Hm, software vendors put enormous effort into preventing attacks over the Internet. Did anyone really think that virus writers were not going to find new attack vectors?
How is this a "new" attack vector?
Microsoft has had auto-run on things like CDs and USB drives for years, and you usually need to turn it off. Otherwise, it would happily run any old shit you plug in without even asking.
When I plug my iPad into my Vista box, the auto-run dialog comes up and asks me if I want to either download pictures or open it like a file storage. There is no "do nothing" option, which I find kind of amusing, since I've usually turned off auto-run for everything.
I'm not even remotely surprised that USB is a popular attack vector -- they're the new floppies. Microsoft has defaulted to "easy" mode (run everything), which also happens to be the most trusting and dangerous mode you could get. I think this was kind of inevitable.
Well, I disagree that what you say is "truth", and hold it be your best-guess based on your world view -- I agree with neither the inevitability of it, nor what you propose as a solution to it or the underlying cause of it.
So, in several years if you're right, you get to be smug about it.
In the mean time, I'll stick with my happiness and optimism.
because of their sample selection. If religiosity is hard-wired in the brain http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/ [cnn.com] then these researchers have selected a sample that will make their results applicable to... nuns and other religiodelusionals.
Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains, I seriously doubt that what you suggest will actually affect what they're studying.
They have access to 850+ brains of aging people, all of which will go through annual testing to check for degradation in skills and the like, and be able to compare that to long-term medical histories. Getting that big of a sample of anybody is a huge big deal -- the fact that some of these people have been in this survey since the early 90's gives them a truckload of data, and speaks volumes about how helpful and committed they've been.
I'm the first to disagree with mindless adherence to religion, but these ladies are willingly participating in science, so we're not talking drooling zealots who think the Earth is 6000 years old. Hell, one of the smartest (and nicest) people I ever met was an old Jesuit Priest who was a university lecturer in physics and astronomy at the university I went to. He was nice enough to let me access his UNIX machine since the CS department didn't have one and I wanted to learn it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- the religious people who can accept the science can be pretty nice people, and they're generally not talking about things that science can intelligently speak to (or even want to). They're certainly not all groping the choice boys or smacking people with rulers. Like with the rest of society, that's a small subset of the overall population.
You're still breathing, so it's not too late to open your mind.:-P
So...I need a place to keep all this money safe. Yep. Nice and safe. A safe place to keep it hidden. Someplace...safe...
You know, it's not that far-fetched. I've certainly known people who keep a stash of cash scurried away in an obscure corner of their house in case of emergency.
I've certainly heard stories about people keeping money mattresses -- although, it didn't work out so well for this lady who threw out her mother's life savings.:-P
It didn't have a happy ending or great production values, but.. you haven't seen it and I have so I can act as savvy and cultured as I like and look down my nose, and isn't that what seeing movies is all about?
If your movie tastes run in that direction, I recommend Hunger by Steve McQueen (no, not that one).
Definitely not light and fluffy, but a movie I couldn't look away from (even though at times I really wanted to). YMMV of course, but it's a movie with the among most minimal sound-track and dialog I've ever seen.
Anyway, random suggestion. Take it for what you will.:-P
It is not like before "digital devices" people would sit around doing nothing for "downtime"
I'm not so sure. I know someone who isn't so big on technology and doesn't need it in his life (sometimes I admire him the simplicity that affords him).
Apparently, he's perfectly content to just sit quietly on his sofa for periods of time. No music, no TV, not even sure he's having any "inner dialog" -- I think he literally is content to just sit.
I've been known to sit on a rock for an hour or two, but that was usually taking in the sights around me and just actively sitting there with no more action than need be.
I think back in the day when people had far fewer distractions, more than a few of them probably occupied some time doing what we would essentially call 'nothing' since it didn't involve an activity or another person.
Hell when we sleep we dont even have brain downtime.
Well, I don't think they don't mean "zero activity", they mean that it's restful and will help 'recharge' somewhat.
