and other UI creations are all hacks to help users get around the problem of genericity of the machine.
Thats why its called the User Interface.
However, look at the user interfaces on phones and electronics like TVs and stereos. There horrible. I would love it if my CD or DVD player had a slider bar like that that comes with most media players on computers that you can click to go to the middle of the track, or 1/4 into it, etc.
Don't get me on remotes! My god, they have about as many keys as a computer keyboard, they are all different (yet do 99% of the same functionality). There is no feedback from the device to say to the user or remote "Hey I actually got that signal!". This is important because remotes use IR which requires a direct line of sight to the device (why????). These things have not changed in at least 20 years.
Also, it is amazing how little info that comes from an AV reciever to the actual TV set. Most TV's have PIP, mine has a dual split screen version with plenty of real estate to give me info, but no, lets not do that. Anyway...
But thats only 65 lines of text! For the terse, version try 'rpm --help'. That's 138.
I've been using Linux for 10 years now (now I'm a sysadmin), and redhat (thus rpms) for about 7 and I still find myself trying to figure out how to use rpm.
I don't know what I would say to a newbe about that command besides its half broken, complicated, it sucks, and I still don't know much about it. And, I've even created an rpm before. Never again.
and, the sale of horse carriages absolutely plumited (sp?) after the adoption of the car. I wanted to buy one and searched on google and only found theselinks.
But more seriously. Enclyclopeias were never much of a reference to begin with. I don't think they were accepted in my schooling past 3rd or 5th grade as a citable source. They had generic information, little current information except for the update's that you could buy each year.
Granted I did look at them when I was a kid, but if I had a kid today, I would supervise him/her on the internet instead.
Good bye encyclopedias and horse carriages! Next topic.
And since when is anti-social behavior immediately seen as a negative thing.
People are social animals. Period. Even when Thoreau was by himself at Walden Pond, he wrote about social things that he experienced before going to walden (Civil Disobedience, Self Reliance, etc), and he did eventually leave walden.
A human that is not raised in a social environment would not be "human". Think Tarzan and whatnot.
However, as with Self Reliance, it is nice, if not health and beneficial to be alone and in touch with one's "self", and I do not consider that to be anti-social. Nor do I see using headphones in a public place as being anti-social.
The whole printer-ink system reeks of things like the Debeers diamond cartel.
Debeers atificially created their market through advertising and monopolistic control of the maket.
Printers are a little different, they use lead in pricing to get you "hooked" to come back for the expensive cardridges. The market demand for these things is as strange as the market demand for overpriced cell phones. People seem to want them for some reason, and seem willing to pay whatever it takes to do it. My roomates pay between $100 and $400 a month for their phone. I have one phone that my work pays for. Also, if I were to buy a printer I would get a decent laser printer and be done with it. If I need high quality color prints, I go to a printer. Its cheaper and better quality.
A physical substance, such as food, grains, and metals, which is interchangeable with another product of the same type, and which investors buy or sell, usually through futures contracts. The price of the commodity is subject to supply and demand. Risk is actually the reason exchange trading of the basic agricultural products began. For example, a farmer risks the cost of producing a product ready for market at sometime in the future because he doesn't know what the selling price will be.
I don't see printer cartridges fitting this definition at all.
Re:Fun with Fingerprints: Chamelon Card
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Fingerprint readers can be defeated using a simple hack involving common household items.
I'm assuming your talking about the gelatin in the linked article.
Many of the biometric sensors today take pulse and temperature readings which defeat the gummy bear experiment.
Also, as it is now the only metric used is a signature that is rarely checked nor verified. Even if these items were as "easy" as getting someone's fingerprint and making a mold of it, it would be much more difficult than lifting someone's wallet or finding a credit card (that many times has the signature on the back, I have never seen a detached finger with a credit card).
People who say it "Just Works" probably haven't spent much time using it.
Well, I havn't spent much time using it. About a month since I got this powerbook. And for the most part I can say, yeah, "It just works!".
I got my powerbook, brought it home. Plugged it in. Hit the powerbutton. And after answering a couple of questions I downloaded the updates over my wireless broudband connection that I had never used before, and was learning about my new OS in minutes. I downloaded fink, installed some of my favorite UNIX like apps. I checked out my dotfiles from CVS via ssh. Changed my default shell to zsh. Dropped my dotfiles in place and had to add/sw/bin and/sw/sbin to my path, and that was it. Period. I set up my network to go to 3 different places, with 2 printers with no problems (well, there was a kernel panic problem with the airport driver when switching locations but that has been patched).
