It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
Honestly, the Steaming Heap of IInnovative Technology that was Windows 3 is what led me to Linux and UNIX and much of the rest of my career.
Right when nearing the end of Uni a free UNIX came along in the form of Linux... because I had witnessed first hand what a steaming pile of crap was Windows 3, and then eventually Windows 3.11 (which sucked somewhat less, but not enough), I knew I wanted UNIX experience. It led to my first jobs.
I will be marked troll by people who weren't there, but Windows 3 was such a steaming pile of shit compared to what Linux (and at some point FreeBSD) could do on the exact same hardware, it's almost impossible to describe.
In 1993 no fewer than 3 other science nerds, to whom I said "hey, if you like Windows, far be it for me to judge... but if you're asking for my Slackware disks and some install help, no problem -- I'll wipe out your new computer". They all switched to Linux because it was far more usable than Windows was on the same hardware. Even if Linux did occasionally crash, it was more robust than Windows. Because they could actually do several things at once.
On the same hardware, Linux destroyed Windows 3/3.11.
Windows 3 is significant in that it forced me to realize Windows wasn't anywhere NEAR being able to do what I'd learned in operating systems class... I wrote an instance of pre-emptive multi-tasking before Microsoft made a commercial instance of it.
That doesn't mean that I could write a better OS than Microsoft, but it means when Linux was doing pre-emptive multitasking with proper virtual memory... Microsoft was doing time-slicing... it was a hell of a better operating system than Microsoft had written.
It just didn't have Word. It did, however, have LaTex... yet another bit of awesome for a university student.
So, Kudos to Windows 3 for being such an out-dated pile of crap technology by the time it was released that it wasn't even fully utilizing a 386's inbuilt hardware features for multitasking, and wouldn't until Windows '95... which made possible (and preferable) for the widespread popularity of Linux.
If it hadn't sucked, we might not even know who Linus even is.
I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.
I dare you to tell us the cost of fitting tanks and skimmers into every sewer in California. Or every other body of water it flows into.. like apparently 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day. Filtering the inputs to San Francisco Bay would be ridiculously expensive. Outlawing this plastic crap makes far more sense.
What you describe is theoretically possible, but utterly absurd in reality.
It's not a nothing issue. It's huge amount of crap dumped into waterways which acts like silt, doesn't break down, and otherwise serves to give people whiter teeth (or whatever the hell it's used for).
Related question: What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life? I don't especially want to give up a swiping keyboard, a decent camera, or podcast playback, but I do miss being able to go 5 or more days on a single charge.
So, you want a dumb phone, but you want it to have smart phone features, and a huge battery charge, and lots of doo-dads and stuff... just like a smart phone?
I envision that one day there will be a series of tubes that give us access to this type of information from nearly anywhere and not a severely limited number of physical locations.
Yeah, but then they'll charge access for it, and the copyright cartel will insist we're not allowed to see anything without paying them a trillion dollars.
Hey, wait a minute... that's exactly what we have now.
The footage would then be automatically uploaded to storage, either locally or in the cloud, over-redacted for privacy and posted online for everyone to see within a day.
For court purposes, there can't be any redaction.
Because as soon as you start snipping out bits, you lose context and some of what actually happened.
The full video must be available for scrutiny... or you'll get the 5 seconds which supports the police version of events, or which has been edited to alter the sequence of events.
Part of the reason people are starting to insist on body cameras is we don't trust the police. Because increasingly the police are not trustworthy, and don't know or care what the law says.
Which means all of this raw video should be held in escrow where the police have no ability to alter or delete it.
If the police hold it, and have the power to edit it... suddenly it becomes a less trustworthy record.
So when the police start claiming they need to redact it, they better have the ability to provide the un-redacted version for court proceedings.
And, of course, let's not stop there... let's move to the managers, executives, and sales/marketing assholes who force this shit out the door.
The poor bastard of a programmer who has been told by the VP or the CEO (or the sales wanker) that the product must ship now, or that security doesn't matter is not always the cause of this. Sometimes they're the ones saying "umm, guys, this could be a problem".
