Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? I mean, obviously the sight of the WTC in these movies may be upsetting to some people, but in my opinion, wiping them out of movies and tv shows like they never even existed is extremely disrespectful to the memories of those who lost their lives in the disaster.
I agree completely.
The other day I saw a movie that took place in California in 1998, and they showed it without any glaciers, and there were no dinosaurs walking around either! How disrespectful to the memories of all the primitive hominid people who were killed by glaciers, and all the dinosaurs who perished in natural cataclysm, that we should just pretend they never existed.
Um, if a movie is set after the towers were destroyed, it doesn't make much sense to show them standing.
Sorry, but you get paid for the end product, if you do graphic arts, then gimp can do it for you
Does GIMP do CMYK yet? If not, it's pretty much useless in the print world. I tried to check the web site but www.gimp.org is not responding at the moment.
Why not just dual boot if you're going to have it on a powerpc anyway?
I've never understood this dual booting thing. I cannot imagine, ever in a thousand years, dual booting. What could be more annoying? Get 40 or 50 windows open, all sorts of tasks underway, and then have to shut it all down just to do one more thing? What on earth is the appeal of that? Absolutely bizarre.
I mean, I guess if you want to experiment with some operating system once in a blue moon, and don't have the 30 minutes it takes to find a free spare PC, it might be vaguely acceptable. But as part of any sort of normal routine, ugh!
Because Darwin does not add much value to the Unix/BSD world from an application developer's standpoint...
It does stand to add one rather crucial thing: A doubling or tripling of the user base. This means more people using the software and more people contributing to the software.
This will provided some well-appreciated incentives for students in IT security classes to discover firsthand the process by which systems are compromised.
Imagine how fun it'll be for the students to plaster their own deepest thoughts (tasteful mix of cursing and swearing, no doubt) instantly across every public computer screen on campus!
Re:How does this affect ALPHA?
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
I have no experience w/their professional series -- but knowing what Compaq did w/their newly aquired Alpha line I could only make some assumptions that it isn't good
When I was with the government there was strong pressure to buy Compaq, with the result that whenever I didn't feel like a fight they'd get another 5 digts of my budget.
The machines were fairly expensive, and a major pain to work with. Everything was a step beyond nonstandard, from the interfaces to the chipsets to the tools required to work with the machines.
And for those who care, getting Linux and FreeBSD to install and run on the Compaqs - especially with a decent amount of hardware support beyond keyboard, hard drive, and 640x480 video - ranged from difficult to impossible.
I would never buy Compaq in any situation where I didn't feel forced to. I hope this doesn't mean that HP becomes a no-buy brand too.
You bring up a good point, but keep in mind that the jobs are much more mobile than labor.
The company in VA can move the jobs to Russia, Indonesia, Mexico, or wherever, quite easily. They're free to look around the world for the best work at the cheapest wages. However, there are only so many options open to the workers. They're not free to go from country-to-country looking for the highest wages, due to immigration laws, or just plain unwillingness to relocate.
If what you say were true (workers being unable to seek employment outside of their locality) then how is it that they are earning big bucks from a company in another country?
Oh, what luxury! My old cubicle was no better than a refrigerator box on a top shelf in a warehouse. I had to cut holes in the bottom so my feet would have somewhere to dangle. And I didn't have a computer, there wasn't any room. I'd have to shout the keys I wanted pressed to the person at the end of the office. Of course she was typing for 6 people so sometimes my programs got a bit messed. But that was all we needed back then and I was happy to have that much.
[ long pause] Riiiiiiight.
At my first job, we worked four to a desk - two sitting on the floor and two sharing the chair. They didn't have money for computers, so they gave each of us two paper clips and an electrical outlet, and we had to modulate our data into the building power by running the electricity through our bodies and flexing various muscles in phase with the 60Hz AC pulse. If we made any mistakes our manager would punish us by connecting us to the 240V, 30A laundry room circuit.
Ah, you tell the kids today that, and they won't believe you.
Re:Did you even read the article's arguments?
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
Other services that encrypt and tunnel and decentralize and info-hide are not subject to this weakness, no matter how many silly red herrings some tech-ignorant journalist might pull out of his pants.
And there will always be new, exploitable, and fatal weaknesses which will be easily exploitable by a well funded government agency, no matter how invincible some cocky technicians might believe they are.
