such a competition says absolutely nothing about the operating system and everything about the person or persons who configured it
Wrong. Mac's out of the box don't have open ports.
See: mymac~% netstat -an |grep -i listen *.6000 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter 127.0.0.1.631 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter 127.0.0.1.1033 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter
The 6000 port opening is from my installation of X11 on the machine. I had to prune down the real output from netstat, but if you have run it before you know the deal.
Anyone who has taken PSYC101 will tell you that punishment only works when it is temporally near the behavior that it is trying to change.
Prison is about control, revenge, instilling fear in others so they won't do the same thing, and the feeling that the bad guys are "off the street", but it has nothing to do with punishment.
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading/.?
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.
I find it amusing to see these companies invest millions in technology and licensing to fight a battle they know they are not going to be able to win.
All it takes is one person to circumvent the protection (we all know how good macrovision has been in the past...) or to have access to source material to distribute it to millions using P2P.
Tell me that when you lock your house or car that you honestly believe that there is not one person in the world that can break in?
There is a reason for the stuff. Macrovision is easily defeated, but it takes knowledge that Macrovision exists and then the time and effort to get something to defeat it. To be able to watch my first DVD player, it took me about an hour or more on the internet finding out what was wrong with my picture (I was playing the DVD though a VCR) and then I just so happened to have an Asian guy selling a Macrovision defeater across the street at a PC shop.
Most people would not have gone through that much effort.
I thought the purpose of ripping the media was to have a perfect (or near perfect) digital copy...
Ever heard of an MP3? Those are in no way shape or form perfect or near perfect.
Back to Macrovision. The first time I heard of them I was very upset. I just spent $300 for my first DVD player in 98 or so, and I went home to watch my first DVD and it looked like crap. The picture faded in and out and I could not finish watching the movie.
Why?
Because my tv did not have a line input for the DVD player and I was routing it through a VCR. It was macrovision that was screwing up my 1st experience watching a DVD.
So, I walked across the street and bought a macrovision defeater for $20 or so and I was OK after that.
The joke with Macrovision is that it injects junk signal way out of band for normal video and if the receiving device has a Macrovision "feature" to detect this out of band junk, it screws with the picture.
All it takes is a low pass filter to remove the Macrovision in the signal and your set.
They're actually concerned with someone outputting a digital format (MPG, DIVX, WMV, etc.) to an Analog source like a VCR? C'mon... who does that?
If the digital part is sufficiently DRMed (and I doubt this will ever happen), then playing the content through and analog source is the only way to go.
I mean people actually watch movies encoded in DIVX or XVID that were recorded from a freaking camcorder in a movie theater don't they? Its amazing what people do sometimes.
ANYONE with a.08 BAC is going to drive poorly, only some folks who talk on a cell phone while they drive will drive poorly.
I beg to differ. Most of the accidents and whatnot that involve alcohol are not due to driving poorly, but driving stupidly. Yes, alcohol does impair things like vision, reaction time, and general common sense. But these effects are varied from individual to individual. When I read about a fatal drunk driving accident, it is because the person was driving at something like 100mph or some other completely unsafe manor which would be unsafe regardless of BAC.
If a 0.08 BAC was that "godlike" of a measurement for not being able to drive, then bars and restaurants would not be able to serve alcohol. You would have to do it at your home. Period. The US is not suitable for public transportation. A cab is not at all practical being that the cab cannot take your car home. A designated driver is a joke. Noone wants to hang out at a bar all night and not drink. Alcohol has similar affects on walking, but it is not until someone is _much_ beyond 0.08 BAC that they have that swaggering drunk walk and/or fall down. That is when someone should not drive. Oh, and "field sobriety tests", I never do them. I'm sorry, but I do not drive my car with my eyes closed and my head tilted back. I pay attention to where I am going.
I'm going to be preemptive here, the solution lies in education, training and responsibility, not prohibition.
I agree. I've seen people driving drunk around me where they were obviously not in control of their car. On Christmas eve this year, I saw at least 3 or so cars where they were drving off of the road and/or swerving like the drunk swagger walk I was talking about earlier.
Oh, and it takes on average of 5 years for an alcoholic to get a DUI, and then 99% of the time its due to a simple traffic violation and not an accident.
I've played with the slimserver software and it appears to be junk to me. Maybe I wasn't patient enough for it to finish thrashing my computer, but I don't remember the details, but it didn't do what I wanted.
