Conjugal visits? Mmmm. Not that I know of. Y'know, minimum-security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.
but the iMacs I have used have been silent. Dell's, not so much.
Then you are one of the few.
I have two friends who purchased iMacs for music/video production and one of their constant problems when recording voiceovers was the iMac fans would kick on and they'd get a soft "whooosh" sound in their recording. Since the iMac was "all in one" they just couldn't stick CPU somewhere with long cables. One eventually returned it and got a PowerMac, the other just does all his production on a PC and uses the iMac for other purposes.
The initial iMacs had tons of heat problems and serious video interference from a poor midplane design. Check Google for details.
Is it just me, or does it look like ever since Steve Ballmer took over the reigns Microsoft's business plan can be summed up as "Whatever Google/Apple is doing, we're gonna compete with that."?
I agree. The same could be said for putting a trashcan icon on a GUI desktop designed to emulate an office work space. Mundane, obvious stuff like this shouldn't be patentable.
I believe that was copyright, not patent, though I could be wrong. Apple lost that suit, EXCEPT for the Trash Can. The judge let them keep the Trash Can icon so they would have a place to store the rest of their stupid lawsuit.
Because with God as their witness, no one else ever thought of a portable, digital music player. It is *SO* non-obvious that it takes a special kind of certified genius to come up with ideas like a scroll wheel, buttons, earphones, and -- wait for it -- a round front panel. I mean, it is like Apple was ripping off Einstein or Newton or something. How DARE they actually know how to market a product!
My guess is Steve Jobs will file a patent on a rectally inserted portable music player. Just to make sure the guys at Creative are aware of this, he'd be glad to demonstrate how it works on their entire legal dept over at Creative.
Did you ever play Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
C:>Quit Are you sure you want to quit? Y Are you really sure you want to quit? Y Are you really, really sure you want to quit? Y Are you really, really, really sure you want to quit? Y
You have to sign an NDA to get the documents. So you would be violating the NDA to redistribute them.
You are wrong. I just filled out their form and got immediate access to the spec sheets, no NDA required. The form asked if I had an existing NDA and I said "no". It didn't complain. I was automatically e-mailed a password which gave me immediate access to the 7956 Security Accelerator data sheet, no questions asked.
The data sheet itself is copyright and does say you can't redistribute without permission. It also contains a US Export notice and claims to be HiFn Confidential. I've already sent in an e-mail asking for permission, so we'll see where that goes.
The form was basically name, address, phone number and do you want to be notified when they update docs.
Get a damn P.O. Box and disposable cell phone if you are really bothered.
There ARE clauses on the document that are worrisome, so Theo HAS a valid argument but I believe a lot of this stems from boilerplate text which HiFn executives haven't read in years. Theo obviously HAS read it and is raising an appropriate fuss.
I think the bigger issue is this has no chance of catching any actual terrorists or criminals or anyone the NSA might have legitimate reason to be snooping on. When will they figure out that TERRORISTS ARE NOT STUPID?
There are LOTS of stupid criminals and terrorists. There are entire websites dedicated to this sort of thing. Plenty of stuff on YouTube, Google Video and the like of people documenting their own criminal stupidity. Hell, I just saw one the other day where some teenage morons videotaped themselves doing drive-by shootings with paintball guns. The video ends with them doing a drive-by of a Sheriff's car.:-)
Taking blogs into account, it wouldn't surprise me if there were MORE stupid than not-stupid people on the net.
I know that when we order servers from Dell they are ordered w/o operating systems as we install Debian. We order about 15 a month, not a lot but here is the point: when we order and choose the operating system, there are two "no operating system" options -- No OS Microsoft Windows and No OS Red Hat Linux. It defaults to No OS Microsoft Windows and I know our admin person doing the auditing never changes it.
I would not be surprised to learn that the server sales are higher than they think.
But one elderly villager sitting outside her house had another kind of force in mind.
"I thought the Americans had got here," she said, laughing.
