This is the point where it starts to make sense to browse from a VMWare instance, and roll back to a prior snapshot afterward. Or, to browse from a Kubuntu live CD session. Etc...
Jailbreaking doesn't mean getting apps for free. Apps from the iTunes store still cost the same, and come to that, I have a handful of paid apps from Cydia, too. In fact, the two most expensive apps on my phone are only available on jailbroken phones.
The point of jailbreaking is to be able to run more apps, including ones that Apple doesn't approve for the official store. Free apps are free whether you get them on a jailbroken phone or not, paid apps are paid whether you get them on a jailbroken phone or not. (Although, an app developer might not pay the same fees to get listed on Cydia as on iTunes...)
We've been through this once before, when the original PGP was acquired by Network Associates (McAffee). Didn't they learn their lesson after that fiasco?
That depends entirely on your usage pattern. It sounds like your laptop use fits the "carry on bag" pattern -- you throw a few files in the "carry on bag" laptop, go hop on an airplane, and sync up with the "mothership" later. (That's pretty much exactly the market that netbooks and the MacBook Air target.)
There are other patterns out there. Mine would be more the "Winnebago" usage pattern -- I certainly could keep some of my stuff on a server elsewhere, but I'd rather have everything right there with me and live on my laptop full time. (Sadly, I only have a 500 GB drive at the moment, but that may change depending on what happens with prices.) This also influences choices like the 17 inch screen and full keyboard.
I'm sure you'll find opinions to the contrary, but I'm going to insist that neither way is "wrong". Do what works, but don't expect the same thing to work for everyone.
You "can't be arsed" to open a Word document? Seriously? Open a Word document? You're that close-minded that you feel it necessary to make your students jump through arbitrary hoops to appease your moral standing on a file format? I'm extremely grateful I'm not in a class taught by someone like you.
Naturally I can't speak for GP, but I "can't be arsed" to pay for a copy of Word, or to keep a machine around that could run it if I had it. Thankfully I'm not taking any classes at all just now, but if I were, I'd be much happier with a teacher that refused Word, than with one that required it.
In high school (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and TV was black and white) a group of us put together a game of assassination with toy guns, foam rubber knives, methylene blue and what-have-you. The rule was that your "weapon" couldn't do any actual physical harm to the target, but that it otherwise had to in some way resemble the real thing -- e.g. guns had to actually shoot something, poisons had to change the color or taste of the food, etc.
As a concession to school rules, we agreed not to play during class. Between classes, at lunch or on the way to or from school was fine.
I shudder to think where a group of kids would end up if they did that today...
Python isn't a favorite language of mine, and I'd much rather start with Ruby or even Perl. But. Take a look at Snake Wrangling for Kids, and Python may well turn out to be your best starting point.
I'm running the FitPC v1, which is advertised as operating in 5 watts. Mine has FreeBSD on it, but you can get them with Ubuntu preinstalled if you prefer. I've had OpenBSD on mine before, too, so I can verify that that also works.
I do mine with ssh, bash and git, for the moment. I'm looking at moving to something like puppet for system configuration, though. I've also heard good things about cobbler for initial provisioning, but it's mainly aimed at an RHEL environment and that's not what we're using.
"Encrypted twice" doesn't mean anything. A composed encryption scheme is a single function, same as y = (2x + 1)^2 - 4.
Technically true, but depending on the cipher(s) you use, you may have no idea at all what the resulting function is, and it is therefore often easier to decrypt in the same steps you used for the encryption.
Some cryptographic functions, RSA for instance, are mathematical groups. In other words, RSA(RSA(plaintext, key1), key2) === RSA(plaintext, key3) for some key3 that you probably don't know. In such cases, if you were trying to break the cipher and had no means to recover keys 1 and 2, it would be easier to discover key3 and decrypt in one step.
That's not true for all ciphers, however. DES is one example of a cipher that is not a mathematical group, which is why "TripleDES" is regarded as being more secure than a single pass of DES -- I believe the assumption is that 3 passes of 56-bit DES are about equivalent to a 112 bit key.
All of that theory, of course, breaks down if you can get at the original keys. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis has the obvious advantages of being fast and computationally cheap.
You'll find that Linux support, or not, varies widely between different departments on campus. At the school where I went (long, long ago), the computer science department hires most of their part-time computer support staff from the campus Linux user group. As you might imagine, their Linux support is pretty good. The law school, on the other hand, requires all students to have an approved laptop, which must run Windows, and may not dual-boot any other OS. This is both because of their required (and provided) software package, and because a certain utility they use while taking tests requires direct access to the master boot record and is incompatible with dual-boot configurations.
It's unlikely that any university will have good campus-wide Linux support, but you may get good support in specific departments. If not, you can likely get good support from the campus LUG, unless you're in a situation like the law school where Windows is explicitly required.
I'd personally also like to see a 10Mb/s lower bound. This is 2009 after all, and the telecoms have already been paid for 45Mb/s symmetrical bandwidth to everyone.
