I really can't understand this. How anyone with ANY kind of serious insight into the workings of computer science would come up with this is beyond me. It just proves the naivety and narrow mindedness of the author.
Extensible programming languages, then. Apparently it's no longer enough to be able to extend basic types, override functionality and reuse code. Now you have to be able to create completely new language functionality! Um, why?
By adding to the DTD/XMLSchema you are not 'extending the language'. Perl modules extend the language. C libraries extend the language. The do it by building new features from the building blocks provided.
Rather, you'd make the language proprietary. Forget the problems of the difference between g++/VC++/TurboC++ etc. Now you're into the realms of a different language per project. It's not enough just to read the (standardised) code and the way it works. Oh no, now you just have to learn all the language extensions as well. Welcome to the world where gnome-x++ is similar, but unlike, kde-x++ thanks to some muppet messing with the language constructs. Welcome to the world where you have to incorporate each projects language extensions to be able to build it.
I won't go into further reasons why using XML programming languages is a bad idea. I'll just leave you with this Dan Quayle quote:
Heh! I'm pretty sure that if someone bought a 'power solution' for the server room based on marketting schpiel and it turned out to be a coal powered turbine they'd be pretty pissed!
Many people consider Windows GUI integration to be a bad idea when the OS is used as a server. The server may not even have any console devices attached, so the use of powerful graphics as a requirement seems to be fundamentally wrong in this case.
The second problem with this is the proliferation of 'display export' systems in use. How would the display be rendered to a non-graphics device (e.g. terminal server virtual display) with any kind of speed if this reliance on complex 3D interfaces was mandatory?
Windows is bad enough to use as a server, thanks to the fact that remote administration is an absolute nightmare, without making display export a near impossibility too! Tying the GUI to the kernel was one problem. Tying it to the hardware sounds like a step backwards to the early to mid-nineties!
Linux needs the security to rock out of the box if it is to continue it's mainstream grouth without running into the problems windows has.
I wonder how many insecure installations had a box to come out of? Very few, I would think. Those with RHE susbscriptions and the like would be classed as 'out of the box', but admins installing because they prefer it are more likely to suffer these issues. No box required.
yep, hence the... having a password is no security. In fact, it's worse! It's apparent security, which leads to a false sense of security in the individual.
There is one school in the UK trialling this, but each parent has a username and password to prevent unauthorised access. Still, if a username/password combination is all that is required...
I saw a video being played in a prominent retailer's shop window (Dixons, owners of PC World) about the 'Y2K Threat'. In it, a guy gets up on 01/01/2000 and tries to make coffee. Oh no! His kettle won't boil! So he goes to work. Except his car won't start! He tries to cross the road, but the crossing is going crazy, so he can't get across! It never explains why the traffic was busy, especially as it was just demonstrated that cars wouldn't start...
The whole thing was just ridiculous, and it was all to sell some crappy CD with a TSR style 'clock set right thing' for Windows. The retailers of the world were rubbing their hands.
Of course, my analogue watch ne'er skipped a beat in the turmoil:)
The truth of the matter is, running as an unlimited user is perfectly safe if you don't run anything w/o knowing what it is.
Correct. Absolutely. Now, open up Task Manager, switch to the Processes tab and tell me what all those processes are and what they're doing. How about Iap.exe, or hkcmd.exe, or ssexp.exe.
They're all perfectly safe and known code, aren't they? After all, you trust them enough to run them as with admin rights all the time...
Sadly there is, and far more cunning. I recently had to kill a bit of spyware on my uncles PC over the phone. He is PC inept, never mind illiterate. Anyway, turns out that there were 2 executables that wrote their own and EACH OTHER's registry entries to get them to start up on boot. Trying to take the spyware programs out one at a time (a logical approach) wouldn't work because you had to figure out which 2 processes were part of it and kill them both before shutting down the machine. They wrote registry information on shutdown! Even when I deleted one of the executables it came back. Nasty recursive spyware.
Took me about half an hour just to kill that one, over the phone, and without a PC literate on the other end. Felt kinda proud of that one, which is wrong on so many levels.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
(And, yes, I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead.)
