An opt-out system works great if you get one spam a day. However, if you get 100 spam a day, as many of us do, there's no way you're going to actually look at each one, find the opt-out link, and trust that the opt-out link will actually opt you out and not just reveal that someone actually exists at your email address.
The opt-out system works fine for telemarketers because you have to answer the phone or risk missing an important call. For email, I don't have to look at ones I know are spam, so an opt-out system is stupid and useless.
As much as Plone seems great and wonderful, I installed it and couldn't figure out how the hell to access it or set it up. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather have a CMS that's easy to setup and sits quite transparently on top of the excellent Apache/PHP base.
How come when I install all the updates to XP in order to keep my network safe from this new worm, it creates a new account called "ASP.NET something something blah blah" and forces users to a login screen that confuses the hell out of them on boot? Seems like a quick-fix workaround for some problem that MS decided they didn't really have time to fix properly, and it means I have to go around and delete the newly-created user from every machine.
Perhaps what they've actually realized is that the ONLY advantage Windows has over other OSes (and the only reason why a large portion of the population is sticking with Windows) is the availability of games.
Since it's the only reason for people to use Windows these days, Microsoft ought to be capitalizing on it.
I, for one, don't wish that Linux was more like OSX and am very happy using it on the desktop (hell, it's all I've used on my personal desktop for the last 7ish years, so I must like it).
I'm not saying that Linux is for everyone. OSX is an excellent OS and I don't mind using it now and then (my parents and many of my friends use Macs, so I use it on a semi-regular basis). However, after using OSX for a bit I am always happy to return to my Linux box.
OSX is wonderful for people who just want an OS that works and is stable and secure. It's an awesome piece of software and I commend Apple for the great job they did putting together. But it's not customizable. If you want your environment to look and feel different from how Apple says OSX looks and feels, too bad, you're stuck with it. Linux is completely customizable and for those of us who have quite specific ideas about how a desktop environment should look, feel and work, it is the ideal choice.
"Make it easy for users to use their system. Make it so they can visit VersionTracker or Tucows and try everything under the sun! Give the users back control of their computers!"
I don't know about you, but I find it a complete pain in the ass to visit a software site, figure out where to download the software, figure out how to install it, install it, figure out where the hell it put its launcher, then run it, decide I don't like it and have to find the uninstaller, which probably doesn't work anyway and uninstall it from my machine. That's the shareware model!
Easier method: Open up synaptic, search for what I'm looking for, install a few candidates, try them out, remove the ones I don't want through synaptic, knowing that they'll be removed properly.
Having an individual installer/uninstaller for each program on your computer is so old fashioned. The modern way is to have it all centralized. When will people realize this?
Please don't do it. Really. Please. I'm begging you.
The last thing we need is more computer "consultants" who are really just recreational sysadmins. If you really want to make money fixing computers, then get a couple certifications (even an A+ is fine for fixing Windows issues) and open it as a real business instead of pretending to be something you're not and defrauding people.
If I sound particularly bitter, it's because the company I work for has been taken in by such people. They hired a guy with a book called "Unix for Dummies" to setup a FreeBSD file server for them, then continued for several years to pay him every time the machine needed a reboot because none of the services they used started automatically at boot time. It was an unprofessional mess (and the guy who set it up decided to call my boss and tell him he was going to charge us to get information from him about the server, rather than returning my phone calls) and I ended up building them a new server and putting a proper Linux install on it that needs no maintenance at all other than occaisional software updates.
Not that you'll neccessarily claim to be capable of setting up Unix servers when you're actually not or be a complete dick and take people's money, but it's just one more person that probably doesn't know enough to do what they do.
I thought this was supposed to be a modern OS. With Ubuntu, installation takes about 20 minutes and doesn't involve rebooting until everything is done and your system is ready to use. Sure, it doesn't have a pretty interface (although one is being worked on for the next release), but neither do the first several steps of the XP installation.
If people actually installed something other than Windows once in a while, they would never put up with the giant heap of shit that MS calls an OS installer.
I am a big fan of standards and I strive to make all of the pages I design XHTML 1.1 and CSS compliant. However, my love for standards is superceded only by my hatred for plugins. A user should NEVER need a plugin to view a webpage properly. If you build a site that uses Flash, or Java, or SVG or whatever, there had better be a version that's equally-functional and requires no plugins at all. That's pretty much the oldest rule in the book, and unfortunately a lot of people have forgotten it.