As far as I'm concerned, all other incarnations of MacOS sucked. "It just crashed". I could crash a mac in about 5 minutes doing stuff like web browsing, using the finder, or whatever. I had really bad luck with them.
This is coming from almost 10 years of Linux/UNIX usage that was pretty much exclusive. I did do Windows development for a couple of years, and yeah, that tought me I was barking up the wrong tree. We would do demos with a windows client and a Linux server for SSL and smartcard interaction, and have to tell the people giving the demos. "This is rover. Its a Linux based OS that does the backend stuff. All you have to do is turn it on this way and when your done turn it off this way. This is a windows box like your familiar with, when it fucks up, just hard shut it down and reboot it."
For a desktop OS, I couldn't be happier. "It just works!" I hated Macs a couple of years ago because of the little bomb icon, and having to see that happy face all the time rebooting them. Windows almost works (depending on the version, the time of last reinstall, the phase of the moon, the level of service pack you have, the proper drivers, and which applications you are runnint). Linux is a decent desktop os, but doing stuff like dual headed displays, installing software (I admin supercomputers, I know what to do OK), printing, dynamic devices like firewire and USB, whatever, is almost there, but not quite.
I'm still new to OS X, and am still learning about it. I have not developed anything for it besides perl and shell scripts yet. But I'm impressed. Its a little hard dealing with some of the "dumb downedness", like the lack of configuration options that comes with linux, but the defaults or what you can change are not bad.
I like how OS X integrated UNIX with a GUI. The role of root is unobtrusive and natural. It asks for my password for installing software, no viruses, no virus checker, no popups, no spyware, etc. Don't get me wrong. Its not perfect. But its the best end user os for me out there. Hands down.
The disaster was a damn good example of bad mix of technology, science and politics. Boy, don't we have plenty of that in the U.S.
Not to meantion that the system had little to no foresight that humans would be using it. When it started overheating the alarms went off full steam and the workers got scared and threw all of the rods into the core. (The rods are supposed to slow down the reaction.) Well, since the core was so hot, the rods started reacting inside of the reactor and _increased_ the temperature.
The moral of this story is that there is no moral. All great system failures or any other "big" event never is caused by the apparent singular event right before the shit hit the fan.
Many sys-admins don't realize that the people they work for often have technical skills in other areas and simply don't have time to deal with computers.
I had a user mail me at 10pm on a Sunday night saying that she was going to fill up the shared harddisk for all users, and a few hours later she did.
Sysadmins are concerned about _everybody's_ usage of a system, users are concerned about _their own_.
It's sort of like being a mechanic. People do all sorts of stupid shit with their cars, but that doesn't make them stupid people. It just means they have little technical expertise dealing with cars.
See above. A mechanic would think your pretty stupid to go on an across country trip with a 1/4 tank of gas, knowing the gas was at 1/4 tank, telling you it was at 1/4 tank, and wondering why the car does not go....read the error message instead of panicking when one occured
Do you know how many creative interpretations of "No such file or directory" I have heard? I have to curb myself from saying "What part of no such file or direcory do you not understand!?!?!?".
But isn't the spyware in and of itself the vulnerability?
Nah, AFAIK spyware only runs on Windows and its no big deal to run arbitrary code or programs on those systems.
The funny thing is that if the system came with yet another little program that hangs out by the clock (the tray or something like that) that showed CPU utilization, maybe, just maybe the user might have a clue that _something_ is going on.
My first experience with spyware was the other day when a friend came over with his (windows) laptop and I wanted to scp a file from it to my Mac. He didn't have scp so I typed in google: "putty scp", and assumed that google would do the rest. Well, I noticed a popunder (Internet Exploder still does that) the results were sleezy sounding results like: YEAH DOWNOAD SCP HERE! Or whatever. None of the results looked like normal web sites.
I could not click on a single link, I was freaked out that this was on my network, he didn't seem to concerned though. He thought it was time to reinstall windows anyway.
The RIAA and MPAA don't sue _all_ of their customers. They have a product that more than the 10 or 50, or whatever the last count of SCO's customers are, are willing to pay for without being sued.
Thugs doing extortion on a "little guy" does not make the news. The EV1 deal is only the tip of the iceburg, and we know little about it. Did Microsoft back EV1? Dunno. Did SCO make the whole thing up for more pump and dump? Dunno.
