Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, IIS, and his brother, Apache.
I'll leave the two of you to get accquainted.
Wait, before I go... they have this weird cousin. He has 99% of his market, but because he doesn't sit and listen for any random IP traffic presented to him, it's really hard to exploit him. Mostly impossible. Well, actually impossible, unless the user does something. But hey, I guess market share magically makes a machine exploitable, so lets watch the fun.
These guys must be part of my upper level of management.
I tried to install Ethereal to diagnose some issues on the LAN that normal host-based diagnostics would never catch. Had to do with EBCDIC-ASCII translations, so each host always disagreed with what was sent out on the wire. IT security freaked, calling it a "hacker's tool". I explained patiently that our LAN was segmented enough that they needn't worry, I wasn't about to be stealing the CEO's password. Still no go.
I ended up installing the damn thing anyway, confirmed my suspicions, and saved myself and several hours many days of hunting around. Didn't tell them that, though:)
Every news story that tries to use the fear of "packet sniffers" as a dangerous tool can pretty much be dismissed out of hand. Watching the data flow in and out of your own computer is never a security risk.
And that's why Code Red was just a myth. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Malware authors go after the easy targets. They don't consciously choose to go after home users only - this is a side effect of being able to amass thousands of unpatched machines weeks after the fact. But don't kid yourself - even if every single machine on the planet always managed to patch itself 24 hours after infection, we'd still see Code Red. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Asshats are asshats. Botnet farming is a relatively new phenomenon, but infecting computers en masse has been going on for decades now.
Of course, even if we magically removed Windows from the desktop entirely, we'd still never rid ourselves of this idiotic marketshare myth. People are quite happy to ignore history just to focus on one or two recent events, so I'm sure they'd remain happy to ignore reality just a little bit longer...
The individual tab closing button (it's nice...just give it a shot)
We have given it a shot. It's how Opera worked in the 6/7 days (not sure if this is still the case, it's been years for me).
We hated it. It's not nice. It's far too easy to close a tab by accident.
Believe me, if you think Slashdot harps on this feature too much, just wait till the general public start using it. I expect forums full of "how the hell do I turn this off!!!" posts.
If I could run every intraweb site/application on Firefox, I could convert my desktop to Linux. If I could run Linux, most of the rest of the company could, too. Most businesses don't play games, use photoshop, or some obscure DVD-ripping software that is only available on Windows. Most businesses are stuck on Windows due to the Office stack (which is getting to be replacable) and IE-based applications. Where the business machines go, the home users will follow.
Yeesh. There must be 6 highly-modded comments already that all say "home users don't care about the browser, so they'll never switch to Linux/OSX!".
Sorry folks, you need to get out of the basement more. Home users are unimportant in the big picture, because they never choose anything anyway. They either buy what work uses, or they buy what Best Buy has on the shelf.
You'd think that if that were the case, they could just put a button somewhere that says "release memory".
Whether it's a genuine leak, extentions misbehaving, or overzealous cache - if they can find a way to re-render all of your current pages while still freeing up memory, it should be trivial to code this without having to kill the app and re-start it.
The new caching mechanism is claimed to cache "all images" and "all text" of a page, and this is why it uses so much memory. Why then when I hit the back button, do I often see the browser making a connection back to the original site? I've seen sites start having problems enough that hitting going back to them can pretty leave the browser displaying a blank page - even though all of this is supposedly cached and taking up major amounts of memory.
Opera's caching feature sure didn't act like this. You could browse a bunch of sites, and yank your Intenet connection, and still go back to those sites just fine.
Anyone know why Firefox doesn't seem to actually cache everything?
On file sharing and leaking videos
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Interesting quote from the article:
"His new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood" (Volcano), shot into the Billboard Top 10 upon its release last month--his highest chart placing since he opened his one-man spoof-factory in the early '80s."
So after all of those Internet hackers have been destroying musicians' careers with their file sharing, and leaking videos, and other piratical nonsense...
You make something people want, and it SELLS.
Considering the exposure Weird Al had in the 80s (his videos were in heavy rotation for years, every news organization wanted to talk with him and leech off the Michael Jackson bubble), to be selling even better today speaks volumes.
Don't car stereos and home hifi systems come with their own amplifiers?
I know my Lyra actually has 2 outputs because of this - one amplified for headphones, and one not, for use with steroes and the like.
Regardless, I like a player to have a LOT of volume range, too. It's annoying when you find some mp3s that were whisper quiet when recorded/encoded/ripped and your player just doesn't have the balls to bring it out.
