I think it's a testament to the fact that whatever game they were running doesn't bottleneck at the CPU. Most video games are not CPU-limited beyond a GHz or two.
Its time to do what we used to do back in 1990 before the Pentium arrived, run benchmarks to determine how fast the machine is.
The only interesting thing about using a game as a benchmark is if the thing will run. Its not unusual to find that a game simply does not run on a laptop.
But, hacking their system and showing how vulnerable they are is not dictating how they should manage their network. I didn't force them to enable better security measures, they could have easily went back to their insecure method. What I did promote was to RTFM.
Which is exactly the sort of arrogant geek centric approach that has led to bad security.
The access points could have been designed to be secure without anyone ever needing to RTFM. Print the serial number of the device on the case of the box, use it as the default password.
Same thing goes for these idiotic WEP keys which I keep having to type into one machine after another. Build the system so that I don't keep having to enter long strings of digits into each new machine I buy.
Twice now, I have seen "linksys" as the SSID. Both times, I logged in remotely to their router because the the owners kept the default password. So I changed their SSID to "Yeasty Cunts" and then I booted and blocked them off their own network. I felt that doing this would teach them a little lesson in security. In both instances, the owners had a better SSID, enabled a new password and either WEP or WPA within a day or two. Mission accomplished
In the process committing a serious crime.
You don't have the right to decide how other people should manage their network. The fault here lies with the manufacturers for providing systems that require too much effort to secure.
Terrorising people into behaving in the way you think they should is despicable. Who made you King?
Well, that's where we differ. I pass IQ tests with flying colors, so I prefer not to have my intelligence insulted by a half-bright OS.
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics and a measured IQ that is more than three standard deviations above the mean.
I believe that "Unix" delivered something called the World Wide Web
Funny you should raise that one given that I worked on the Web back in the earliest days. The code all ran on VMS or UNIX.
Linux is nowhere near a match for the Nextstep environment that the Web was originally built on and it is completely ridiculous to claim Nextstep as a UNIX 'flavor' as if the differences were minor issues of taste. Nextstep was an engineered system, UNIX was is and probably always will be a botch job.
Er, even assuming that's true, don't you think 15 years is a long time to be getting Windows/64b to merely "look like a stable OS"? Since you think that kind of history is complimentary, of course you think it's popular on Slashdot because it's popular on Slashdot, ignoring all the evidence (on Slashdot and elsewhere) that MS produces great profits, but crappy software
Twenty five years later UNIX has still not delivered a decent online help system and it still is nowhere near the levels of reliability VMS achieved.
It all depends on what you consider essential. I prefer to use an environment that does not appear to have the idea that its performing a continuous IQ test on the user.
Don't you think that the predictability of any MS OS announcement drawing posts about its poor quality are a result of reliably bad MS software releases?
Nope, I think its the result of it being a popular thing to say on slashdot.
If this was a blog dedicated to high quality user interfaces then it would probably be very popular to trash Linux in a similar way.
As a matter of fact Windows was in 64 bit before Linux existed. The original Windows ran on MIPS and the 64 bit Dec Alpha.
Actually there is a huge problem with anti-spyware deleting anti-spyware. The problem is that the anti-spyware ends up looking very much like spyware as far as heuristic checks go. So for example it tries to resist being clobbered by the spyware, it scans the disk, it hooks into similar entry points.
The same problem happens with legislation. The Bono anti-spyware bill as currently drafted would make most of the anti-spyware programs illegal. its not intentional, its just bad drafting. The problem is that what is spyware is at some level a consent issue and so drafting is horribly difficult.
Of course, a lot of old-school audiophiles would be mortified to hear you bought an integrated receiver with a remote controle.
I managed to get one of my wife's friends to stop speaking to me after I explained to him why the quality of the motor in his DVD would make precisely zero difference to his sound experience unless the motor was so noisy you could hear it over the music. This was the type of guy who spends $1000 on cables.