Your proposed solution to our current economic problems is to become a communist nation? (not to be confused with a Communist nation)
No, he's not calling for anything even resembling communism.
He's talking about scorched earth, start from scratch capitalism with all of the attendant upheaval which will come along with economic collapse and restructuring, as well as mostly removing government. You know, the kind of world where you can only enforce you property rights with a gun, and whoever has the biggest gun wins.
I don't want to live in his world. It has some pretty scary consequences, and I'm not sure it would be nearly as fun and happy as he hopes.
Now every tech company has to get an ipad competitor on the market. Kudos to Apple for leading innovation like no one else. How many years have we seen people talk about thjs particular form-factor? Appple makes one and boom. Now everyone is doing it.
And, I will be curious to see how successful they are, or if they're just bringing an existing desktop paradigm to a touch screen.
I also find it interesting that everybody keeps pointing out that the iPad isn't anything new -- they're largely right, but the iPad is the first to be successful on any meaningful scale, as opposed to being a very niche product that nobody knows about. All of a sudden, every body wants a touch screen they can carry around with them.
At this point, I doubt there are many people living in "western" societies who don't know what an iPad is, it's been talked about so much. I think it's about time we actually started to see this form factor -- it's long overdue. The keyboard and mouse model is old and doesn't need to be used for everything.
It's pretty ridiculous that thousands of people can walk into a library and make photocopies of books all day long and it's up to the copyright holder to scour the libraries for all of the violations.
The book publishers have fought photocopiers for that exact reason.
Do you see a trend here? Yes, protecting your copyrights is hard. But don't expect others to spend their time and money to do it for you.
Sadly, they feel like they're "losing so many bazillions of dollars every second" that they now need to get everybody else to be responsible for it. If they could prevent the loss of those bazillions of dollars, they'd be so much more profitable, see?
Of course, they stupidly believe that getting all of the other industries to spend more actual dollars than their hypothetical losses would actually work.
They want their cake, and they want our cake. And, they want everybody else to be keeping track of all cake to be sure that they don't miss out on any.
If there is actual RIAA literature out there saying the downloading of music is the same as theft of a CD, wouldn't that establish a monetary value of the content and hence limit the financial liability of the downloader/filesharer?
No, because they already bought the law that places the statutory damages at something like $250K for each infringed work.
If they accepted a 1:1 value for downloaded music, those lucrative court settlements wouldn't be nearly as fun or profitable.
Wow, that just sounds like something out of a bad gangster movie... "we'd like to reach an informal arrangement wit youze, but if we can't, we'd be willing to force one on you".
What will be enough for these people? Everybody just simply tithes to them?
They want the entire world to be beholden to, and policing, their copyright. At some point, they're actually doing society more harm than good. These people aren't even the ones "creating" anything -- they're just the ones using funny math to prove they're losing money hand over fist so they can avoid paying the actual creators. A bunch of middlemen skimming off the top don't contribute anything.
Sadly, I'm mostly preaching to the converted, and I fear bitching about it won't help.
Quite a ripoff. I want to SEE the tits, not read about them. (Yeah, yeah, I should go to the magazine rack. Not the point, people.)
Oh, how quaint. Old fashioned glossy magazine porn. Do people still use analog porn? I figured the internet would have put most of those out of business.
Nope, Vista 64-bit with 8GB of RAM, a quad-core CPU, and 2 TB of disk space (soon to be a couple of TB more). All hoked up to a 23" monitor running at 1920x1080.
Makes for a pretty sweet machine. I can easily run two VM images and do everything else I need without worrying about memory or CPU load -- granted, I'm not a gamer, and I'm not doing heavy multi-media stuff, but it suits my needs rather well.
Buying a machine with ridiculous amounts of RAM will do more to future proof it than almost any other component.
As someone that writes mobile apps, the process is frustrating. We are seeing a mass dumbing down of the already dumb consumer. Everyone now expects all software to cost $0.99 - be feature packed, and work flawlessly. As anyone that develops software knows, "pick two of those."