So, if we're assigning blame, let's go with the people who are actually to blame and who make the decisions.
In the military, "just following orders" may not be a defense. But in private industry it's often the management who create these problems.
Which is precisely why I say that corporations should be held to a legal standard for the protection of personal information, and should carry penalties for failure to do so.
As long as corporations just say "oh, bummer dude" and have no penalties, they'll continue to cut as many corners as possible. Because there simply is no consequence for them.
I'm as concerned about the management people who don't give a damn. Because they're the ones who make policy and decide that not sucking at security is too costly.
So, want a secure internet? Kick an MBA or a CEO in the nuts, and tell them you'll keep doing it until they insist on secure code.
Well, if they choose to make it opt-in, then awesome, no harm no foul, and only people who turn it on will have it.
But when it is made opt-out, it says "fuck you, we'll track you unless you know enough to stop us".
And it's that kind of behavior which really pisses us off. It shouldn't be up to the average user to have to know where to disable this crap.
Just like they backed down on 3rd party cookies to keep the ad companies happy -- it's a sign that increasingly they're driven by money, instead of writing a good browser which doesn't have all of this shit in it.
If they make this crap opt in, nobody will bitch at them. But they haven't. And we're pissed off.
It doesn't stop any tracking. It's a voluntary program which doesn't mean what you think it means:
Even if you have Do Not Track turned on, that information will be collected and stored and used to create a profile of you that may or may not be accurate. That profile can be used by credit agencies, big corporations, and health insurance companies to make decisions about you that can literally affect your life and livelihood.
And it's not just the tracking industry that is ignoring the intent of Do Not Track.
If Firefox is relying on a useless fucking setting like Do Not Track to disable this advertising, then they're assholes.
Do Not Track is a complete lie in order to give the illusion corporations give a crap about your privacy or your wishes.
Want to stop being tracked? Run every ad blocker and privacy extension you can find. Because relying on some marketing asshole to not track you anyway is just stupid.
It's the piles and piles of third party shit on the internet embedded in every page which you need to be blocking.
"With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users' privacy and giving them control over their data."
How about no? How about some of us don't want advertising? How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
What part of "not interested in your damned ads" is hard to understand?
Then I suggest finding a real Italian restaurant with a real wood-fired oven, making thin crust pizza at high heat, and with good quality toppings.
Things like Dominos and Pizza Hut? Well, they're pretty much the most nasty form of disgusting greasy pizza known to man.
If you're using those as your benchmark for pizza, you're doing it wrong. Just like if you're using McDonald's as a benchmark for what a good burger should be.
Well, if you only have a nice academic abstraction in a book which is the language... sure, that's awesome and all.
And then in the real world the platform, and its many variations, becomes an issue.
It's been years since I wrote in Java, but we'd get the regular updates of the platform, which may or may not have broken something. You'd get every vendor having their own JVM, or their extensions.
So you'd write a webapp for one platform and test it, and then someone would cram it into yet another proprietary variant which wasn't compatible. Which usually left the customer screeching that when you listed the platforms you supported, that it didn't work on the one they had which you'd never tested against.
And don't even get me stared on the shitware which Java wants to install now. Sorry, Oracle, but we don't give a fuck about your stupid Ashole.com toolbar.
So, yes, maybe in some perfect little bubble which doesn't depend on the platform Java is an awesome language. But in the real world, it seems like many things were a moving target, and that the platform gave you more sources of grief than the language.
I've lost count of the number of applications I've seen which the vendor basically says "we are compatible with this version of Java, and nothing else".
In that regards, as much as I like the actual language... the platform can be a pain in the ass.
I don't know what it's like now (as I said, haven't directly used it in years). But there was a time when there was so much fragmentation as to make the "write once/run anywhere" a really bad joke.
Yes, and how many of those devices are supposed to support the factory reset which wipes all the storage?
What's that? All of them?
Full disk encryption is one of 5 problems they found, but not the main one.
the researchers found that all retained at least partial amounts of data from contacts information, images and video, SMS, email, and data from third-party apps like Facebook.
They were able to recover Google authentication tokens in all devices with flawed factory reset, and were able to access master tokens in 80 percent of cases.
