The trick is finding the most common 3 word phrases (in English) and applying the basic grammatical rules you learned in school.
Every [good] article I've seen advocating this type of password specifies that it has to be 50-60 characters long to be effective. Using a three word passphrase is similar to using a 3 character password.
Take this for example:
"My first guinea pig's name was Spud. She was brown and white."
It's made up of two simple sentences, but because of the length of it, there's a very, very large number of possibilities that could fit in that amount of space.
The idea of using long passphrases fails because most people wouldn't bother using a passphrase that long, and even if they did, many people couldn't reliably type something that long without making mistakes.
Deja.com, the first major web archive of usenet [news.google.com is built on their archive], has a similar "feature" where it would add advertising links to certain words in the archive. I don't know exactly when this was, but this article is mid-2000 and refers to another now defunct site, Remarq, doing it even earlier.
Interestingly enough, with both Deja and Remark, the users complained enough that the companies dropped the plans.
The law is there to uphold the beliefs of society. If enough people are breaking a law, who is that law representing exactly?
Laws are also there to protect the common good. I'm an excellent driver and could safely exceed many speed limits, but I'm still glad that they exist to help keep those who can't in line. If they weren't forced to, many people wouldn't bother to get auto insurance - the law serves to protect the general public.
History teaches us that the most effective way to get rid of unjust laws is to ignore them.
Could you cite some examples of this? Slavery wasn't done away but just ignoring it. Prohibition wasn't done away with just by ignoring it. [In answer to your expected answer to that statement, the flouting of the law created criminal enterprizes with lasting negative effects - forcing politicians to pass the law reinstuting legal alcohol is what got rid of them.]
Mass ignoring of laws often leads to them being left on the books, giving the powers that be the ability to selectively enforce them against enemies.
There is nothing said about the severity of the vulnerabilities.
There have been quite a few _significant_ problems with OpenSSL in the past year that I imagine contributed to the evaluation. That said, I'm still happily running Apache.
Music and movies are experienced differently and have a very different level of reusability.
True. But radio existed for a long time, and would prolly actually still be doing well if they hadn't been gobbled by megacorps that turned them into computer generated playlists with 10 songs. There's plenty of music that I enjoy listening to from time to time but would never buy, even for $1/track. The music rental music is also great for people like me because I can listen to a wide selection of stuff at work without having to carry CDs around all the time. It's also great for checking out music before buying it without being stuck listening to short clips at online stores or trying to hear over the general din at a music store. I think it's great to read a review of a group someplace and be able to check them out right away with no delay or financial risk that I'll get a CD I don't like.
As I said, whether there's enough people like me to make it worth to companies is still up in the air.
Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.
You're so very right. No legal operation will ever be able to compete on price with an illegal one. Your parents must be so proud that their child has become such an astute thinker.
Actually, nothing of the kind came out of my mouth. If you really care, dictionary.com has a fairly good definition of IP.
So your snide insinuation that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property" is circular at best.
I never insinuated that making an honest living is dependent upon IP. I have two uncles who make their living without developing IP. However, they are in an increasingly small group in this country. Almost anything that can be designed in the first world countries can be made for less in the second world countries. More and more people in the first world do nothing more than pushing electrons around without ever creating a physical product. Unless you relish the idea of the first world countries' economies crumbling, some kind of IP is necessary.
Most of the people who whine the most about how they should be free to copy whatever media they want for free have absolutely nothing to loose, because most of them have no connection to the creation of those products. However, most of them are dependent upon IP in one form or the other for their living.
Well, the Russian mafia won't use that money to sue my friends.
Similarly, the Russian mafia won't do anything to me for punching people in the face, so I guess they're my buddies too? Your friends knowingly violate the law? Guess what, they run the risk of having their wrist slapped. You play the game, you take the chances/
What does the Russian mafia do with that money? Assination, protection rackets, prostitution (often with with horrible effect on the women), internet scams, spamming.. You, sir, are a fine tribute to humanity for choosing such esteemed company over a group that defends themselves when they're transgressed against.
how many people making "top quality" music in the past few years have been fairly treated by their record labels?
How much do you know about the music industry? How many of your friends have worked in it? There's far more to it than a black and white issue. Labels front large amounts of money to a variety of musicians to cover the cost of quality recordings (thousands of dollars) and then tens of thousands of dollars on promotions to let the people know those artists exist. Some make it, some don't. The ones that make it subsidize the failures. Not ideal for them, but on the other hand, it beats being $50,000+ in debt. Musicians have known how the industry works for years. It's no secret what they're getting into when they sign on the dotted line, yet they still make that choice. Perhaps they know more than you do?
