar to Gmail's search that worked with IMAP accounts and mail providers other than Gmail
Since part of Gmail's competitive edge is good search technology, reMail was a substantial competitive threat.
Now by buying and killing them, their search capability is no longer available on the mobile platform. iPhone users will have to use gmail and Google's built-in search instead of a third-party IMAP provider in order to get a decent search experience.
Killing this competitor protects Google's monopoly on search, and on e-mail search in particular.
Deleting a tweet draws even more attention to its text when just one of the >100,000 followers noticed the tweet went away
There are entire websites already dedicated to archiving all deleted tweets
I'd be far more concerned about integrity of the message.
For example, what happens if Twitter.com admins decide to alter the text of a tweet during posting, or shortly after it is posted?
Such as to censor bad words, block certain tweets from being published (spam filter), or alteration for selfish commercial purposes (such as adding ad placement to their tweet)
Then the "archived" tweet might not even actually be close to what got published, or might not reflect the version that was the most widely disseminated.
Tweets are public in the first place, and can't really be withdrawn.
They aren't tweets until displayed by third-party servers. And displaying them means that they are published...
And anyone can archive them already.
So I question whether it's an efficient use of government resources.
When a politician is answering questions at a press conference... is an archivist scrupulously keeping their own record to be stored in the presidential archives?
Including requiring all members of the press to have their video and notes run through a machine to "archive" it, before they're allowed to leave.
And also... that all articles published also get archived.....
It seems like the things most important to require be archived carefully are the things that aren't published, or contain elements that were not made public at the time.
Or no other qualified candidates in that area who wanted to work for Google and applied for a job they were qualified for and happened to get hired to it?
Yeah an entire workforce of white males would be very fishy, but anything short of that would be that way for unclear reason.
EVERYTHING can be rationalized as something that can happen with global warming.
Everything and anything, no matter how absurd that happens, can be used to substantiate rogue pseudo-theories like global warming, which are intentionally vague, and fail to make specific falsifiable predictions about what should happen and what should not happen and when.
If it were a real scientific theory, there would be no room for ad hoc explanations as events occur, that they somehow "further solidify" the proposition. If global warming were proper valid theory, these things would already have been predicted as things that would happen, as results of the theory.
Global warming can mean colder winters and less heat during summers.
Global warming can mean oceans freezing.
Global warming can mean an ice age.
Global warming can mean hell freezes.
Global warming can mean record low temperatures
Global warming can mean higher crime rates
Global warming can mean more sex
Global warming can mean higher unemployment
Global warming can mean more recessions
Global warming can mean more housing meltdowns
Global warming can mean higher gas prices
Global warming can mean more militant terrorists
Global warming can mean more wars
Global warming can mean nuclear proliferation
Global warming can mean more violence in schools
Global warming can mean pigs fly.
Global warming can mean earth spontaneously implodes.
Global warming can mean more blackholes
Global warming can mean more attention from extraterrestrials
Global warming can mean increased cockroach populations
Global warming can mean monkeys conquer humans for world domination
That depends on what version of flash you're running, how many unpatched 0-day vulnerabilities it contains, and if the person who constructed the .swf for you knew about them.
On the other hand... by sheer numbers, there are probably more dangerous .EXE files in circulation than .SWF files, numerically speaking.
The suspicious .EXE file almost certainly is highly dangerous...
the suspicious .SWF might be (under certain conditions), when not run in a proper sandbox, or with additional precautions such as IDS to jail flash or the browser from running or installing arbitrary code.
You have a much better shot viewing a flash file when running MSIE 8 in Protected mode on Windows 7, than clicking 'run' on a susupicious .EXE file on your windows system, or even suspicious .SH file on your Linux system.
I prefer suspicious .dmg, .img, .iso files, and suspicious printed CDs with suspicious C:\autorun.inf files :)
You can't actually test the theory to see how valid or reliable it is.
Like all theories in science, it leads to certain predictions, which are falsifiable through experiment. It is testable -- it's just not necessarily cheap simple, or necessarily worthwhile to test such an informal proposition, but there are ways to show it likely to be false (or in need of revision), by showing predictions that follow from it do not hold up in experiments.
Like other theories, it's plausible and based on a person's objective observations, which could be wrong, but have been repeated by others.
You can create an experiment by getting 10 teams of sequestered developers, 3 people per team randomly assigned, from a pool of developers with approximate the same skill level and experience to write software to do a specified thing in a clean-room setting.
And get 50 randomly assigned developers (5 per software project) to be "users" and "testers" of the software, drawn from the pool of developers.
And randomly select which 5 programs will be open source and which 5 projects will be closed source.
All 10 projects having the same objective, but only the developers and users assigned to the same project are able to communicate with each other (no communications between projects, no communications with the outside world), and only through private e-mail lists and a forum site assigned on each project's intranet.
In the open-sourced projects' forums, the users see source code at every step of the way through "Trac", every single commit (if they want), the closed-sourced ones are identical, except in what the developers may post is limited.
In the closed projects (as is the custom of closed-source developers), the developers are not allowed to provide any proprietary information. They can only post official documentation, and discuss the elements of the program that are user-visible (no discussion of data structures or program internals).
All users have access to debuggers, and standard tools on a "test" machine. But their task has to be completed on a "production computer" that can only run the program binary.
(Meaning each user has two machines to run the software on: a 'clean' machine they have to do the task on using only the "stable" release binary signed by the devs, without the benefit of a debugger. And a test machine they can perform debugging on.)
Oh yes... and there is an elaborate task each user is required to utilize the software to perform.
Every user to finish their task gets a nice cash reward. The project where 50% of the users finish the task first accurately, with no errors gets rewarded, and so do the developers.
The task is hard enough that it takes a while, and requires the software to be reliable.
Also, the task must be performed on the "clean" machine, and only 3 attempts are allowed.
They may test the binaries as much as they want on the test machine. But they have only 3 attempts to complete the task on the test machine (without the software crashing or failing), before the user is disqualified.
Also, the 'tasks' are randomly assigned, and if multiple attempts are made, the task will be different each time.
If the software works perfectly, then the task should not be too difficult.
Also, each project is only allowed 3 stable releases. If the developers make a 3rd stable release, they can no longer do anything more.
They can each make a maximum of 10 beta releases between each stable release.
As is the custom of closed-source projects: binaries are only available for beta or stable releases.
Open source projects may release hourly builds, but they will have to do this manually, and it will consume allowed development time.
Anyways, if the Open source projects do no better under these conditions, then Linus' theory should be considered likely to be false.
A quick and dirty hack is not shitty coding, but inadequate design. The code probably does exactly what the (inadequate, informal) design said it ought to. which makes the code itself high quality, even if the design using it sucks :)