While I agree that consumers are expecting more for less -- what they're really looking for is an app that is stripped down to do the core functionality without the "kitchen sink" scope creep that has beset most software. It's amazing what people are cramming into a 1-2MB application as compared to a desktop application.
I actually prefer working with some of the minimalist apps that I've gotten on my iPad. And, unfortunately for you, there's tons of free apps that have been able to meet my needs so far -- the two I've chosen are "free" and "enough functionality for my needs without being bloated". In some cases, one app can be used to feed into another app, making both more useful (I can use dropbox to push a PDF into iBooks for instance).
If anything, I see this as a throwback to the good old days of nice freeware/shareware utilities that did exactly one thing, and did it exceedingly well. Though, I still see the odd app in the iTunes app store that goes for $189.99 or something like that. A $0.99 app might have the opportunity to sell a far larger number of copies and offset the lower purchase price.
Okay, but was Windows 95 really such an important milestone?
Did you ever use Windows 3.11? Because that whole "time-slice" multi-tasking made for a dog-slow machine. An idle app still got it's "fair share" of the CPU time for no good reason. It also couldn't manage memory to save its life and needed add-on software to access more physical memory. Oh, and I think '95 was the first time Windows came with a viable networking stack and could do TCP/IP out of the box.
As much as I wasn't a fan on Windows '95, and had been using Linux for several years before that, it did bring better multi-tasking and the like.
Windows '95 was the beginnings of Microsoft actually having an operating system that did what 'real' operating systems of the day did, everything else was just basically cheap hacks on top of DOS -- and, in some ways, Windows '95 still had some cheap hacks, but it was a step in the right direction.
Next year it will be 16 years old. Are we going to have another Slashdot story about it then?
Heck, they might have another one tomorrow, just for the fun of it. You know how dupes go around here.:-P
Re:I remember putting it on a 486
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember getting caught up in the hype and putting it on a 486 DX2 66 with 4 MB. Damn but that was slower than molasses running uphill in January. Suffered with that computer for nearly 2 years before I saved up enough for a replacement (poor college student at the time).
God, 4MB of RAM for Windows '95??? That must have been brutal.
In '92 or '93 my girlfriend bought a similar machine with 4MB of RAM, and that was only Windows 3.11. On the second day she had it we watched Word thrash the machine within an inch of its life with a single document open. On day 3 she had me install Linux, which could actually work better with 4MB of RAM.
Machines of that era are what taught me to put as much physical memory into a machine as you can afford -- Windows or Linux, the machine will last longer and not become bogged down in it's VM. Heck, my Vista machine with 8GB of RAM has been a joy since it's had all the resources it ever needed. I credit throwing that much memory at it with actually having found Vista to be a pretty good OS.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this a "new" attack vector?
Microsoft has had auto-run on things like CDs and USB drives for years, and you usually need to turn it off. Otherwise, it would happily run any old shit you plug in without even asking.
When I plug my iPad into my Vista box, the auto-run dialog comes up and asks me if I want to either download pictures or open it like a file storage. There is no "do nothing" option, which I find kind of amusing, since I've usually turned off auto-run for everything.
I'm not even remotely surprised that USB is a popular attack vector -- they're the new floppies. Microsoft has defaulted to "easy" mode (run everything), which also happens to be the most trusting and dangerous mode you could get. I think this was kind of inevitable.
*laugh* Well, have fun with that. I'm sure you and your money will be very happy together.
Well, I disagree that what you say is "truth", and hold it be your best-guess based on your world view -- I agree with neither the inevitability of it, nor what you propose as a solution to it or the underlying cause of it.
So, in several years if you're right, you get to be smug about it.
In the mean time, I'll stick with my happiness and optimism.
Doh. That, of course, should be "choir boys". :-P
Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains, I seriously doubt that what you suggest will actually affect what they're studying.
They have access to 850+ brains of aging people, all of which will go through annual testing to check for degradation in skills and the like, and be able to compare that to long-term medical histories. Getting that big of a sample of anybody is a huge big deal -- the fact that some of these people have been in this survey since the early 90's gives them a truckload of data, and speaks volumes about how helpful and committed they've been.