You have an awful lot of faith in humanity. With no DRM, why would the majority of people have paid for it when they could just get it from their buddy for free? In an ideal world, yeah, something like that could work, but the reality is that humanity is greedy and flawed.
Now the best we can hope for is something like that Lindows fellow set up. $.88 and no DRM just a good ol MP3.
Actually, emusic.com has been around much longer, has the same advantages, is cheaper [overall], and actually has artists that you might have heard of.
For now I will stick with Allofmp3.com The Russians got it right on that one.
Yeah, when you engage in criminal activity, it's amazing what great prices you can offer.
If someone in the US were allowed to do the same thing (even charging double allofmp3's rates) tons of music would be sold. TONS.
And virtually no [top quality] music would be made, because the money that aomp3.com (even doubling the fee) pays to the artists doesn't even begin to pay for the gas to get to the studio, let alone pesky details like eating and buying instruments.
It's dubiously legal at best inside Russia, and is not legal outside of it.
3) I'm still using the 10 dollars I paid about 6 months ago, and I download a lot of music.
That's great. In the mean time, you're supporting a group of "Russian mafiya" while the people who worked hard to create the "lot" of music that you enjoy get essentially nothing. I bet they'll keep making that music that you enjoy for free... Hey, the chop shop in the bad part of town will sell you parts at 1/10 of the cost of those suckers at $CAR_PARTS_SHOP. Let's all go support the criminals.
So, how do you make [or intend to make] your living? Does it depend on the concept of intellectual property at all?
Your monthly payment gets messed up, you loose access to the music for a couple days, you call them and fix it, and it comes back. It's really not a big deal.
In both cases you loose access to all the music you have paid Napster for.
You've not paid for for the music. You've paid for the right to listen to the music _that_ month. Do you complain that Netflix is horrible because you don't get to keep the DVDs?
when they go out of business, all your songs go poof
The point is that they're not _your_ songs, but that for $15/month you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month. Think of it as a membership at Netflix - you pay a certain amount per month and get [theoretically] as much as you want to watch, but you don't get to keep it. Whether the market will decide that this is something the public is interested in for music remains to be seen.
There is the option to buy tracks and keep the forever just like iTunes. But just like iTunes it's about $1/track in the US. The whole point of the Napster to go is that you can get thousands of tracks and switch them around as you like, which is great for people like me who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs over the course of the month. My online music habbit would cost me around $80/week from iTunes. It's not great if you just want to listen to a handful of them - it's clearly cheaper over the long run to buy the CD or download the perminant copy from your choice of vendors.
Wow, I make a disagreement on which step was the biggest improvement and I'm flamebait (not aimed at you, just the clueless mods)...
1) Firewall Not a great firewall or a huge improvement. The fact that it's built in is a very good thing for users, particularly hobbiests and home users, but it's not a major advance in OS design.
2) Enhanced driver support 3) Enhanced Stability I've never written a device driver for Windows, so perhaps it was a big change between W2K and XP from the developer standpoint, but on the ~50 Windows boxes I admin (about a 3/2 ration of XP to W2K), I don't tell much of a difference between the two as far as driver availability and stability. My W2K desktop stays up for months, generally until the next patch that requires a reboot.
4) Improved boot times As someone else pointed out, displaying the desktop before it's usable isn't a great leap forward. And again, it's a nice thing, not a groundbreaking change. I'll grant you that *some* machines take forever to boot W2K for whatever reason, but the majority of them I've only seen about a 5 second difference, and that could be explained away by faster processors.
6) Better/easier networking Other than the wireless setup, I'm not sure what you're refering to here. I set up interfaces pretty much the same between the two.
The first real OS that could be used for either home or office.... That, in my opinion, is what made XP so big at the time.
We have different priorities, so we'll just agree to disagree. I've been running Linux at home for years now - what I care about Windows-wise is whether it's stable enough to use at work. NT->W2K was a far bigger change as far as that. It saw the kernel/system mature into something stable. It was their first OS that really took this internet thing into account. It was the first OS to really work with Active Directory. Those are the changes that are important to me. XP may have gotten into the home, but it brought Blaster and Sasser with it. It's a double edged sword, and one that SP2 has only begun to blunt, years after XP was released.