If that's the case, then the lower bound should be 45Mb/s, not 10.
The problem is, nearly everyone who cares or is likely to care about Microsoft's behavior has already switched. The ones who are left either (a) will never switch because they want what they're used to, or (b) need a really compelling product reason to switch: "I can run $program_I_need (or $game_I_wnat) on FreeBSD, but it's not available on Windows".
You'll never get group a to switch. Negative advertising about Microsoft won't work on group b, either, so if you want them to switch, it's time to get working on the Big Compelling Thing that they'll switch for.
Exactly. If Microsoft makes that statement in the EULA for the OEM version of Vista, it stands to reason that there's a corresponding clause in the OEM contract that allowed Lenovo to distribute that version of Vista in the first place.
ACORN has not been charged with any fraud because ACORN was not the perpetrator, but rather the victim of the fraud: specifically, they were asked to pay lazy contractors for voter registration work that they hadn't actually done (and had instead filled out with false information).
If there had, in fact, been any conspiracy, it would have been to (1) defraud ACORN of money, and (2) damage the good name of the organization by blaming ACORN for the contractors' fraudulent activities.
Small thumb drives are great for bootable utilities and installers. In my laptop bag right now, I have thumb drives with Darik's Boot and Nuke, g4u, the OpenBSD 4.4 install floppy image, installers for FreeBSD 7.1 i386 and AMD64, and a couple of live-CD-like KUbuntu sticks.
In many cases (like DBAN and OpenBSD) it's a simple matter of dd if=the-floppy-image of=/dev/da0 to prepare the drive -- thumb drives work very well as fake floppies. The FreeBSD and KUbuntu setups were a bit more complicated because they contain a lot more than a floppy image, but still fairly easy if you can Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely unimportant (the fake email you use to fill out forms when you don't want spam later) -- mailinator doesn't use any password at all :)
Mostly unimportant (games and such, with no personal information and no credit card attached) -- pick something easy, because who cares?
Moderately important -- "correct horse battery staple", but keep it unique
Really important -- `openssl rand -base64 12`
Impressive. I don't think i knew the difference until I was...30.
You won't really know the difference until you're 45.
This is the point where it starts to make sense to browse from a VMWare instance, and roll back to a prior snapshot afterward. Or, to browse from a Kubuntu live CD session. Etc...
Jailbreaking doesn't mean getting apps for free. Apps from the iTunes store still cost the same, and come to that, I have a handful of paid apps from Cydia, too. In fact, the two most expensive apps on my phone are only available on jailbroken phones.
The point of jailbreaking is to be able to run more apps, including ones that Apple doesn't approve for the official store. Free apps are free whether you get them on a jailbroken phone or not, paid apps are paid whether you get them on a jailbroken phone or not. (Although, an app developer might not pay the same fees to get listed on Cydia as on iTunes...)
I hit the space bar twice in vim and then trust LaTeX (or the browser, or whatever's responsible for the actual rendering) to Do The Right Thing.
We've been through this once before, when the original PGP was acquired by Network Associates (McAffee). Didn't they learn their lesson after that fiasco?
That depends entirely on your usage pattern. It sounds like your laptop use fits the "carry on bag" pattern -- you throw a few files in the "carry on bag" laptop, go hop on an airplane, and sync up with the "mothership" later. (That's pretty much exactly the market that netbooks and the MacBook Air target.)
There are other patterns out there. Mine would be more the "Winnebago" usage pattern -- I certainly could keep some of my stuff on a server elsewhere, but I'd rather have everything right there with me and live on my laptop full time. (Sadly, I only have a 500 GB drive at the moment, but that may change depending on what happens with prices.) This also influences choices like the 17 inch screen and full keyboard.
I'm sure you'll find opinions to the contrary, but I'm going to insist that neither way is "wrong". Do what works, but don't expect the same thing to work for everyone.
You "can't be arsed" to open a Word document? Seriously? Open a Word document? You're that close-minded that you feel it necessary to make your students jump through arbitrary hoops to appease your moral standing on a file format? I'm extremely grateful I'm not in a class taught by someone like you.
Naturally I can't speak for GP, but I "can't be arsed" to pay for a copy of Word, or to keep a machine around that could run it if I had it. Thankfully I'm not taking any classes at all just now, but if I were, I'd be much happier with a teacher that refused Word, than with one that required it.
In high school (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and TV was black and white) a group of us put together a game of assassination with toy guns, foam rubber knives, methylene blue and what-have-you. The rule was that your "weapon" couldn't do any actual physical harm to the target, but that it otherwise had to in some way resemble the real thing -- e.g. guns had to actually shoot something, poisons had to change the color or taste of the food, etc.
As a concession to school rules, we agreed not to play during class. Between classes, at lunch or on the way to or from school was fine.
I shudder to think where a group of kids would end up if they did that today...