In an interview on Wednesday, SCO's CFO confirmed that the three companies were licensees, and claimed that his company had now signed up somewhere between 10 and 50 IP License for Linux customers....
I listened (sp?) in on the teleconference and that exchange was the most interesting. The CFO was asked "How many companies have licensed SCO's intellectual property?" And he stuttered and said a few and growing, or something to that affect. He was then asked "Well, how many is a few?" And he came back with "A handful". Then he was asked "How many is a handful?" and finally answered "Less than 50".
This is from memory, but it went something like that. Pretty evasive speach for a CFO IMHO.
Ironically, UC Berkeley is also going to be a licensee!!
Why? I thought edu's were exempt. I called SCO numerous times telling them I owed them about $1mil for them to send me a bill, and they never did. I too am from an educational institution and will not pay them 1 cent until they can 1) give me something to license 2) support said product. Plus, RH will back me for legal issues if they sent me a bill.
I have paid for linux in the past and will do it again. I would even pay SCO if they had something to sell.
It's not hard to see why you missed the other definitions of instigate - they don't fit your point so well:-P
I'm glad you took it so well, but I think the word does have a negative connotation. Considering:
\Goad\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Goaded; p. pr. & vb. n. Goading.] To prick; to drive with a goad; hence, to urge forward, or to rouse by anything pungent, severe, irritating, or inflaming; to stimulate.
and foment is just wierd.
Oh, and I'm also quite good at what I do. That might have something to do with it.
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Your right. Its been a long time. Its move.exe that I'm thinking of. I believe that that it once was a builtin, but later moved to an executable.
and other UI creations are all hacks to help users get around the problem of genericity of the machine.
Thats why its called the User Interface.
However, look at the user interfaces on phones and electronics like TVs and stereos. There horrible. I would love it if my CD or DVD player had a slider bar like that that comes with most media players on computers that you can click to go to the middle of the track, or 1/4 into it, etc.
Don't get me on remotes! My god, they have about as many keys as a computer keyboard, they are all different (yet do 99% of the same functionality). There is no feedback from the device to say to the user or remote "Hey I actually got that signal!". This is important because remotes use IR which requires a direct line of sight to the device (why????). These things have not changed in at least 20 years.
Also, it is amazing how little info that comes from an AV reciever to the actual TV set. Most TV's have PIP, mine has a dual split screen version with plenty of real estate to give me info, but no, lets not do that. Anyway...
But thats only 65 lines of text! For the terse, version try 'rpm --help'. That's 138.
I've been using Linux for 10 years now (now I'm a sysadmin), and redhat (thus rpms) for about 7 and I still find myself trying to figure out how to use rpm.
I don't know what I would say to a newbe about that command besides its half broken, complicated, it sucks, and I still don't know much about it. And, I've even created an rpm before. Never again.
Only a subset of the DOS commands were built into command.com. Basic ones like dir, vol, and del.
FWIW, del was an executable in more recent versions of DOS.
still feel bad for causing someone to lose their job.
Don't worry about it. He's probably the CEO of a company like SCO right now.
and, the sale of horse carriages absolutely plumited (sp?) after the adoption of the car. I wanted to buy one and searched on google and only found these links.
But more seriously. Enclyclopeias were never much of a reference to begin with. I don't think they were accepted in my schooling past 3rd or 5th grade as a citable source. They had generic information, little current information except for the update's that you could buy each year.
Granted I did look at them when I was a kid, but if I had a kid today, I would supervise him/her on the internet instead.
Good bye encyclopedias and horse carriages! Next topic.
Whenever I go on the subway, every fourth person on the train is listening to music on their headphones.
They are probably trying to ignore the every fourth person on the train who is talking about nothing on their cell phones.
And since when is anti-social behavior immediately seen as a negative thing.
People are social animals. Period. Even when Thoreau was by himself at Walden Pond, he wrote about social things that he experienced before going to walden (Civil Disobedience, Self Reliance, etc), and he did eventually leave walden.
A human that is not raised in a social environment would not be "human". Think Tarzan and whatnot.
However, as with Self Reliance, it is nice, if not health and beneficial to be alone and in touch with one's "self", and I do not consider that to be anti-social. Nor do I see using headphones in a public place as being anti-social.
By "going to a printer" I mean a print shop like kinkos or similar.
The whole printer-ink system reeks of things like the Debeers diamond cartel.