I do remember that the web interface was lacking by refreshing itself all the time and whatnot. There were a number of issues I had with the software, so I stopped considering getting the hardware after that.
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
Yeah. For lower quality settings like my kitchen and outside porch. I'm going to buy an FM transmitter. Plug it into the 1/8" out on your computer and you have complete synchronous wireless transmission inside and outside of your house. They are under $30 too.
Also large wires reduce the inductance which can cause some delay for the highest frequencies, but unlikely that you will hear it.
Another inductance tidbit. NEVER coil up extra wire in a circle. That is basically an inductor which will act like a high pass filter and can kill your bass. If you have extra wire to play with, wrap it back and forth in an S pattern.
I've never heard about delay in high frequencies, but lower gauge wire is definitely a plus for longer cable runs.
You put down money for a NEW house. Studs still in the walls? Where wiring up speakers and such is a piece of cake. Putting in a full sound system in every room (you can do it yourself for free) is pretty simple and easy to do...
But you'd rather drop a big clunky P3 in the room with a wireless card.... why? I see no advantage in it. Wire up speakers in every room. All wires go to computer room. Wires then attached to a single machine that manipulates everything.
But, being a computer geek and having a buncha P3 boxes lying about is what makes you happy, knock yourself out.
You must be new here. This is ask.slashdot.org, where periodically through the day Cliff posts a question that basically falls in two categories. 1) Its something that can be found in the first 10 links on a google search or 2) its something completely crazy where someone is too cheap but geeky enough to spend hours/weeks/months on end to get a half baked solution that usually can be bought off the shelf at a reasonable price.
Yeah, if I were building a new house I would have it wired for both ethernet and an audio system. Heck, a grand in cables and jacks (much lest than 1% of building price) could very well add value to your home in the future.
So, long story short, changing passwords frequently does not automatically mean better security. But we all knew that, right?
Then why in the name of the god of goat cheese does every network that pretends to be secure have these silly ridiculous password rules and once you have fulfilled the rules to get a _good password_ they make you change them?
I never make my user's change their passwords. In fact, only in Wargames and at some ISPs where people have chosen easy to guess passwords like their username, or password, wife, or whatever and someone knew the people and could guess the password have I _ever_ heard of a correctly guessed password.
I mean, I would bet that a system that had a failed login cutoff at say 100 to 1000 and a simple 4 letter dictionary word all lower case with 2 digits thrown in would _never_ be compromised.
The breakins that I have heard of over the years have been: #1 a vulnerability in the OS or a daemon that allowed remote access that may have been coupled with a local root exploit if the script kiddie didn't get in as root (over 99% of the breakins I've heard of fall in this category) or #2 a password was obtained via social engineering (very easy to do) or was somehow sniffed off of the network, because the secure (yeah right) network allowed plain text file transfers.
Now I have heard of one time where a breakin of #1 category involved someone getting a password file and then cracking passwords to snoop around other places, but after a box is completely owned as root, all accounts are subject to being compromised as well. Thats normal.
PA-Risc/HPUX boxes had their place in time for things like CAD workstations and things. But a regular PC with a good graphics card is just as good if not better today. A company down the hall is switching from dual PA-Risc boxes to regular dual PCs and they could afford to rebuy new equipment every year to 18months with the equivalent money that they were spending on maintenance contracts alone.
I spoke with some reps from HP last week and there was no indication whatsoever that Itanium support was going away, nor Linux support.
What's amazing to me is the Apple ][ series lifespan was from 1977 to 1993. Unbelievable!
Another crazy thing is my 1st computer was an Apple ][c. I got it in 1984 and used it until 1994 when I got my 486 and started using Linux. Apple hardware in general has a longer lifespan than other similar products.
Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.
I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.
Apple and Sun provide a complete product. Hardware and software that is supported and designed to work together. Microsoft sells software. In defense of MS, many of their problems over the years have been due to 3rd party drivers and whatnot. Driver issues are not that much of a problem with Sun and Apple products.
Its nice having one company responsible for both the hardware and software. It eliminates many variables.
