As so many in this thread have mentioned, there's lots of worthy alternatives: qBittorrent, Deluge, Transmission, that are open-source, and are not bundled with malware.
I'm not going to use an older version of a program produced by a bunch of sociopathic scumbags pulling this dishonest bullshit. I'm going elsewhere.
Use something like Alcodroid to estimate your BAC, using your weight, how much you just ate, etc. etc., and you can drink to your creativity level with ease.
The Mac's menu-bar at the top of the screen was a Fitts' Law thing, the same reason why Windows (before 8) put the Start Button in the corner, and why Windows 95 was so brain-damaged for putting the Start button two pixels away from the corner.
In Windows
Hell, I'm using Kubuntu with KDE right now, and how is it set up? With the K menu in the lower right corner, ready to be quick-drawn at the flick of a mouse.
Though to be honest, the Mac-style menubars don't work as well as they used to. In the early days of the Mac, screens were smaller, trying to get multiple windows on screen just made it hard to get work done, so you maximized your window, had your menubar on the top of the screen, and for those early Macs with small monitors and lower resolutions, that was the optimal way to get things done.
Now with big screens, and multiple screens, people want to have multiple windows up. On my system, I usually don't have my web browser maximized, because it makes columns too wide that way, and makes reading harder, so I have it only vertically maximized. On systems with the huge amounts of screen real-estate, the top-of-the-screen Mac-style menu bar doesn't make as much sense anymore. It's too removed from the application. Some power users will still like it - they're all for quick-drawing their menus, but having the app in one window, and the menus for that app way off on the top edge of the screen is confusing.
And big monitors is why Microsoft's insistence on forcibly full-screening applications is brain-damaged.
U-232 is also produced in LFTR reactors, and is HELLACIOUSLY radioactive. You can't work around U-232 with just a glove-box - you're gonna get a tan that way. It also poisons the reaction of a U-233 bomb, so you've got to separate it out, so you're back to centrifuges and the like, and you're gonna have to throw out the contaminated and radioactive centrifuges when you're done as well.
My very first job, I worked at an A&W, and they put me to work at the deep fryer. The procedure there (OSHA would not approve) was to take a big bag of fries out of the freezer, cook some of them, put the fries back in the freezer, and repeat for a few iterations. They freeze-thaw cycles would cause the fries to get covered with ice crystals.
One particularly frantic dinner rush, I was scrambling to get fries out, and I jammed a whole bunch of ice-covered fries in the deep fryer. Of course, the crystals flashed to steam, and splashed my arm with napalm-hot frying oil. I still have the scars.
That's the thing - it's more fun to play with friends than with random Internet assholes, whether the game is deathmatch or co-op.
Play co-op with random people on the Internet, and you'll get some douchebag griefers who'll do things like team-killing just to screw with people.
I have better things to do than deal with griefers.
What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, we've had a whole 150,000 years since the last time we built Cylons and they rebelled, attempting genocide against the human race.
Surely it can't happen again...
Ideally, there should be a Pat Roach fight in order to make it a true Indiana Jones movie.
In any case, you can't do it right without some hapless bad guy getting chopped up by an airplane propeller or mashed in a rock crusher...
Very important, you see.
Just a few years ago, only servers and a few enthusiasts had more than one CPU in their machines. Now we have desktops with dual cores or quad cores. Only servers had 64-bit OS's and software. Now we have 64-bit desktops. Only servers had more than 4GB RAM (or 1GB, or 64MB, or 640KB) - now desktops routinely have that much memory. Same for disk space - filesystems had size limits, but servers had bigger size limits, then server file systems moved to the desktops as desktops got bigger hard drives. I'm seeing RAID in desktop machines - that used to be solely a server thing.
Not only that, but he could keep the Windows virtual machine perfectly pristine, so the tracking software is always reporting data that shows he's being a good boy, even if he's doing other things in the base Ubuntu system or other virtual machines...