Um, no, it was some [mostly obnoxious and slow] skinning of W2K. I'm not disagreeing with you that it's a tolerable OS for users, but XP was nothing groundbreaking.
They'll get the needed security when they produce a read only OS.
Real only doesn't equate to secure. A vulnerable knoppix system can be owned just as easily as a vulnerable hard drive installed system of any flavour. The long term damage is mitigated by ease of recovery, but rebooting will only take you back to where you were - in a vulnerable state. Doing forensics on an owned live CD is harder than a standard installation because there's not as much information that can be gleaned from the hard drive. And even after finding the vulnerability, most users don't have the knowhow to master their own patched version of the live disc. Lastly, the slow development of the live CDs means that you're more likely to have vulnerable software...
I was not able to get a position as a faculty member, become full professor
Most of the math majors I know going into teaching. They're often brilliant people and help create the next generations of engineers etc., but in general they're just part of a self-sustaining group of teachers. Which isn't a bad thing. Some go on to do things such as physics or computer science work, but generally they're so abstracted that their work has little practical value. I certainly wouldn't want the vast majority of those brilliant people running a company.
It is fashionable to berate university education.
There's nothing wrong with university education, but is not the end-all and be-all of whether someone can do a job well, particularly a management position that must bridge the technical with human resource management and customer relations. A math or CS degree does little to help with that. A business degree (these days) prolly doesn't help much either. What matters is having been in the trenches and done the job interacting with workers and client. You can read and study about certain things all you want, but until you actually do it, you'll never get good at it. One of the best technical managers I worked under had a BA in English literature and an MS in Early English Plays. Whether he'd studied math or English in college would have made little difference in his performance - what mattered was that he understood the problem domain, had the charisma to work with people, and kept people happy. Diffy-Q won't help you with that. Many of the best sysadmins I know have no school background in computers, although Physics is a common one.
If you've worked on both Optiplexes and Dimensions, you would know that there is a difference. If you were equiped to handle a position managing 300+ computers, you would know there were a difference. Optiplexes not supporting the latest version of Windows? Could you provide a specific model on that? I've got 5 year old Dells happily running Win 2K3 and various current versions of Linux.
Optiplexes are built better than Dimensions. They [theoretically] are standardized so you get essentially the same computer every time you order one. This is massively important for wide-scale distributions. They come with much better warranties. Those one year old chips that you scoff at are heavily tested and debugged by that point.
The solution is to program competently, regardless of language.
Similarly, rather than putting seat belts and airbags in cars we should all just drive competently? I'm an excellent driver, but there's been times I've made mistakes that could have been bad. Everyone has. The same thing can be said for programmers.
I believe that the point was that the same task could be accomplished by simply reading in a plaintext file much faster than it could by pulling it out of the database. Databases are great for producing related data, but basic configuration is better kept in text/XML/whatever files. (Note that I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a listing of the states in the database, just that you shouldn't use that to generate a select box.)
And you are right, passwords should not contain spaces.
It depends - having spaces allowed if your users are allowed to choose long sentences is generally a good thing. "I have a brown dog whose name is Alfred that is six years old." is an extremely effective password, provided your users don't mind typing that much. For some, the benefit of being easy to remember offsets the amount of typing.
if it's not done *FAST* by the developers, someone in the community will do it
The problem is that the moment it's disclosed, the blackhats also start 'doing it', except their task is often easier than that of the white hats. *FAST* releases may contain other safety flaws, bugs, break important things, or just not fix the bug. If keeping a bug [that there's no evidence of an exploit being in existance already] private for a week means that a fix is better tested and ready for release by all the major vendors at the time of disclosure, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
This is not the case if it is kept private.
That may be the case in commercial software, but I'm not sure if it would carry over to the open source world. I suspect that Linux has attracted a certain type of programmer whose involvement goes beyond the simple code==paycheck mindset. There are people being paid by various companies to work on the kernel, but they're generally the ones that demonstrated their commitment to working on Linux prior to getting hired specifically to do so.
The decentralized nature of the kernel means that it's not dependant on the whims of a single company or a few individuals within a single organization. $COMPANY has to worry about their stock price when a vulnerability is disclosed. There's much less impact on the core Linux programmers by such things.
I can't see Linus saying to himself, "No one knows about this problem, therefore I don't have to work on it yet." Can you?