At this point the audiophile market is completely dead. The audiosnobs found it difficult to convince even themselves that they could realy hear any difference with the modern gear. So the new snob playground is Ho-ohm The-ahh-taah. Even here the plasma displays have made the field a whole heap less exclusive. So the new richard-size measuring contest is 'integration', getting the stuff to talk to each other nicely. Whole house systems and so on.
In my humble, and somewhat learn-ed opinion, I think Bose is VERY over-rated.
My wife was in a course on speaker design by Dr Bose. She also dislikes the Bose sound. As for the electronics side, I can't beleive that they design them themselves, I bet that they are like Bang and Olofsen and buy in all the electronics to go in the cute cases.
As for the Onkyo, they do nice stuff but make sure you don't loose the remote, the replacement for mine costs half what I paid for the receiver and I have not found a multi-purpose remote that supports all the functions.
This situation reminds me of Hollywood's notoriously inaccurate portrayal of historical events, and the academic criticism that generates. The type of person who might learn his history from a Hollywood movie is probably the same type that would accept information presented on Wikipedia as truth, acontextually.
That is a very different issue. Hollywood movies do not provide a platform for alternative points of view or debunking. So what you have is propaganda that misinforms large numbers of people.
Take Mel Gibson for example who is a member of an anti-semitic and militantly anti-British cult. Gibbson has made a series of films which present invented anti-British 'events' as history. In 'The Patriot' the British are shown burning down a church with civilians inside, no attrocity that is remotely similar is reported in any creditble history of the revolutionary war. The war is if anything remarkable because of the lack of that type of attrocity given the time it took place.
But Hollywood turns out to be frequently more accurate than the textbooks used in US Schools as is demonstrated at length in 'Lies my Teacher Told Me'.
Your name calling of the Swift Boat Veterans shows your bias. Your unsupported attack on them is a perfect example of people with your political slant. When you cannot refute claims you resort to name calling.
The smear boat liars have been proven to be liars numerous times. The fact that you attempt to repeat their baseless claims shows that you are the partisan hack here. I note that you claim that I am unable to support my claims with facts when in fact you provide absolutely no facts to back your argument, moreover the burden of proof is squarely on the accusers which in this case is the smear boat liars for Bush.
The leader of the smear boat liars operated a smear campaign against Kerry on behalf of Richard Nixon. In a taped interview with Nixon he is heard to claim that he was personally in Cambodia, yet one of the 'lies' he accuses Kerry of is of falsely claiming the be in Cambodia. Similarly the claims that Kerry was not under fire during the engagement for which he won a bronze star are disproved by the citation of another award to the very 'eyewitness' claiming that there was no fire.
When all contemporary sources refute the claims of cowardice being made and the claims come from a clearly partisan source the claims can have absolutely no credibility.
If CBS had been doing real journalism they would never have published the alleged TANG reports on Bush. Not because of the specious allegations that they were produced using Word or that typewriters did not exist in those days as the blogosphere pundits would have it. The documents are very clearly produced on a typewriter, the baseline moves up and down, other documents released by the WH and accepted as genuine are in the same proportional font. But no journalist should be accepting that type of material from a single source that has already claimed to be an eyewitness. If he had the material he would have released it when he made the first allegation.
The irony of the situation is that CBS could easily have stitched up Bush completely by simply pulling out a 1970s era IBM Director typewriter and showing a memo being produced on it. The blogosphere almost ended up causing the bogus to be certified as genuine because they were latching onto the wrong test for authenticity.
You shouldn't cite any encyclopaedia in your own work - use them as a jumping board towards new lines of research.
That depends whether the article is a normative reference or a background or credit reference. There used to be a time when academics used to claim that there should NEVER EVER be references to URLs in academic papers. Then the engineering journals started to discover that many network standards are only available through the web and the URL is the definitive reference.
The emphemeral nature of wiki does create problems for citation, but these are entirely fixable with a sufficient attention to the problem in the naming scheme.
If I am writing a paper on a Web service and need to provide a background to either the application area or to the general technology wiki may well provide a free description that is at least as good as a background citation to a standard text. It also has the advantage of being at least potentially being updated to reflect changes since.