But that's not nearly as significant. When the goal is to get Pandora's box open, nobody cares much in the long term when someone manages to keep it closed for a few extra minutes.
1. Bring an allen wrench to work
2. Stay late each night, "working"
3. Every night expand your cubicle a couple of inches.
4. Within a month or two, you should own the place.
Actually happened to a friend of mine. She's very neurotic about decorating, so when she looked up one day and her perfectly-centered poster was no longer centered, she knew something was wrong. She looked at the carpet in her neighbor's cubicle and found fresh dimples from where their shared partition wall used to rest.
The best part was when she confronted the neighbor, asking "Did you move the wall this weekend?" and his response was, "Um, I don't remember."
Re:taming .. not too sure,but then again..
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 1
Laws in a country that makes people who act legally in their countries,all of a sudden become criminals to be arrested in the USA just go too far.
I disagree. All perpetrators of, say, genocide who show up at JFK indeed ought to be arrested.
The problem is with the law itself, not whom it's been applied to.
Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
Nevis has Cable and Wireless for a provider. Cable and Wireless has an exclusive very long term government sanctioned monopoly on ALL telecommunications. You just try to set up your satellite ground station and see how fast you wind up in JAIL.
The same rules exist all over the place. Plenty of satellite dishes. Easy to hide. Radio waves != visual spectrum waves. Camouflage therefore trivially feasible.
You'd be amazed what's happening outside your little patch of Hicksville
Granted, I've only worked on networking projects on 5 continents so far, so I've plenty to learn, but where exactly is Hicksville?
Re:Can't Control the Web...
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
Tell that to users in China or Afganistan. The government actively shuts down ISP's and terminates all connections to "undesireable" sites.
1. China and Afghanistan are two separate countries. They do not share an entity called "the government."
2. Afghanistan does not have any ISPs and it never did. Internet users dial to Pakistan.
3. What do you mean "terminates all connections to 'undesireable' sites"? Someone sits there tossing in filtering rules in real time?
4. The government of China doesn't have a hope. They only catch the stupidest people. The rest have figured out how to get what they need without attracting attention or running into filters.
You mean to tell me that if some alphabetic government agency or powerful international corporation started putting MASSIVE pressure on backbone providers to shut down... (enter offending matter here - Movies - MP3 - p0rn)... they couldn't get action?
They might get "action", but it wouldn't be effective in the long term, because it's not possible to identify movies/mp3s/porn when properly conveyed.
Re:Explain this one to me...
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
The only thing I can think of is that your ISP doesn't allow any initial SYN packets through to you. This would make you only capable of being a client. If enough ISPs banded together to they could conceivably restrict the majority of iternet connected people this way.
Nope. You could just come up with a protocol that tunneled atop existing connections (opened from the ISP customer to some central server that brokers the handshakes), used UDP, or whatever.
What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.
Re:Did you even read the article's arguments?
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster
Napster was regulated because they felt it a worthwhile tradeoff to have access to the "legit" capital market.
If they could/would have foregone outside capital, or gone to the underground capital market, they would have been much harder to regulate.
Of course, the more salient point is that they were regulatable because their operation depended completely on centralization. Other services that encrypt and tunnel and decentralize and info-hide are not subject to this weakness, no matter how many silly red herrings some tech-ignorant journalist might pull out of his pants.
Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
Read the article, they actually address this argument. It doesn't matter if I setup a Napster server in Timbuktu if the RIAA can cut off my one-and-only access point to the outside world.
The article "addressed" it in a most unsatisfactory way. It used a single anecdotal case (St. Kitts & Nevis) and generalized from that, with no basis, to the entire world. So what if St. Kitts has one primary cable connection? They still have satellite. And other countries may have more connections. It is not going to be very easy to cut off a profitable link because someone within a country isn't playing nice.
with raw sockets, you can go into things that cant be done legally according to protocol, so now you can stuff round, triangular, and star shaped pegs through the square hole. things will break. its like trying to run a car on water, or trying to withdraw cash from an atm with the ace of spades.
You need to put down the Gibson crack pipe and start speaking in real-world terms. Square pegs? Ace of spades? Random hallucinatory metaphors do not a persuasive argument make.
