How often do you need encryption on your IM conversations?
Always.
Personally, I'm rarely bothered about anyone eavesdropping on me asking my sister how she is.
Here's the thing: if you pass plaintext traffic 99.9% of the time, it's going to look awfully suspicious when you encrypt that remaining 0.1%. Maybe you're only asking your coworker what kind of beer to buy for that party you're having and don't want the nosy network admin reading about it (or insert other innocent use here), but suddenly your messages stick out like a sore thumb.
Encrypt your traffic whenever possible even if you don't need it. If and when you actually do need it, you'll be glad you did.
Not until KDE4, AFAIK. My "several different OSes" are all Unixes (Unices?), so I admit that I have an easier time of it.
Re:Firefox is yet another OSS victory!
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Firefox Usage Climbing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, what make Firefox pretty good is that the vast majority of web sites render correctly under this browser
Correction: all of them render correctly, and if they don't, it deserves a bug report.
However, "correctly" may not be the same as "what the designer thought they were making" due to a seemingly infinite number of bugs and incompatibilities in IE's render engine. If a designer used a hypothetical "<splitscreenthreeways>" tag, IE splits the screen four ways, but Firefox only splits it the correct three ways, then the bug is in IE for rendering it wrong in the first place even if the designer liked the end result. It's not Firefox's fault if it does The Right Thing but generates ugly output.
Fortunately, the upswing in non-IE browsers means that designers pretty much have to write good code now, which is especially nice for those of us using relatively rare browsers like Konqueror and Opera. Thanks, Firefox, for creating the tide that's also lifting our little ships!
Re:What about Opera, Safari and Konq.
on
Firefox Usage Climbing
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· Score: 2, Informative
Bookmarks are just _terrible_ in konquerer. Specifically the bookmark toolbar is just rediculous. I like to have just a few bookmarks in my toolbar and more in my Bookmarks menu... in Konquerer all bookmarks end up in the toolbar... which is just rediculous.
Umm, what? Go to Bookmarks -> Edit Bookmarks. Make a folder in there called "toolbar folder" or something similar. Select that folder. Go to Folder -> Set as Toolbar Folder. Voila: your toolbar now only shows bookmarks that are stored in that folder. I don't know why your distro made the root folder the toolbar folder, but that's their choice and not a KDE requirement.
Couple this with the fact that I have to use several computers and OS's all day long (between dual-booting my desktop, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my school computer, my lab computer) and it is nice to be able to use the _exact_ same browsing interface on all of them
Fair enough. I use KDE (on several differents OSes) at work and home so I avoid that problem, but I can see how it would be annoying.
The third reason is plugins. Are there even _any_ konquerer plugins?
I think you meant "extensions" because Konqueror can already use Mozilla plugins (Flash, etc.). Konqueror does have a few extensions floating around, but again, most of them are built into KDE or Konqueror already. For example, the KDE Control Center has a configurator for system-wide mouse gestures (Regional & Accessibility -> Input Actions). You could define gestures there that map to commands like the ones you've been using in Firefox. The biggest difference is that they work everyone and not just in one particular application.
Wouldn't just one reason be nice? I'm only saying so that you give a person an incentive to switch...
OK, here are a few:
It's fast. Really fast. New windows open almost instantaneously and all operation feel quick.
It's tightly integrated with the rest of KDE. It stores passwords and other form data inside the KWallet application. PDFs open inside a browser tab with KPDF (which is the fastest PDF viewer I've ever used under Linux).
It's stable. I almost never have to restart it because of a crash.
It's (comparatively) lightweight. I currently have about 15 tabs open and it's using less than 68MB of memory.
Like a lot of KDE apps, it's configurable in ways that you didn't realize such a thing could be altered.
Beyond that, it renders almost exactly like Firefox so pages look like you've come to expect. Honestly, I can't think of a single downside except that it doesn't use Firefox extensions (although equivalents are available for the most popular ones). It "feels" a little different at first, but not in a "wrong" way - just different.
If you're already using KDE, give it a shot. Even if you don't like it, you have nothing to lose.