It looks like a nice program, but even with squeezing costs down, the costs are still there. And unless their website is horribly out of date, they only claim to have shipped 710 computers to Africa. I'm sure they've made a difference to people's lives, but there's a world of difference between 710 computers and a program whose minimum order is over 1300 that number.
Send over 200-300 thousand old computers that people are throwing out
OK, so first you have to create local programs around the country to get the computers. You have to pay advertising costs to let the people know that the program exists. Chances are you have to pick the computers up because most peope won't bother to drop them off. You have to then store the units until it's worth moving them to a more central location. This has to be done year round, as people don't all upgrade at the same time, and most people would prolly just chuck it rather than hold onto it for 9 months until the yearly pickup. Space costs money. You have to arrange for some kind of centralized pickup/delivery system to regional centers. Which, incidentally, cost money to rent and operate. Then you have to somehow package them up (just chucking them into a shipping bin (ie what they go across the ocean on) almost guarantees that they'll arrive broken, which kind of makes the whole exercise moot). So to be practical, you have to box them up, except you can't use any kind of standardization, because the computers are in all kinds of different form factors. Then you have to get the large containers across the country to a port, on a ship, and across the ocean.
And you still haven't dealt with the issue that some software can't legally be transferred. Not to mention the fact that many people aren't savy enough to wipe their data, so you'd be handing over all kinds of personal data. (No, you can't just use a bulk demagnatizer, as pretty much any demag unit powerful enough to wipe a hard drive will physically destroy the drive.) It's not like the Nigerian-style scammers need any additional tools in fooling people.
So your costs have now added up to the point that you can pretty much make something new that you know works, you know has legal, properly installed software, etc., is designed for the target user, and is designed for the expected power supply. If your villiage only has DC power available, that 386 that takes 110/220AC doesn't do them a bit of good.
Why do we have to handhold them through setting up stuff we're giving to them for free?
Just like trying to derive water by eating snow, some things are a zero net gain (or even loss) even when it's free. Not everything that's free is worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is finding the most common 3 word phrases (in English) and applying the basic grammatical rules you learned in school.
Every [good] article I've seen advocating this type of password specifies that it has to be 50-60 characters long to be effective. Using a three word passphrase is similar to using a 3 character password.
Take this for example:
"My first guinea pig's name was Spud. She was brown and white."
It's made up of two simple sentences, but because of the length of it, there's a very, very large number of possibilities that could fit in that amount of space.
The idea of using long passphrases fails because most people wouldn't bother using a passphrase that long, and even if they did, many people couldn't reliably type something that long without making mistakes.
Deja.com, the first major web archive of usenet [news.google.com is built on their archive], has a similar "feature" where it would add advertising links to certain words in the archive. I don't know exactly when this was, but this article is mid-2000 and refers to another now defunct site, Remarq, doing it even earlier.
Interestingly enough, with both Deja and Remark, the users complained enough that the companies dropped the plans.
The law is there to uphold the beliefs of society. If enough people are breaking a law, who is that law representing exactly?
Laws are also there to protect the common good. I'm an excellent driver and could safely exceed many speed limits, but I'm still glad that they exist to help keep those who can't in line. If they weren't forced to, many people wouldn't bother to get auto insurance - the law serves to protect the general public.
History teaches us that the most effective way to get rid of unjust laws is to ignore them.
Could you cite some examples of this? Slavery wasn't done away but just ignoring it. Prohibition wasn't done away with just by ignoring it. [In answer to your expected answer to that statement, the flouting of the law created criminal enterprizes with lasting negative effects - forcing politicians to pass the law reinstuting legal alcohol is what got rid of them.]
Mass ignoring of laws often leads to them being left on the books, giving the powers that be the ability to selectively enforce them against enemies.
So, just for the record, how do you earn your living? What great benefit do you give to musicians that you deserve anything for free from them?
There is nothing said about the severity of the vulnerabilities.
There have been quite a few _significant_ problems with OpenSSL in the past year that I imagine contributed to the evaluation. That said, I'm still happily running Apache.
Music and movies are experienced differently and have a very different level of reusability.