Netscape was cool like 10 years ago, and that was only because there simply wasn't anything else. To be honest, in looking back, all of their browsers sucked. But the company has been bought and bastardized and not even used by AOL. The only thing I know about Netscape nowadays is that they their name has been now sold by AOL to some cheesy dial up company that is competing with Netzero for $9.99 a month internet access at blazing speeds at 56 whatever or less. That was a stroke of genius by AOL to sell the Netscape name for a competing product.
Netscape is dead. Only its name remains, and that hardly means anything.
But if psychologists knew enough about human behavior to predict with reasonable accuracy who is most likely to commit crimes then we would be able to prevent crimes before they happened.
Criminals commit crimes. You don't need a PhD to figure that out. Take a poll in jail or prison and ask if its their first run in with the law.
All we currently know is that there is some correlation between crime and some social parameters, such as low education level and poverty.
Wrong again. Poor and stupid people get caught and punished more. If OJ were not a millionaire, he would be in prison -- even if he is innocent. Take for example "white collar crimes" or mafia kind of stuff. These people have cash and brains and probably commit about the same number of crimes as your stereotyped criminal. But they get punished at a much lower rate.
As things stand now, we can't even predict which people will return to crime after being released from jail.
The odds are pretty good, at least for long stints in prison. Jail is just jail. Think about it. You go to prison for 10 or so years. You come out as the lowest part of society. You typically have no money, and often are outcasted by your family (or they suck in the first place) and odds are your "friends" are like you were before you went to prison if not in prison now. You've seen that little question at the bottom of most job applications? "Have you been convicted of a crime other than minor traffic violations? Yes _ No _ If Yes explain here: "
I don't know about you, but I would not jump at the chance to hire a convicted felon. Also, what kind of skills are they going to have? If nothing else, social skills. Prison is not known for promoting this like "strong oral and written communication skills" like you see on many job applications.
The best comparison for the current state of the psychology science isn't with Newtonian physics. Psychology today is much closer to Aristotelian physics, when people tried to determine the laws of nature more by philosophical musings than from the hard work of measuring what nature is trying to show us.
Go to a library and pick up a Psych Journal some time. Not "Psychology today", I mean a scientific journal. For example, I have done research with the effects of neonatal ethanol exposure on maternal retrieval behavior of these neonatally exposed pups (yeah rats). For this experiment, there were 3 groups of pups. 1) control, "normal" rats 2) rats where the mom's drank alcohol and 3) "pair fed" rats where the mother's were fed the same amount and kinds of food as the ethanol ones to eliminate confounds due to nutritional deficiencies. These pups were put at the end of a 8 foot runway and out of sight of the mothers. There was a backdraft in the runway to eliminate the sense of smell. Then all of the moms were put at one end of the runway and the pups at the other end. All of the moms would go and pick up all of the other pups except for the ones from the drunk moms. The only thing that could be different from the pups would be their vocalizations. So we recorded their calls with a 1/4" reel to reel deck at 60 ips, fed those recordings to a computer, and wrote software to run FFTs and power analysis on the vocalizations. It ended up that there were significant differences between the ethanol pups and the others in terms of the frequency power and duration of the 2nd harmonic in their vocalizations by using an ANOVA. Now what caused the differences in the vocalizations is not known. If it was a developmental issue from being in a drunk womb. If the mom's vagina was too relaxed from being drunk all the time and didn't properly shape the heads on the way out. Who knows. But there was a clearly defined behavior "pup retrieval" and scientific measurement and analysis of the causes of the retrieval or nonretrieval.
To me psych is more of a science than the "hard sciences". The hard sciences have been pretty easy until recen
People die to defend these rights, and some of our students don't even know what these rights are?
I've never polled these people, but people go into the military for 2 reasons. 1) They can't do anything else, and one fateful decision can give them up to 20 years of something to do. 2) They want to defend "the greatest country on Earth" to keep it that way. If you actually look at the behaviors of many of the military (enlisted, not officers) they are pretty immature and clueless people. Look at the silly businesses that cater to military people around bases for an example.
Hey conservatives! Maybe if instead of worrying about absitence only education and attacking Darwinism you spent your efforts in communicating why and how we are a free society, and why that is of tantamount importance, we could all get along here, hm?
1st. Freedom is completely a myth. Now we did initially have rights given to us in retaliation of the ways we were treated in other countries. But we've forgotten about that. That was a long time ago. The government is all about control. Why is it in my state (Virginia) that I am not allowed to have penis in vagina sex when I am legally bound in some kind of contract with a woman? What kind of freedom is that? Does the Patriot act ring a bell?