Well, I went to a lecture recently (end of last month) presented by Robin Rowe (CinePaint project leader) and it seems to be pretty well alive to me. It's used by a bunch of film production studios (list on the site) for 48 bit image processing. Just because you don't use it doesn't make it dead...
For the record, I was kinda implying that sorting the strength issue would involve making the blocks smaller, out of titanium or something.
Although a world in which war machines are made entirely of Lego sounds pretty cool. You can imagine the hordes of 8 year olds sat in bunkers frantically trying to find a 4x2 block before the advance can begin!
More than that, with all that experience he is naive enough to believe that he can clean machine using the very same machine - have he ever heard of rootkits and stealth program? Maybe he is just an idiot?
Doesn't that kind of prove his point? Joe Public wants to use the computer. The computer won't let him. Just run it as admin! That's the default, so it must be OK, right?
Now he's infested with spyware, trojans, viruses and the like. So, he installs SpyBot, AVG, ZoneAlarm, whatever. Nobody told him that wouldn't work because the processes are on the same box. Of course he has to go out and buy another machine for the sole purpose of disinfecting the first! (OK, he doesn't, but Joe Public won't understand the difference between 'installed on another hard drive' and 'another computer')
It just goes further to prove that to clean your PC of all these attacks the first thing to do is remove Windows and all its failings. Or buy a Mac.
I finally called her up about not proofreading stuff when she congratulated the wrong person for an internal promotion (not me).
It can get worse than that. Soon after I started at the last company I worked for, the HR director stood up in front of the whole development department and announced that an ex-employee had rejoined the company.
However, upon announcing said employee's name, he got it completely wrong and announced an ex-employee who had not, in fact, returned to the company. The returning employee was not impressed, and the HR director looked like an idiot. However, that was the normal state of things and nobody noticed.
The previously named employee did, in fact, rejoin the company little over a month later. The HR director tried to cover his gaff by claiming that he knew about it, despite the returner not applying until a week after the incident.
Human resources; can't live with 'em... that's it.
Hmm.. you may be right. According to the man page for mount:
"The following options apply to any file system that is being mounted (but not every file system actually honors them - e.g., the sync option today has effect only for ext2, ext3 and ufs):"
However, when I specify the option the vfat filesystem on the card does seem to a) slow down somewhat and b) not need a massive amount of flushing when unmounting. A quick google indicates others recommend using sync with vfat, despite the man page!
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
Resign.
Quite right. After being forced into 80 hour weeks and treated like scum ("I don't give a f*ck about the f*cking employees" is an actual quote from the MD) I quit. They responded with a nice 60% raise and a promise that it would all be better.
Didn't trust 'em as far as I could comfortably spit out a rat, but I had a cunning plan. I took the monster raise and worked it for 6 months to see what happened.
After 6 months, things were actually worse. I quit again and went to work somewhere much nicer, using the rather inflated salary to negotiate a very healthy starting rate at the new job.
I doubt that they will ever learn why I was so p*ssed at them, but that's just not my problem any more. They're already reaching the point where reputation precedes them and people turn down job offers based on that. They can't last much longer without a serious change in attitude.
Still, I think the default should be not to cache and people should enable it if they wanted to.
Interesting chicken and egg sitation here. If Google had taken the route of not doing anything without specific permission, who would have every heard of them to give permission?
Can you imagine a startup, fairly unheard of search engine who would only link to people who had a) heard of it and b) specifically allowed access by it. 'Google - searching 231 web pages!'
Slashdot Mirror
Good, solid anecdotes. That'll put the world to rights.
"Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"
I bet the crew of the Enterprise never dreamed that their worst enemy might be a paper jam!
Lets shut down any company found making weapons that have been used to illegal kill somebody, and put the entire staff in jail.
I mean, if they didn't take reasonable care to ensure that the weapons could only be used to kill legally.
Obviously.
I really can't understand this. How anyone with ANY kind of serious insight into the workings of computer science would come up with this is beyond me. It just proves the naivety and narrow mindedness of the author.
Extensible programming languages, then. Apparently it's no longer enough to be able to extend basic types, override functionality and reuse code. Now you have to be able to create completely new language functionality! Um, why?