True. But radio existed for a long time, and would prolly actually still be doing well if they hadn't been gobbled by megacorps that turned them into computer generated playlists with 10 songs. There's plenty of music that I enjoy listening to from time to time but would never buy, even for $1/track. The music rental music is also great for people like me because I can listen to a wide selection of stuff at work without having to carry CDs around all the time. It's also great for checking out music before buying it without being stuck listening to short clips at online stores or trying to hear over the general din at a music store. I think it's great to read a review of a group someplace and be able to check them out right away with no delay or financial risk that I'll get a CD I don't like.
As I said, whether there's enough people like me to make it worth to companies is still up in the air.
Sounds like crap to me. Kazaa offers a much better deal.
You're so very right. No legal operation will ever be able to compete on price with an illegal one. Your parents must be so proud that their child has become such an astute thinker.
Intellectual property" is trotted out...
Actually, nothing of the kind came out of my mouth. If you really care, dictionary.com has a fairly good definition of IP.
So your snide insinuation that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property" is circular at best.
I never insinuated that making an honest living is dependent upon IP. I have two uncles who make their living without developing IP. However, they are in an increasingly small group in this country. Almost anything that can be designed in the first world countries can be made for less in the second world countries. More and more people in the first world do nothing more than pushing electrons around without ever creating a physical product. Unless you relish the idea of the first world countries' economies crumbling, some kind of IP is necessary.
Most of the people who whine the most about how they should be free to copy whatever media they want for free have absolutely nothing to loose, because most of them have no connection to the creation of those products. However, most of them are dependent upon IP in one form or the other for their living.
Similarly, the Russian mafia won't do anything to me for punching people in the face, so I guess they're my buddies too? Your friends knowingly violate the law? Guess what, they run the risk of having their wrist slapped. You play the game, you take the chances/
What does the Russian mafia do with that money? Assination, protection rackets, prostitution (often with with horrible effect on the women), internet scams, spamming.. You, sir, are a fine tribute to humanity for choosing such esteemed company over a group that defends themselves when they're transgressed against.
how many people making "top quality" music in the past few years have been fairly treated by their record labels?
How much do you know about the music industry? How many of your friends have worked in it? There's far more to it than a black and white issue. Labels front large amounts of money to a variety of musicians to cover the cost of quality recordings (thousands of dollars) and then tens of thousands of dollars on promotions to let the people know those artists exist. Some make it, some don't. The ones that make it subsidize the failures. Not ideal for them, but on the other hand, it beats being $50,000+ in debt. Musicians have known how the industry works for years. It's no secret what they're getting into when they sign on the dotted line, yet they still make that choice. Perhaps they know more than you do?
People would have paid it
You have an awful lot of faith in humanity. With no DRM, why would the majority of people have paid for it when they could just get it from their buddy for free? In an ideal world, yeah, something like that could work, but the reality is that humanity is greedy and flawed.
Now the best we can hope for is something like that Lindows fellow set up. $.88 and no DRM just a good ol MP3.
Actually, emusic.com has been around much longer, has the same advantages, is cheaper [overall], and actually has artists that you might have heard of.
For now I will stick with Allofmp3.com The Russians got it right on that one.
Yeah, when you engage in criminal activity, it's amazing what great prices you can offer.
If someone in the US were allowed to do the same thing (even charging double allofmp3's rates) tons of music would be sold. TONS.
And virtually no [top quality] music would be made, because the money that aomp3.com (even doubling the fee) pays to the artists doesn't even begin to pay for the gas to get to the studio, let alone pesky details like eating and buying instruments.
1) It's semi-legal
It's dubiously legal at best inside Russia, and is not legal outside of it.
3) I'm still using the 10 dollars I paid about 6 months ago, and I download a lot of music.
That's great. In the mean time, you're supporting a group of "Russian mafiya" while the people who worked hard to create the "lot" of music that you enjoy get essentially nothing. I bet they'll keep making that music that you enjoy for free... Hey, the chop shop in the bad part of town will sell you parts at 1/10 of the cost of those suckers at $CAR_PARTS_SHOP. Let's all go support the criminals.
So, how do you make [or intend to make] your living? Does it depend on the concept of intellectual property at all?
Your monthly payment gets messed up, you loose access to the music for a couple days, you call them and fix it, and it comes back. It's really not a big deal.
In both cases you loose access to all the music you have paid Napster for.