I'm the first to disagree with mindless adherence to religion, but these ladies are willingly participating in science, so we're not talking drooling zealots who think the Earth is 6000 years old. Hell, one of the smartest (and nicest) people I ever met was an old Jesuit Priest who was a university lecturer in physics and astronomy at the university I went to. He was nice enough to let me access his UNIX machine since the CS department didn't have one and I wanted to learn it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- the religious people who can accept the science can be pretty nice people, and they're generally not talking about things that science can intelligently speak to (or even want to). They're certainly not all groping the choice boys or smacking people with rulers. Like with the rest of society, that's a small subset of the overall population.
You're still breathing, so it's not too late to open your mind. :-P
Wow, reading TFA gets me this ...
People have a fetish for quicksand?? WTF?
Man, I guess rule 34 once again rears its head.
Oh, I don't know. I seem to recall an episode where Tony was stashing bricks of cash in planters and various places around his house.
That's not very far removed from a shoe box. :-P
You know, it's not that far-fetched. I've certainly known people who keep a stash of cash scurried away in an obscure corner of their house in case of emergency.
I've certainly heard stories about people keeping money mattresses -- although, it didn't work out so well for this lady who threw out her mother's life savings. :-P
iMbezzle?
If your movie tastes run in that direction, I recommend Hunger by Steve McQueen (no, not that one).
Definitely not light and fluffy, but a movie I couldn't look away from (even though at times I really wanted to). YMMV of course, but it's a movie with the among most minimal sound-track and dialog I've ever seen.
Anyway, random suggestion. Take it for what you will. :-P
I'm not so sure. I know someone who isn't so big on technology and doesn't need it in his life (sometimes I admire him the simplicity that affords him).
Apparently, he's perfectly content to just sit quietly on his sofa for periods of time. No music, no TV, not even sure he's having any "inner dialog" -- I think he literally is content to just sit.
I've been known to sit on a rock for an hour or two, but that was usually taking in the sights around me and just actively sitting there with no more action than need be.
I think back in the day when people had far fewer distractions, more than a few of them probably occupied some time doing what we would essentially call 'nothing' since it didn't involve an activity or another person.
Well, I don't think they don't mean "zero activity", they mean that it's restful and will help 'recharge' somewhat.
I don't think this is the first instance of this technology. I remember hearing about it last year. It was CBS and Pepsi.
It was discussed last August.
This is now a year after the first people did this. I suspect Slashdot covered it then too.
You, sir, have a damned bleak worldview.
No, he's not calling for anything even resembling communism.
He's talking about scorched earth, start from scratch capitalism with all of the attendant upheaval which will come along with economic collapse and restructuring, as well as mostly removing government. You know, the kind of world where you can only enforce you property rights with a gun, and whoever has the biggest gun wins.
I don't want to live in his world. It has some pretty scary consequences, and I'm not sure it would be nearly as fun and happy as he hopes.
Yes, the keyboard and mouse do work, and are well defined.
However, as someone who has been using keyboards for around 20 years, and mice for about 17, sometimes my poor wrists like a little break.
We have used those as an input technique for decades, it was time for something new to come along.
And, I will be curious to see how successful they are, or if they're just bringing an existing desktop paradigm to a touch screen.
I also find it interesting that everybody keeps pointing out that the iPad isn't anything new -- they're largely right, but the iPad is the first to be successful on any meaningful scale, as opposed to being a very niche product that nobody knows about. All of a sudden, every body wants a touch screen they can carry around with them.
At this point, I doubt there are many people living in "western" societies who don't know what an iPad is, it's been talked about so much. I think it's about time we actually started to see this form factor -- it's long overdue. The keyboard and mouse model is old and doesn't need to be used for everything.
The book publishers have fought photocopiers for that exact reason.
Sadly, they feel like they're "losing so many bazillions of dollars every second" that they now need to get everybody else to be responsible for it. If they could prevent the loss of those bazillions of dollars, they'd be so much more profitable, see?