Do you have an example of how malformed packets could be used to "take over" something? They're occasionally effective tools for DOS (though less and less as IP protocol handler authors stop making silly assumptions), and I do recall one FreeBSD ipfw vulnerability that hinged on the ability to set a certain flag in the packet header, but basically this is not such a big issue. All the fun and power is at higher levels - in the application layer.
How much RAM do you have, how much do they have, and how big are the.ps files? If they're hitting the disk, that could make a huge difference.
You may have a point there. The Windows machines (running 98) mostly have 64M. My Mac has 128, though I invariably have PhotoShop, QuarkXPress, FreeHand, Distiller, Acrobat, Outlook Express, IE, and NiftyTelnet open.
Though 98 is cleverer about virtual memory than OS9 (what isn't?) so one would expect better results.
The PS files are in the 20+M range (lots of TIFFs, though what really seems to slow it down on the Windows side is documents with large numbers of fonts.
the effect of adding TLDs on DNS cache hit rates (they decrease)
Trivially, if at all. Looking up NS for 'ford.com.', charitably assuming NS for 'com.' has been cached, is one query. Likewise looking up NS for hypothetical TLD 'ford.' would be one query. The labor just shifts from the gTLD servers to the root servers. Same amount of work.
the effect of adding TLDs on DNS root server load (the loads increase)
See above.
the technical difficulties associated with having a large number of root servers
Do tell. A bigger cache preload file shipped with resolvers? Going from 250 bytes to 500? Heavens. We'll all have to sell our gold fillings to buy larger hard drives.
the undesirability of having poorly-managed TLDs
First of all, that's a separate issue. Secondly, who cares? If they're poorly managed, they're poorly managed. Why is that a problem for anyone except those who depend on that particular TLD - just like people who now depend on a particular ISP or other service provider?
the undesirability of having a flat DNS space
Huh?.com +.net +.org is as about as flat as it could possibly be - how many zillion 2LDs does.com have again? Oh, you say that.museum solved all that and now we've reached the optimal level of hierarchy? I see.
Re:At the risk of pissing off... well... everybody
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They're okay, but I'm guessing the designers at Apple could build something that would blow them all away visually.
My Macs are under my desks; I don't particularly care how they look.
Where I see the elegance is on the screen, and selling Windows machines won't help with that.
For instance, all the Photoshop benchmarks in the world can't explain why I vastly prefer the Mac for Photoshop: The mouse movement is much more smooth and natural. I can't do any fine-detail work with a mouse in Windows (as an experiment, try moving the mouse pointer in a little circle repeatedly as fast as possible with both machines. On the Windows machine, if your hand is anything like mine, the circle tracks across the screen and takes on a NW-SE ovoid shape). Worse still, when you have the mouse speed/acceleration set to any reasonable levels on Windows, it actually SKIPS PIXELS even when you're moving it as slowly as possible. So you end up having to zoom way all the time to get things done.
And don't even get me started on fonts, default locations for open/save dialogs, etc.
Re:It's not the chip speed, it's Net speed
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
First, I got my son and my mom iMacs. I don't have to spend hours telling them how to use their boxen. They just work.
A few months ago my sister, who's in grad school, finally broke down and bought her first computer. She got an iMac. When it came she called me up at work to have me talk her through setting it up. Here's how the conversation went:
SISTER: Okay, I got it out of the box. So how do I...? Oh never mind, I see.
ME:...
SISTER: Oh, now it wants... Oh, okay. And... Okay, it wants the phone number to dial the internet. Do I just put in the number the university gave me?
ME: Yes.
SISTER: Okay, oh... And now... Oh, I see. Okay. It's working! Did you get my email?
Excellent. Perhaps someone can explain to me why Acrobat Distiller 4.0 chugs through 20MB postscript files in a minute or less on my 450MHz G4, while the same files take 10 or 15 minutes on the 800ish-MHz Pentium IIIs that other people in the office use.
I'd really like to know, because I'm sick of everyone emailing me their.ps's to convert.
my point about raw socket support & code red is that a similar worm could appear, one that requires the use of malformed packets to take control of the IIS server/other microsoft product
This is getting better and better. How are you going to take control of IIS with malformed packets?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely.