You've not paid for for the music. You've paid for the right to listen to the music _that_ month. Do you complain that Netflix is horrible because you don't get to keep the DVDs?
when they go out of business, all your songs go poof
The point is that they're not _your_ songs, but that for $15/month you get the ability to legally listen to whatever tracks (that they have the rights to) for that month. Think of it as a membership at Netflix - you pay a certain amount per month and get [theoretically] as much as you want to watch, but you don't get to keep it. Whether the market will decide that this is something the public is interested in for music remains to be seen.
There is the option to buy tracks and keep the forever just like iTunes. But just like iTunes it's about $1/track in the US. The whole point of the Napster to go is that you can get thousands of tracks and switch them around as you like, which is great for people like me who listen to hundreds or thousands of songs over the course of the month. My online music habbit would cost me around $80/week from iTunes. It's not great if you just want to listen to a handful of them - it's clearly cheaper over the long run to buy the CD or download the perminant copy from your choice of vendors.
Wow, I make a disagreement on which step was the biggest improvement and I'm flamebait (not aimed at you, just the clueless mods)...
... That, in my opinion, is what made XP so big at the time.
1) Firewall
Not a great firewall or a huge improvement. The fact that it's built in is a very good thing for users, particularly hobbiests and home users, but it's not a major advance in OS design.
2) Enhanced driver support
3) Enhanced Stability
I've never written a device driver for Windows, so perhaps it was a big change between W2K and XP from the developer standpoint, but on the ~50 Windows boxes I admin (about a 3/2 ration of XP to W2K), I don't tell much of a difference between the two as far as driver availability and stability. My W2K desktop stays up for months, generally until the next patch that requires a reboot.
4) Improved boot times
As someone else pointed out, displaying the desktop before it's usable isn't a great leap forward. And again, it's a nice thing, not a groundbreaking change. I'll grant you that *some* machines take forever to boot W2K for whatever reason, but the majority of them I've only seen about a 5 second difference, and that could be explained away by faster processors.
6) Better/easier networking
Other than the wireless setup, I'm not sure what you're refering to here. I set up interfaces pretty much the same between the two.
The first real OS that could be used for either home or office.
We have different priorities, so we'll just agree to disagree. I've been running Linux at home for years now - what I care about Windows-wise is whether it's stable enough to use at work. NT->W2K was a far bigger change as far as that. It saw the kernel/system mature into something stable. It was their first OS that really took this internet thing into account. It was the first OS to really work with Active Directory. Those are the changes that are important to me. XP may have gotten into the home, but it brought Blaster and Sasser with it. It's a double edged sword, and one that SP2 has only begun to blunt, years after XP was released.
Windows XP was even bigger than that.
Um, no, it was some [mostly obnoxious and slow] skinning of W2K. I'm not disagreeing with you that it's a tolerable OS for users, but XP was nothing groundbreaking.
They'll get the needed security when they produce a read only OS.
Real only doesn't equate to secure. A vulnerable knoppix system can be owned just as easily as a vulnerable hard drive installed system of any flavour. The long term damage is mitigated by ease of recovery, but rebooting will only take you back to where you were - in a vulnerable state. Doing forensics on an owned live CD is harder than a standard installation because there's not as much information that can be gleaned from the hard drive. And even after finding the vulnerability, most users don't have the knowhow to master their own patched version of the live disc. Lastly, the slow development of the live CDs means that you're more likely to have vulnerable software...
I was not able to get a position as a faculty member, become full professor
Most of the math majors I know going into teaching. They're often brilliant people and help create the next generations of engineers etc., but in general they're just part of a self-sustaining group of teachers. Which isn't a bad thing. Some go on to do things such as physics or computer science work, but generally they're so abstracted that their work has little practical value. I certainly wouldn't want the vast majority of those brilliant people running a company.
It is fashionable to berate university education.
There's nothing wrong with university education, but is not the end-all and be-all of whether someone can do a job well, particularly a management position that must bridge the technical with human resource management and customer relations. A math or CS degree does little to help with that. A business degree (these days) prolly doesn't help much either. What matters is having been in the trenches and done the job interacting with workers and client. You can read and study about certain things all you want, but until you actually do it, you'll never get good at it. One of the best technical managers I worked under had a BA in English literature and an MS in Early English Plays. Whether he'd studied math or English in college would have made little difference in his performance - what mattered was that he understood the problem domain, had the charisma to work with people, and kept people happy. Diffy-Q won't help you with that. Many of the best sysadmins I know have no school background in computers, although Physics is a common one.