Of course, if he gets too cute with his setup, the feds will find an excuse to show he violated his parole, and back to prison he goes... We do have to keep in mind that parole officers probably search his place at random.
It isn't that NVidia or ATI won't release code. They won't even release hardware specs. There are plenty of kernel and X.org hackers out there who would jump at the chance to write open-source drivers for NVidia and ATI cards. But to do that, you need hardware programming information. You need to know which registers in the cards do what, you need to know what opcodes do what. You need to know what data goes in what registers, or to which addresses, and what data the card sends back, in raw binary. The driver developers don't have this information, and without it, they can't write drivers. NVidia and ATI aren't providing this and won't provide this, citing the need to protect trade secrets. Just to provide the 2-D open-source drivers that X.org does have for NVidia cards, the X.org developers had to run the driver source files through a code mangler that makes those particular.c files look like an entry to the Obfuscated C Contest, or NVidia wouldn't provide enough information to do even 2-D acceleration. The whole point of Nouveau is the laborious process of reverse-engineering NVidia's cards to figure out this information.
Sure, there may be some secret sauce in there that makes for shinier 3-D graphics at a higher frame rate. But I suspect that shiny graphics aren't on the top of the list of things they're protecting. It's DRM. Macrovision's built into every video card that has a TV output port (so you can't use a VCR and tape a DVD movie.) Soon, HDCP will be built into every new graphics card so you can watch HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies without being able to exercise Fair Use legally. And very likely, all you have to do to turn off Macrovision and completely piss off the MPAA is flip a single bit in a particular register. And it's likely that if hardware programming information was known about newer cards, cracking HDCP would be trivial.
Console kiosks have had a solution to the "hog-the-machine" problem for ages - there's a timer inside the kiosk that power-cycles the console every 20 minutes or so.
I fail to see why Sony would pass up that solution for this "solution." Resetting the kiosk every few minutes requires no human intervention - the brat's trying to get to level 42 while other people are waiting, and the system restarts like clockwork after 20 minutes. You don't have to have a clerk there to reset the machine, you don't make the console look flaky and unstable.
What's more plausible - that Sony would deliberately do this, which would require multiple versions of a game get stamped out, makes the system look bad, and so on, or that the system's just plain unstable and somebody's making the story up as an excuse?
I'd say that no, it isn't ready yet for handling security-sensitive tasks like credit card or debit card transactions. It's happening anyways, but I don't think it's mature enough to trust our bank accounts to them.
Just for a tiny bit of reassurance, RFID tags and readers used in credit card/debit card applications (I know because I help make these readers, though I'm still new to the business) include cryptography features such as encrypted data transfer and authentication. In other words, if you don't have the correct crypto keys in the RFID tag and the RFID reader, they will refuse to speak to each other, and anyone trying to listen to the signals will get nothing but encrypted data.
That helps to ensure that random Joe Scumbag can't get himself a handheld reader, wave it a few feet from people's wallets and electronically pick pockets in the simple case. We're assuming that crypto keys are kept secure, so that only authorized card readers have the crypto keys required to authenticate themselves to the cards, and only authorized people have the keys required to encode the cards in such a way that they'll authenticate to the readers, and that the readers have secure connections to the credit card networks. Unfortunately, that's a big assumption to make.
Personally, the scenario of electronic pickpocketing does concern me. I've seen RFID tags read from 30 feet away (though you need a reader with a relatively powerful transceiver, which isn't as portable.) Handheld readers are more likely to have ranges between a few inches and a few feet, depending on the power level of the reader's signal, the type of tag, the phase of the moon, and the number of RF gremlins present. If the authentication can be circumvented, it probably will be, since there is significant money involved.
Or better yet, think of this project in the same way you'd think of implementing an Obfuscated C Code contest entry - how horrible can you make the code, and still get paid. Make it as painful as possible for Big Brother to go data mining.
That, or use some ethics and don't take work like this.