One thing to take note, is that we are a nation in crisis and confusion. The past 2 elections can demonstrate this, and the bozo in office should be sufficient to illustrate this confusion. But, even if these students are not good students, Bush has hope for them:
"To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States."
-- George W. Bush, speaking at Yale University's 300th commencement ceremony
In times of crisis we look towards silly comforts like bubblegum pop stars and donuts and we strive for some sense of control and sense to our lives. Since 9/11/01, bible sales are on the rise and so are government controls and the popular opinion that the government should have these controls.
In summary, most Americans are ignorant and proud of it.
If psychologists knew as much as they pretend to, we wouldn't need jails.
Wow. Show me a psychologist that believes that jails are an acceptable form of behavior modification and I'll show you one that has failed Psyc 101. Psychologists study behavior (or at least the behavior of rats and undergrads).
If one had an effective measure of "extrovertedness", one would be able to state that slashdotters have an average of extroversion of "x", with "y" standard deviation.
That can be defined and measured.
But psychologists eschew numbers. About a hundred years ago someone invented one way of measuring the intelligence of a human being. Ever since, there have been many psychologists trying to prove that IQ is an invalid measurement.
Psychology didn't commonly use the scientific method until the '60s. Physicists today still talk about Newton's "laws" and are trying to disprove them. Thats the nature of science. One person throws up some theory with some kind of support behind it and its fairly accepted by most people until someone has a better accepted theory. After all, it was a fact that the Earth was the center of the universe and it was flat. IQ is synonymous with BS. However, Spearman did do a lot of good measures in statistics in trying to determine IQ. Its a very interesting read for those who care about science and statistics.
If you have numeric knowledge, then you can do tests to verify your measurements. Suppose you invent one way to measure the probability of someone committing a crime or of committing suicide. Compare your measurements with the crime and suicide statistics in a sufficiently large sample of the population and you'll know for sure how right your measurement is. But if you just state that people who cross their 't's in a particular way are prone to suicide or to crime, without providing any way of putting numbers in your observations, then you are just stating your unsupported opinion.
and before anybody jumps on this bandwagon, let's remember that handwriting analysis is only a little more authoritative than phrenology or astrology
Yes and no.
Any aspect of an animal's behavior or physical environment to some extent has something to say about that animal. Its even more so for human animals because we pretty much collectively create our environment.
Take for example your average slashdot reader. Being that I have met very few/.ers in person, from the people I have met and from people's posts, I can summarize a typical/.er as a bright, introverted, introspective, geeky, slightly antisocial, slightly angry with a passive aggressive twist person.
The same can be said to a degree with astrology. The stars and planets go through cycles and even something as simple as one's birthday does influence them and their behavior. Lets take for example someone that becomes twoish and becomes "self aware" in the summer vs the winter. A summer kid would probably be more comfortable with their body, being naked, going barefoot, etc. Whereas the opposite might be true in the winter.
Bumper stickers say a good amount about a person. Think someone with the "Don't like my driving call 1-800-EAT-SHIT" sticker. Think they are a pissed off individual? Probably.
With phrenology, that too is not that far fetched. Don't you kinda have an idea what a person is like when you see them? Their facial affect, size of their body, and whatnot? I do. Sometimes I'm wrong. But there certainly is some degree of correlation there.
The problem with any of these things is if they are taken to be a single measurement to mean something. I described the "average slashdotter", but surely there are those that are more extroverted or whatever else disagrees with my description, but I would imagine I'm pretty much on target.
Slashdot Mirror
such a competition says absolutely nothing about the operating system and everything about the person or persons who configured it
Wrong. Mac's out of the box don't have open ports.
See:
mymac~% netstat -an |grep -i listen
*.6000 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter
127.0.0.1.631 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter
127.0.0.1.1033 LISTEN this is not junk lameness filter
The 6000 port opening is from my installation of X11 on the machine. I had to prune down the real output from netstat, but if you have run it before you know the deal.
A prison is supposed to be a place of punishment.
Anyone who has taken PSYC101 will tell you that punishment only works when it is temporally near the behavior that it is trying to change.
Prison is about control, revenge, instilling fear in others so they won't do the same thing, and the feeling that the bad guys are "off the street", but it has nothing to do with punishment.