Point one is correct, otherwise this is just a cleverly worded troll. Unless every shred of Earth Science theory has been torn to pieces in the past 5 minutes, none of what this poster claims is even remotely true - or even very believable, for that matter.
I don't see anyone saying, "Whichever way you look at it, polio patients have a choice."
Of course you don't, because it's a stupid analogy. You can't take a polio-infected person away from their polio. You CAN take a WoW player away from their game.
No one in the history of medicine has just chosen to "quit" having a disease. Some may be cured mysteriously, but it's not due to their own choice of saying "I don't want this disease anymore".
Millions of people have walked away from addiction.
Every addict has a choice, it just may be an extremely difficult one to make.
Sony whipped the console market into such a frenzy over the PS2 that by the time it was released, the Dreamcast was pretty much dead in the water. Even though the PS2 was arguably an inferior unit (and most early games sure demonstrate this), EVERYONE wanted Sony.
Rampant piracy also had something to do with it, although not as much as people think. It was still mostly us "geeks" doing it - you couldn't just burn any old Dreamcast game with your $59.99 CD burner, you needed special software (or a boot CD) which wasn't free, etc. Sega lost our dollars for sure, but the common person (who is still 95%+ of the market) just abandoned ship and went with the latest Sony offering.
The Dreamcast was an amazing machine with an incredible lineup, that lost out to such gaming gems as a crappy Snowboarding game. Once Sony took all the "good" sports franchises, that was it - although again, the Dreamcast was pretty much toast long before this, it still played into it. No EA == dead console these days.
Plus, a gaming market that for 25 years had not cared about backwards compatibility, suddenly wanted to play their 5 year old games again. Whether this was a true shift in the gaming demographic, or just more marketing hype, I leave as an exercise for the reader:)
Lastly, there was the small thing about getting a free DVD player with the console that definitely swayed a lot of people - although oddly enough, most people still ended up with a stand-alone unit because the PS2 was notoriously awful as a DVD player.
Because for some reason, the people who code "good samaritan" software seem to be very stupid.
Seriously, you could write software like this that DOESN'T spit out traffic. You want to stop a lot of botnets? Hang out on IRC, wait for infected hosts to do their thing, and then patch them. And THEM ONLY. Put up webpages with your exploit, and ONLY PATCH THOSE ALREADY INFECTED.
The problem is, everyone tries to write this stuff a la the original worm/trojan - spewing itself out to hosts all over the Internet, thereby making the cure in many ways worse than the disease.
As someone who runs as root all the time, "full access" to my system basically means anything that I'd otherwise need access to with a limited-user account. For most of you, this is/home/x. For me, it's many places. Wherever its location, if I ran as a limited user account I'd still need full access to every last IMPORTANT file on my system./lib can be replaced./bin can be replaced./home is gone whether I'm root or not, and that's what can't as easily be replaced.
As for not needing root for 99.999% of tasks, I suppose if web browsing and solitaire is what you spend your time doing on a computer, you're correct. However, an awful lot (99.999%) of how-tos specifically mention using sudo in them for a reason - it's a pain to administer your system as a non-root user.
Pretty much by definition, if I can do almost all of what I need without being root, I might as well be root anyway. Because at that point an attacker can do the most damage possible anyway.
I can re-install my OS. I can't re-install my data (not as easily, anyway). There's simply no need to avoid root on a single-user, desktop system - unless you seriously worry about rm -rf 'ing your system by mistake.
I think this asshat refreshes Slashdot all day looking for keywords "Sony" and "PS3", just so he can find some minor point to quibble on, and bash Zonk for his "anti-Sony bias".
Dude, relax. A lot. No amount of Zonk in this world will prevent you from enjoying your precious PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, IIS, and his brother, Apache.
I'll leave the two of you to get accquainted.
Wait, before I go... they have this weird cousin. He has 99% of his market, but because he doesn't sit and listen for any random IP traffic presented to him, it's really hard to exploit him. Mostly impossible. Well, actually impossible, unless the user does something. But hey, I guess market share magically makes a machine exploitable, so lets watch the fun.
These guys must be part of my upper level of management.
:)
I tried to install Ethereal to diagnose some issues on the LAN that normal host-based diagnostics would never catch. Had to do with EBCDIC-ASCII translations, so each host always disagreed with what was sent out on the wire. IT security freaked, calling it a "hacker's tool". I explained patiently that our LAN was segmented enough that they needn't worry, I wasn't about to be stealing the CEO's password. Still no go.