By adding to the DTD/XMLSchema you are not 'extending the language'. Perl modules extend the language. C libraries extend the language. The do it by building new features from the building blocks provided.
Rather, you'd make the language proprietary. Forget the problems of the difference between g++/VC++/TurboC++ etc. Now you're into the realms of a different language per project. It's not enough just to read the (standardised) code and the way it works. Oh no, now you just have to learn all the language extensions as well. Welcome to the world where gnome-x++ is similar, but unlike, kde-x++ thanks to some muppet messing with the language constructs. Welcome to the world where you have to incorporate each projects language extensions to be able to build it.
I won't go into further reasons why using XML programming languages is a bad idea. I'll just leave you with this Dan Quayle quote:
"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things"
That about sums it up, I think.
Heh! I'm pretty sure that if someone bought a 'power solution' for the server room based on marketting schpiel and it turned out to be a coal powered turbine they'd be pretty pissed!
The one I like is 'in terms of'. Everything is 'in terms of' something else.
"What is your schedule, in terms of lunch?"
'In terms of lunch? You want me to translate my schedule to a combination of vegetables, bread and dairy products, and sauce?'
I especially like the question in terms of a far more precise question:
"What are you doing tonight, in terms of going out for a drink?"
The only sense is nonsense.
Many people consider Windows GUI integration to be a bad idea when the OS is used as a server. The server may not even have any console devices attached, so the use of powerful graphics as a requirement seems to be fundamentally wrong in this case.
The second problem with this is the proliferation of 'display export' systems in use. How would the display be rendered to a non-graphics device (e.g. terminal server virtual display) with any kind of speed if this reliance on complex 3D interfaces was mandatory?
Windows is bad enough to use as a server, thanks to the fact that remote administration is an absolute nightmare, without making display export a near impossibility too! Tying the GUI to the kernel was one problem. Tying it to the hardware sounds like a step backwards to the early to mid-nineties!
Linux needs the security to rock out of the box if it is to continue it's mainstream grouth without running into the problems windows has.
I wonder how many insecure installations had a box to come out of? Very few, I would think. Those with RHE susbscriptions and the like would be classed as 'out of the box', but admins installing because they prefer it are more likely to suffer these issues. No box required.
yep, hence the ... having a password is no security. In fact, it's worse! It's apparent security, which leads to a false sense of security in the individual.
There is one school in the UK trialling this, but each parent has a username and password to prevent unauthorised access. Still, if a username/password combination is all that is required...
:)
http://www.windowsstartup.com/wso/index.php
or use the properties of the executable.
Point was that on a Windows box, just because you didn't manually install it doesn't mean it ain't running!
No, because that would have been worth watching ;-)
I saw a video being played in a prominent retailer's shop window (Dixons, owners of PC World) about the 'Y2K Threat'. In it, a guy gets up on 01/01/2000 and tries to make coffee. Oh no! His kettle won't boil! So he goes to work. Except his car won't start! He tries to cross the road, but the crossing is going crazy, so he can't get across! It never explains why the traffic was busy, especially as it was just demonstrated that cars wouldn't start...
:)
The whole thing was just ridiculous, and it was all to sell some crappy CD with a TSR style 'clock set right thing' for Windows. The retailers of the world were rubbing their hands.
Of course, my analogue watch ne'er skipped a beat in the turmoil
The truth of the matter is, running as an unlimited user is perfectly safe if you don't run anything w/o knowing what it is.
Correct. Absolutely. Now, open up Task Manager, switch to the Processes tab and tell me what all those processes are and what they're doing. How about Iap.exe, or hkcmd.exe, or ssexp.exe.
They're all perfectly safe and known code, aren't they? After all, you trust them enough to run them as with admin rights all the time...
Sadly there is, and far more cunning. I recently had to kill a bit of spyware on my uncles PC over the phone. He is PC inept, never mind illiterate. Anyway, turns out that there were 2 executables that wrote their own and EACH OTHER's registry entries to get them to start up on boot. Trying to take the spyware programs out one at a time (a logical approach) wouldn't work because you had to figure out which 2 processes were part of it and kill them both before shutting down the machine. They wrote registry information on shutdown! Even when I deleted one of the executables it came back. Nasty recursive spyware.