No, it's not perfect for newbs. It doesn't automount removable media, it doesn't have desktop icons, it doesn't have an integrated office suite that shines your shoes for you. It does what a window manager ought to do: manage windows unobtrusively so I never notice I'm using it. On my machine here at work, I use 1152x864 since that's all my screen can handle at a reasonable refresh rate. I have a taskbar that pops up when I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen and has nothing but my tasks, a desktop pager and some notification area icons (GAIM, etc) on it. I have a panel on the left of the screen that pops up when I move my mouse there that has some apps, another desktop pager and some panel applets on it (clock, current weather, volume control, etc). The titlebars on the windows take up about 15px. So, what's my point? I get to use the whole screen, all 1152x864 pixels of it for whatever I'm working on! No start menu bar at the bottom, no panel at the top, no trash at all. Just six desktops, a little titlebar and lots of handy keyboard shortcuts. Oh, and for the rare occaision that I want a GUI file manager, it has one that is almost as good as the Mac OS 9 Finder, which is as good as GUI file management ever got.
So, the moral of my post: don't use KDE/Gnome and complain that they're not innovative enough and are too much like Windows/OSX. Any newb-friendly WM is going to be like that. It's what newbs expect and it's the only way newbs will switch to Linux. If you want something innovative, use a more expert-friendly WM that can be customized to suit your exact needs and desires. Linux is about choice. You have many.
Unfortunately for us all, this attitude is very common. My approach is quite the opposite: code to the standards so it works/looks correct in FF (or other mostly-standards-compliant browsers), give it basic functionality in IE and if an IE user complains about it not being perfect tell them to use a proper browser.
Obviously, when doing work for the company I have to be careful and make things look at least reasonably proper in IE (for which the IE7 javascript library has been a lifesaver). However, for my local LUG's webpage, I can just tell IE users to switch browsers or go fuck themselves.
Re:The Dumbing-Down of America...part XXVII
on
VoIP Security
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"but the sheer amount of errors"
It is best, when correcting an article's spelling, not to make grammatical errors yourself.
"The sheer number of errors" would be correct, as errors are counted not measured.
My guess is that it's that script trying to bruteforce random SSH servers, as mentioned on/. a couple weeks ago. My server here at work has been hit too, although the attacking machines were in Europe and Korea in my case. I emailed the owners of the IP blocks the attacks came from and have left it in their courts. My system is secure (I'm the only one who can login via SSH and I have a damn good password), so there was no harm done.
I think before you jump to any conclusions about it being malicious on the part of the other company, you should call the tech there and let him/her know what's happening. If it is indeed a script then there's no harm done and the other tech can take care of fixing their system. If it was actually a malicious attack, then you can try and figure out who is responsible.
God forbid that kids see a bit of sex intermixed with their violence! It saddens me that a game centered around killing people, stealing cars, picking up prostitues, buying and selling drugs and various other criminal activities draws relatively little outcry from parents and even the staunchest conservatives, but that as soon as said game is discovered to contain some mildly-explicit sex scenes everyone goes crazy. Kids whose parents are naive enough to allow their children to play such a violent game are probably looking at internet porn already anyway, so it's nothing they haven't seen before.
True, Rockstar did keep the sex scenes a secret and deceived the ratings board. For this they should maybe be fined (or whatever the normal course of action for that type of thing is). However, the outcry that these sex scenes have caused is ridiculous and there are much better things that congress could spend its money inquiring about.
Anyone who honestly believes that the violent nature of GTA is fine for kids but that the sex isn't needs to very promptly re-examine his or her values.
I don't understand this one. You can sort by either and hide the type/extension if you want.
The thing is, a file's type has nothing at all to do with its extension. That's one of the things that has always annoyed the hell out of me in Windows. On the old Mac OS, the OS determined file types and decided what program should open a file based on the actual content of the file, not the name. You could name an MPEG foo.doc and a JPEG bar.aalsf and the OS would still know exactly what they were and how to open them. If I'm not mistaken, this info was stored as an extended attribute in the file system.
Back in those days, I never even used file extensions. I didn't need to - if it was a picture of a cat, I could just call it Cat and since the Finder knew how to open it that was fine. GUI file managers never got better than that IMO.