I ended up installing the damn thing anyway, confirmed my suspicions, and saved myself and several hours many days of hunting around. Didn't tell them that, though
Every news story that tries to use the fear of "packet sniffers" as a dangerous tool can pretty much be dismissed out of hand. Watching the data flow in and out of your own computer is never a security risk.
And that's why Code Red was just a myth. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Malware authors go after the easy targets. They don't consciously choose to go after home users only - this is a side effect of being able to amass thousands of unpatched machines weeks after the fact. But don't kid yourself - even if every single machine on the planet always managed to patch itself 24 hours after infection, we'd still see Code Red. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Asshats are asshats. Botnet farming is a relatively new phenomenon, but infecting computers en masse has been going on for decades now.
Of course, even if we magically removed Windows from the desktop entirely, we'd still never rid ourselves of this idiotic marketshare myth. People are quite happy to ignore history just to focus on one or two recent events, so I'm sure they'd remain happy to ignore reality just a little bit longer...
That's actually pretty cool, and at least the Thing is an appropriate costume for a fat geek, unlike, oh, say, Tron.
I can routinely see Firefox over the course of a day or two of remaining open consume upwards of 900K
Yeah, 640K should be enough for any web browser!
The individual tab closing button (it's nice...just give it a shot)
We have given it a shot. It's how Opera worked in the 6/7 days (not sure if this is still the case, it's been years for me).
We hated it. It's not nice. It's far too easy to close a tab by accident.
Believe me, if you think Slashdot harps on this feature too much, just wait till the general public start using it. I expect forums full of "how the hell do I turn this off!!!" posts.
You should go check out a business sometime.
If I could run every intraweb site/application on Firefox, I could convert my desktop to Linux. If I could run Linux, most of the rest of the company could, too. Most businesses don't play games, use photoshop, or some obscure DVD-ripping software that is only available on Windows. Most businesses are stuck on Windows due to the Office stack (which is getting to be replacable) and IE-based applications. Where the business machines go, the home users will follow.
Yeesh. There must be 6 highly-modded comments already that all say "home users don't care about the browser, so they'll never switch to Linux/OSX!".
Sorry folks, you need to get out of the basement more. Home users are unimportant in the big picture, because they never choose anything anyway. They either buy what work uses, or they buy what Best Buy has on the shelf.
You'd think that if that were the case, they could just put a button somewhere that says "release memory".
Whether it's a genuine leak, extentions misbehaving, or overzealous cache - if they can find a way to re-render all of your current pages while still freeing up memory, it should be trivial to code this without having to kill the app and re-start it.
How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare? In fact, if FF were to take over it might actually benefit MS.
Huh? Wha? Ever think of asking Microsoft themselves this question?
You don't seriously think Microsoft really spends millions in development dollars only to HURT themselves, do you?
This is insightful exactly how?
You know what I don't get about Firefox?
The new caching mechanism is claimed to cache "all images" and "all text" of a page, and this is why it uses so much memory. Why then when I hit the back button, do I often see the browser making a connection back to the original site? I've seen sites start having problems enough that hitting going back to them can pretty leave the browser displaying a blank page - even though all of this is supposedly cached and taking up major amounts of memory.
Opera's caching feature sure didn't act like this. You could browse a bunch of sites, and yank your Intenet connection, and still go back to those sites just fine.
Anyone know why Firefox doesn't seem to actually cache everything?
Interesting quote from the article:
"His new album, "Straight Outta Lynwood" (Volcano), shot into the Billboard Top 10 upon its release last month--his highest chart placing since he opened his one-man spoof-factory in the early '80s."
So after all of those Internet hackers have been destroying musicians' careers with their file sharing, and leaking videos, and other piratical nonsense...
You make something people want, and it SELLS.
Considering the exposure Weird Al had in the 80s (his videos were in heavy rotation for years, every news organization wanted to talk with him and leech off the Michael Jackson bubble), to be selling even better today speaks volumes.
Wow, is that thing ever off. Western Canada and the NW USA are wrong by hundreds of kms.
You're kidding, right? Or have you completely missed what's happened SINCE the 80s?
Intoxication defense.
Used, abused, and very effective in getting your sentence reduced/abolished.
Don't car stereos and home hifi systems come with their own amplifiers?
I know my Lyra actually has 2 outputs because of this - one amplified for headphones, and one not, for use with steroes and the like.
Regardless, I like a player to have a LOT of volume range, too. It's annoying when you find some mp3s that were whisper quiet when recorded/encoded/ripped and your player just doesn't have the balls to bring it out.