If it is reliable for the 'most part', then it is not reliable at all.
No data sources are reliable. The Encyclopeadia Britanica which keeps being referred to as some sort of gold standard of accuracy was started as a triumphalist celebration of the British Empire.
But even unreliable data can point to data that is more reliable. Police investigations do not begin with firm facts, they begin with a set of evidence which may or may not be contaminated in various ways. The same is actually the case in physics research, there are very few experiments that work really well and repeatedly when they are first done.
In the last election we discovered that the mainstream media are terrebly sloppy and unreliable. The media gave far more attention to the smear boat liars for Bush and TANG memos provided by a highly dubious source than they did to actual policies.
The problem with openness is that it only takes a small proportion of jerks to screw everything up. I don't think anyone would seriously consider running the Linux kernel on wiki lines.
Fortunately there is a very simple way out of the current situation and one that will inevitably be put into practice. Just as slashdot has a reputation mechanism and can be surfed at +1 (mostly good stuff) or -1 (mostly trolls) the same sort of mechanism will eventually be put in place on wikipedia or a branch thereof.
The creative commons license even makes it easy for people to do this, the troll version of wiki is simply the last input to the editor queue.
A deeper problem though is the one that all these knowledge engineering projects suffer from at some point, not everything is physics, in most fields there is no absolute knowledge of the form that fits into a rigid taxonomic structure. There is no definitive opinion of the literary merits of Burroughs or Dickens.
The revert wars are in part reflecting genuine differences of opinion. A bunch of loonies who think they have found absolute truth and attempt to construct a rigid ideology arround it are not going to tolerate dissenting views. And bunches of loonies with a rigid ideology are not going to tollerate any form of epistomological relativism.
Well lets see, the guy is selling high powered green lasers to responsible members of the public at $700 a time
Exactly how does someone have $700 worth of fun with a laser in a responsible fashion? Its not like the thing is powerful enough to do really cool things like cut James bond in half or something.
Incidentally, if Goldfinger had really known what he was up to he would have had Bond upside down on the slab of gold. This was the general practice in the middle ages when sawing a man in half was a means of execution. If the victim was upside down then the blood loss was less and they could be kept alive until the saw got down to the heart.
How can a laser beam travel round the nose of a plane overhead, and accurately reach the pilot's eyes from say, a few thousand feet away?
The first thing to consider is what the local terain looks like. It is going to be a lot easier doing something like this if you are in an area with high buildings or hills in the line of sight.
Second thing to consider is how to minimize the effect of the plane's velocity, if the plane is heading directly towards you this type of trick is going to be much easier than if you are perpendicular to the direction of travel.
Third, what did the pilots really experience? Most likely they saw an unexplained light in the cockpit and assumed it was a laser comming from the outside. They could be wrong. The eyesight damage statistics are completely untrustworthy and are probably best ignored.
Fourth, is the objective to hit the cockpit or just the plane? if there is a bunck of geeks doing this type of thing on a large scale they will hit the cockpit every so often by accident. Another possibility is that the laser is just scanning at random without being targetted.
It could be post 9/11 paranoia or it could be Al Qaeda, or even a bunch of racist redneck fruitcakes like Timothy McVeigh. It would not take a great deal of expertise to put together somthing that could do a degree of tracking. Take one of the telescopes that has a CCD drop in and a computer drive. You can buy that type of thing for a few hundred dollars.
The objective here may just be to test a tracking system, not to bring down the plane, or if it is Al Qaeda the target is more likely to be a helicopter.
As I read this it occurred to me, has MS EVER lost a market once they came to dominate it?
Microsoft no longer dominates the world of talking Barney dolls.
Of course the Barney partnership was the real PR blunder, all that anti-trust stuff was just people trying to get at Barney through Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft is under any threat in the desktop area from Linux any more than they are under threat from Apple. Its actually quite hard to loose a dominant market position in the software industry because of the network effect.
