While our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors would have regarded children as belonging to the tribe, today we have a "Stay the fuck away from MY children! MINE MINE MINE!" attitude.
I agree with this point. And I like your tribal analogy. Let us continue to develop it:
This isn't just someone from the local tribe handing out some well-meaning advice, but something far more global.
It is very different, and anyone would be a fool to think otherwise. Getting unsolicited advice about child development from a neighbor or a loved one (ala "from the local tribe") is a totally separate thing from being ridiculed on a global forum by a complete stranger (as if from some far-away tribe).
In the former case, such advice should, of course, be welcomed. In latter? It's not their business, and they should stay the hell out of it -- they've got their own tribe to worry about.
My own children are my own responsibility, and I choose to share some of that responsibility with people whom I know and trust. And it should be bloody obvious, but none of those trusted souls are random people on Teh Intarweb.
You exemplify a growing trend for people to spend way too much fucking time raising everyone else's kids.
How about you just worry about your own, let he worry about his, while I worry about mine?
You OK with that, champ?
Or would you really prefer that everyone else tell you what to do with your own children, too? I'm sure that no matter what you say about them, I can find something sufficiently abnormal about your statement to feed a steady stream of admonishment toward you, your children, and your methods of raising a family...
I've made v.32bis (~14.4kbps) calls using a CDMA phone, and it worked fine. I've even sent faxes with a cell phone (to a Vonage-connected fax machine, no less), which also worked fine. It's been possible to do this stuff for ages.
Here's the trick: There isn't any voice compression involved.
All one needs to do is connect a serial (or USB, depending on phone) cable to the telephone, and treat the device like a regular old analog modem. ATDT[insert number here], and things go off without a hitch -- the phone itself already knows how to behave just like a modem, as least as far as your own computer is concerned.
It looks something like this:
RS-232 -> fake cell phone modem -> CDMA data -> cellular base with fake v.32bis modem -> v.32bis over POTS -> recipient's modem
(replace "fake" with "virtual" or "nonexistant" or "software," depending on how you choose to perceive the combination of a device and cellular network which together emulate an analog modem but really share very little in common with one)
So, similar to the old dialup packet switched networks (tymnet, telenet, etc), there is a little magic involved in the middle. When you call an ISP using a cell phone, -you- aren't calling an ISP; instead, you've just instructed Verizon's base to so with the data you provide. In this way, analog v.32bis data never, ever hits the airwaves - everything turns into a cellular-specific protocol long before it gets broadcast from either side.
Now that you've familiarized yourself with the topic somewhat:
The Hitachi drive in my laptop is good for 600,000 load/unload cycles, according to spec. Under Vista, this equates to about 3 years of use, as extrapolated from the six months that I've been running it. This is a bit shorter than I'd like the drive to last, obviously, but it's not too bad.
However, at the rate Ubuntu racks up load/unload cycles on this machine, on a default install of Gutsy with compiz and Firefox and a couple of xterms, all doing nothing much but idling, it will exceed 600,000 in about 22 days/i> according to some math I did a few days ago, which is so broken that it makes me ill.
The reason? Software. I might be being remedial here, but software exists to make hardware do stuff. Usually, it's useful stuff that software does. But in this case, it's doing non-useful stuff, like reading and writing to the hard drive with such veracity that just as soon as the head parks (unloads) due to being idle, some software something-or-other in Ubuntu decides it needs something else, the heads dutifully load, Ubuntu gets its data, and the drive idles for a few seconds. And then, because it is idle, it goes ahead parks the heads (this is actually a fairly important and very common safety feature for mobile devices) again. And immediately, Ubuntu decides it needs more data. The heads load. Data is read. Drive idles. Heads park. More data is needed. The heads load. Data is read. Drive idles. Heads parks.
So on, and so forth. Et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum (or 600k load cycles, whichever comes first). Were I foolish enough to run an active database on a laptop, I'd expect this sort of strangeness.
But I'm not.
It is a very basic incompatibility between the way Ubuntu treats the disk, and the way the disk expects to be treated. Much like an incompatibility between a printer and ghostscript, it is the software implementor's responsibility to make sure that they're using the hardware correctly.