Good freaking God! I thought it was just an exaggeration that America is being blamed for everything and anything negative under the sun. Yes, she said it laughingly but she DID think it. WTF is wrong with some people that they honestly believe the U.S. has nothing better to do -- not to mention the extra resources -- to fuck with a little podunk village out in the middle of nowhere Russia?
Not true. More votes were cast -- but many people voted multiple times in the American Idol final.
Ah, I forgot about this. I wonder what the unique statistics are.
[2] where 'couple' = thousands.
Not enough to matter. We're talking raw totals here, not per district stats so "thousands" doesn't mean much in the context of tens of millions. It is still close enough to be pathetic.
How is it that Apple is able to get away with allowing easy generation of PDFs via OS X's printing utilities, but Microsoft can't? Did Apple pony up Adobe's danegelt? Or are they too small for Adobe to care?
Repeat after me. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, Apple is not. The rules are different for a monopoly.
The concept of "harmonization" has been used to justify lengthening copyright terms around the globe. If a major area has a longer term, it is easier to convince everyone to bump up to that than have the term lowered. Governments almost never give back power or revenue willingly.
In this case, Europe was used as a trial balloon by the U.S. While the data retention laws were discussed and debated in Europe, the U.S. policy makers publically commented about the dangers of this sort of thing and how it could lead to a totalitarian "big brother" mentality. All the while they were telling people in the U.S. how much of a breach of privacy this is and how it will never happen here, the back-channels to Europe were doing nothing but supporting the push for mandatory retention and gauging the reaction -- and attention levels -- of the peoples.
Once the E.U. backdoor hammered thru a mandatory data retention law, the U.S. changed its tune. Newly appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and staff started talking up data retention in the U.S. and pointing to Europe as leading the way. We are now well down this path. For those of you hoping to stall for two more years until there is a change in administration (aka "regeime change"), don't get your hopes up because the Democrats are just as bad. They'll still fuck you over but will be telling you how much they love you and how it is for your own good. (The Republicans just leave out the "but we love you" part. It is still for your own good.)
While Europeans love to preach to Americans about how much more privacy aware they are, and how they have Constitutional guarantees and strong laws protecting their privacy and data use, they miss a fundamental difference.
In Europe, the concept of privacy doesn't include the government. Yes, they have strong laws dictating how data is used, kept, stored and brokered so as to prevent misuse by third parties, individuals and corporations. But, they have no real protections about government access and use to all that data. All in the name of paternalistic government, enacted thru "anti-terror", "anti-drug" and "immigration control" laws the gov'ts of Europe have no privacy when it comes to bureaucratic eyes.
In the U.S. the concept of privacy really means just you. It is *your* data and *your* information and privacy means ONLY YOU get to determine where it goes and how it is used. The government is NOT (in theory) given a free pass or exemption to use, store or broker your data. For the longest time the U.S. Social Security numbers had printed on the issued cards "not to be used as I.D." so great was the fear of a "national I.D.". Of course, this is offset by most American's apathy towards anything to do with government. As long as they can afford their beers, pay the bills and watch their idiot box most of them will be complacent about damn near anything that doesn't interfere with any of that.
Don't believe me? How about his for a statistic: more people voted in the last American Idol episode of that television show than did in the last Presidential Election.
Not to mention that the pole is NORTH and Africa/S America are moving away from each other EAST/WEST. Your estimates, either high or low, assume almost straight north/south movement.
If I lose/, I can just download a clean distro. If I lose/home, I'm screwed./home is infinitely more important on a single-user system.
Actually, a complete reinstall on a Linux system is so trivial it doesn't matter -- as long as/home is a separate partition. And, of course, you have some skill with the system.
I don't, nor do I known anyone that does, back up their/home folder daily. I do back it up weekly to a DVD-R, but nightly? The process is too much of a PITA. *CRITICAL* files are backed up, but there is so much that isn't critical, I don't bother.
What I found was easy was to create a folder for all the updates I have installed (.tgz in my case, but.deb or.rpm for the non-Slackware types) and back THAT up to a CD-R on a regular basis. Then, I can do a reinstall -- skipping/home if possible -- from clean distro disks in maybe 20 minutes. Follow that up with a quick "upgradepkg/mnt/cdrom/updates/*.tgz" and I'm right back to where I was before disaster struck.