Its probably over $18/hr for white collar jobs with email, wouldn't you think?
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
/.?
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.
I find it amusing to see these companies invest millions in technology and licensing to fight a battle they know they are not going to be able to win.
All it takes is one person to circumvent the protection (we all know how good macrovision has been in the past...) or to have access to source material to distribute it to millions using P2P.
Tell me that when you lock your house or car that you honestly believe that there is not one person in the world that can break in?
There is a reason for the stuff. Macrovision is easily defeated, but it takes knowledge that Macrovision exists and then the time and effort to get something to defeat it. To be able to watch my first DVD player, it took me about an hour or more on the internet finding out what was wrong with my picture (I was playing the DVD though a VCR) and then I just so happened to have an Asian guy selling a Macrovision defeater across the street at a PC shop.
Most people would not have gone through that much effort.
I thought the purpose of ripping the media was to have a perfect (or near perfect) digital copy ...
... who does that?
Ever heard of an MP3? Those are in no way shape or form perfect or near perfect.
Back to Macrovision. The first time I heard of them I was very upset. I just spent $300 for my first DVD player in 98 or so, and I went home to watch my first DVD and it looked like crap. The picture faded in and out and I could not finish watching the movie.
Why?
Because my tv did not have a line input for the DVD player and I was routing it through a VCR. It was macrovision that was screwing up my 1st experience watching a DVD.
So, I walked across the street and bought a macrovision defeater for $20 or so and I was OK after that.
The joke with Macrovision is that it injects junk signal way out of band for normal video and if the receiving device has a Macrovision "feature" to detect this out of band junk, it screws with the picture.
All it takes is a low pass filter to remove the Macrovision in the signal and your set.
They're actually concerned with someone outputting a digital format (MPG, DIVX, WMV, etc.) to an Analog source like a VCR? C'mon
If the digital part is sufficiently DRMed (and I doubt this will ever happen), then playing the content through and analog source is the only way to go.
I mean people actually watch movies encoded in DIVX or XVID that were recorded from a freaking camcorder in a movie theater don't they? Its amazing what people do sometimes.
Why did Linus start writing Gnu/Linux, when there were already great operating systems like Windows/Dos, and Unix/Unix?
Linus did not believe that Windows/DOS was great.
And at the time the only UNIX like thing that worked on x86 hardware was Xenix (I believe) so he posted a USENET message and Linux was born.
From this same /. article http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138120 &cid=11553341
ANYONE with a .08 BAC is going to drive poorly, only some folks who talk on a cell phone while they drive will drive poorly.
I beg to differ. Most of the accidents and whatnot that involve alcohol are not due to driving poorly, but driving stupidly. Yes, alcohol does impair things like vision, reaction time, and general common sense. But these effects are varied from individual to individual. When I read about a fatal drunk driving accident, it is because the person was driving at something like 100mph or some other completely unsafe manor which would be unsafe regardless of BAC.
If a 0.08 BAC was that "godlike" of a measurement for not being able to drive, then bars and restaurants would not be able to serve alcohol. You would have to do it at your home. Period. The US is not suitable for public transportation. A cab is not at all practical being that the cab cannot take your car home. A designated driver is a joke. Noone wants to hang out at a bar all night and not drink. Alcohol has similar affects on walking, but it is not until someone is _much_ beyond 0.08 BAC that they have that swaggering drunk walk and/or fall down. That is when someone should not drive. Oh, and "field sobriety tests", I never do them. I'm sorry, but I do not drive my car with my eyes closed and my head tilted back. I pay attention to where I am going.
I'm going to be preemptive here, the solution lies in education, training and responsibility, not prohibition.
I agree. I've seen people driving drunk around me where they were obviously not in control of their car. On Christmas eve this year, I saw at least 3 or so cars where they were drving off of the road and/or swerving like the drunk swagger walk I was talking about earlier.
Oh, and it takes on average of 5 years for an alcoholic to get a DUI, and then 99% of the time its due to a simple traffic violation and not an accident.
The issue is that people think that because they pay taxes, they should be able to get any document they want without paying anything extra.
That is worth repeating. No, it should not be difficult at all.
The issue is that people think that because they pay taxes, they should be able to get any document they want without paying anything extra.
Damn straight. The government is chosen by the people and paid for by the people and they work for the people.