But killing a disk in 22 days is not correct. It's broken.
Of course the software is at fault, if for no other reason than the fact that the hardware was here first.
Why is it that when Microsoft fucks up and breaks lots of stuff, everyone starts complaining about how Microsoft is destroying the world?
whereas...
Why is it that when Ubuntu starts physically destroying laptop hard drives at an unprecedented rate, everyone blames the hardware?
and
Why is it that when Apple fucks something up and breaks lots of stuff, everyone says that the users should've known better?
Look, kids. Broken software is broken software. Publishing software that bricks phones, trashes drives, or makes desktop PCs unbootable (if not technically bricked) is a big deal, no matter who it was that released the software responsible.
Call it whatever you want; perhaps it is a lack of testing, market analysis, or quality assurance, or maybe a EULA loophole, whatever. It's still fucking broken, should not exist in such a state, and is the catalyst in a very real problem.
Your vagueness is to be applauded, and you misunderstand.
I posted a fact, with appropriate qualifications.
Do you honestly think that people in general (whether police officers or not) understand what a high-voltage electric shock feels like, unless they've been tazed?
Dense, dense, dense. But, as ex military, I guess I could expect that from you.
Straw man, indeed. You created an argument from my post which I myself did not make, and then responded to that creation in earnest.
And you'd like me to validate what, exactly? My assertion that training does not equate to experience?
Heh.
If that's the case, then you really are a dense one, but I'll play along:
Being trained about rebuilding an engine and doing it are two different things. Being trained about homebuilding and constructing a house are two different things. Being trained about structural engineering and designing bridges are two different things. Being trained about hand-to-hand combat and being punched in the face are two different things. Being trained about driving and actually doing it are two different things. Being trained about fucking and doing it are two different things. Being trained about tazers and actually being tazed are two different things.
It is obvious (much like it is that the sky is blue) that both of our life experiences in other matters show that training and experience are two very different things.
I eagerly await your rebuttal, which I do hope will include citations to support the notion that training about tazers is equal to actually being tazed, which would indeed be a rather unique facet of life were it to be true.
"Otherwise," as in, "other than being tazed." I don't think I need to come up with evidence to support the plain and obvious notion that an officer has a low probability of having experienced an intense electric shock, outside of a tazer. It simply isn't a common thing; most people in the US have never been exposed to voltages beyond 120VAC no matter how careless they've been when working near electricity.
I don't condemn tazers, or their use by police officers. I merely suggest, in support of a previous poster, that tazing officers as a matter of course during their initial training would level the playing field with other forms of non-lethal force, in terms of experience.
I do not think that requiring it would be ridiculous, as you've previously suggested. Instead, I believe that it is the only sane way to allow them to understand exactly what it is that they're doing; watching someone be tazed, or learning about it through books and videos is simply not sufficient. They need to actually -be- tazed to fully comprehend what level of force such an action actually applies.
Anarchy? Hardly. More like being in-keeping with expectations of other non-lethal deterrents.
An officer carries a club, but likely has been hit hard (or fallen, or something) at some point in their life and understand that it will be a painful experience for the recipient. An officer therefore carries an understanding that being hit by a club is going to be painful, and has a reasonable expectation about the level of pain a particular blow might produce, verifiable by the feel and sound of each hit.
An officer carries his fists. A very common weapon, and certainly one that they've been on the receiving end of before. There is also good feedback as to the level of deterrence being administered, as registered by the officer's own pain.
Pepper spray and tear gas. I don't know if officers are hit with pepper spray during training, but being exposed to CS tear gas is certainly a regular part of training, and the experience of this is probably adequate to cover usage of pepper spray. (I have experienced CS as a part of military training. It was unpleasant, to say the least, but did do wonders for clearing my lungs and sinuses of all manner of goo.)
Tazer? There's no feedback, except for the convulsions of the subject on the ground. Given the low probability of the officer having otherwise experienced such an intense electric shock, it seems to me that they'd have no reasonable way to genuinely estimate what it is that they're doing to the subject. That is, of course, unless they themselves have been tazed.