Mods, wake up!
Point one is correct, otherwise this is just a cleverly worded troll. Unless every shred of Earth Science theory has been torn to pieces in the past 5 minutes, none of what this poster claims is even remotely true - or even very believable, for that matter.
Shuuuuuuuut up, or Paul Newman's gonna have my legs broke.
Just like most geeks in the know turned off the "XP" part of Windows XP.
Heck, even in Canada you can get 250GB drives for $100 or so. 4x250GB = 1TB = $400.
:)
You must be part of the "generation gap" that this article is talking about. Are you a senior government official, by chance?
I don't see anyone saying, "Whichever way you look at it, polio patients have a choice."
Of course you don't, because it's a stupid analogy. You can't take a polio-infected person away from their polio. You CAN take a WoW player away from their game.
No one in the history of medicine has just chosen to "quit" having a disease. Some may be cured mysteriously, but it's not due to their own choice of saying "I don't want this disease anymore".
Millions of people have walked away from addiction.
Every addict has a choice, it just may be an extremely difficult one to make.
In 4-6 years I don't see why flash memory couldn't compete with optical for software distribution.
Back to cartridges!
Other than cost, of course. Would be nice to go back to the days when consoles didn't have "Loading....." displayed all the time.
Sony whipped the console market into such a frenzy over the PS2 that by the time it was released, the Dreamcast was pretty much dead in the water. Even though the PS2 was arguably an inferior unit (and most early games sure demonstrate this), EVERYONE wanted Sony.
:)
Rampant piracy also had something to do with it, although not as much as people think. It was still mostly us "geeks" doing it - you couldn't just burn any old Dreamcast game with your $59.99 CD burner, you needed special software (or a boot CD) which wasn't free, etc. Sega lost our dollars for sure, but the common person (who is still 95%+ of the market) just abandoned ship and went with the latest Sony offering.
The Dreamcast was an amazing machine with an incredible lineup, that lost out to such gaming gems as a crappy Snowboarding game. Once Sony took all the "good" sports franchises, that was it - although again, the Dreamcast was pretty much toast long before this, it still played into it. No EA == dead console these days.
Plus, a gaming market that for 25 years had not cared about backwards compatibility, suddenly wanted to play their 5 year old games again. Whether this was a true shift in the gaming demographic, or just more marketing hype, I leave as an exercise for the reader
Lastly, there was the small thing about getting a free DVD player with the console that definitely swayed a lot of people - although oddly enough, most people still ended up with a stand-alone unit because the PS2 was notoriously awful as a DVD player.
Again, see subject line.
Because for some reason, the people who code "good samaritan" software seem to be very stupid.
Seriously, you could write software like this that DOESN'T spit out traffic. You want to stop a lot of botnets? Hang out on IRC, wait for infected hosts to do their thing, and then patch them. And THEM ONLY. Put up webpages with your exploit, and ONLY PATCH THOSE ALREADY INFECTED.
The problem is, everyone tries to write this stuff a la the original worm/trojan - spewing itself out to hosts all over the Internet, thereby making the cure in many ways worse than the disease.
As someone who runs as root all the time, "full access" to my system basically means anything that I'd otherwise need access to with a limited-user account. For most of you, this is /home/x. For me, it's many places. Wherever its location, if I ran as a limited user account I'd still need full access to every last IMPORTANT file on my system. /lib can be replaced. /bin can be replaced. /home is gone whether I'm root or not, and that's what can't as easily be replaced.
As for not needing root for 99.999% of tasks, I suppose if web browsing and solitaire is what you spend your time doing on a computer, you're correct. However, an awful lot (99.999%) of how-tos specifically mention using sudo in them for a reason - it's a pain to administer your system as a non-root user.
Pretty much by definition, if I can do almost all of what I need without being root, I might as well be root anyway. Because at that point an attacker can do the most damage possible anyway.
I can re-install my OS. I can't re-install my data (not as easily, anyway). There's simply no need to avoid root on a single-user, desktop system - unless you seriously worry about rm -rf 'ing your system by mistake.
Please, someone tell me that's an Onion story.
Please.
We can't seriously be getting this stupid as a species.
*cries*
I think this asshat refreshes Slashdot all day looking for keywords "Sony" and "PS3", just so he can find some minor point to quibble on, and bash Zonk for his "anti-Sony bias".
Dude, relax. A lot. No amount of Zonk in this world will prevent you from enjoying your precious PS3.