The companies that have lost a dominant position have mostly done so through total negligence. Lotus and Wordperfect both refused to support either the Microsoft or the IBM GUI. They also charged a bucketload of cash for their product and did not drop prices when computing became a mass market. When I bought my first copy of office it was cheaper than buying either Lotus OR Wordperfect.
The markets that have gone Linux are mostly markets that ten years ago were dominated by 'engineering workstations', mostly running SunOs or Solaris.
While AIX, "Ain't unIX", might be described as Unix and the advert looks like HR drool, I'd still wager that some thing M$ failed something Sybase and that the AIX rumor is someone blowing smoke up your ass. Comparing reputations, AIX vrs. M$, the choice is clear.
So lets think this one through for a second. The people who work there say the system that failled runs on AIX and that its the application thats gone whoopsie. So they obviously must be lying since everyone knows that the minute an application is ported to AIX all the bugs fall out of it.
Of course with this type of thinking there is no way that reputations are ever going to change since every computer error is attributed to Windows even if it has nothing to do with the issue.
I suspect that the HR advert is for a completely unrelated job.
I also would hazzard a guess that the real problem at the place now is not the system anymore. The system is probably back up but they are now having to deal with planes that are in the wrong places and crews that have no flying hours left because of decisions that were taken manually while the system was down.
As others pointed out, man pages tend to have major defects and inaccuracies covered by disclaimers like "this isn't being maintained" or "see info/html/other".
In addition, a huge amount of Unix documentation lacks structure. There is a huge amount of raw data, but no tables of contents (or at least no -accurate- ones), and poor or nonexistent indexes.
A lot of Unix documentation tends to address the esoteric needs of the few, and ignores the more common needs of the many.
The big problem is that technical writers were not part of the design process. So nobody ever said 'make that command easier to explain'.
The UNIX manuals only describe low level commands. There is no documentation that follows the sequence problem - solution or anything close. And anyone who complains is simply told that they are cretins/idiots/fools/etc. just for asking. To make matters even worse the commands are often intentionally obscure.
The most important job of an operating system is providing a user interface. So these are not minor problems that can be ignored.
Yes, the link is hosted on MS servers, but before you ignore it for that, at least notice that the forward is by Dennis Ritchie and it was contributed to primarily by Unix geeks. It's about 10 years old, but large portions of it are still relevent today.
I think most of us on the Unix Haters list were Lisp machine or VMS hackers who were pretty upset that a piece of utter crap was winning the O/S standards wars at the time.
The forward by Dennis is actually an anti-forward, more of a backward. At the time he was working on Plan-9 which takes all the best ideas from UNIX and junks them, leaving only the unrefined crud that is best ignored.
The book is somewhat uneven in its criticisms, I don't think that the gripes abous X-Windows hit the mark as well as when they are explaining the file systems lossage.
Ultimately the problem with Unix is that it is built the way that cars used to be built before Henry Ford, its a computer O/S for folk who like to spend their time tinkering with their system and like endless opportunities for low grade intellectual stimulation because thats an end in itself for them.
Unix still has the same major architectural deficiencies. The inter process communication is not up to much, the concurrency model is weak, the user interface is eratic and there is no consistency. Documentation is a complete joke.
Yes, I don't see what the problem is? At least Windows Media Player doesn't take over your PC. Everytime I installed RealOne or whatever its called, you tell it to only associated REAL specific file extensions and it totally ingores your options and configures EVERYTHING. I only wanted it so I can watch.rm or.ram files...
Not to mention infesting your machine with spyware and pesterware that is made hard to remove.
I block connections to real at my firewall to stop people from downloading it. I am happy with most of the major active X plug ins but the Real one is simply malware.
Quick time is okay, I hate that it sits in the system tray taking memory by default
Why do programs do that? There is no reason to, they can be invoked on demand easily enough. Its not just the memory hogging, its the slowing of the startup that I object to.
I don't think that the EU judgement will have any practical effect. PC manufacturers are still going to ship the machines with media player because their customers will expect it. Nobody is going to install Realplayer instead unless the adware and pesterware is turned off which is not going to happen.