It is obviously very important that an officer be able to use a level of force which appropriate for the matter at hand, and in order to determine what that level is an officer needs to have an understanding of what each deterrent will do. Without the experience, an officer's decision on what level of force needs to be used will be (at best) misguided, and the results of that decision might be far more dangerous than the situation should dictate.
1. Not always interruptive. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had a UAC prompt on the taskbar, just sitting there, waiting for me to both notice its existence and do something with it.
2. Of course. But, then, it is their own fucking computer.
3. And? If programs would stop repeatedly trying to poke at things that needn't be poked at, the repetition would disappear. Instead of (perhaps) several UAC prompts per day, a typical user running more proper software might only see it once every several days.
So. Your suggestion for a replacement for the complete and total abomination that UAC consists of is...what, exactly? Giving users their unrestricted "Administrator" account back?
Under Ubuntu, there are no admin accounts that are actually admin accounts, either, at least by default -- you're actively discouraged from running as root, and are supposed to do everything with sudo instead.
This, it seems, is heralded by security nuts as a great advancement. Real root access (or "administrator" access) comes anonymity, which is exactly what one does not want when dealing with low-level system functions. BUT, if you do all your administratia through sudo (ala UAC) instead, you can actually make logs of -who- does what, not just that some anonymous root user made a change.
The same things would seem to apply to the Administrator account of a Windows box, word for word.
Therefore, I resubmit that Vista and Ubuntu implement identical privilege escalation methods for common administrative tasks out-of-the-box, and that each method is equally both tolerable and intolerable.
Why, then, as a user of a home computer would anyone ever bother fucking with SELinux? It seems that it would be totally broken and useless (and thus disabled or avoided) in that application.
We aren't talking about corporate intranet security, here, but a desktop operating system, controlled and used by people who are both users and administrators.
Vista's UAC does a fine job of taking care of the difficulties that such an arrangement produces, and exhibits almost exactly the same behavior as Ubuntu does by default.
It's all fucking inane. The posting, the comments -- all of it.
I figure I'm owed about three minutes for the posting itself, three minutes for the attached comments, and another three minutes for you complaining about people complaining.
So here I am, complaining about people complaining about people complaining. And I've only got three more words for you: Plz STFU. THX.
Maybe -- and I realize that you'll think I'm going out on a limb here -- the reason to keep a database open to the network is so that end-users might be able to use an interface which doesn't fucking suck?
Contrary to modern opinion, not everything lends itself well to being presented in a web browser. In fact, it is my considered opinion that most web interfaces are a complete abomination[1]. Some applications just don't work that way at all[2].
And, yeah, sure - one could always create an extra (non-SQL) middle layer, and hide the DB behind that. But that involves more work, and doesn't really solve any of the authentication/security issues, only obscures them. This is, of course, not security: if it's adequately secure for a PHP script on a web server somewhere to access an SQL datebase somewhere else, then it is also adequately secure for an end-user application to do the same, at least in a business setting.
It's just another open port. It is no more, and no less, dangerous than ports 80, 25 or 123.
[1]: Media storage. It's a pain in the ass to manage an otherwise-fine program like Gallery, chiefly because of the assumption that everything must be inserted into the system via a PHP script running on a web server. Which is not only long-winded and stupid, but makes it painful to actually put anything into the system. There are dedicated applications for this, but they also communicate with the web server, and tend to behave erratically. And never mind trying to store and peruse things like personal music and video collections with a database and a web-browser front-end - the basic concept is so broken that few even try, and all of them fail.
[2]: Point of sale is a lousy thing to run over a web browser. It's a real motherfucker (impossibility?) to sanely integrate simple things like cash drawers, unique input devices like credit card and bar code readers, and receipt printers in a program like Firefox. Conducting HTTP transactions in a generic browser instead of simple SQL queries in a custom end-user application can really slow things down. A middle layer would fix some of this, sure, but that just does more of making Apache look like a third wheel than it does to fix anything.
Re:Worthless without a cooling fan...
on
Lap Desks
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· Score: 1
Odd stuff.