I'm kind of curious about that, too. It seems like I'm the only person in the world who uses Konqueror as their primary browser, but I'm not sure why. Firefox is nice and I use it as a backup, but I really love Konqueror for reasons too numerous to list in a short post. Since KDE is the most popular desktop for Linux, I'd think that more people would be using its flagship product.
I know what you're saying, but you're missing a critical point: he thought that the information would be private. As in, there's at least one person in the world whom he didn't wish to see the information. By definition, he was compromisable. Had he published the information openly, he probably would have stood a much better chance of being able to deflect the questions by saying that everyone already knew that stuff anyway.
Go out and listen to people talking. At work, at a bar, whatever. You're going to hear pointless rambling.
True, but keep one thing in mind: even Einstein probably liked to unwind with a beer from time to time. I don't claim to be Einstein, but I am one of those weirdos who read math textbooks for fun. Still, I'll happily chat about football (Go Huskers!) or American Idol if that's the way conversation is leaning.
Just because you hear someone babbling about something pointless doesn't mean that they're incapable of deep thoughts. Maybe they're relaxing after a long day of thinking them.
But you can't take a toyota, copy it, and sell it as a toyota.
True, but you can most certainly take a Toyota, alter it, and sell the result as a Toyota, in much the way that you should morally be able to buy a copy of a string of bits, media-shift it, chop parts out, and sell the resulting string of bits.
If Mr. Director directs a film, then some christian guy in the midwest decides he doesn't like something and cuts it out of the film, then Mr. Director no longer directed the film.
Who cares? Mr. Director already got paid for it, and Jane Delicate-Ear knows that she bought a modified version. In fact, she paid extra to get one modified in exactly the manner she wanted, after making the conscious decision that Mr. Director's version was unsuitable for her purposes.
People here can argue the finer legal points all they want, but I see no moral reason why Mr. Director should possibly be allowed to force me to watch his movie in a certain way or not at all. If my purchase results in him getting the full retail price for a copy of his movie, then he has no legitimate claim to what I (or an agent acting on my behalf) do with it afterward. It's mine.
The fact is, there are many people around here who like copyright as long they can get what they want for free, preferably under the GPL. The minute someone wants to exercise their rights in any other way, the system is 'broken'.
You're emphasizing the wrong aspect of those transactions. People here want to share their software via the GPL and use the software that others have written and freely distributed, and want the same freedom in their entertainment. I don't think that's inconsistent.
Hearing the 'F' word or 'bitch' does nothing to diminish the morality of myself or my children, any more than my wife showing her face without a Burqa does.
I agree, but don't presume to make that decision for me and my children.
It is cute to see you referring to "The 'F' word" as though it is unspeakable, but using the word "screwed" which has a nearly-identical slang meaning and usage, where "screw" means "fuck" and "screwed" means exactly "fucked", but it doesn't have quite the same derogatory tag.
"Shit" and "poop" are nearly perfect synonyms as both nouns and verbs, but my preschooler can say one of them without getting in trouble. That you think this is "cute" or unusual speaks more to your distorted view of society than the way the rest of us experience it.
That sounds ok, but when the intent of the movie is changed, I don't think they should be watching the movie in the first place.
Who said anything about intent? My kids love the movie "Twister", but I wish it had a few less "goddamns". Am I really "religious frek" and a "moron" because I'd prefer not to hear gratuitous bad language?
Look, I did my time in the Navy, and have heard (and uttered) more than my fair share of profanity. It's all about context, though. My wife and I liked Pulp Fiction, but I wouldn't dream of censoring the language there. The cursing is appropriate in that context. However, I'm sure we could both list otherwise family-friendly movies that just had to drop a few F-bombs to earn a PG-13 rating.
My point is this: I think there's an assumption that a person who displays a few bad habits must have even more that aren't displayed, so is therefore less trustworthy than someone who hides a vice. I also think that's a very poor assumption, that's based in prejudice rather than reason.