Of course, they stupidly believe that getting all of the other industries to spend more actual dollars than their hypothetical losses would actually work.
They want their cake, and they want our cake. And, they want everybody else to be keeping track of all cake to be sure that they don't miss out on any.
No, because they already bought the law that places the statutory damages at something like $250K for each infringed work.
If they accepted a 1:1 value for downloaded music, those lucrative court settlements wouldn't be nearly as fun or profitable.
Wow, that just sounds like something out of a bad gangster movie ... "we'd like to reach an informal arrangement wit youze, but if we can't, we'd be willing to force one on you".
What will be enough for these people? Everybody just simply tithes to them?
They want the entire world to be beholden to, and policing, their copyright. At some point, they're actually doing society more harm than good. These people aren't even the ones "creating" anything -- they're just the ones using funny math to prove they're losing money hand over fist so they can avoid paying the actual creators. A bunch of middlemen skimming off the top don't contribute anything.
Sadly, I'm mostly preaching to the converted, and I fear bitching about it won't help.
Man, I haven't seen cyan and magenta on screen in years. That's hilarious. :-P
Oh, how quaint. Old fashioned glossy magazine porn. Do people still use analog porn? I figured the internet would have put most of those out of business.
Nope, Vista 64-bit with 8GB of RAM, a quad-core CPU, and 2 TB of disk space (soon to be a couple of TB more). All hoked up to a 23" monitor running at 1920x1080.
Makes for a pretty sweet machine. I can easily run two VM images and do everything else I need without worrying about memory or CPU load -- granted, I'm not a gamer, and I'm not doing heavy multi-media stuff, but it suits my needs rather well.
Buying a machine with ridiculous amounts of RAM will do more to future proof it than almost any other component.
While I agree that consumers are expecting more for less -- what they're really looking for is an app that is stripped down to do the core functionality without the "kitchen sink" scope creep that has beset most software. It's amazing what people are cramming into a 1-2MB application as compared to a desktop application.
I actually prefer working with some of the minimalist apps that I've gotten on my iPad. And, unfortunately for you, there's tons of free apps that have been able to meet my needs so far -- the two I've chosen are "free" and "enough functionality for my needs without being bloated". In some cases, one app can be used to feed into another app, making both more useful (I can use dropbox to push a PDF into iBooks for instance).
If anything, I see this as a throwback to the good old days of nice freeware/shareware utilities that did exactly one thing, and did it exceedingly well. Though, I still see the odd app in the iTunes app store that goes for $189.99 or something like that. A $0.99 app might have the opportunity to sell a far larger number of copies and offset the lower purchase price.
Did you ever use Windows 3.11? Because that whole "time-slice" multi-tasking made for a dog-slow machine. An idle app still got it's "fair share" of the CPU time for no good reason. It also couldn't manage memory to save its life and needed add-on software to access more physical memory. Oh, and I think '95 was the first time Windows came with a viable networking stack and could do TCP/IP out of the box.
As much as I wasn't a fan on Windows '95, and had been using Linux for several years before that, it did bring better multi-tasking and the like.
Windows '95 was the beginnings of Microsoft actually having an operating system that did what 'real' operating systems of the day did, everything else was just basically cheap hacks on top of DOS -- and, in some ways, Windows '95 still had some cheap hacks, but it was a step in the right direction.
Heck, they might have another one tomorrow, just for the fun of it. You know how dupes go around here. :-P
God, 4MB of RAM for Windows '95??? That must have been brutal.
In '92 or '93 my girlfriend bought a similar machine with 4MB of RAM, and that was only Windows 3.11. On the second day she had it we watched Word thrash the machine within an inch of its life with a single document open. On day 3 she had me install Linux, which could actually work better with 4MB of RAM.
Machines of that era are what taught me to put as much physical memory into a machine as you can afford -- Windows or Linux, the machine will last longer and not become bogged down in it's VM. Heck, my Vista machine with 8GB of RAM has been a joy since it's had all the resources it ever needed. I credit throwing that much memory at it with actually having found Vista to be a pretty good OS.