The only laptop I've personally seen overheat was a Dell Inspiron 8000, which had the business end of the heatsink completely stuff with cat hair. A small amount of disassembly and dollar's worth of canned air, and it was fine.
My own laptop, an Inspiron 6000, usually doesn't even have the fan running under normal load, let alone overheat.
Now, mind you, it's not quite stock - the CPU has been substantially undervolted in order to reduce heat output (and power consumption). The stock fan control is replaced with some software which lets me run the CPU at a much higher temperature than what most would consider normal (currently 59 C), which in turn maximizes the amount of heat which can be removed by a slow-moving (and usually off) fan.
But that's all just to minimize noise, really. Other nice side effects are increased fan life (it runs slower and less frequently than stock), and decreased accumulation of dust and other funk on the heatsinks.
Nevertheless, even with a 30% overclock on the video card, it is a stable and relatively cool machine. Sometimes the two sticks of DDR-2 it has can get a bit warm, but there's not much to be done about that and it's never had an effect on stability.
Suggestion: Clean your computer. It doesn't have to be that way.
Most (I am sure there must be one that actually works somewhere) "PC" laptops will stay on if you just close the lid (even with sleep when lid is closed selected in windows) and then get really hot, overheat and shut down.
My Inspiron 6000 actually works, but I've disabled that function -on purpose-. Just because I've closed the lid doesn't mean that I'm done using the computer and want it to immediately go to sleep. When I do want it to sleep, I just mash the power button, close the lid, and put the computer into my backpack. (Why would anyone wait 5 seconds?)
OTOH, with Ubuntu 7.10 on this same machine, it doesn't even properly turn off the display when the lid is closed. It sees the ACPI event just fine, but seemingly does absolutely nothing with that information. Bad, bad, bad behavior. (After more than 12 hours of fucking with it, Ubuntu is almost running as well as Vista on this box.)
So, clearly, while Windows can be ill-behaved, everyone's favorite golden boy Ubuntu is even worse. (That Apple seems to get it right is more an indication of one advantage their closed-loop hardware platform than of any particular hardware or software prowess.)
I doubt we'll see 3x sensors for automagic HDR images in anything but very specific (ie, expensive) applications, for a few reasons:
- Cost. The current and obvious trend, at least toward the low end of digital photography, is to reduce sensor size as much as possible in order to manufacture more CCDs with a single wafer. 3 times as many sensors means 3 times as much cost. I suppose one could put all 3 CCDs onto a single die, making the whole package a bit smaller, but I doubt it'd help much with the final cost.
- Rarity. Because most people don't care about HDR photos for their routine shapshots, they technology will have no economy of scale boost to cover the R&D on the manufacturing side for the short runs it would entail.
- Lighting. Split the optical path into 3 equal parts so that you can expose 3 sensors at the same time, and even in a perfect world each of them will get one-third as much light. Without some very dramatic increases in signal-to-noise ratio over what is common now, this isn't likely to be very practical in most uses. (In reality, you'd want them graduated such that one sensor gets overexposed, another gets normally exposed, and the third gets underexposed. But this still means less light available, even for the "normal exposure" sensor.)
One could, I suppose, scan a mirror between the three sensors and cure the light problem by using each one in series. But then, you've got time distortion between exposures, geomatric distortion, focal plane issues, and a bunch of extra jittery mechanical parts (which SLRs have plenty enough of, already) -- solvable problems, sure, but unnecessary ones. And it's not at all clear to me how such a scanning arrangement might ever be better or faster than using a single CCD, and having the camera's software take a quick series of three shots at different exposures.
No, sir. I just don't think it will happen. Better, simpler, cheaper, and far more available results would be produced by improving the dynamic range of conventional single-CCD cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
A link to the scene in question, for the uninitiated.
Um. Uh. Er.
The question was about video games. The answer was about child rearing.
I fail to see the connection.
Might you care to explain your position in greater detail?
I agree with this point. And I like your tribal analogy. Let us continue to develop it:
This isn't just someone from the local tribe handing out some well-meaning advice, but something far more global.