I think at some point you have to bring statistics into the picture: "people who engage in questionable behavior $x have a 43% chance of going on to do $y within 5 years". I rather suspect they track such numbers.
I also suspect that they weigh how $x and $y will reflect on $organization should it become widely known that they hire people who do that stuff. Maybe your or I don't care if someone smokes pot, their friends and family know that they smoke pot, and they only smoke pot at the beginning of long weekends when they have plenty of time to sober up before they get back to work. However, a large chunk of the population might care a whole awful lot that the government is paying potsmokers to perform sensitive tasks. While it may be silly and immaterial, such political considerations carry weight with the people who make them.
As if there were still a clear distinction between "online" and "offline"! Where you've been, to whom you've talked on the phone and how often and how long (and maybe what), what you've bought and thousands other things end up more or less online.
The distinction is that only the government is likely big enough to correlate all those data into a coherent picture of your lifestyle. That is, the fact that you bought a pair of rubber pants the day after you wrote a check for a gallon-size jar of jalapenos is only interesting and available to the same people who would be investigating you for your security clearance. On the other hand, this guy published a bunch of information about himself and labelled it "stuff I did that I'm embarrassed about". It doesn't take an NSA-sized organization to uncover that dirt.
Really, the only thing you can say when you see stupid stuff posted on Myspace/Facebook is "this person *certainly* does stupid things" and "this person is willing to post about them online".
I agree. I think his biggest mistake was trying to keep it private. That directly indicated that there are at least a few people that he didn't want to know about his activities, hence the blackmail angle. If his blog had amused comments from his mom, I doubt that we'd be reading about this on Slashdot.
And seriously, how do they know you haven't told your dad about that 'experimental weekend' and your family isn't proud of your insane genius?
Without knowing for sure, I'd guess that they'd ask.
This is an alleged case where someone took the steps to keep something private and it was still used against him!
Put on your "think like The Man" hat for a few minutes. If the gov't could find stuff he'd published on the web (but tried to keep private), so could an infiltrator. Do you think that spies are all mean, ugly, simian-browed giants? No. They'd look like that girl who just moved in down the hall, or that cool guy you met while shooting pool. Show them that "private" (ha!) Facebook or MySpace page where you're drunk and making out with a hooker and suddenly The Bad Guys have something on you.
The opposite arguement could be used just as easily in screening
Look, it's really not my goal to argue whether this logic is good, just, or correct. However, that's irrelevant here. The reality is that people who do make these decisions do think this way. If you want to work for them, then those are the standards you have to uphold. If they require you to paint your thumb green on Saturday, then don't paint it yellow and be surprised when they're not pleased.
Any job where the government is likely to audit your life before you're hired is the sort of job that demands a certain level of personal discretion. Publishing incriminating information about yourself online sort of disqualifies you for such jobs in the first place.
Know why the government won't give you a security clearance if you have bad credit or unsavory habits? Because it makes you vulnerable to blackmail. If their screening process doesn't identify people that have made themselves extortable ("'lose' your keys this weekend or I tell your dad about that 'experimental weekend' you posted about on MySpace") then they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
In short, if you must keep secrets about yourself, don't publish them online and still expect to get the sort of jobs that frown on them. This isn't rocket science.
- your average comp sci college grad already knows visual studio
Depends on your school, I guess, but the average comp sci student at mine would already know Emacs, GCC, a Lisp derivative or two, and BSD/Linux. I literally never once saw Visual Studio on a comp sci lab machine.
For our tests, we ran what is essentially a pure Zope/Plone implementation, with Plone running on a SUSE Enterprise Linux system.
In some benchmarks, Plone was an average performer, sticking close to the middle. This is actually better than we expected, given that the Plone documentation is very upfront about the fact that Plone shouldn't be used alone in a production environment and should be run behind other servers to improve performance.
So, they ran an outward-facing Zope server (after being explicitly told not to) and the performace was lackluster? Go figure. In the real world, they'd run Zope behind an Apache or Squid proxy (as per every installation recommendation I've ever seen) which would immediately boost throughput by an order of magnitude. In short, using Zope to dynamically generate static content instead of caching the results whenever possible is insane, and pretty much no one does it. They also apparently forgot about ZEO, although I'm not sure how you can be savvy enough to get Zope up and populated without knowing about it's built-in clustering.