This looks like a very, very cool idea. However, I have a major concern that would need to be satisfied before I would buy one: Drivers.
I'm a dedicated Linux user and I think that the complexity of the drivers required for a keyboard like this might mean that a Linux driver doesn't appear right away (I mean, what are the chances of them releasing one, and we all know how long it takes for community-started open-source drivers to become stable, although they're quicker now than ever). Also, that driver had better not put any load on my CPU or memory. I have better things to do with those.
That said, when an open-source driver for it does emerge, you know it'll do all sorts of cool stuff. For those of us who don't need to look at the keys anyway, it could be programmed to show movies while I'm typing instead.
But, really, all of those fan and water and air-conditioning based cooling options are just really good ways to make your office or computer area really friggin' loud. It's not that I want to spend $1500 Canadian on my next computer case, but I'm going to seriously consider it. Just imagine, no fans at all to make my room noisy, and if there's a nuclear attack, I can hide behind it for safety!
They haven't come down any faster than the prices of all other computer components (not other processors, but RAM, hard disks, etc) have. If Intel wasn't anti-competitive, they would need to lower their prices to where AMD prices their processors (somewhat lower than Intel does) in order to compete.
Those with insecure operating systems aren't leaving their mobiles in their cars; what they're doing is leaving their mobiles in their cars with the car doors wide open and a billboard on top that says "MY DOORS ARE OPEN." If you had something stolen out of your car because you left the doors wide open and put up an inviting sign, it'd still be theft, but you sure wouldn't report it because you'd feel stupid.
This completely ignores the fact that writing a worm that attacks insecure computers isn't even like robbing an open car. It's more like climbing into the car and performing some petty vandalism (writing graffiti on the inside of the windshield, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
An opt-out system works great if you get one spam a day. However, if you get 100 spam a day, as many of us do, there's no way you're going to actually look at each one, find the opt-out link, and trust that the opt-out link will actually opt you out and not just reveal that someone actually exists at your email address.
The opt-out system works fine for telemarketers because you have to answer the phone or risk missing an important call. For email, I don't have to look at ones I know are spam, so an opt-out system is stupid and useless.
As much as Plone seems great and wonderful, I installed it and couldn't figure out how the hell to access it or set it up. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather have a CMS that's easy to setup and sits quite transparently on top of the excellent Apache/PHP base.
How come when I install all the updates to XP in order to keep my network safe from this new worm, it creates a new account called "ASP.NET something something blah blah" and forces users to a login screen that confuses the hell out of them on boot? Seems like a quick-fix workaround for some problem that MS decided they didn't really have time to fix properly, and it means I have to go around and delete the newly-created user from every machine.
Perhaps what they've actually realized is that the ONLY advantage Windows has over other OSes (and the only reason why a large portion of the population is sticking with Windows) is the availability of games.
Since it's the only reason for people to use Windows these days, Microsoft ought to be capitalizing on it.
I, for one, don't wish that Linux was more like OSX and am very happy using it on the desktop (hell, it's all I've used on my personal desktop for the last 7ish years, so I must like it).
I'm not saying that Linux is for everyone. OSX is an excellent OS and I don't mind using it now and then (my parents and many of my friends use Macs, so I use it on a semi-regular basis). However, after using OSX for a bit I am always happy to return to my Linux box.
OSX is wonderful for people who just want an OS that works and is stable and secure. It's an awesome piece of software and I commend Apple for the great job they did putting together. But it's not customizable. If you want your environment to look and feel different from how Apple says OSX looks and feels, too bad, you're stuck with it. Linux is completely customizable and for those of us who have quite specific ideas about how a desktop environment should look, feel and work, it is the ideal choice.
"Make it easy for users to use their system. Make it so they can visit VersionTracker or Tucows and try everything under the sun! Give the users back control of their computers!"
I don't know about you, but I find it a complete pain in the ass to visit a software site, figure out where to download the software, figure out how to install it, install it, figure out where the hell it put its launcher, then run it, decide I don't like it and have to find the uninstaller, which probably doesn't work anyway and uninstall it from my machine. That's the shareware model!
Easier method: Open up synaptic, search for what I'm looking for, install a few candidates, try them out, remove the ones I don't want through synaptic, knowing that they'll be removed properly.