It is very different, and anyone would be a fool to think otherwise. Getting unsolicited advice about child development from a neighbor or a loved one (ala "from the local tribe") is a totally separate thing from being ridiculed on a global forum by a complete stranger (as if from some far-away tribe).
In the former case, such advice should, of course, be welcomed. In latter? It's not their business, and they should stay the hell out of it -- they've got their own tribe to worry about.
My own children are my own responsibility, and I choose to share some of that responsibility with people whom I know and trust. And it should be bloody obvious, but none of those trusted souls are random people on Teh Intarweb.
You exemplify a growing trend for people to spend way too much fucking time raising everyone else's kids.
How about you just worry about your own, let he worry about his, while I worry about mine?
You OK with that, champ?
Or would you really prefer that everyone else tell you what to do with your own children, too? I'm sure that no matter what you say about them, I can find something sufficiently abnormal about your statement to feed a steady stream of admonishment toward you, your children, and your methods of raising a family...
But I won't. It's not my job to raise your kids.
Now, everyone can finally thumbs-down experts-exchange.com into oblivion.
It's not as bad as you think.
I've made v.32bis (~14.4kbps) calls using a CDMA phone, and it worked fine. I've even sent faxes with a cell phone (to a Vonage-connected fax machine, no less), which also worked fine. It's been possible to do this stuff for ages.
Here's the trick: There isn't any voice compression involved.
All one needs to do is connect a serial (or USB, depending on phone) cable to the telephone, and treat the device like a regular old analog modem. ATDT[insert number here], and things go off without a hitch -- the phone itself already knows how to behave just like a modem, as least as far as your own computer is concerned.
It looks something like this:
RS-232 -> fake cell phone modem -> CDMA data -> cellular base with fake v.32bis modem -> v.32bis over POTS -> recipient's modem
(replace "fake" with "virtual" or "nonexistant" or "software," depending on how you choose to perceive the combination of a device and cellular network which together emulate an analog modem but really share very little in common with one)
So, similar to the old dialup packet switched networks (tymnet, telenet, etc), there is a little magic involved in the middle. When you call an ISP using a cell phone, -you- aren't calling an ISP; instead, you've just instructed Verizon's base to so with the data you provide. In this way, analog v.32bis data never, ever hits the airwaves - everything turns into a cellular-specific protocol long before it gets broadcast from either side.
Now that you've familiarized yourself with the topic somewhat:
The Hitachi drive in my laptop is good for 600,000 load/unload cycles, according to spec. Under Vista, this equates to about 3 years of use, as extrapolated from the six months that I've been running it. This is a bit shorter than I'd like the drive to last, obviously, but it's not too bad.
However, at the rate Ubuntu racks up load/unload cycles on this machine, on a default install of Gutsy with compiz and Firefox and a couple of xterms, all doing nothing much but idling, it will exceed 600,000 in about 22 days/i> according to some math I did a few days ago, which is so broken that it makes me ill.
The reason? Software. I might be being remedial here, but software exists to make hardware do stuff. Usually, it's useful stuff that software does. But in this case, it's doing non-useful stuff, like reading and writing to the hard drive with such veracity that just as soon as the head parks (unloads) due to being idle, some software something-or-other in Ubuntu decides it needs something else, the heads dutifully load, Ubuntu gets its data, and the drive idles for a few seconds. And then, because it is idle, it goes ahead parks the heads (this is actually a fairly important and very common safety feature for mobile devices) again. And immediately, Ubuntu decides it needs more data. The heads load. Data is read. Drive idles. Heads park. More data is needed. The heads load. Data is read. Drive idles. Heads parks.
So on, and so forth. Et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum (or 600k load cycles, whichever comes first). Were I foolish enough to run an active database on a laptop, I'd expect this sort of strangeness.
But I'm not.
It is a very basic incompatibility between the way Ubuntu treats the disk, and the way the disk expects to be treated. Much like an incompatibility between a printer and ghostscript, it is the software implementor's responsibility to make sure that they're using the hardware correctly.
But killing a disk in 22 days is not correct. It's broken.
Of course the software is at fault, if for no other reason than the fact that the hardware was here first.
Why is it that when Microsoft fucks up and breaks lots of stuff, everyone starts complaining about how Microsoft is destroying the world?
whereas...