Apparently they had no interest in any tuning whatsoever, to the point of de-tuning it by installing it in an explicitly unrecommended configuring. And then it lost. Go figure.
But those KDE folks...sheesh, why not just recycle some perfectly good gnome apps.
In this case, there weren't any "perfectly good" Gnome apps. Don't get me wrong - Gnucash is a solid, well-written program - but have you ever seen it's dependency list? Parts of it are even written in Scheme. Now, I personally like Lisp and Lisp-like languages, but good look finding:
A good programmer
Who likes writing non-glamorous applications
For free
That must be extremely reliable
In languages used by a comparative handful of people
It could turn out that a mix of Cobol and Fortran would be the ideal combination for such work, but good luck finding competent and willing people to contribute in those languages. I think the KMyMoney team's approach of starting over with a pure-C++ codebase is much more likely to attract a wide developer pool.
P.S. Sorry for lumping Scheme in with Cobol. It was purely on relative rarity and not on functionality or aesthetics. Please don't hate me!
This seems like a good place to ask. My understanding of higher physics comes from reading "Six {, Not So} Easy Pieces" - IANAP - so please forgive me if this is a stupidly obvious question.
The Casimir Effect is well documented. Is there any reason it wouldn't work if the plates weren't parallel, but actually formed a wedge? If so, wouldn't the forces still be perpendicular to the plates (and not exactly parallel to each other) resulting in a net tangential force, however tiny?
Parallel:
force -> | | <- force
net force: none
Angled:
force -> / \ <- force
net force: down
If that holds, then could you theoretically manufacture $BIGNUM of them and use them to turn a generator?
I know that perpetual motion machines violate the laws of thermodynamics. So, is this an exception outside "normal" physics, or does my idea break down at some point (and if so, where)? I'd consider the debunking to be interesting, so don't worry about hurting my feelings.
Slashdot Mirror
Always.
Here's the thing: if you pass plaintext traffic 99.9% of the time, it's going to look awfully suspicious when you encrypt that remaining 0.1%. Maybe you're only asking your coworker what kind of beer to buy for that party you're having and don't want the nosy network admin reading about it (or insert other innocent use here), but suddenly your messages stick out like a sore thumb.
Encrypt your traffic whenever possible even if you don't need it. If and when you actually do need it, you'll be glad you did.
Not until KDE4, AFAIK. My "several different OSes" are all Unixes (Unices?), so I admit that I have an easier time of it.
Correction: all of them render correctly, and if they don't, it deserves a bug report.
However, "correctly" may not be the same as "what the designer thought they were making" due to a seemingly infinite number of bugs and incompatibilities in IE's render engine. If a designer used a hypothetical "<splitscreenthreeways>" tag, IE splits the screen four ways, but Firefox only splits it the correct three ways, then the bug is in IE for rendering it wrong in the first place even if the designer liked the end result. It's not Firefox's fault if it does The Right Thing but generates ugly output.
Fortunately, the upswing in non-IE browsers means that designers pretty much have to write good code now, which is especially nice for those of us using relatively rare browsers like Konqueror and Opera. Thanks, Firefox, for creating the tide that's also lifting our little ships!
Umm, what? Go to Bookmarks -> Edit Bookmarks. Make a folder in there called "toolbar folder" or something similar. Select that folder. Go to Folder -> Set as Toolbar Folder. Voila: your toolbar now only shows bookmarks that are stored in that folder. I don't know why your distro made the root folder the toolbar folder, but that's their choice and not a KDE requirement.
Fair enough. I use KDE (on several differents OSes) at work and home so I avoid that problem, but I can see how it would be annoying.