Python isn't a favorite language of mine, and I'd much rather start with Ruby or even Perl. But. Take a look at Snake Wrangling for Kids, and Python may well turn out to be your best starting point.
Damn, you beat me to it :D
+1 for Password Gorilla. Although I haven't finished moving over everything I had in my plain text + PGP file yet.
I'm running the FitPC v1, which is advertised as operating in 5 watts. Mine has FreeBSD on it, but you can get them with Ubuntu preinstalled if you prefer. I've had OpenBSD on mine before, too, so I can verify that that also works.
I do mine with ssh, bash and git, for the moment. I'm looking at moving to something like puppet for system configuration, though. I've also heard good things about cobbler for initial provisioning, but it's mainly aimed at an RHEL environment and that's not what we're using.
The 2009 Utah Open Source Conference had several good presentations on infrastructure automation. See, in particular, Phil Windley's slides on puppet and cobbler (hopefully audio and maybe video will be available soon).
If this is the first time the responsible party has made a mistake like this, then it probably doesn't need to be a career-terminating experience.
With that said, though, you're entirely right that there should have been validation and change control!
"Encrypted twice" doesn't mean anything. A composed encryption scheme is a single function, same as y = (2x + 1)^2 - 4.
Technically true, but depending on the cipher(s) you use, you may have no idea at all what the resulting function is, and it is therefore often easier to decrypt in the same steps you used for the encryption.
Some cryptographic functions, RSA for instance, are mathematical groups. In other words, RSA(RSA(plaintext, key1), key2) === RSA(plaintext, key3) for some key3 that you probably don't know. In such cases, if you were trying to break the cipher and had no means to recover keys 1 and 2, it would be easier to discover key3 and decrypt in one step.
That's not true for all ciphers, however. DES is one example of a cipher that is not a mathematical group, which is why "TripleDES" is regarded as being more secure than a single pass of DES -- I believe the assumption is that 3 passes of 56-bit DES are about equivalent to a 112 bit key.
All of that theory, of course, breaks down if you can get at the original keys. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis has the obvious advantages of being fast and computationally cheap.
You'll find that Linux support, or not, varies widely between different departments on campus. At the school where I went (long, long ago), the computer science department hires most of their part-time computer support staff from the campus Linux user group. As you might imagine, their Linux support is pretty good. The law school, on the other hand, requires all students to have an approved laptop, which must run Windows, and may not dual-boot any other OS. This is both because of their required (and provided) software package, and because a certain utility they use while taking tests requires direct access to the master boot record and is incompatible with dual-boot configurations.
It's unlikely that any university will have good campus-wide Linux support, but you may get good support in specific departments. If not, you can likely get good support from the campus LUG, unless you're in a situation like the law school where Windows is explicitly required.
We need a moderation option "+1 Sad but true" :(
I'd personally also like to see a 10Mb/s lower bound. This is 2009 after all, and the telecoms have already been paid for 45Mb/s symmetrical bandwidth to everyone.
If that's the case, then the lower bound should be 45Mb/s, not 10.
The problem is, nearly everyone who cares or is likely to care about Microsoft's behavior has already switched. The ones who are left either (a) will never switch because they want what they're used to, or (b) need a really compelling product reason to switch: "I can run $program_I_need (or $game_I_wnat) on FreeBSD, but it's not available on Windows".
You'll never get group a to switch. Negative advertising about Microsoft won't work on group b, either, so if you want them to switch, it's time to get working on the Big Compelling Thing that they'll switch for.
Exactly. If Microsoft makes that statement in the EULA for the OEM version of Vista, it stands to reason that there's a corresponding clause in the OEM contract that allowed Lenovo to distribute that version of Vista in the first place.
Oh, for a mod point...
ACORN has not been charged with any fraud because ACORN was not the perpetrator, but rather the victim of the fraud: specifically, they were asked to pay lazy contractors for voter registration work that they hadn't actually done (and had instead filled out with false information).
If there had, in fact, been any conspiracy, it would have been to (1) defraud ACORN of money, and (2) damage the good name of the organization by blaming ACORN for the contractors' fraudulent activities.
For programming, use vim and stay away from the mouse. For general use, though, I'd go with one of these: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/trackballs/devices/166&cl=us,en
My money is on unionized workers facing layoffs or payroll cuts.
I'd be more inclined to bet on anti-union people trying to make the union workers look bad.
Small thumb drives are great for bootable utilities and installers. In my laptop bag right now, I have thumb drives with Darik's Boot and Nuke, g4u, the OpenBSD 4.4 install floppy image, installers for FreeBSD 7.1 i386 and AMD64, and a couple of live-CD-like KUbuntu sticks.
In many cases (like DBAN and OpenBSD) it's a simple matter of dd if=the-floppy-image of=/dev/da0 to prepare the drive -- thumb drives work very well as fake floppies. The FreeBSD and KUbuntu setups were a bit more complicated because they contain a lot more than a floppy image, but still fairly easy if you can Google.