To test their findings, they used one of the recovered master tokens from a reset to restore the credential file.
Disk encryption, in theory, should make the factory reset more robust. But the sense I get is that the factory reset is complete garbage independent of encryption on some of these devices.
Which mostly reaffirms that I have no interest in anything but the stock Google Android. Because by the time another entity has gotten their hands on it and tweaked it to advance their own commercial interests , you really have no idea of what holes they've introduced, and you have no idea how long before they'll drop support for it.
Carrier certification is shorthand for "all of our crapware needs to be checked if we get around it". The shit carriers put on phones is for their benefit, not ours. Because it's intended to drive traffic to their garbage.
Or, you know, she can't talk about future technology decisions because it would either violate confidentiality agreements or SEC rules for insider trading.
I've personally been someone who had to (for purely technical reasons) suddenly become classed as an insider for trading purposes for the remainder of a quarter -- because I suddenly knew something which could materially relate to future financial statements or hint at deals which aren't yet public.
Our research and development teams are working on various solutions when it comes to energy storage but I can't provide specifics as to what exactly we're focused on for the future.
I don't even think it's that unusual for an executive chief engineer to more or less have to say "I'm not allowed to talk to you about that".
Did you expect her to release trade secrets and future company directions just for an interview? Because that would be silly.
Driving over the speed limit is a criminal act. Period. Crossing the street off the walkpath is a criminal act.
OK, but honestly, nobody is giving you a damned website to act as a marketplace for someone to speed or jaywalk for you.
Which means the site pretty much has one function: to facilitate people doing illegal things on your behalf in exchange for money. As soon as you start facilitating connections between people to break the law, it becomes something else.
If the owner didn't police this, then I'm going to say "ethical ambiguity" is a crock of shit.
How many of these transactions are provably legal? Because reading the examples in TFA, they're pretty much blatantly illegal.
Well, and then extend the metaphor to real world things and it gets even harder to understand.
Need access to your neighbor's house? Someone else's car? A safe?
Yes, you would totally go find a pseudo-anonymous entity to help you get into those things, because that's how those things are normally done. No, wait, it completely isn't.
But suddenly hacking into Facebook, or GMail, or a database (so you can use it for doxxing).. and someone can claim to have a legal business facilitating these transactions? I think not.
Sounds quite sketchy to me, especially when the site owner is adamant that people won't be using his site for anything illegal. I'm with you, I can't think of any situation in which this makes sense.
What next, the pseudo-anonymous physical intimidation service? Mooks List?
Unauthorized computer access is a criminal act. Period.
Well, the fairly obvious answer is that if it's a federal crime, then federal resources will be the ones going after you and won't need to care about state jurisdiction.
For a felony you would not necessarily get the feds turning their resources to you.
So, in terms of which agencies will be coming after you, and with what resources... pointing out that you'd be violating federal law says you get a whole different class of people coming after you.
Federal crimes may not be worse, but the magnitude of who is investigating it and how much resources they have is an entirely different animal.
I'd say it's very relevant. Because it's the big boys who will be investigating and prosecuting, not local/state agencies.
Shady stuff on the intertubes? I'm shocked I tell 'ya.
There's really only one question: is the owner aware that his site is being used for illegal stuff, or has be willfully made sure he isn't aware.
Because TFA sure as hell makes it sound like it's pretty blatantly being used for illegal stuff... and then it's just a matter to which the owner is consciously facilitating this.
So, which is it... clueless that your site is being used to break the law? Or intentionally not noticing that your site is being used to break the law?
Hacker's List "is intended for legal and ethical use." And, according to the owner, "[n]o one is going to complete an illegal project through my website."
How about "i need hack account facebook of my girlfriend," completed for $90 in January? Or "need access to a g mail account," finished for $350 in February? Or "I need [a database hacked] because I need it for doxing," done for $350 last month?
That does not sound like a site which is in any way policing itself to be a legal operation.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, the Steaming Heap of IInnovative Technology that was Windows 3 is what led me to Linux and UNIX and much of the rest of my career.