I think you meant "extensions" because Konqueror can already use Mozilla plugins (Flash, etc.). Konqueror does have a few extensions floating around, but again, most of them are built into KDE or Konqueror already. For example, the KDE Control Center has a configurator for system-wide mouse gestures (Regional & Accessibility -> Input Actions). You could define gestures there that map to commands like the ones you've been using in Firefox. The biggest difference is that they work everyone and not just in one particular application.
OK, here are a few:
Beyond that, it renders almost exactly like Firefox so pages look like you've come to expect. Honestly, I can't think of a single downside except that it doesn't use Firefox extensions (although equivalents are available for the most popular ones). It "feels" a little different at first, but not in a "wrong" way - just different.
If you're already using KDE, give it a shot. Even if you don't like it, you have nothing to lose.
I'm kind of curious about that, too. It seems like I'm the only person in the world who uses Konqueror as their primary browser, but I'm not sure why. Firefox is nice and I use it as a backup, but I really love Konqueror for reasons too numerous to list in a short post. Since KDE is the most popular desktop for Linux, I'd think that more people would be using its flagship product.
I know what you're saying, but you're missing a critical point: he thought that the information would be private. As in, there's at least one person in the world whom he didn't wish to see the information. By definition, he was compromisable. Had he published the information openly, he probably would have stood a much better chance of being able to deflect the questions by saying that everyone already knew that stuff anyway.
True, but keep one thing in mind: even Einstein probably liked to unwind with a beer from time to time. I don't claim to be Einstein, but I am one of those weirdos who read math textbooks for fun. Still, I'll happily chat about football (Go Huskers!) or American Idol if that's the way conversation is leaning.
Just because you hear someone babbling about something pointless doesn't mean that they're incapable of deep thoughts. Maybe they're relaxing after a long day of thinking them.
True, but you can most certainly take a Toyota, alter it, and sell the result as a Toyota, in much the way that you should morally be able to buy a copy of a string of bits, media-shift it, chop parts out, and sell the resulting string of bits.
Who cares? Mr. Director already got paid for it, and Jane Delicate-Ear knows that she bought a modified version. In fact, she paid extra to get one modified in exactly the manner she wanted, after making the conscious decision that Mr. Director's version was unsuitable for her purposes.
People here can argue the finer legal points all they want, but I see no moral reason why Mr. Director should possibly be allowed to force me to watch his movie in a certain way or not at all. If my purchase results in him getting the full retail price for a copy of his movie, then he has no legitimate claim to what I (or an agent acting on my behalf) do with it afterward. It's mine.
You're emphasizing the wrong aspect of those transactions. People here want to share their software via the GPL and use the software that others have written and freely distributed, and want the same freedom in their entertainment. I don't think that's inconsistent.
I agree, but don't presume to make that decision for me and my children.
"Shit" and "poop" are nearly perfect synonyms as both nouns and verbs, but my preschooler can say one of them without getting in trouble. That you think this is "cute" or unusual speaks more to your distorted view of society than the way the rest of us experience it.
Who said anything about intent? My kids love the movie "Twister", but I wish it had a few less "goddamns". Am I really "religious frek" and a "moron" because I'd prefer not to hear gratuitous bad language?
Look, I did my time in the Navy, and have heard (and uttered) more than my fair share of profanity. It's all about context, though. My wife and I liked Pulp Fiction, but I wouldn't dream of censoring the language there. The cursing is appropriate in that context. However, I'm sure we could both list otherwise family-friendly movies that just had to drop a few F-bombs to earn a PG-13 rating.
I think at some point you have to bring statistics into the picture: "people who engage in questionable behavior $x have a 43% chance of going on to do $y within 5 years". I rather suspect they track such numbers.
I also suspect that they weigh how $x and $y will reflect on $organization should it become widely known that they hire people who do that stuff. Maybe your or I don't care if someone smokes pot, their friends and family know that they smoke pot, and they only smoke pot at the beginning of long weekends when they have plenty of time to sober up before they get back to work. However, a large chunk of the population might care a whole awful lot that the government is paying potsmokers to perform sensitive tasks. While it may be silly and immaterial, such political considerations carry weight with the people who make them.