I haven't played with it on Slackware, but on Fedora/Red Hat and their derivatives you could create a kickstart disk after your initial install to automate the reinstall. No need to choose timezones, package sets or anything. Very handy.
I would like to point out that this is so damned easy because Linux DOES NOT USE A REGISTRY like Windows, instead saves global configs in/etc and user configs in ~. The #1 complaint I had from people restoring Windows from scratch was that they had to waste so much time going back and tweaking the configs on all the software they use. Very, very time consuming.
'd have no problem with this if it were treated as property. Subject to property tax. Squat on a thousand domains worth a thousand bucks each? (potentially) Pay property tax on $1,000,000. Probably around $5,000 a year, depending.
Taxed by who? Taxes are levied by governments and property tax is on tangible items that have defined boundries. Exactly which gov't agency do you propose levy a property tax on domains?
Keep in mind, there is no such animal as a multi-national taxing agency that is recognized in the U.S. Even taxes in the E.U. are handled by member States and not the over-arching organization.
There are also several examples of items that are not subject to either real or tangible personal property taxes.
All domains are worth precisely $12. No more, no less.
If someone has registered a domain, and is offering to sell it to you for more than that, they're nothing but leeching parasites, or as the PC like to call them, "cyber-squatters".
Don't feed the parasites.
Bullshit. There is such a thing as supply and demand. Domain names have features such as being easy to remember, have connotations to other items, being short, etc. This is why something like gmail.com is much more valueable than MyCantRememberTheNameForEmailButThisMightBeIt.com or asdf1324la8h_asdlkjuq7.com.
A domain name is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, no more and no less.
You might want to review some economic theories postulated after the 17th Century. What you're espousing is called the "natural price" in Pre-Classical Thought.
Motorola Surfboard cable modems, for one. There are several others. It is a "security" measure so your super-vulnerable Windows PC isn't open to evil hackers late at night. You punch the button when you leave for any length of time and it suspends the connection.
Halo 2 is a peer-2-peer game, where one of the people playing is the "host". It varies as to who gets to be the host, but the point is there is no dedicated server other than the one doing authentication and charging your credit card.
I like how congress gets all up in arms claiming the executive branch violated the constitution by searching a congressional office. I didn't see most of them raising a fuss when they found out that Americans were being wiretapped without warrants or collecting a database of every phone call. Now that there offices can be searched by the FBI they are scared and will have to find a new place to hide their skeletons.
That isn't the point. See what happens if you send a Congressional Subpoena over to the White House, or try and send the FBI to serve a search warrant there. The President, Vice President or staffers would (and HAVE) scream "Executive Privilege" in a heartbeat.
This is really a case of "what is good for the goose is good for the gander".
Re:What would you prefer?
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Want bugs fixed faster? Quit bitching and start testing.
Typical I-have-no-life-but-my-project response.
Here is the typical "test" from a user perspective.
1. Website has dire warnings about stable vs unstable, so user gets stable version. 2. User finds bug and reports it. Often they provide no useful information other than "feature X doesn't work". 3. Odd are, user just e-mailed someone which means this now needs to be entered into development bugtracking system, like bugzilla. User is pointed to bugzilla and/or proper bug reporting method. 4a. If the user is worth a damn, they will attempt to report it properly. 4b. Other users bitch about FOSS software quality and leave to flame on/. 5. User spends days trying to figure out the proper way to report a bug via bugzilla. Here is a tip to developers -- Bugzilla is NOT USER FRIENDLY AT ALL if you are not a developer. It sucks like a Dyson. If you're a developer, KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING and use it daily, it is great. If not, it is a bitch. 6. User offers to test, gets development version. 7. User finds out that all the real action is in CVS/Subversion and spends the next 6 weeks trying to figure that mess out. 8. User finally gets CVS source, takes the next few days trying to understand the code. 9. By the time user understands the code enough to make a change, someone else has changed something and they have to resync. Loop to 8 at infinitum.