Debeers atificially created their market through advertising and monopolistic control of the maket.
Printers are a little different, they use lead in pricing to get you "hooked" to come back for the expensive cardridges. The market demand for these things is as strange as the market demand for overpriced cell phones. People seem to want them for some reason, and seem willing to pay whatever it takes to do it. My roomates pay between $100 and $400 a month for their phone. I have one phone that my work pays for. Also, if I were to buy a printer I would get a decent laser printer and be done with it. If I need high quality color prints, I go to a printer. Its cheaper and better quality.
This link says a commodity is:
A physical substance, such as food, grains, and metals, which is interchangeable with another product of the same type, and which investors buy or sell, usually through futures contracts. The price of the commodity is subject to supply and demand. Risk is actually the reason exchange trading of the basic agricultural products began. For example, a farmer risks the cost of producing a product ready for market at sometime in the future because he doesn't know what the selling price will be.
I don't see printer cartridges fitting this definition at all.
Fingerprint readers can be defeated using a simple hack involving common household items.
I'm assuming your talking about the gelatin in the linked article.
From this link it says:
Many of the biometric sensors today take pulse and temperature readings which defeat the gummy bear experiment.
Also, as it is now the only metric used is a signature that is rarely checked nor verified. Even if these items were as "easy" as getting someone's fingerprint and making a mold of it, it would be much more difficult than lifting someone's wallet or finding a credit card (that many times has the signature on the back, I have never seen a detached finger with a credit card).
People who say it "Just Works" probably haven't spent much time using it.
/sw/bin and /sw/sbin to my path, and that was it. Period. I set up my network to go to 3 different places, with 2 printers with no problems (well, there was a kernel panic problem with the airport driver when switching locations but that has been patched).
Well, I havn't spent much time using it. About a month since I got this powerbook. And for the most part I can say, yeah, "It just works!".
I got my powerbook, brought it home. Plugged it in. Hit the powerbutton. And after answering a couple of questions I downloaded the updates over my wireless broudband connection that I had never used before, and was learning about my new OS in minutes. I downloaded fink, installed some of my favorite UNIX like apps. I checked out my dotfiles from CVS via ssh. Changed my default shell to zsh. Dropped my dotfiles in place and had to add
As far as I'm concerned, all other incarnations of MacOS sucked. "It just crashed". I could crash a mac in about 5 minutes doing stuff like web browsing, using the finder, or whatever. I had really bad luck with them.
This is coming from almost 10 years of Linux/UNIX usage that was pretty much exclusive. I did do Windows development for a couple of years, and yeah, that tought me I was barking up the wrong tree. We would do demos with a windows client and a Linux server for SSL and smartcard interaction, and have to tell the people giving the demos. "This is rover. Its a Linux based OS that does the backend stuff. All you have to do is turn it on this way and when your done turn it off this way. This is a windows box like your familiar with, when it fucks up, just hard shut it down and reboot it."
For a desktop OS, I couldn't be happier. "It just works!" I hated Macs a couple of years ago because of the little bomb icon, and having to see that happy face all the time rebooting them. Windows almost works (depending on the version, the time of last reinstall, the phase of the moon, the level of service pack you have, the proper drivers, and which applications you are runnint). Linux is a decent desktop os, but doing stuff like dual headed displays, installing software (I admin supercomputers, I know what to do OK), printing, dynamic devices like firewire and USB, whatever, is almost there, but not quite.
I'm still new to OS X, and am still learning about it. I have not developed anything for it besides perl and shell scripts yet. But I'm impressed. Its a little hard dealing with some of the "dumb downedness", like the lack of configuration options that comes with linux, but the defaults or what you can change are not bad.
I like how OS X integrated UNIX with a GUI. The role of root is unobtrusive and natural. It asks for my password for installing software, no viruses, no virus checker, no popups, no spyware, etc. Don't get me wrong. Its not perfect. But its the best end user os for me out there. Hands down.
The disaster was a damn good example of bad mix of technology, science and politics. Boy, don't we have plenty of that in the U.S.
Not to meantion that the system had little to no foresight that humans would be using it. When it started overheating the alarms went off full steam and the workers got scared and threw all of the rods into the core. (The rods are supposed to slow down the reaction.) Well, since the core was so hot, the rods started reacting inside of the reactor and _increased_ the temperature.
The moral of this story is that there is no moral. All great system failures or any other "big" event never is caused by the apparent singular event right before the shit hit the fan.