Why is it that when Ubuntu starts physically destroying laptop hard drives at an unprecedented rate, everyone blames the hardware?
and
Why is it that when Apple fucks something up and breaks lots of stuff, everyone says that the users should've known better?
Look, kids. Broken software is broken software. Publishing software that bricks phones, trashes drives, or makes desktop PCs unbootable (if not technically bricked) is a big deal, no matter who it was that released the software responsible.
Call it whatever you want; perhaps it is a lack of testing, market analysis, or quality assurance, or maybe a EULA loophole, whatever. It's still fucking broken, should not exist in such a state, and is the catalyst in a very real problem.
Of course the software is to blame.
Your vagueness is to be applauded, and you misunderstand.
I posted a fact, with appropriate qualifications.
Do you honestly think that people in general (whether police officers or not) understand what a high-voltage electric shock feels like, unless they've been tazed?
Dense, dense, dense. But, as ex military, I guess I could expect that from you.
Really? Where? I certainly don't remember lying, much less see where I've admitted to having done so.
You really are dense. I certainly wasn't lying about that part.
Straw man, indeed. You created an argument from my post which I myself did not make, and then responded to that creation in earnest.
And you'd like me to validate what, exactly? My assertion that training does not equate to experience?
Heh.
If that's the case, then you really are a dense one, but I'll play along:
Being trained about rebuilding an engine and doing it are two different things.
Being trained about homebuilding and constructing a house are two different things.
Being trained about structural engineering and designing bridges are two different things.
Being trained about hand-to-hand combat and being punched in the face are two different things.
Being trained about driving and actually doing it are two different things.
Being trained about fucking and doing it are two different things.
Being trained about tazers and actually being tazed are two different things.
It is obvious (much like it is that the sky is blue) that both of our life experiences in other matters show that training and experience are two very different things.
I eagerly await your rebuttal, which I do hope will include citations to support the notion that training about tazers is equal to actually being tazed, which would indeed be a rather unique facet of life were it to be true.
Straw man.
"Otherwise," as in, "other than being tazed." I don't think I need to come up with evidence to support the plain and obvious notion that an officer has a low probability of having experienced an intense electric shock, outside of a tazer. It simply isn't a common thing; most people in the US have never been exposed to voltages beyond 120VAC no matter how careless they've been when working near electricity.
I don't condemn tazers, or their use by police officers. I merely suggest, in support of a previous poster, that tazing officers as a matter of course during their initial training would level the playing field with other forms of non-lethal force, in terms of experience.
I do not think that requiring it would be ridiculous, as you've previously suggested. Instead, I believe that it is the only sane way to allow them to understand exactly what it is that they're doing; watching someone be tazed, or learning about it through books and videos is simply not sufficient. They need to actually -be- tazed to fully comprehend what level of force such an action actually applies.
Anarchy? Hardly. More like being in-keeping with expectations of other non-lethal deterrents.
An officer carries a club, but likely has been hit hard (or fallen, or something) at some point in their life and understand that it will be a painful experience for the recipient. An officer therefore carries an understanding that being hit by a club is going to be painful, and has a reasonable expectation about the level of pain a particular blow might produce, verifiable by the feel and sound of each hit.
An officer carries his fists. A very common weapon, and certainly one that they've been on the receiving end of before. There is also good feedback as to the level of deterrence being administered, as registered by the officer's own pain.
Pepper spray and tear gas. I don't know if officers are hit with pepper spray during training, but being exposed to CS tear gas is certainly a regular part of training, and the experience of this is probably adequate to cover usage of pepper spray. (I have experienced CS as a part of military training. It was unpleasant, to say the least, but did do wonders for clearing my lungs and sinuses of all manner of goo.)
Tazer? There's no feedback, except for the convulsions of the subject on the ground. Given the low probability of the officer having otherwise experienced such an intense electric shock, it seems to me that they'd have no reasonable way to genuinely estimate what it is that they're doing to the subject. That is, of course, unless they themselves have been tazed.