Having an individual installer/uninstaller for each program on your computer is so old fashioned. The modern way is to have it all centralized. When will people realize this?
Please don't do it. Really. Please. I'm begging you.
The last thing we need is more computer "consultants" who are really just recreational sysadmins. If you really want to make money fixing computers, then get a couple certifications (even an A+ is fine for fixing Windows issues) and open it as a real business instead of pretending to be something you're not and defrauding people.
If I sound particularly bitter, it's because the company I work for has been taken in by such people. They hired a guy with a book called "Unix for Dummies" to setup a FreeBSD file server for them, then continued for several years to pay him every time the machine needed a reboot because none of the services they used started automatically at boot time. It was an unprofessional mess (and the guy who set it up decided to call my boss and tell him he was going to charge us to get information from him about the server, rather than returning my phone calls) and I ended up building them a new server and putting a proper Linux install on it that needs no maintenance at all other than occaisional software updates.
Not that you'll neccessarily claim to be capable of setting up Unix servers when you're actually not or be a complete dick and take people's money, but it's just one more person that probably doesn't know enough to do what they do.
"Installation took about an hour and 10 minutes."
AN HOUR AND TEN MINUTES??????
I thought this was supposed to be a modern OS. With Ubuntu, installation takes about 20 minutes and doesn't involve rebooting until everything is done and your system is ready to use. Sure, it doesn't have a pretty interface (although one is being worked on for the next release), but neither do the first several steps of the XP installation.
If people actually installed something other than Windows once in a while, they would never put up with the giant heap of shit that MS calls an OS installer.
I am a big fan of standards and I strive to make all of the pages I design XHTML 1.1 and CSS compliant. However, my love for standards is superceded only by my hatred for plugins. A user should NEVER need a plugin to view a webpage properly. If you build a site that uses Flash, or Java, or SVG or whatever, there had better be a version that's equally-functional and requires no plugins at all. That's pretty much the oldest rule in the book, and unfortunately a lot of people have forgotten it.
We can and we do. It's called XFCE.
No, it's not perfect for newbs. It doesn't automount removable media, it doesn't have desktop icons, it doesn't have an integrated office suite that shines your shoes for you. It does what a window manager ought to do: manage windows unobtrusively so I never notice I'm using it. On my machine here at work, I use 1152x864 since that's all my screen can handle at a reasonable refresh rate. I have a taskbar that pops up when I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen and has nothing but my tasks, a desktop pager and some notification area icons (GAIM, etc) on it. I have a panel on the left of the screen that pops up when I move my mouse there that has some apps, another desktop pager and some panel applets on it (clock, current weather, volume control, etc). The titlebars on the windows take up about 15px. So, what's my point? I get to use the whole screen, all 1152x864 pixels of it for whatever I'm working on! No start menu bar at the bottom, no panel at the top, no trash at all. Just six desktops, a little titlebar and lots of handy keyboard shortcuts. Oh, and for the rare occaision that I want a GUI file manager, it has one that is almost as good as the Mac OS 9 Finder, which is as good as GUI file management ever got.
So, the moral of my post: don't use KDE/Gnome and complain that they're not innovative enough and are too much like Windows/OSX. Any newb-friendly WM is going to be like that. It's what newbs expect and it's the only way newbs will switch to Linux. If you want something innovative, use a more expert-friendly WM that can be customized to suit your exact needs and desires. Linux is about choice. You have many.
Unfortunately for us all, this attitude is very common. My approach is quite the opposite: code to the standards so it works/looks correct in FF (or other mostly-standards-compliant browsers), give it basic functionality in IE and if an IE user complains about it not being perfect tell them to use a proper browser.
Obviously, when doing work for the company I have to be careful and make things look at least reasonably proper in IE (for which the IE7 javascript library has been a lifesaver). However, for my local LUG's webpage, I can just tell IE users to switch browsers or go fuck themselves.
"but the sheer amount of errors"
It is best, when correcting an article's spelling, not to make grammatical errors yourself.
"The sheer number of errors" would be correct, as errors are counted not measured.