Moral of the story? Testers are NOT developers. If you want quality TEST people then never EVER send them to Bugzilla and never EVER give them CVS/Subversion. Give them a SIMPLE form to fill out for reporting bugs that can then be parsed by someone who knows Bugzilla or your bug reporting system.
Don't assume testers have a development toolchain. Don't expect them to use CVS or compile/link anything. Give them a.tar.gz or.zip of an executable. THAT they can test.
If you're moving so fast in development that this is unreasonable, then don't be asking for non-development testers.
Since a one-time pad is totally random, each potential key is equally possible. Would you not be able to generate another pad that will return a totally different, but quite possibly meaningful, result?
For example, if your plaintext was:
Mary had a little lamb.
A onetime pad could transform that into:
Xualgneehktfilawltbendn
For which we could generate a reverse pad that turns it into:
The rain isn't in Spain
You'd need two "keys" to whatever it was you were encrypting, and you'd have to spend some time to create a second plaintext of the exact same length that was plausable but harmless. When you're done, if you have to, give out the second key (pad).
So you mean that if you take a IP packet stream and analyze the headers you can reconstruct the communications??? When did this madness start? What kind of voodoo magic are they using up there?
The kind that allows you to do that in real time, on a 10 Gbps stream of data, with multiple target filters.
Sort of like tcpdump, netsed and grep on a metric asston of steroids.
All else being equal, the bad guys win more often than the good guys because they are willing to cheat and use tactics that are out of bounds for the good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
I was modded as funny because MOST people recognized the quote from Office Space -- a very funny and geek-popular movie.
Twit.
Hey, Gary.
Conjugal visits? Mmmm. Not that I know of. Y'know, minimum-security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.
but the iMacs I have used have been silent. Dell's, not so much.
Then you are one of the few.
I have two friends who purchased iMacs for music/video production and one of their constant problems when recording voiceovers was the iMac fans would kick on and they'd get a soft "whooosh" sound in their recording. Since the iMac was "all in one" they just couldn't stick CPU somewhere with long cables. One eventually returned it and got a PowerMac, the other just does all his production on a PC and uses the iMac for other purposes.
The initial iMacs had tons of heat problems and serious video interference from a poor midplane design. Check Google for details.
-Charles
Is it just me, or does it look like ever since Steve Ballmer took over the reigns Microsoft's business plan can be summed up as "Whatever Google/Apple is doing, we're gonna compete with that."?
-Charles
I agree. The same could be said for putting a trashcan icon on a GUI desktop designed to emulate an office work space. Mundane, obvious stuff like this shouldn't be patentable.
I believe that was copyright, not patent, though I could be wrong. Apple lost that suit, EXCEPT for the Trash Can. The judge let them keep the Trash Can icon so they would have a place to store the rest of their stupid lawsuit.
Because with God as their witness, no one else ever thought of a portable, digital music player. It is *SO* non-obvious that it takes a special kind of certified genius to come up with ideas like a scroll wheel, buttons, earphones, and -- wait for it -- a round front panel. I mean, it is like Apple was ripping off Einstein or Newton or something. How DARE they actually know how to market a product!
My guess is Steve Jobs will file a patent on a rectally inserted portable music player. Just to make sure the guys at Creative are aware of this, he'd be glad to demonstrate how it works on their entire legal dept over at Creative.
Did you ever play Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
C:>Quit
Are you sure you want to quit? Y
Are you really sure you want to quit? Y
Are you really, really sure you want to quit? Y
Are you really, really, really sure you want to quit? Y
ad infinitum
You have to sign an NDA to get the documents. So you would be violating the NDA to redistribute them.
You are wrong. I just filled out their form and got immediate access to the spec sheets, no NDA required. The form asked if I had an existing NDA and I said "no". It didn't complain. I was automatically e-mailed a password which gave me immediate access to the 7956 Security Accelerator data sheet, no questions asked.