The other day I saw a movie that took place in California in 1998, and they showed it without any glaciers, and there were no dinosaurs walking around either! How disrespectful to the memories of all the primitive hominid people who were killed by glaciers, and all the dinosaurs who perished in natural cataclysm, that we should just pretend they never existed.
Um, if a movie is set after the towers were destroyed, it doesn't make much sense to show them standing.
Does GIMP do CMYK yet? If not, it's pretty much useless in the print world. I tried to check the web site but www.gimp.org is not responding at the moment.
I've never understood this dual booting thing. I cannot imagine, ever in a thousand years, dual booting. What could be more annoying? Get 40 or 50 windows open, all sorts of tasks underway, and then have to shut it all down just to do one more thing? What on earth is the appeal of that? Absolutely bizarre.
I mean, I guess if you want to experiment with some operating system once in a blue moon, and don't have the 30 minutes it takes to find a free spare PC, it might be vaguely acceptable. But as part of any sort of normal routine, ugh!
It does stand to add one rather crucial thing: A doubling or tripling of the user base. This means more people using the software and more people contributing to the software.
This will provided some well-appreciated incentives for students in IT security classes to discover firsthand the process by which systems are compromised.
Imagine how fun it'll be for the students to plaster their own deepest thoughts (tasteful mix of cursing and swearing, no doubt) instantly across every public computer screen on campus!
When I was with the government there was strong pressure to buy Compaq, with the result that whenever I didn't feel like a fight they'd get another 5 digts of my budget.
The machines were fairly expensive, and a major pain to work with. Everything was a step beyond nonstandard, from the interfaces to the chipsets to the tools required to work with the machines.
And for those who care, getting Linux and FreeBSD to install and run on the Compaqs - especially with a decent amount of hardware support beyond keyboard, hard drive, and 640x480 video - ranged from difficult to impossible.
I would never buy Compaq in any situation where I didn't feel forced to. I hope this doesn't mean that HP becomes a no-buy brand too.
And if you exclude Compaq, with their non-standard components and horrible support for non-MS OSes.
If what you say were true (workers being unable to seek employment outside of their locality) then how is it that they are earning big bucks from a company in another country?
[ long pause] Riiiiiiight.
At my first job, we worked four to a desk - two sitting on the floor and two sharing the chair. They didn't have money for computers, so they gave each of us two paper clips and an electrical outlet, and we had to modulate our data into the building power by running the electricity through our bodies and flexing various muscles in phase with the 60Hz AC pulse. If we made any mistakes our manager would punish us by connecting us to the 240V, 30A laundry room circuit.
Ah, you tell the kids today that, and they won't believe you.
But that's not nearly as significant. When the goal is to get Pandora's box open, nobody cares much in the long term when someone manages to keep it closed for a few extra minutes.
Actually happened to a friend of mine. She's very neurotic about decorating, so when she looked up one day and her perfectly-centered poster was no longer centered, she knew something was wrong. She looked at the carpet in her neighbor's cubicle and found fresh dimples from where their shared partition wall used to rest.
The best part was when she confronted the neighbor, asking "Did you move the wall this weekend?" and his response was, "Um, I don't remember."
I disagree. All perpetrators of, say, genocide who show up at JFK indeed ought to be arrested.
The problem is with the law itself, not whom it's been applied to.
The same rules exist all over the place. Plenty of satellite dishes. Easy to hide. Radio waves != visual spectrum waves. Camouflage therefore trivially feasible.
Granted, I've only worked on networking projects on 5 continents so far, so I've plenty to learn, but where exactly is Hicksville?
1. China and Afghanistan are two separate countries. They do not share an entity called "the government."
2. Afghanistan does not have any ISPs and it never did. Internet users dial to Pakistan.
3. What do you mean "terminates all connections to 'undesireable' sites"? Someone sits there tossing in filtering rules in real time?
4. The government of China doesn't have a hope. They only catch the stupidest people. The rest have figured out how to get what they need without attracting attention or running into filters.
They might get "action", but it wouldn't be effective in the long term, because it's not possible to identify movies/mp3s/porn when properly conveyed.
Nope. You could just come up with a protocol that tunneled atop existing connections (opened from the ISP customer to some central server that brokers the handshakes), used UDP, or whatever.
What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.
Napster was regulated because they felt it a worthwhile tradeoff to have access to the "legit" capital market.
If they could/would have foregone outside capital, or gone to the underground capital market, they would have been much harder to regulate.