Ultimately the solution to this has to be to get to an open standard format for streaming video that is supported by Windows Codecs.
The difference is that you can actually usefully run UNIX without X, while you cannot run Windows without the dressing. Why do you need X to run UNIX? Why do you think you need it? Yes, if you want a desktop, you will most likely use X, but not every UNIX installation is a desktop (not by a long shot).
And you can run Windows without the GUI, there are many devices that run Windows Embedded.
The 'security' of X windows is a joke. It does not get reported as bugs because it is in there by design. Its like nobody reports FTP or Telnet for the design errors that cause them to transfer passwords in the clear.
Have you actually tried removing notepad?
Windows tries pretty hard to keep you from doing so.
That because if you delete notepad you have no editor and no viewer for TXT files.
I think the argument that there are no holes in UNIX because UNIX is no more than the kernel is bunk. To compare like with like you have to look at every component of the O/S which can cause a security breach when normally installed.
To get to a minimal level of functionality for comparison purposes you have to be running X-Windows. Ooops UNIX just lost.
To really have a realistic comparison you have to include the user in the evaluation and measure both the amount of work they can get done and the amount of security issues. Mitnick showed plenty of ways that an attacker can exploit the byzantine complexity of UNIX to make a social engineering attack.
In that case, George Washington was nothing more than a murdurous traitor who was responsible for the deaths of many a fine troop of King George. Now had he actually listened to what you're saying, and not had a little insurrection (and no one else had an insurrection), we would still be grovelling at the English throne
Treason never prospers, for if it prospers none dare call it treason.
If the war had gone differently the adulatory biographies would have been written about Benedict Arnold.
If innocent until proven guilty meant what some appear to it would mean that the police cannot even arrest someone until they have been found guilty.
Thats not how it works, if you are arrested and suspected of being a dangerous person the police have a right and a duty to take steps they consider necessary to stop you from committing further crimes until they can get you in front of a court. They can also ask a court for further restrictions to stop you running away &ct.
Slashdot Mirror
Its time to do what we used to do back in 1990 before the Pentium arrived, run benchmarks to determine how fast the machine is.
The only interesting thing about using a game as a benchmark is if the thing will run. Its not unusual to find that a game simply does not run on a laptop.
If ever there was an invitation to a dick size measuring contest this would be it...
Which is exactly the sort of arrogant geek centric approach that has led to bad security.
The access points could have been designed to be secure without anyone ever needing to RTFM. Print the serial number of the device on the case of the box, use it as the default password.
Same thing goes for these idiotic WEP keys which I keep having to type into one machine after another. Build the system so that I don't keep having to enter long strings of digits into each new machine I buy.
In the process committing a serious crime.
You don't have the right to decide how other people should manage their network. The fault here lies with the manufacturers for providing systems that require too much effort to secure.
Terrorising people into behaving in the way you think they should is despicable. Who made you King?
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics and a measured IQ that is more than three standard deviations above the mean.
I believe that "Unix" delivered something called the World Wide Web
Funny you should raise that one given that I worked on the Web back in the earliest days. The code all ran on VMS or UNIX.
Linux is nowhere near a match for the Nextstep environment that the Web was originally built on and it is completely ridiculous to claim Nextstep as a UNIX 'flavor' as if the differences were minor issues of taste. Nextstep was an engineered system, UNIX was is and probably always will be a botch job.
Twenty five years later UNIX has still not delivered a decent online help system and it still is nowhere near the levels of reliability VMS achieved.
It all depends on what you consider essential. I prefer to use an environment that does not appear to have the idea that its performing a continuous IQ test on the user.
Nope, I think its the result of it being a popular thing to say on slashdot.
If this was a blog dedicated to high quality user interfaces then it would probably be very popular to trash Linux in a similar way.
As a matter of fact Windows was in 64 bit before Linux existed. The original Windows ran on MIPS and the 64 bit Dec Alpha.