The data sheet itself is copyright and does say you can't redistribute without permission. It also contains a US Export notice and claims to be HiFn Confidential. I've already sent in an e-mail asking for permission, so we'll see where that goes.
The form was basically name, address, phone number and do you want to be notified when they update docs.
Get a damn P.O. Box and disposable cell phone if you are really bothered.
There ARE clauses on the document that are worrisome, so Theo HAS a valid argument but I believe a lot of this stems from boilerplate text which HiFn executives haven't read in years. Theo obviously HAS read it and is raising an appropriate fuss.
And you can view samples of what it generates here.
I think the bigger issue is this has no chance of catching any actual terrorists or criminals or anyone the NSA might have legitimate reason to be snooping on. When will they figure out that TERRORISTS ARE NOT STUPID?
:-)
There are LOTS of stupid criminals and terrorists. There are entire websites dedicated to this sort of thing. Plenty of stuff on YouTube, Google Video and the like of people documenting their own criminal stupidity. Hell, I just saw one the other day where some teenage morons videotaped themselves doing drive-by shootings with paintball guns. The video ends with them doing a drive-by of a Sheriff's car.
Taking blogs into account, it wouldn't surprise me if there were MORE stupid than not-stupid people on the net.
-Charles
I know that when we order servers from Dell they are ordered w/o operating systems as we install Debian. We order about 15 a month, not a lot but here is the point: when we order and choose the operating system, there are two "no operating system" options -- No OS Microsoft Windows and No OS Red Hat Linux. It defaults to No OS Microsoft Windows and I know our admin person doing the auditing never changes it.
I would not be surprised to learn that the server sales are higher than they think.
-Charles
But one elderly villager sitting outside her house had another kind of force in mind.
"I thought the Americans had got here," she said, laughing.
Good freaking God! I thought it was just an exaggeration that America is being blamed for everything and anything negative under the sun. Yes, she said it laughingly but she DID think it. WTF is wrong with some people that they honestly believe the U.S. has nothing better to do -- not to mention the extra resources -- to fuck with a little podunk village out in the middle of nowhere Russia?
Get a grip people.
Not true. More votes were cast -- but many people voted multiple times in the American Idol final.
Ah, I forgot about this. I wonder what the unique statistics are.
[2] where 'couple' = thousands.
Not enough to matter. We're talking raw totals here, not per district stats so "thousands" doesn't mean much in the context of tens of millions. It is still close enough to be pathetic.
How is it that Apple is able to get away with allowing easy generation of PDFs via OS X's printing utilities, but Microsoft can't? Did Apple pony up Adobe's danegelt? Or are they too small for Adobe to care?
Repeat after me. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, Apple is not. The rules are different for a monopoly.
The concept of "harmonization" has been used to justify lengthening copyright terms around the globe. If a major area has a longer term, it is easier to convince everyone to bump up to that than have the term lowered. Governments almost never give back power or revenue willingly.
In this case, Europe was used as a trial balloon by the U.S. While the data retention laws were discussed and debated in Europe, the U.S. policy makers publically commented about the dangers of this sort of thing and how it could lead to a totalitarian "big brother" mentality. All the while they were telling people in the U.S. how much of a breach of privacy this is and how it will never happen here, the back-channels to Europe were doing nothing but supporting the push for mandatory retention and gauging the reaction -- and attention levels -- of the peoples.
Once the E.U. backdoor hammered thru a mandatory data retention law, the U.S. changed its tune. Newly appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and staff started talking up data retention in the U.S. and pointing to Europe as leading the way. We are now well down this path. For those of you hoping to stall for two more years until there is a change in administration (aka "regeime change"), don't get your hopes up because the Democrats are just as bad. They'll still fuck you over but will be telling you how much they love you and how it is for your own good. (The Republicans just leave out the "but we love you" part. It is still for your own good.)
While Europeans love to preach to Americans about how much more privacy aware they are, and how they have Constitutional guarantees and strong laws protecting their privacy and data use, they miss a fundamental difference.