My guess is that it's that script trying to bruteforce random SSH servers, as mentioned on /. a couple weeks ago. My server here at work has been hit too, although the attacking machines were in Europe and Korea in my case. I emailed the owners of the IP blocks the attacks came from and have left it in their courts. My system is secure (I'm the only one who can login via SSH and I have a damn good password), so there was no harm done.
I think before you jump to any conclusions about it being malicious on the part of the other company, you should call the tech there and let him/her know what's happening. If it is indeed a script then there's no harm done and the other tech can take care of fixing their system. If it was actually a malicious attack, then you can try and figure out who is responsible.
Was this comment intended to be sarcastic? Because really it's just true.
God forbid that kids see a bit of sex intermixed with their violence! It saddens me that a game centered around killing people, stealing cars, picking up prostitues, buying and selling drugs and various other criminal activities draws relatively little outcry from parents and even the staunchest conservatives, but that as soon as said game is discovered to contain some mildly-explicit sex scenes everyone goes crazy. Kids whose parents are naive enough to allow their children to play such a violent game are probably looking at internet porn already anyway, so it's nothing they haven't seen before.
True, Rockstar did keep the sex scenes a secret and deceived the ratings board. For this they should maybe be fined (or whatever the normal course of action for that type of thing is). However, the outcry that these sex scenes have caused is ridiculous and there are much better things that congress could spend its money inquiring about.
Anyone who honestly believes that the violent nature of GTA is fine for kids but that the sex isn't needs to very promptly re-examine his or her values.
I don't understand this one. You can sort by either and hide the type/extension if you want.
The thing is, a file's type has nothing at all to do with its extension. That's one of the things that has always annoyed the hell out of me in Windows. On the old Mac OS, the OS determined file types and decided what program should open a file based on the actual content of the file, not the name. You could name an MPEG foo.doc and a JPEG bar.aalsf and the OS would still know exactly what they were and how to open them. If I'm not mistaken, this info was stored as an extended attribute in the file system.
Back in those days, I never even used file extensions. I didn't need to - if it was a picture of a cat, I could just call it Cat and since the Finder knew how to open it that was fine. GUI file managers never got better than that IMO.
A Longhorn feature that everyone hopes is vaporware!
This looks like a very, very cool idea. However, I have a major concern that would need to be satisfied before I would buy one: Drivers.
I'm a dedicated Linux user and I think that the complexity of the drivers required for a keyboard like this might mean that a Linux driver doesn't appear right away (I mean, what are the chances of them releasing one, and we all know how long it takes for community-started open-source drivers to become stable, although they're quicker now than ever). Also, that driver had better not put any load on my CPU or memory. I have better things to do with those.
That said, when an open-source driver for it does emerge, you know it'll do all sorts of cool stuff. For those of us who don't need to look at the keys anyway, it could be programmed to show movies while I'm typing instead.
Mambo. It's pretty much the best thing ever.
But, really, all of those fan and water and air-conditioning based cooling options are just really good ways to make your office or computer area really friggin' loud.
It's not that I want to spend $1500 Canadian on my next computer case, but I'm going to seriously consider it. Just imagine, no fans at all to make my room noisy, and if there's a nuclear attack, I can hide behind it for safety!
Alt-Tab? That's highly unreliable. What if you accidentally flip to your other Slashdot window?
I much prefer either the multiple-desktops ctrl-alt-leftarrow approach or the (even better) KVM double-scroll lock approach.
They haven't come down any faster than the prices of all other computer components (not other processors, but RAM, hard disks, etc) have. If Intel wasn't anti-competitive, they would need to lower their prices to where AMD prices their processors (somewhat lower than Intel does) in order to compete.
I switched back to Visual C++.
And when a Microsoft product is the lesser of two evils, you know for sure that there's something fishy going on.
I think my company's mission statement is:
"To preserve inefficiency in the face of great innovation, such that nothing ever needs to change."
Those with insecure operating systems aren't leaving their mobiles in their cars; what they're doing is leaving their mobiles in their cars with the car doors wide open and a billboard on top that says "MY DOORS ARE OPEN." If you had something stolen out of your car because you left the doors wide open and put up an inviting sign, it'd still be theft, but you sure wouldn't report it because you'd feel stupid.
This completely ignores the fact that writing a worm that attacks insecure computers isn't even like robbing an open car. It's more like climbing into the car and performing some petty vandalism (writing graffiti on the inside of the windshield, etc).