I don't remember being asked if I wanted to pay extra for obtaining my information.
I've played with the slimserver software and it appears to be junk to me. Maybe I wasn't patient enough for it to finish thrashing my computer, but I don't remember the details, but it didn't do what I wanted.
I do remember that the web interface was lacking by refreshing itself all the time and whatnot. There were a number of issues I had with the software, so I stopped considering getting the hardware after that.
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
Yeah. For lower quality settings like my kitchen and outside porch. I'm going to buy an FM transmitter. Plug it into the 1/8" out on your computer and you have complete synchronous wireless transmission inside and outside of your house. They are under $30 too.
Also large wires reduce the inductance which can cause some delay for the highest frequencies, but unlikely that you will hear it.
Another inductance tidbit. NEVER coil up extra wire in a circle. That is basically an inductor which will act like a high pass filter and can kill your bass. If you have extra wire to play with, wrap it back and forth in an S pattern.
I've never heard about delay in high frequencies, but lower gauge wire is definitely a plus for longer cable runs.
You put down money for a NEW house. Studs still in the walls? Where wiring up speakers and such is a piece of cake. Putting in a full sound system in every room (you can do it yourself for free) is pretty simple and easy to do...
But you'd rather drop a big clunky P3 in the room with a wireless card.... why? I see no advantage in it. Wire up speakers in every room. All wires go to computer room. Wires then attached to a single machine that manipulates everything.
But, being a computer geek and having a buncha P3 boxes lying about is what makes you happy, knock yourself out.
You must be new here. This is ask.slashdot.org, where periodically through the day Cliff posts a question that basically falls in two categories. 1) Its something that can be found in the first 10 links on a google search or 2) its something completely crazy where someone is too cheap but geeky enough to spend hours/weeks/months on end to get a half baked solution that usually can be bought off the shelf at a reasonable price.
Yeah, if I were building a new house I would have it wired for both ethernet and an audio system. Heck, a grand in cables and jacks (much lest than 1% of building price) could very well add value to your home in the future.
Welcome to ask.slashdot.org.
A 90 day rotation will ensure that password crackers need to re-sniff your network for login hashes every 90 days
Funny. I thought that people started using encryption if they cared about security. I've heard that somewhere, I'm sure.
So, long story short, changing passwords frequently does not automatically mean better security. But we all knew that, right?
Then why in the name of the god of goat cheese does every network that pretends to be secure have these silly ridiculous password rules and once you have fulfilled the rules to get a _good password_ they make you change them?
I never make my user's change their passwords. In fact, only in Wargames and at some ISPs where people have chosen easy to guess passwords like their username, or password, wife, or whatever and someone knew the people and could guess the password have I _ever_ heard of a correctly guessed password.
I mean, I would bet that a system that had a failed login cutoff at say 100 to 1000 and a simple 4 letter dictionary word all lower case with 2 digits thrown in would _never_ be compromised.
The breakins that I have heard of over the years have been: #1 a vulnerability in the OS or a daemon that allowed remote access that may have been coupled with a local root exploit if the script kiddie didn't get in as root (over 99% of the breakins I've heard of fall in this category) or #2 a password was obtained via social engineering (very easy to do) or was somehow sniffed off of the network, because the secure (yeah right) network allowed plain text file transfers.
Now I have heard of one time where a breakin of #1 category involved someone getting a password file and then cracking passwords to snoop around other places, but after a box is completely owned as root, all accounts are subject to being compromised as well. Thats normal.
Passwords. Gheesh. What year is this?
Given that HP are dropping PA-Risc in favour of Itanium and that Intel appear to be dropping Itanium
Where in the world did you get that Intel was dropping the Itanium?
And yeah, they may be dropping UNIX (HPUX) proper, but check out their linux support.
PA-Risc/HPUX boxes had their place in time for things like CAD workstations and things. But a regular PC with a good graphics card is just as good if not better today. A company down the hall is switching from dual PA-Risc boxes to regular dual PCs and they could afford to rebuy new equipment every year to 18months with the equivalent money that they were spending on maintenance contracts alone.
I spoke with some reps from HP last week and there was no indication whatsoever that Itanium support was going away, nor Linux support.
What's amazing to me is the Apple ][ series lifespan was from 1977 to 1993. Unbelievable!