Right when nearing the end of Uni a free UNIX came along in the form of Linux ... because I had witnessed first hand what a steaming pile of crap was Windows 3, and then eventually Windows 3.11 (which sucked somewhat less, but not enough), I knew I wanted UNIX experience. It led to my first jobs.
I will be marked troll by people who weren't there, but Windows 3 was such a steaming pile of shit compared to what Linux (and at some point FreeBSD) could do on the exact same hardware, it's almost impossible to describe.
In 1993 no fewer than 3 other science nerds, to whom I said "hey, if you like Windows, far be it for me to judge ... but if you're asking for my Slackware disks and some install help, no problem -- I'll wipe out your new computer". They all switched to Linux because it was far more usable than Windows was on the same hardware. Even if Linux did occasionally crash, it was more robust than Windows. Because they could actually do several things at once.
On the same hardware, Linux destroyed Windows 3/3.11.
Windows 3 is significant in that it forced me to realize Windows wasn't anywhere NEAR being able to do what I'd learned in operating systems class ... I wrote an instance of pre-emptive multi-tasking before Microsoft made a commercial instance of it.
That doesn't mean that I could write a better OS than Microsoft, but it means when Linux was doing pre-emptive multitasking with proper virtual memory ... Microsoft was doing time-slicing ... it was a hell of a better operating system than Microsoft had written.
It just didn't have Word. It did, however, have LaTex ... yet another bit of awesome for a university student.
So, Kudos to Windows 3 for being such an out-dated pile of crap technology by the time it was released that it wasn't even fully utilizing a 386's inbuilt hardware features for multitasking, and wouldn't until Windows '95 ... which made possible (and preferable) for the widespread popularity of Linux.
If it hadn't sucked, we might not even know who Linus even is.
Oh, my, but I bet you'd squeal like a pig.
You're a whiny little punk with nothing intelligent to say.
But, hey, you can tell all the other whiny little punks at your playdate tomorrow how tough you were on the intertubes.
I'm sure your mom will be impressed.
Childish little asshole.
I dare you to tell us the cost of fitting tanks and skimmers into every sewer in California. Or every other body of water it flows into .. like apparently 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
Filtering the inputs to San Francisco Bay would be ridiculously expensive. Outlawing this plastic crap makes far more sense.
What you describe is theoretically possible, but utterly absurd in reality.
It's not a nothing issue. It's huge amount of crap dumped into waterways which acts like silt, doesn't break down, and otherwise serves to give people whiter teeth (or whatever the hell it's used for).
California has decided that's a dumb idea.
Wow ... calibrating the sights to cross the streams. Only really wee streams to cross.
Or is it more analogous to the beam hits an object (hence the guy)?
That actually makes sense, thanks.
Pew pew!! Way cooler than lasers!
Tech Seargent Chen please report to the bridge for plot exposition.
It sounds so good, and it's the LHC ... but I honestly have no idea of what it means.
So, you want a dumb phone, but you want it to have smart phone features, and a huge battery charge, and lots of doo-dads and stuff ... just like a smart phone?
Well, good luck with that.
What joking? I wasn't joking.
I totally think delivering ass-whoopings to MBAs and CEOs for corporate malfeasance would solve a lot of problems.
Because it would be better than this "non est mea culpa" shit we have now where CEOs issue some drivel apology and have no consequences.
I'm not joking at all.
Yeah, but then they'll charge access for it, and the copyright cartel will insist we're not allowed to see anything without paying them a trillion dollars.
Hey, wait a minute ... that's exactly what we have now.
For court purposes, there can't be any redaction.
Because as soon as you start snipping out bits, you lose context and some of what actually happened.
The full video must be available for scrutiny ... or you'll get the 5 seconds which supports the police version of events, or which has been edited to alter the sequence of events.
Part of the reason people are starting to insist on body cameras is we don't trust the police. Because increasingly the police are not trustworthy, and don't know or care what the law says.
Which means all of this raw video should be held in escrow where the police have no ability to alter or delete it.
If the police hold it, and have the power to edit it ... suddenly it becomes a less trustworthy record.