Of course, the more salient point is that they were regulatable because their operation depended completely on centralization. Other services that encrypt and tunnel and decentralize and info-hide are not subject to this weakness, no matter how many silly red herrings some tech-ignorant journalist might pull out of his pants.
The article "addressed" it in a most unsatisfactory way. It used a single anecdotal case (St. Kitts & Nevis) and generalized from that, with no basis, to the entire world. So what if St. Kitts has one primary cable connection? They still have satellite. And other countries may have more connections. It is not going to be very easy to cut off a profitable link because someone within a country isn't playing nice.
By what perverse, freakish aberration did that two-page text chart need to be 1,500Kbytes???
You need to put down the Gibson crack pipe and start speaking in real-world terms. Square pegs? Ace of spades? Random hallucinatory metaphors do not a persuasive argument make.
Do you have an example of how malformed packets could be used to "take over" something? They're occasionally effective tools for DOS (though less and less as IP protocol handler authors stop making silly assumptions), and I do recall one FreeBSD ipfw vulnerability that hinged on the ability to set a certain flag in the packet header, but basically this is not such a big issue. All the fun and power is at higher levels - in the application layer.
You may have a point there. The Windows machines (running 98) mostly have 64M. My Mac has 128, though I invariably have PhotoShop, QuarkXPress, FreeHand, Distiller, Acrobat, Outlook Express, IE, and NiftyTelnet open.
Though 98 is cleverer about virtual memory than OS9 (what isn't?) so one would expect better results.
The PS files are in the 20+M range (lots of TIFFs, though what really seems to slow it down on the Windows side is documents with large numbers of fonts.
Trivially, if at all. Looking up NS for 'ford.com.', charitably assuming NS for 'com.' has been cached, is one query. Likewise looking up NS for hypothetical TLD 'ford.' would be one query. The labor just shifts from the gTLD servers to the root servers. Same amount of work.
See above.
Do tell. A bigger cache preload file shipped with resolvers? Going from 250 bytes to 500? Heavens. We'll all have to sell our gold fillings to buy larger hard drives.
First of all, that's a separate issue. Secondly, who cares? If they're poorly managed, they're poorly managed. Why is that a problem for anyone except those who depend on that particular TLD - just like people who now depend on a particular ISP or other service provider?
Huh? .com + .net + .org is as about as flat as it could possibly be - how many zillion 2LDs does .com have again? Oh, you say that .museum solved all that and now we've reached the optimal level of hierarchy? I see.
My Macs are under my desks; I don't particularly care how they look.
Where I see the elegance is on the screen, and selling Windows machines won't help with that.
For instance, all the Photoshop benchmarks in the world can't explain why I vastly prefer the Mac for Photoshop: The mouse movement is much more smooth and natural. I can't do any fine-detail work with a mouse in Windows (as an experiment, try moving the mouse pointer in a little circle repeatedly as fast as possible with both machines. On the Windows machine, if your hand is anything like mine, the circle tracks across the screen and takes on a NW-SE ovoid shape). Worse still, when you have the mouse speed/acceleration set to any reasonable levels on Windows, it actually SKIPS PIXELS even when you're moving it as slowly as possible. So you end up having to zoom way all the time to get things done.
And don't even get me started on fonts, default locations for open/save dialogs, etc.
A few months ago my sister, who's in grad school, finally broke down and bought her first computer. She got an iMac. When it came she called me up at work to have me talk her through setting it up. Here's how the conversation went:
SISTER: Okay, I got it out of the box. So how do I...? Oh never mind, I see.
ME: ...
SISTER: Oh, now it wants... Oh, okay. And... Okay, it wants the phone number to dial the internet. Do I just put in the number the university gave me?
ME: Yes.
SISTER: Okay, oh... And now... Oh, I see. Okay. It's working! Did you get my email?
ME: Yes.
Excellent. Perhaps someone can explain to me why Acrobat Distiller 4.0 chugs through 20MB postscript files in a minute or less on my 450MHz G4, while the same files take 10 or 15 minutes on the 800ish-MHz Pentium IIIs that other people in the office use.
I'd really like to know, because I'm sick of everyone emailing me their .ps's to convert.
This is getting better and better. How are you going to take control of IIS with malformed packets?