Many sys-admins don't realize that the people they work for often have technical skills in other areas and simply don't have time to deal with computers.
...read the error message instead of panicking when one occured
I had a user mail me at 10pm on a Sunday night saying that she was going to fill up the shared harddisk for all users, and a few hours later she did.
Sysadmins are concerned about _everybody's_ usage of a system, users are concerned about _their own_.
It's sort of like being a mechanic. People do all sorts of stupid shit with their cars, but that doesn't make them stupid people. It just means they have little technical expertise dealing with cars.
See above. A mechanic would think your pretty stupid to go on an across country trip with a 1/4 tank of gas, knowing the gas was at 1/4 tank, telling you it was at 1/4 tank, and wondering why the car does not go.
Do you know how many creative interpretations of "No such file or directory" I have heard? I have to curb myself from saying "What part of no such file or direcory do you not understand!?!?!?".
Yes, I am a sysadmin, obviously you are not.
get an email, get a penny, send an email, send a penny
Paid by whom, to whom, managed by whom?
And how many mailing lists do I have to subsribe to in order to spam the universe? Oh, who is going to pay for that mailing list? Hmm...
I wonder how many people would not bother contacting us to inquire about services if they had to pay for the priviledge?
Have you ever dialed a 1-800 number or their derivitives (because the 1-800 thing was so popular they ran out of numbers)?
You must not know anyone that pays their cell phone bill each month.
But isn't the spyware in and of itself the vulnerability?
Nah, AFAIK spyware only runs on Windows and its no big deal to run arbitrary code or programs on those systems.
The funny thing is that if the system came with yet another little program that hangs out by the clock (the tray or something like that) that showed CPU utilization, maybe, just maybe the user might have a clue that _something_ is going on.
My first experience with spyware was the other day when a friend came over with his (windows) laptop and I wanted to scp a file from it to my Mac. He didn't have scp so I typed in google: "putty scp", and assumed that google would do the rest. Well, I noticed a popunder (Internet Exploder still does that) the results were sleezy sounding results like: YEAH DOWNOAD SCP HERE! Or whatever. None of the results looked like normal web sites.
I could not click on a single link, I was freaked out that this was on my network, he didn't seem to concerned though. He thought it was time to reinstall windows anyway.
The RIAA and MPAA don't sue _all_ of their customers. They have a product that more than the 10 or 50, or whatever the last count of SCO's customers are, are willing to pay for without being sued.
Yeah, the one where "Boy meets girl and fucks her" would be a good one to do. I can't remember the name off hand, but I'm sure you've seen it.
Thugs doing extortion on a "little guy" does not make the news. The EV1 deal is only the tip of the iceburg, and we know little about it. Did Microsoft back EV1? Dunno. Did SCO make the whole thing up for more pump and dump? Dunno.
I believe that people are starting to catch on. Look at this 3month trend. And look at what the people in the know are doing with their stock.
In an interview on Wednesday, SCO's CFO confirmed that the three companies were licensees, and claimed that his company had now signed up somewhere between 10 and 50 IP License for Linux customers. ...
I listened (sp?) in on the teleconference and that exchange was the most interesting. The CFO was asked "How many companies have licensed SCO's intellectual property?" And he stuttered and said a few and growing, or something to that affect. He was then asked "Well, how many is a few?" And he came back with "A handful". Then he was asked "How many is a handful?" and finally answered "Less than 50".
This is from memory, but it went something like that. Pretty evasive speach for a CFO IMHO.
Ironically, UC Berkeley is also going to be a licensee!!
Why? I thought edu's were exempt. I called SCO numerous times telling them I owed them about $1mil for them to send me a bill, and they never did. I too am from an educational institution and will not pay them 1 cent until they can 1) give me something to license 2) support said product. Plus, RH will back me for legal issues if they sent me a bill.
I have paid for linux in the past and will do it again. I would even pay SCO if they had something to sell.
It's not hard to see why you missed the other definitions of instigate - they don't fit your point so well :-P
I'm glad you took it so well, but I think the word does have a negative connotation. Considering:
\Goad\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Goaded; p. pr. & vb. n. Goading.] To prick; to drive with a goad; hence, to urge forward, or to rouse by anything pungent, severe, irritating, or inflaming; to stimulate.
and foment is just wierd.
Oh, and I'm also quite good at what I do. That might have something to do with it.
Maybe. It depends on if you inhale or not.