In the end, captchas are obnoxious for legitimate end users, while only providing temporary relief from spammers. The spammers can and will find ways around the captchas, which may include more sophisticated OCR algorithms, but also other solutions such as the manually created lookup tables that were mentioned earlier.
Other ways need to be found to distinguish humans from spammer's bots.
One large, well known company in the tech industry only accepts job applications by their web site. Of course I would follow up resumes with phone calls to improve my chances, but they don't provide any way to do that. Don't call us, we'll call you.
Oh, and if we're talking about the low level service sector jobs like at grocery stores or Wal-Mart, one pet peeve of mine is that on top of the other stupid hoops they make you jump through, they make you take an "Integrity test" with questions like "Is it ok to steal medication for your 4 year old that needs dialysis because you're too poor to pay for them?" Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree... Of course, if you don't put Strongly Disagree, the system automatically circular-files your application.
How hard can it be for a builder to comply with this demand? If they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax, image the system with Ubuntu and ship it. The customers will either use the system as is, or they're perfectly free to nuke the hard drive and install their OS of choice.
I work as a contractor for another big company in the industry. Same badges issues - I wear an orange badge, the permanent employees wear blue badges. It's kind of a mixed blessing for me. One one side, the side, I'm missing out of some of the benefits, and I'm excluded from some of the meetings. On the other hand, I'm paid really well, and I don't have to go to some of the meetings...
I just saw the Seasickness cures episode. Obviously, that one was incredibly unpleasant for Adam and Grant. I also remember the Baghdad Battery episode where Kari wired up a replica of the Ark of the Covenant with an electric fence energizer. (OUCH!) What would you say was the absolute worst, most painful myth you've tested on the show?
Assuming you were in a position to fix whatever you deemed to be broken in most Linux distributions, what are the top five things you would fix first to improve Linux's security and reliability?
Slashdot Mirror
As so many in this thread have mentioned, there's lots of worthy alternatives: qBittorrent, Deluge, Transmission, that are open-source, and are not bundled with malware. I'm not going to use an older version of a program produced by a bunch of sociopathic scumbags pulling this dishonest bullshit. I'm going elsewhere.
Use something like Alcodroid to estimate your BAC, using your weight, how much you just ate, etc. etc., and you can drink to your creativity level with ease.
And I'm also getting the "mistake scroll-drag for click" bug. I want the old site back. This new one sucks.
The Mac's menu-bar at the top of the screen was a Fitts' Law thing, the same reason why Windows (before 8) put the Start Button in the corner, and why Windows 95 was so brain-damaged for putting the Start button two pixels away from the corner.
In Windows
Hell, I'm using Kubuntu with KDE right now, and how is it set up? With the K menu in the lower right corner, ready to be quick-drawn at the flick of a mouse.
Though to be honest, the Mac-style menubars don't work as well as they used to. In the early days of the Mac, screens were smaller, trying to get multiple windows on screen just made it hard to get work done, so you maximized your window, had your menubar on the top of the screen, and for those early Macs with small monitors and lower resolutions, that was the optimal way to get things done.
Now with big screens, and multiple screens, people want to have multiple windows up. On my system, I usually don't have my web browser maximized, because it makes columns too wide that way, and makes reading harder, so I have it only vertically maximized. On systems with the huge amounts of screen real-estate, the top-of-the-screen Mac-style menu bar doesn't make as much sense anymore. It's too removed from the application. Some power users will still like it - they're all for quick-drawing their menus, but having the app in one window, and the menus for that app way off on the top edge of the screen is confusing.
And big monitors is why Microsoft's insistence on forcibly full-screening applications is brain-damaged.
U-232 is also produced in LFTR reactors, and is HELLACIOUSLY radioactive. You can't work around U-232 with just a glove-box - you're gonna get a tan that way. It also poisons the reaction of a U-233 bomb, so you've got to separate it out, so you're back to centrifuges and the like, and you're gonna have to throw out the contaminated and radioactive centrifuges when you're done as well.