The same problem happens with legislation. The Bono anti-spyware bill as currently drafted would make most of the anti-spyware programs illegal. its not intentional, its just bad drafting. The problem is that what is spyware is at some level a consent issue and so drafting is horribly difficult.
I managed to get one of my wife's friends to stop speaking to me after I explained to him why the quality of the motor in his DVD would make precisely zero difference to his sound experience unless the motor was so noisy you could hear it over the music. This was the type of guy who spends $1000 on cables.
At this point the audiophile market is completely dead. The audiosnobs found it difficult to convince even themselves that they could realy hear any difference with the modern gear. So the new snob playground is Ho-ohm The-ahh-taah. Even here the plasma displays have made the field a whole heap less exclusive. So the new richard-size measuring contest is 'integration', getting the stuff to talk to each other nicely. Whole house systems and so on.
My wife was in a course on speaker design by Dr Bose. She also dislikes the Bose sound. As for the electronics side, I can't beleive that they design them themselves, I bet that they are like Bang and Olofsen and buy in all the electronics to go in the cute cases.
As for the Onkyo, they do nice stuff but make sure you don't loose the remote, the replacement for mine costs half what I paid for the receiver and I have not found a multi-purpose remote that supports all the functions.
That is a very different issue. Hollywood movies do not provide a platform for alternative points of view or debunking. So what you have is propaganda that misinforms large numbers of people.
Take Mel Gibson for example who is a member of an anti-semitic and militantly anti-British cult. Gibbson has made a series of films which present invented anti-British 'events' as history. In 'The Patriot' the British are shown burning down a church with civilians inside, no attrocity that is remotely similar is reported in any creditble history of the revolutionary war. The war is if anything remarkable because of the lack of that type of attrocity given the time it took place.
But Hollywood turns out to be frequently more accurate than the textbooks used in US Schools as is demonstrated at length in 'Lies my Teacher Told Me'.
The smear boat liars have been proven to be liars numerous times. The fact that you attempt to repeat their baseless claims shows that you are the partisan hack here. I note that you claim that I am unable to support my claims with facts when in fact you provide absolutely no facts to back your argument, moreover the burden of proof is squarely on the accusers which in this case is the smear boat liars for Bush.
The leader of the smear boat liars operated a smear campaign against Kerry on behalf of Richard Nixon. In a taped interview with Nixon he is heard to claim that he was personally in Cambodia, yet one of the 'lies' he accuses Kerry of is of falsely claiming the be in Cambodia. Similarly the claims that Kerry was not under fire during the engagement for which he won a bronze star are disproved by the citation of another award to the very 'eyewitness' claiming that there was no fire.
When all contemporary sources refute the claims of cowardice being made and the claims come from a clearly partisan source the claims can have absolutely no credibility.
If CBS had been doing real journalism they would never have published the alleged TANG reports on Bush. Not because of the specious allegations that they were produced using Word or that typewriters did not exist in those days as the blogosphere pundits would have it. The documents are very clearly produced on a typewriter, the baseline moves up and down, other documents released by the WH and accepted as genuine are in the same proportional font. But no journalist should be accepting that type of material from a single source that has already claimed to be an eyewitness. If he had the material he would have released it when he made the first allegation.
The irony of the situation is that CBS could easily have stitched up Bush completely by simply pulling out a 1970s era IBM Director typewriter and showing a memo being produced on it. The blogosphere almost ended up causing the bogus to be certified as genuine because they were latching onto the wrong test for authenticity.
That depends whether the article is a normative reference or a background or credit reference. There used to be a time when academics used to claim that there should NEVER EVER be references to URLs in academic papers. Then the engineering journals started to discover that many network standards are only available through the web and the URL is the definitive reference.
The emphemeral nature of wiki does create problems for citation, but these are entirely fixable with a sufficient attention to the problem in the naming scheme.
If I am writing a paper on a Web service and need to provide a background to either the application area or to the general technology wiki may well provide a free description that is at least as good as a background citation to a standard text. It also has the advantage of being at least potentially being updated to reflect changes since.