If you've worked on both Optiplexes and Dimensions, you would know that there is a difference. If you were equiped to handle a position managing 300+ computers, you would know there were a difference. Optiplexes not supporting the latest version of Windows? Could you provide a specific model on that? I've got 5 year old Dells happily running Win 2K3 and various current versions of Linux.
Optiplexes are built better than Dimensions. They [theoretically] are standardized so you get essentially the same computer every time you order one. This is massively important for wide-scale distributions. They come with much better warranties. Those one year old chips that you scoff at are heavily tested and debugged by that point.
The solution is to program competently, regardless of language.
Similarly, rather than putting seat belts and airbags in cars we should all just drive competently? I'm an excellent driver, but there's been times I've made mistakes that could have been bad. Everyone has. The same thing can be said for programmers.
I believe that the point was that the same task could be accomplished by simply reading in a plaintext file much faster than it could by pulling it out of the database. Databases are great for producing related data, but basic configuration is better kept in text/XML/whatever files. (Note that I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a listing of the states in the database, just that you shouldn't use that to generate a select box.)
And you are right, passwords should not contain spaces.
It depends - having spaces allowed if your users are allowed to choose long sentences is generally a good thing. "I have a brown dog whose name is Alfred that is six years old." is an extremely effective password, provided your users don't mind typing that much. For some, the benefit of being easy to remember offsets the amount of typing.
if it's not done *FAST* by the developers, someone in the community will do it
The problem is that the moment it's disclosed, the blackhats also start 'doing it', except their task is often easier than that of the white hats. *FAST* releases may contain other safety flaws, bugs, break important things, or just not fix the bug. If keeping a bug [that there's no evidence of an exploit being in existance already] private for a week means that a fix is better tested and ready for release by all the major vendors at the time of disclosure, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
This is not the case if it is kept private.
That may be the case in commercial software, but I'm not sure if it would carry over to the open source world. I suspect that Linux has attracted a certain type of programmer whose involvement goes beyond the simple code==paycheck mindset. There are people being paid by various companies to work on the kernel, but they're generally the ones that demonstrated their commitment to working on Linux prior to getting hired specifically to do so.
The decentralized nature of the kernel means that it's not dependant on the whims of a single company or a few individuals within a single organization. $COMPANY has to worry about their stock price when a vulnerability is disclosed. There's much less impact on the core Linux programmers by such things.
I can't see Linus saying to himself, "No one knows about this problem, therefore I don't have to work on it yet." Can you?
It looks like a nice program, but even with squeezing costs down, the costs are still there. And unless their website is horribly out of date, they only claim to have shipped 710 computers to Africa. I'm sure they've made a difference to people's lives, but there's a world of difference between 710 computers and a program whose minimum order is over 1300 that number.
Send over 200-300 thousand old computers that people are throwing out
OK, so first you have to create local programs around the country to get the computers. You have to pay advertising costs to let the people know that the program exists. Chances are you have to pick the computers up because most peope won't bother to drop them off. You have to then store the units until it's worth moving them to a more central location. This has to be done year round, as people don't all upgrade at the same time, and most people would prolly just chuck it rather than hold onto it for 9 months until the yearly pickup. Space costs money. You have to arrange for some kind of centralized pickup/delivery system to regional centers. Which, incidentally, cost money to rent and operate. Then you have to somehow package them up (just chucking them into a shipping bin (ie what they go across the ocean on) almost guarantees that they'll arrive broken, which kind of makes the whole exercise moot). So to be practical, you have to box them up, except you can't use any kind of standardization, because the computers are in all kinds of different form factors. Then you have to get the large containers across the country to a port, on a ship, and across the ocean.
And you still haven't dealt with the issue that some software can't legally be transferred. Not to mention the fact that many people aren't savy enough to wipe their data, so you'd be handing over all kinds of personal data. (No, you can't just use a bulk demagnatizer, as pretty much any demag unit powerful enough to wipe a hard drive will physically destroy the drive.) It's not like the Nigerian-style scammers need any additional tools in fooling people.
So your costs have now added up to the point that you can pretty much make something new that you know works, you know has legal, properly installed software, etc., is designed for the target user, and is designed for the expected power supply. If your villiage only has DC power available, that 386 that takes 110/220AC doesn't do them a bit of good.
Why do we have to handhold them through setting up stuff we're giving to them for free?
Just like trying to derive water by eating snow, some things are a zero net gain (or even loss) even when it's free. Not everything that's free is worth it.