Another crazy thing is my 1st computer was an Apple ][c. I got it in 1984 and used it until 1994 when I got my 486 and started using Linux. Apple hardware in general has a longer lifespan than other similar products.
Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.
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I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.
FWIW http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=2y&l=on&z=
Apple and Sun provide a complete product. Hardware and software that is supported and designed to work together. Microsoft sells software. In defense of MS, many of their problems over the years have been due to 3rd party drivers and whatnot. Driver issues are not that much of a problem with Sun and Apple products.
Its nice having one company responsible for both the hardware and software. It eliminates many variables.
Better question, why use Netscape at all?
Netscape was cool like 10 years ago, and that was only because there simply wasn't anything else. To be honest, in looking back, all of their browsers sucked. But the company has been bought and bastardized and not even used by AOL. The only thing I know about Netscape nowadays is that they their name has been now sold by AOL to some cheesy dial up company that is competing with Netzero for $9.99 a month internet access at blazing speeds at 56 whatever or less. That was a stroke of genius by AOL to sell the Netscape name for a competing product.
Netscape is dead. Only its name remains, and that hardly means anything.
But if psychologists knew enough about human behavior to predict with reasonable accuracy who is most likely to commit crimes then we would be able to prevent crimes before they happened.
Criminals commit crimes. You don't need a PhD to figure that out. Take a poll in jail or prison and ask if its their first run in with the law.
All we currently know is that there is some correlation between crime and some social parameters, such as low education level and poverty.
Wrong again. Poor and stupid people get caught and punished more. If OJ were not a millionaire, he would be in prison -- even if he is innocent. Take for example "white collar crimes" or mafia kind of stuff. These people have cash and brains and probably commit about the same number of crimes as your stereotyped criminal. But they get punished at a much lower rate.
As things stand now, we can't even predict which people will return to crime after being released from jail.
The odds are pretty good, at least for long stints in prison. Jail is just jail. Think about it. You go to prison for 10 or so years. You come out as the lowest part of society. You typically have no money, and often are outcasted by your family (or they suck in the first place) and odds are your "friends" are like you were before you went to prison if not in prison now. You've seen that little question at the bottom of most job applications? "Have you been convicted of a crime other than minor traffic violations? Yes _ No _ If Yes explain here: "
I don't know about you, but I would not jump at the chance to hire a convicted felon. Also, what kind of skills are they going to have? If nothing else, social skills. Prison is not known for promoting this like "strong oral and written communication skills" like you see on many job applications.
The best comparison for the current state of the psychology science isn't with Newtonian physics. Psychology today is much closer to Aristotelian physics, when people tried to determine the laws of nature more by philosophical musings than from the hard work of measuring what nature is trying to show us.
Go to a library and pick up a Psych Journal some time. Not "Psychology today", I mean a scientific journal. For example, I have done research with the effects of neonatal ethanol exposure on maternal retrieval behavior of these neonatally exposed pups (yeah rats). For this experiment, there were 3 groups of pups. 1) control, "normal" rats 2) rats where the mom's drank alcohol and 3) "pair fed" rats where the mother's were fed the same amount and kinds of food as the ethanol ones to eliminate confounds due to nutritional deficiencies. These pups were put at the end of a 8 foot runway and out of sight of the mothers. There was a backdraft in the runway to eliminate the sense of smell. Then all of the moms were put at one end of the runway and the pups at the other end. All of the moms would go and pick up all of the other pups except for the ones from the drunk moms. The only thing that could be different from the pups would be their vocalizations. So we recorded their calls with a 1/4" reel to reel deck at 60 ips, fed those recordings to a computer, and wrote software to run FFTs and power analysis on the vocalizations. It ended up that there were significant differences between the ethanol pups and the others in terms of the frequency power and duration of the 2nd harmonic in their vocalizations by using an ANOVA. Now what caused the differences in the vocalizations is not known. If it was a developmental issue from being in a drunk womb. If the mom's vagina was too relaxed from being drunk all the time and didn't properly shape the heads on the way out. Who knows. But there was a clearly defined behavior "pup retrieval" and scientific measurement and analysis of the causes of the retrieval or nonretrieval.
To me psych is more of a science than the "hard sciences". The hard sciences have been pretty easy until recen
People die to defend these rights, and some of our students don't even know what these rights are?