No data sources are reliable. The Encyclopeadia Britanica which keeps being referred to as some sort of gold standard of accuracy was started as a triumphalist celebration of the British Empire.
But even unreliable data can point to data that is more reliable. Police investigations do not begin with firm facts, they begin with a set of evidence which may or may not be contaminated in various ways. The same is actually the case in physics research, there are very few experiments that work really well and repeatedly when they are first done.
In the last election we discovered that the mainstream media are terrebly sloppy and unreliable. The media gave far more attention to the smear boat liars for Bush and TANG memos provided by a highly dubious source than they did to actual policies.
The problem with openness is that it only takes a small proportion of jerks to screw everything up. I don't think anyone would seriously consider running the Linux kernel on wiki lines.
Fortunately there is a very simple way out of the current situation and one that will inevitably be put into practice. Just as slashdot has a reputation mechanism and can be surfed at +1 (mostly good stuff) or -1 (mostly trolls) the same sort of mechanism will eventually be put in place on wikipedia or a branch thereof.
The creative commons license even makes it easy for people to do this, the troll version of wiki is simply the last input to the editor queue.
A deeper problem though is the one that all these knowledge engineering projects suffer from at some point, not everything is physics, in most fields there is no absolute knowledge of the form that fits into a rigid taxonomic structure. There is no definitive opinion of the literary merits of Burroughs or Dickens.
The revert wars are in part reflecting genuine differences of opinion. A bunch of loonies who think they have found absolute truth and attempt to construct a rigid ideology arround it are not going to tolerate dissenting views. And bunches of loonies with a rigid ideology are not going to tollerate any form of epistomological relativism.
Exactly how does someone have $700 worth of fun with a laser in a responsible fashion? Its not like the thing is powerful enough to do really cool things like cut James bond in half or something.
Incidentally, if Goldfinger had really known what he was up to he would have had Bond upside down on the slab of gold. This was the general practice in the middle ages when sawing a man in half was a means of execution. If the victim was upside down then the blood loss was less and they could be kept alive until the saw got down to the heart.
The first thing to consider is what the local terain looks like. It is going to be a lot easier doing something like this if you are in an area with high buildings or hills in the line of sight.
Second thing to consider is how to minimize the effect of the plane's velocity, if the plane is heading directly towards you this type of trick is going to be much easier than if you are perpendicular to the direction of travel.
Third, what did the pilots really experience? Most likely they saw an unexplained light in the cockpit and assumed it was a laser comming from the outside. They could be wrong. The eyesight damage statistics are completely untrustworthy and are probably best ignored.
Fourth, is the objective to hit the cockpit or just the plane? if there is a bunck of geeks doing this type of thing on a large scale they will hit the cockpit every so often by accident. Another possibility is that the laser is just scanning at random without being targetted.
It could be post 9/11 paranoia or it could be Al Qaeda, or even a bunch of racist redneck fruitcakes like Timothy McVeigh. It would not take a great deal of expertise to put together somthing that could do a degree of tracking. Take one of the telescopes that has a CCD drop in and a computer drive. You can buy that type of thing for a few hundred dollars.
The objective here may just be to test a tracking system, not to bring down the plane, or if it is Al Qaeda the target is more likely to be a helicopter.
Microsoft no longer dominates the world of talking Barney dolls.
Of course the Barney partnership was the real PR blunder, all that anti-trust stuff was just people trying to get at Barney through Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft is under any threat in the desktop area from Linux any more than they are under threat from Apple. Its actually quite hard to loose a dominant market position in the software industry because of the network effect.
The companies that have lost a dominant position have mostly done so through total negligence. Lotus and Wordperfect both refused to support either the Microsoft or the IBM GUI. They also charged a bucketload of cash for their product and did not drop prices when computing became a mass market. When I bought my first copy of office it was cheaper than buying either Lotus OR Wordperfect.
The markets that have gone Linux are mostly markets that ten years ago were dominated by 'engineering workstations', mostly running SunOs or Solaris.