So when the police start claiming they need to redact it, they better have the ability to provide the un-redacted version for court proceedings.
Oh, trust me, I've been to a Wal Mart in the US, I know it's real.
Just don't expect anybody to take your opinion seriously about what is tasty food when you eat like a 7 year old.
Pizza Hut is grease, piled on top of oil, to the point that the bottom of the crust is fried (and this is by design). And that's quit disgusting.
And you realize that *straight*, as written by the poster, would produce bolded text in many editors, right?
So, maybe you're not as "clever" as you think?
And, of course, let's not stop there ... let's move to the managers, executives, and sales/marketing assholes who force this shit out the door.
The poor bastard of a programmer who has been told by the VP or the CEO (or the sales wanker) that the product must ship now, or that security doesn't matter is not always the cause of this. Sometimes they're the ones saying "umm, guys, this could be a problem".
So, if we're assigning blame, let's go with the people who are actually to blame and who make the decisions.
In the military, "just following orders" may not be a defense. But in private industry it's often the management who create these problems.
Which is precisely why I say that corporations should be held to a legal standard for the protection of personal information, and should carry penalties for failure to do so.
As long as corporations just say "oh, bummer dude" and have no penalties, they'll continue to cut as many corners as possible. Because there simply is no consequence for them.
I'm as concerned about the management people who don't give a damn. Because they're the ones who make policy and decide that not sucking at security is too costly.
So, want a secure internet? Kick an MBA or a CEO in the nuts, and tell them you'll keep doing it until they insist on secure code.
Well, if they choose to make it opt-in, then awesome, no harm no foul, and only people who turn it on will have it.
But when it is made opt-out, it says "fuck you, we'll track you unless you know enough to stop us".
And it's that kind of behavior which really pisses us off. It shouldn't be up to the average user to have to know where to disable this crap.
Just like they backed down on 3rd party cookies to keep the ad companies happy -- it's a sign that increasingly they're driven by money, instead of writing a good browser which doesn't have all of this shit in it.
If they make this crap opt in, nobody will bitch at them. But they haven't. And we're pissed off.
Do Not Track is useless garbage.
It doesn't stop any tracking. It's a voluntary program which doesn't mean what you think it means:
If Firefox is relying on a useless fucking setting like Do Not Track to disable this advertising, then they're assholes.
Do Not Track is a complete lie in order to give the illusion corporations give a crap about your privacy or your wishes.
Want to stop being tracked? Run every ad blocker and privacy extension you can find. Because relying on some marketing asshole to not track you anyway is just stupid.
It's the piles and piles of third party shit on the internet embedded in every page which you need to be blocking.
How about no? How about some of us don't want advertising? How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
What part of "not interested in your damned ads" is hard to understand?
Ummm ... what the hell are you talking about? I use it daily, I get updates for it regularly, and it's anything but dead.
VirtualBox is alive and well.
Then I suggest finding a real Italian restaurant with a real wood-fired oven, making thin crust pizza at high heat, and with good quality toppings.
Things like Dominos and Pizza Hut? Well, they're pretty much the most nasty form of disgusting greasy pizza known to man.
If you're using those as your benchmark for pizza, you're doing it wrong. Just like if you're using McDonald's as a benchmark for what a good burger should be.
Well, if you only have a nice academic abstraction in a book which is the language ... sure, that's awesome and all.
And then in the real world the platform, and its many variations, becomes an issue.
It's been years since I wrote in Java, but we'd get the regular updates of the platform, which may or may not have broken something. You'd get every vendor having their own JVM, or their extensions.
So you'd write a webapp for one platform and test it, and then someone would cram it into yet another proprietary variant which wasn't compatible. Which usually left the customer screeching that when you listed the platforms you supported, that it didn't work on the one they had which you'd never tested against.
And don't even get me stared on the shitware which Java wants to install now. Sorry, Oracle, but we don't give a fuck about your stupid Ashole.com toolbar.
So, yes, maybe in some perfect little bubble which doesn't depend on the platform Java is an awesome language. But in the real world, it seems like many things were a moving target, and that the platform gave you more sources of grief than the language.