I've never polled these people, but people go into the military for 2 reasons. 1) They can't do anything else, and one fateful decision can give them up to 20 years of something to do. 2) They want to defend "the greatest country on Earth" to keep it that way. If you actually look at the behaviors of many of the military (enlisted, not officers) they are pretty immature and clueless people. Look at the silly businesses that cater to military people around bases for an example.
Hey conservatives! Maybe if instead of worrying about absitence only education and attacking Darwinism you spent your efforts in communicating why and how we are a free society, and why that is of tantamount importance, we could all get along here, hm?
1st. Freedom is completely a myth. Now we did initially have rights given to us in retaliation of the ways we were treated in other countries. But we've forgotten about that. That was a long time ago. The government is all about control. Why is it in my state (Virginia) that I am not allowed to have penis in vagina sex when I am legally bound in some kind of contract with a woman? What kind of freedom is that? Does the Patriot act ring a bell?
One thing to take note, is that we are a nation in crisis and confusion. The past 2 elections can demonstrate this, and the bozo in office should be sufficient to illustrate this confusion. But, even if these students are not good students, Bush has hope for them:
"To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States."
-- George W. Bush, speaking at Yale University's 300th commencement ceremony
In times of crisis we look towards silly comforts like bubblegum pop stars and donuts and we strive for some sense of control and sense to our lives. Since 9/11/01, bible sales are on the rise and so are government controls and the popular opinion that the government should have these controls.
In summary, most Americans are ignorant and proud of it.
If psychologists knew as much as they pretend to, we wouldn't need jails.
Wow. Show me a psychologist that believes that jails are an acceptable form of behavior modification and I'll show you one that has failed Psyc 101. Psychologists study behavior (or at least the behavior of rats and undergrads).
If one had an effective measure of "extrovertedness", one would be able to state that slashdotters have an average of extroversion of "x", with "y" standard deviation.
That can be defined and measured.
But psychologists eschew numbers. About a hundred years ago someone invented one way of measuring the intelligence of a human being. Ever since, there have been many psychologists trying to prove that IQ is an invalid measurement.
Psychology didn't commonly use the scientific method until the '60s. Physicists today still talk about Newton's "laws" and are trying to disprove them. Thats the nature of science. One person throws up some theory with some kind of support behind it and its fairly accepted by most people until someone has a better accepted theory. After all, it was a fact that the Earth was the center of the universe and it was flat. IQ is synonymous with BS. However, Spearman did do a lot of good measures in statistics in trying to determine IQ. Its a very interesting read for those who care about science and statistics.
If you have numeric knowledge, then you can do tests to verify your measurements. Suppose you invent one way to measure the probability of someone committing a crime or of committing suicide. Compare your measurements with the crime and suicide statistics in a sufficiently large sample of the population and you'll know for sure how right your measurement is. But if you just state that people who cross their 't's in a particular way are prone to suicide or to crime, without providing any way of putting numbers in your observations, then you are just stating your unsupported opinion.
You have hit the screw on the tailbone!
and before anybody jumps on this bandwagon, let's remember that handwriting analysis is only a little more authoritative than phrenology or astrology
/.ers in person, from the people I have met and from people's posts, I can summarize a typical /.er as a bright, introverted, introspective, geeky, slightly antisocial, slightly angry with a passive aggressive twist person.
Yes and no.
Any aspect of an animal's behavior or physical environment to some extent has something to say about that animal. Its even more so for human animals because we pretty much collectively create our environment.
Take for example your average slashdot reader. Being that I have met very few
The same can be said to a degree with astrology. The stars and planets go through cycles and even something as simple as one's birthday does influence them and their behavior. Lets take for example someone that becomes twoish and becomes "self aware" in the summer vs the winter. A summer kid would probably be more comfortable with their body, being naked, going barefoot, etc. Whereas the opposite might be true in the winter.
Bumper stickers say a good amount about a person. Think someone with the "Don't like my driving call 1-800-EAT-SHIT" sticker. Think they are a pissed off individual? Probably.
With phrenology, that too is not that far fetched. Don't you kinda have an idea what a person is like when you see them? Their facial affect, size of their body, and whatnot? I do. Sometimes I'm wrong. But there certainly is some degree of correlation there.
The problem with any of these things is if they are taken to be a single measurement to mean something. I described the "average slashdotter", but surely there are those that are more extroverted or whatever else disagrees with my description, but I would imagine I'm pretty much on target.