Took me about half an hour just to kill that one, over the phone, and without a PC literate on the other end. Felt kinda proud of that one, which is wrong on so many levels.
(And, yes, I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead.)
Well, I went to a lecture recently (end of last month) presented by Robin Rowe (CinePaint project leader) and it seems to be pretty well alive to me. It's used by a bunch of film production studios (list on the site) for 48 bit image processing. Just because you don't use it doesn't make it dead...
For the record, I was kinda implying that sorting the strength issue would involve making the blocks smaller, out of titanium or something.
Although a world in which war machines are made entirely of Lego sounds pretty cool. You can imagine the hordes of 8 year olds sat in bunkers frantically trying to find a 4x2 block before the advance can begin!
More than that, with all that experience he is naive enough to believe that he can clean machine using the very same machine - have he ever heard of rootkits and stealth program? Maybe he is just an idiot?
Doesn't that kind of prove his point? Joe Public wants to use the computer. The computer won't let him. Just run it as admin! That's the default, so it must be OK, right?
Now he's infested with spyware, trojans, viruses and the like. So, he installs SpyBot, AVG, ZoneAlarm, whatever. Nobody told him that wouldn't work because the processes are on the same box. Of course he has to go out and buy another machine for the sole purpose of disinfecting the first! (OK, he doesn't, but Joe Public won't understand the difference between 'installed on another hard drive' and 'another computer')
It just goes further to prove that to clean your PC of all these attacks the first thing to do is remove Windows and all its failings. Or buy a Mac.
If the strength issue could be sorted then you'd have a great EMP proof robot for use in nuclear warfare.
I finally called her up about not proofreading stuff when she congratulated the wrong person for an internal promotion (not me).
It can get worse than that. Soon after I started at the last company I worked for, the HR director stood up in front of the whole development department and announced that an ex-employee had rejoined the company.
However, upon announcing said employee's name, he got it completely wrong and announced an ex-employee who had not, in fact, returned to the company. The returning employee was not impressed, and the HR director looked like an idiot. However, that was the normal state of things and nobody noticed.
The previously named employee did, in fact, rejoin the company little over a month later. The HR director tried to cover his gaff by claiming that he knew about it, despite the returner not applying until a week after the incident.
Human resources; can't live with 'em... that's it.
Hmm.. you may be right. According to the man page for mount:
"The following options apply to any file system that is being mounted (but not every file system actually honors them - e.g., the sync option today has effect only for ext2, ext3 and ufs):"
However, when I specify the option the vfat filesystem on the card does seem to a) slow down somewhat and b) not need a massive amount of flushing when unmounting. A quick google indicates others recommend using sync with vfat, despite the man page!
The mystery continues...
Works like a charm on my VFAT compact flash, etc. It's the linux filesystem driver that is affected by this setting, not the filesystem on the disk.
Why would you need to be taught to suckle your laptop keyboard?
Oh, wait.. that kind of nipple..
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
Resign.
Quite right. After being forced into 80 hour weeks and treated like scum ("I don't give a f*ck about the f*cking employees" is an actual quote from the MD) I quit. They responded with a nice 60% raise and a promise that it would all be better.
Didn't trust 'em as far as I could comfortably spit out a rat, but I had a cunning plan. I took the monster raise and worked it for 6 months to see what happened.
After 6 months, things were actually worse. I quit again and went to work somewhere much nicer, using the rather inflated salary to negotiate a very healthy starting rate at the new job.
I doubt that they will ever learn why I was so p*ssed at them, but that's just not my problem any more. They're already reaching the point where reputation precedes them and people turn down job offers based on that. They can't last much longer without a serious change in attitude.
Still, I think the default should be not to cache and people should enable it if they wanted to.
Interesting chicken and egg sitation here. If Google had taken the route of not doing anything without specific permission, who would have every heard of them to give permission?
Can you imagine a startup, fairly unheard of search engine who would only link to people who had a) heard of it and b) specifically allowed access by it. 'Google - searching 231 web pages!'