My very first job, I worked at an A&W, and they put me to work at the deep fryer. The procedure there (OSHA would not approve) was to take a big bag of fries out of the freezer, cook some of them, put the fries back in the freezer, and repeat for a few iterations. They freeze-thaw cycles would cause the fries to get covered with ice crystals.
One particularly frantic dinner rush, I was scrambling to get fries out, and I jammed a whole bunch of ice-covered fries in the deep fryer. Of course, the crystals flashed to steam, and splashed my arm with napalm-hot frying oil. I still have the scars.
"If your phone rings and you discover it's in the back seat, do NOT crawl over the seat to answer it while driving."
http://www.gandhicam.org/
That's the thing - it's more fun to play with friends than with random Internet assholes, whether the game is deathmatch or co-op. Play co-op with random people on the Internet, and you'll get some douchebag griefers who'll do things like team-killing just to screw with people. I have better things to do than deal with griefers.
What could possibly go wrong? I mean, we've had a whole 150,000 years since the last time we built Cylons and they rebelled, attempting genocide against the human race. Surely it can't happen again...
Ideally, there should be a Pat Roach fight in order to make it a true Indiana Jones movie. In any case, you can't do it right without some hapless bad guy getting chopped up by an airplane propeller or mashed in a rock crusher... Very important, you see.
Just a few years ago, only servers and a few enthusiasts had more than one CPU in their machines. Now we have desktops with dual cores or quad cores. Only servers had 64-bit OS's and software. Now we have 64-bit desktops. Only servers had more than 4GB RAM (or 1GB, or 64MB, or 640KB) - now desktops routinely have that much memory. Same for disk space - filesystems had size limits, but servers had bigger size limits, then server file systems moved to the desktops as desktops got bigger hard drives. I'm seeing RAID in desktop machines - that used to be solely a server thing.
Not only that, but he could keep the Windows virtual machine perfectly pristine, so the tracking software is always reporting data that shows he's being a good boy, even if he's doing other things in the base Ubuntu system or other virtual machines...
Of course, if he gets too cute with his setup, the feds will find an excuse to show he violated his parole, and back to prison he goes... We do have to keep in mind that parole officers probably search his place at random.
It isn't that NVidia or ATI won't release code. They won't even release hardware specs. There are plenty of kernel and X.org hackers out there who would jump at the chance to write open-source drivers for NVidia and ATI cards. But to do that, you need hardware programming information. You need to know which registers in the cards do what, you need to know what opcodes do what. You need to know what data goes in what registers, or to which addresses, and what data the card sends back, in raw binary. The driver developers don't have this information, and without it, they can't write drivers. NVidia and ATI aren't providing this and won't provide this, citing the need to protect trade secrets. Just to provide the 2-D open-source drivers that X.org does have for NVidia cards, the X.org developers had to run the driver source files through a code mangler that makes those particular .c files look like an entry to the Obfuscated C Contest, or NVidia wouldn't provide enough information to do even 2-D acceleration. The whole point of Nouveau is the laborious process of reverse-engineering NVidia's cards to figure out this information.
Sure, there may be some secret sauce in there that makes for shinier 3-D graphics at a higher frame rate. But I suspect that shiny graphics aren't on the top of the list of things they're protecting. It's DRM. Macrovision's built into every video card that has a TV output port (so you can't use a VCR and tape a DVD movie.) Soon, HDCP will be built into every new graphics card so you can watch HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies without being able to exercise Fair Use legally. And very likely, all you have to do to turn off Macrovision and completely piss off the MPAA is flip a single bit in a particular register. And it's likely that if hardware programming information was known about newer cards, cracking HDCP would be trivial.
That's why we're stuck with proprietary drivers.
Console kiosks have had a solution to the "hog-the-machine" problem for ages - there's a timer inside the kiosk that power-cycles the console every 20 minutes or so.