It is obviously very important that an officer be able to use a level of force which appropriate for the matter at hand, and in order to determine what that level is an officer needs to have an understanding of what each deterrent will do. Without the experience, an officer's decision on what level of force needs to be used will be (at best) misguided, and the results of that decision might be far more dangerous than the situation should dictate.
1. Not always interruptive. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had a UAC prompt on the taskbar, just sitting there, waiting for me to both notice its existence and do something with it.
2. Of course. But, then, it is their own fucking computer.
3. And? If programs would stop repeatedly trying to poke at things that needn't be poked at, the repetition would disappear. Instead of (perhaps) several UAC prompts per day, a typical user running more proper software might only see it once every several days.
So. Your suggestion for a replacement for the complete and total abomination that UAC consists of is...what, exactly? Giving users their unrestricted "Administrator" account back?
Gee.
Under Ubuntu, there are no admin accounts that are actually admin accounts, either, at least by default -- you're actively discouraged from running as root, and are supposed to do everything with sudo instead.
This, it seems, is heralded by security nuts as a great advancement. Real root access (or "administrator" access) comes anonymity, which is exactly what one does not want when dealing with low-level system functions. BUT, if you do all your administratia through sudo (ala UAC) instead, you can actually make logs of -who- does what, not just that some anonymous root user made a change.
The same things would seem to apply to the Administrator account of a Windows box, word for word.
Therefore, I resubmit that Vista and Ubuntu implement identical privilege escalation methods for common administrative tasks out-of-the-box, and that each method is equally both tolerable and intolerable.
Eh.
Why, then, as a user of a home computer would anyone ever bother fucking with SELinux? It seems that it would be totally broken and useless (and thus disabled or avoided) in that application.
We aren't talking about corporate intranet security, here, but a desktop operating system, controlled and used by people who are both users and administrators.
Vista's UAC does a fine job of taking care of the difficulties that such an arrangement produces, and exhibits almost exactly the same behavior as Ubuntu does by default.
It's all fucking inane. The posting, the comments -- all of it.
I figure I'm owed about three minutes for the posting itself, three minutes for the attached comments, and another three minutes for you complaining about people complaining.
So here I am, complaining about people complaining about people complaining. And I've only got three more words for you: Plz STFU. THX.
It should be noted that UAC behaves exactly like Ubuntu's default user configuration.
Maybe -- and I realize that you'll think I'm going out on a limb here -- the reason to keep a database open to the network is so that end-users might be able to use an interface which doesn't fucking suck?
Contrary to modern opinion, not everything lends itself well to being presented in a web browser. In fact, it is my considered opinion that most web interfaces are a complete abomination[1]. Some applications just don't work that way at all[2].
And, yeah, sure - one could always create an extra (non-SQL) middle layer, and hide the DB behind that. But that involves more work, and doesn't really solve any of the authentication/security issues, only obscures them. This is, of course, not security: if it's adequately secure for a PHP script on a web server somewhere to access an SQL datebase somewhere else, then it is also adequately secure for an end-user application to do the same, at least in a business setting.
It's just another open port. It is no more, and no less, dangerous than ports 80, 25 or 123.
[1]: Media storage. It's a pain in the ass to manage an otherwise-fine program like Gallery, chiefly because of the assumption that everything must be inserted into the system via a PHP script running on a web server. Which is not only long-winded and stupid, but makes it painful to actually put anything into the system. There are dedicated applications for this, but they also communicate with the web server, and tend to behave erratically. And never mind trying to store and peruse things like personal music and video collections with a database and a web-browser front-end - the basic concept is so broken that few even try, and all of them fail.
[2]: Point of sale is a lousy thing to run over a web browser. It's a real motherfucker (impossibility?) to sanely integrate simple things like cash drawers, unique input devices like credit card and bar code readers, and receipt printers in a program like Firefox. Conducting HTTP transactions in a generic browser instead of simple SQL queries in a custom end-user application can really slow things down. A middle layer would fix some of this, sure, but that just does more of making Apache look like a third wheel than it does to fix anything.
Odd stuff.
The only laptop I've personally seen overheat was a Dell Inspiron 8000, which had the business end of the heatsink completely stuff with cat hair. A small amount of disassembly and dollar's worth of canned air, and it was fine.