The distinction is that only the government is likely big enough to correlate all those data into a coherent picture of your lifestyle. That is, the fact that you bought a pair of rubber pants the day after you wrote a check for a gallon-size jar of jalapenos is only interesting and available to the same people who would be investigating you for your security clearance. On the other hand, this guy published a bunch of information about himself and labelled it "stuff I did that I'm embarrassed about". It doesn't take an NSA-sized organization to uncover that dirt.
I agree. I think his biggest mistake was trying to keep it private. That directly indicated that there are at least a few people that he didn't want to know about his activities, hence the blackmail angle. If his blog had amused comments from his mom, I doubt that we'd be reading about this on Slashdot.
Without knowing for sure, I'd guess that they'd ask.
Put on your "think like The Man" hat for a few minutes. If the gov't could find stuff he'd published on the web (but tried to keep private), so could an infiltrator. Do you think that spies are all mean, ugly, simian-browed giants? No. They'd look like that girl who just moved in down the hall, or that cool guy you met while shooting pool. Show them that "private" (ha!) Facebook or MySpace page where you're drunk and making out with a hooker and suddenly The Bad Guys have something on you.
Look, it's really not my goal to argue whether this logic is good, just, or correct. However, that's irrelevant here. The reality is that people who do make these decisions do think this way. If you want to work for them, then those are the standards you have to uphold. If they require you to paint your thumb green on Saturday, then don't paint it yellow and be surprised when they're not pleased.
Know why the government won't give you a security clearance if you have bad credit or unsavory habits? Because it makes you vulnerable to blackmail. If their screening process doesn't identify people that have made themselves extortable ("'lose' your keys this weekend or I tell your dad about that 'experimental weekend' you posted about on MySpace") then they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
In short, if you must keep secrets about yourself, don't publish them online and still expect to get the sort of jobs that frown on them. This isn't rocket science.
Depends on your school, I guess, but the average comp sci student at mine would already know Emacs, GCC, a Lisp derivative or two, and BSD/Linux. I literally never once saw Visual Studio on a comp sci lab machine.
Yes, you're apparently the only one.
So, they ran an outward-facing Zope server (after being explicitly told not to) and the performace was lackluster? Go figure. In the real world, they'd run Zope behind an Apache or Squid proxy (as per every installation recommendation I've ever seen) which would immediately boost throughput by an order of magnitude. In short, using Zope to dynamically generate static content instead of caching the results whenever possible is insane, and pretty much no one does it. They also apparently forgot about ZEO, although I'm not sure how you can be savvy enough to get Zope up and populated without knowing about it's built-in clustering.
Apparently they had no interest in any tuning whatsoever, to the point of de-tuning it by installing it in an explicitly unrecommended configuring. And then it lost. Go figure.
Just wanted you to know that I hadn't literally laughed out loud at a Slashdot comment in months. Job well done.
In this case, there weren't any "perfectly good" Gnome apps. Don't get me wrong - Gnucash is a solid, well-written program - but have you ever seen it's dependency list? Parts of it are even written in Scheme. Now, I personally like Lisp and Lisp-like languages, but good look finding:
It could turn out that a mix of Cobol and Fortran would be the ideal combination for such work, but good luck finding competent and willing people to contribute in those languages. I think the KMyMoney team's approach of starting over with a pure-C++ codebase is much more likely to attract a wide developer pool.
P.S. Sorry for lumping Scheme in with Cobol. It was purely on relative rarity and not on functionality or aesthetics. Please don't hate me!
Your dictionary seems to lack an entry for "most".
The Casimir Effect is well documented. Is there any reason it wouldn't work if the plates weren't parallel, but actually formed a wedge? If so, wouldn't the forces still be perpendicular to the plates (and not exactly parallel to each other) resulting in a net tangential force, however tiny?
If that holds, then could you theoretically manufacture $BIGNUM of them and use them to turn a generator?
I know that perpetual motion machines violate the laws of thermodynamics. So, is this an exception outside "normal" physics, or does my idea break down at some point (and if so, where)? I'd consider the debunking to be interesting, so don't worry about hurting my feelings.