I fail to see why Sony would pass up that solution for this "solution." Resetting the kiosk every few minutes requires no human intervention - the brat's trying to get to level 42 while other people are waiting, and the system restarts like clockwork after 20 minutes. You don't have to have a clerk there to reset the machine, you don't make the console look flaky and unstable.
What's more plausible - that Sony would deliberately do this, which would require multiple versions of a game get stamped out, makes the system look bad, and so on, or that the system's just plain unstable and somebody's making the story up as an excuse?
I'd say that no, it isn't ready yet for handling security-sensitive tasks like credit card or debit card transactions. It's happening anyways, but I don't think it's mature enough to trust our bank accounts to them.
Just for a tiny bit of reassurance, RFID tags and readers used in credit card/debit card applications (I know because I help make these readers, though I'm still new to the business) include cryptography features such as encrypted data transfer and authentication. In other words, if you don't have the correct crypto keys in the RFID tag and the RFID reader, they will refuse to speak to each other, and anyone trying to listen to the signals will get nothing but encrypted data.
That helps to ensure that random Joe Scumbag can't get himself a handheld reader, wave it a few feet from people's wallets and electronically pick pockets in the simple case. We're assuming that crypto keys are kept secure, so that only authorized card readers have the crypto keys required to authenticate themselves to the cards, and only authorized people have the keys required to encode the cards in such a way that they'll authenticate to the readers, and that the readers have secure connections to the credit card networks. Unfortunately, that's a big assumption to make.
Personally, the scenario of electronic pickpocketing does concern me. I've seen RFID tags read from 30 feet away (though you need a reader with a relatively powerful transceiver, which isn't as portable.) Handheld readers are more likely to have ranges between a few inches and a few feet, depending on the power level of the reader's signal, the type of tag, the phase of the moon, and the number of RF gremlins present. If the authentication can be circumvented, it probably will be, since there is significant money involved.
Or better yet, think of this project in the same way you'd think of implementing an Obfuscated C Code contest entry - how horrible can you make the code, and still get paid. Make it as painful as possible for Big Brother to go data mining.
That, or use some ethics and don't take work like this.
In the end, captchas are obnoxious for legitimate end users, while only providing temporary relief from spammers. The spammers can and will find ways around the captchas, which may include more sophisticated OCR algorithms, but also other solutions such as the manually created lookup tables that were mentioned earlier.
Other ways need to be found to distinguish humans from spammer's bots.
One large, well known company in the tech industry only accepts job applications by their web site. Of course I would follow up resumes with phone calls to improve my chances, but they don't provide any way to do that. Don't call us, we'll call you.
Oh, and if we're talking about the low level service sector jobs like at grocery stores or Wal-Mart, one pet peeve of mine is that on top of the other stupid hoops they make you jump through, they make you take an "Integrity test" with questions like "Is it ok to steal medication for your 4 year old that needs dialysis because you're too poor to pay for them?" Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree... Of course, if you don't put Strongly Disagree, the system automatically circular-files your application.
How hard can it be for a builder to comply with this demand? If they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax, image the system with Ubuntu and ship it. The customers will either use the system as is, or they're perfectly free to nuke the hard drive and install their OS of choice.
I work as a contractor for another big company in the industry. Same badges issues - I wear an orange badge, the permanent employees wear blue badges. It's kind of a mixed blessing for me. One one side, the side, I'm missing out of some of the benefits, and I'm excluded from some of the meetings. On the other hand, I'm paid really well, and I don't have to go to some of the meetings...
I just saw the Seasickness cures episode. Obviously, that one was incredibly unpleasant for Adam and Grant. I also remember the Baghdad Battery episode where Kari wired up a replica of the Ark of the Covenant with an electric fence energizer. (OUCH!) What would you say was the absolute worst, most painful myth you've tested on the show?
Assuming you were in a position to fix whatever you deemed to be broken in most Linux distributions, what are the top five things you would fix first to improve Linux's security and reliability?
That didn't take long... Anyone have a mirror?