My own laptop, an Inspiron 6000, usually doesn't even have the fan running under normal load, let alone overheat.
Now, mind you, it's not quite stock - the CPU has been substantially undervolted in order to reduce heat output (and power consumption). The stock fan control is replaced with some software which lets me run the CPU at a much higher temperature than what most would consider normal (currently 59 C), which in turn maximizes the amount of heat which can be removed by a slow-moving (and usually off) fan.
But that's all just to minimize noise, really. Other nice side effects are increased fan life (it runs slower and less frequently than stock), and decreased accumulation of dust and other funk on the heatsinks.
Nevertheless, even with a 30% overclock on the video card, it is a stable and relatively cool machine. Sometimes the two sticks of DDR-2 it has can get a bit warm, but there's not much to be done about that and it's never had an effect on stability.
Suggestion: Clean your computer. It doesn't have to be that way.
No discussion of switches can be complete without a mention of a genuinely magical switch connected to a PDP-10:
A Story About 'Magic', courtesy of the venerable and surprisingly non-ubiquitous Jargon File.
Most (I am sure there must be one that actually works somewhere) "PC" laptops will stay on if you just close the lid (even with sleep when lid is closed selected in windows) and then get really hot, overheat and shut down.
My Inspiron 6000 actually works, but I've disabled that function -on purpose-. Just because I've closed the lid doesn't mean that I'm done using the computer and want it to immediately go to sleep. When I do want it to sleep, I just mash the power button, close the lid, and put the computer into my backpack. (Why would anyone wait 5 seconds?)
OTOH, with Ubuntu 7.10 on this same machine, it doesn't even properly turn off the display when the lid is closed. It sees the ACPI event just fine, but seemingly does absolutely nothing with that information. Bad, bad, bad behavior. (After more than 12 hours of fucking with it, Ubuntu is almost running as well as Vista on this box.)
So, clearly, while Windows can be ill-behaved, everyone's favorite golden boy Ubuntu is even worse. (That Apple seems to get it right is more an indication of one advantage their closed-loop hardware platform than of any particular hardware or software prowess.)
Why Iraqi? Why not Guatamalan or Haitian?
There's lots of relatively impoverished places that stand to make our own industrialized problems seem nothing more than fickle and trite.
I doubt we'll see 3x sensors for automagic HDR images in anything but very specific (ie, expensive) applications, for a few reasons:
- Cost. The current and obvious trend, at least toward the low end of digital photography, is to reduce sensor size as much as possible in order to manufacture more CCDs with a single wafer. 3 times as many sensors means 3 times as much cost. I suppose one could put all 3 CCDs onto a single die, making the whole package a bit smaller, but I doubt it'd help much with the final cost.
- Rarity. Because most people don't care about HDR photos for their routine shapshots, they technology will have no economy of scale boost to cover the R&D on the manufacturing side for the short runs it would entail.
- Lighting. Split the optical path into 3 equal parts so that you can expose 3 sensors at the same time, and even in a perfect world each of them will get one-third as much light. Without some very dramatic increases in signal-to-noise ratio over what is common now, this isn't likely to be very practical in most uses. (In reality, you'd want them graduated such that one sensor gets overexposed, another gets normally exposed, and the third gets underexposed. But this still means less light available, even for the "normal exposure" sensor.)
One could, I suppose, scan a mirror between the three sensors and cure the light problem by using each one in series. But then, you've got time distortion between exposures, geomatric distortion, focal plane issues, and a bunch of extra jittery mechanical parts (which SLRs have plenty enough of, already) -- solvable problems, sure, but unnecessary ones. And it's not at all clear to me how such a scanning arrangement might ever be better or faster than using a single CCD, and having the camera's software take a quick series of three shots at different exposures.
No, sir. I just don't think it will happen. Better, simpler, cheaper, and far more available results would be produced by improving the dynamic range of conventional single-CCD cameras.
Jack Tramail of Atari and Commodore used to say that $200 is a sweet spot for consumers
And we all know what happened to those two companies.
Yikes.