So lets think this one through for a second. The people who work there say the system that failled runs on AIX and that its the application thats gone whoopsie. So they obviously must be lying since everyone knows that the minute an application is ported to AIX all the bugs fall out of it.
Of course with this type of thinking there is no way that reputations are ever going to change since every computer error is attributed to Windows even if it has nothing to do with the issue.
I suspect that the HR advert is for a completely unrelated job.
I also would hazzard a guess that the real problem at the place now is not the system anymore. The system is probably back up but they are now having to deal with planes that are in the wrong places and crews that have no flying hours left because of decisions that were taken manually while the system was down.
The big problem is that technical writers were not part of the design process. So nobody ever said 'make that command easier to explain'.
The UNIX manuals only describe low level commands. There is no documentation that follows the sequence problem - solution or anything close. And anyone who complains is simply told that they are cretins/idiots/fools/etc. just for asking. To make matters even worse the commands are often intentionally obscure.
The most important job of an operating system is providing a user interface. So these are not minor problems that can be ignored.
I think most of us on the Unix Haters list were Lisp machine or VMS hackers who were pretty upset that a piece of utter crap was winning the O/S standards wars at the time.
The forward by Dennis is actually an anti-forward, more of a backward. At the time he was working on Plan-9 which takes all the best ideas from UNIX and junks them, leaving only the unrefined crud that is best ignored.
The book is somewhat uneven in its criticisms, I don't think that the gripes abous X-Windows hit the mark as well as when they are explaining the file systems lossage.
Ultimately the problem with Unix is that it is built the way that cars used to be built before Henry Ford, its a computer O/S for folk who like to spend their time tinkering with their system and like endless opportunities for low grade intellectual stimulation because thats an end in itself for them.
Unix still has the same major architectural deficiencies. The inter process communication is not up to much, the concurrency model is weak, the user interface is eratic and there is no consistency. Documentation is a complete joke.
It probably does not allow messages that are long enough.
Can't think why the Bush administration would not want soldiers sending back more of those happy snaps from Abu Graihb...
Not to mention infesting your machine with spyware and pesterware that is made hard to remove.
I block connections to real at my firewall to stop people from downloading it. I am happy with most of the major active X plug ins but the Real one is simply malware.
Quick time is okay, I hate that it sits in the system tray taking memory by default
Why do programs do that? There is no reason to, they can be invoked on demand easily enough. Its not just the memory hogging, its the slowing of the startup that I object to.
I don't think that the EU judgement will have any practical effect. PC manufacturers are still going to ship the machines with media player because their customers will expect it. Nobody is going to install Realplayer instead unless the adware and pesterware is turned off which is not going to happen.
Ultimately the solution to this has to be to get to an open standard format for streaming video that is supported by Windows Codecs.
And you can run Windows without the GUI, there are many devices that run Windows Embedded.
The 'security' of X windows is a joke. It does not get reported as bugs because it is in there by design. Its like nobody reports FTP or Telnet for the design errors that cause them to transfer passwords in the clear.
That because if you delete notepad you have no editor and no viewer for TXT files.
I think the argument that there are no holes in UNIX because UNIX is no more than the kernel is bunk. To compare like with like you have to look at every component of the O/S which can cause a security breach when normally installed.
To get to a minimal level of functionality for comparison purposes you have to be running X-Windows. Ooops UNIX just lost.
To really have a realistic comparison you have to include the user in the evaluation and measure both the amount of work they can get done and the amount of security issues. Mitnick showed plenty of ways that an attacker can exploit the byzantine complexity of UNIX to make a social engineering attack.
Treason never prospers, for if it prospers none dare call it treason.
If the war had gone differently the adulatory biographies would have been written about Benedict Arnold.
If innocent until proven guilty meant what some appear to it would mean that the police cannot even arrest someone until they have been found guilty.
Thats not how it works, if you are arrested and suspected of being a dangerous person the police have a right and a duty to take steps they consider necessary to stop you from committing further crimes until they can get you in front of a court. They can also ask a court for further restrictions to stop you running away &ct.