I've lost count of the number of applications I've seen which the vendor basically says "we are compatible with this version of Java, and nothing else".
In that regards, as much as I like the actual language ... the platform can be a pain in the ass.
I don't know what it's like now (as I said, haven't directly used it in years). But there was a time when there was so much fragmentation as to make the "write once/run anywhere" a really bad joke.
Yes, and how many of those devices are supposed to support the factory reset which wipes all the storage?
What's that? All of them?
Full disk encryption is one of 5 problems they found, but not the main one.
Disk encryption, in theory, should make the factory reset more robust. But the sense I get is that the factory reset is complete garbage independent of encryption on some of these devices.
Which mostly reaffirms that I have no interest in anything but the stock Google Android. Because by the time another entity has gotten their hands on it and tweaked it to advance their own commercial interests , you really have no idea of what holes they've introduced, and you have no idea how long before they'll drop support for it.
Carrier certification is shorthand for "all of our crapware needs to be checked if we get around it". The shit carriers put on phones is for their benefit, not ours. Because it's intended to drive traffic to their garbage.
Or, you know, she can't talk about future technology decisions because it would either violate confidentiality agreements or SEC rules for insider trading.
I've personally been someone who had to (for purely technical reasons) suddenly become classed as an insider for trading purposes for the remainder of a quarter -- because I suddenly knew something which could materially relate to future financial statements or hint at deals which aren't yet public.
I don't even think it's that unusual for an executive chief engineer to more or less have to say "I'm not allowed to talk to you about that".
Did you expect her to release trade secrets and future company directions just for an interview? Because that would be silly.
OK, but honestly, nobody is giving you a damned website to act as a marketplace for someone to speed or jaywalk for you.
Which means the site pretty much has one function: to facilitate people doing illegal things on your behalf in exchange for money. As soon as you start facilitating connections between people to break the law, it becomes something else.
If the owner didn't police this, then I'm going to say "ethical ambiguity" is a crock of shit.
How many of these transactions are provably legal? Because reading the examples in TFA, they're pretty much blatantly illegal.
Well, and then extend the metaphor to real world things and it gets even harder to understand.
Need access to your neighbor's house? Someone else's car? A safe?
Yes, you would totally go find a pseudo-anonymous entity to help you get into those things, because that's how those things are normally done. No, wait, it completely isn't.
But suddenly hacking into Facebook, or GMail, or a database (so you can use it for doxxing) .. and someone can claim to have a legal business facilitating these transactions? I think not.
Sounds quite sketchy to me, especially when the site owner is adamant that people won't be using his site for anything illegal. I'm with you, I can't think of any situation in which this makes sense.
What next, the pseudo-anonymous physical intimidation service? Mooks List?
Unauthorized computer access is a criminal act. Period.
Well, the fairly obvious answer is that if it's a federal crime, then federal resources will be the ones going after you and won't need to care about state jurisdiction.
For a felony you would not necessarily get the feds turning their resources to you.
So, in terms of which agencies will be coming after you, and with what resources ... pointing out that you'd be violating federal law says you get a whole different class of people coming after you.
Federal crimes may not be worse, but the magnitude of who is investigating it and how much resources they have is an entirely different animal.
I'd say it's very relevant. Because it's the big boys who will be investigating and prosecuting, not local/state agencies.
Shady stuff on the intertubes? I'm shocked I tell 'ya.
There's really only one question: is the owner aware that his site is being used for illegal stuff, or has be willfully made sure he isn't aware.
Because TFA sure as hell makes it sound like it's pretty blatantly being used for illegal stuff ... and then it's just a matter to which the owner is consciously facilitating this.
So, which is it ... clueless that your site is being used to break the law? Or intentionally not noticing that your site is being used to break the law?
That does not sound like a site which is in any way policing itself to be a legal operation.
Not even a little.
Because if they didn't call it that, they might have to say "because we're screamingly incompetent".
You can bet your ass that PR firms and image consultants play a huge part in how this is announced and described.
And "yarg, teh highly sophisticated hax0rs pwned us" puts them in the best possible light.
Now, how difficult and sophisticated the actual attack was, I have no idea.