In Europe, the concept of privacy doesn't include the government. Yes, they have strong laws dictating how data is used, kept, stored and brokered so as to prevent misuse by third parties, individuals and corporations. But, they have no real protections about government access and use to all that data. All in the name of paternalistic government, enacted thru "anti-terror", "anti-drug" and "immigration control" laws the gov'ts of Europe have no privacy when it comes to bureaucratic eyes.
In the U.S. the concept of privacy really means just you. It is *your* data and *your* information and privacy means ONLY YOU get to determine where it goes and how it is used. The government is NOT (in theory) given a free pass or exemption to use, store or broker your data. For the longest time the U.S. Social Security numbers had printed on the issued cards "not to be used as I.D." so great was the fear of a "national I.D.". Of course, this is offset by most American's apathy towards anything to do with government. As long as they can afford their beers, pay the bills and watch their idiot box most of them will be complacent about damn near anything that doesn't interfere with any of that.
Don't believe me? How about his for a statistic: more people voted in the last American Idol episode of that television show than did in the last Presidential Election.
Not to mention that the pole is NORTH and Africa/S America are moving away from each other EAST/WEST. Your estimates, either high or low, assume almost straight north/south movement.
If I lose /, I can just download a clean distro. If I lose /home, I'm screwed. /home is infinitely more important on a single-user system.
/home is a separate partition. And, of course, you have some skill with the system.
/home folder daily. I do back it up weekly to a DVD-R, but nightly? The process is too much of a PITA. *CRITICAL* files are backed up, but there is so much that isn't critical, I don't bother.
.deb or .rpm for the non-Slackware types) and back THAT up to a CD-R on a regular basis. Then, I can do a reinstall -- skipping /home if possible -- from clean distro disks in maybe 20 minutes. Follow that up with a quick "upgradepkg /mnt/cdrom/updates/*.tgz" and I'm right back to where I was before disaster struck.
/etc and user configs in ~. The #1 complaint I had from people restoring Windows from scratch was that they had to waste so much time going back and tweaking the configs on all the software they use. Very, very time consuming.
Actually, a complete reinstall on a Linux system is so trivial it doesn't matter -- as long as
I don't, nor do I known anyone that does, back up their
What I found was easy was to create a folder for all the updates I have installed (.tgz in my case, but
I haven't played with it on Slackware, but on Fedora/Red Hat and their derivatives you could create a kickstart disk after your initial install to automate the reinstall. No need to choose timezones, package sets or anything. Very handy.
I would like to point out that this is so damned easy because Linux DOES NOT USE A REGISTRY like Windows, instead saves global configs in
-Charles
'd have no problem with this if it were treated as property. Subject to property tax. Squat on a thousand domains worth a thousand bucks each? (potentially) Pay property tax on $1,000,000. Probably around $5,000 a year, depending.
Taxed by who? Taxes are levied by governments and property tax is on tangible items that have defined boundries. Exactly which gov't agency do you propose levy a property tax on domains?
Keep in mind, there is no such animal as a multi-national taxing agency that is recognized in the U.S. Even taxes in the E.U. are handled by member States and not the over-arching organization.
There are also several examples of items that are not subject to either real or tangible personal property taxes.
-Charles
It's very simple really.
All domains are worth precisely $12. No more, no less.
If someone has registered a domain, and is offering to sell it to you for more than that, they're nothing but leeching parasites, or as the PC like to call them, "cyber-squatters".
Don't feed the parasites.
Bullshit. There is such a thing as supply and demand. Domain names have features such as being easy to remember, have connotations to other items, being short, etc. This is why something like gmail.com is much more valueable than MyCantRememberTheNameForEmailButThisMightBeIt.com or asdf1324la8h_asdlkjuq7.com.
A domain name is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, no more and no less.
You might want to review some economic theories postulated after the 17th Century. What you're espousing is called the "natural price" in Pre-Classical Thought.
Motorola Surfboard cable modems, for one. There are several others. It is a "security" measure so your super-vulnerable Windows PC isn't open to evil hackers late at night. You punch the button when you leave for any length of time and it suspends the connection.
Halo 2 is a peer-2-peer game, where one of the people playing is the "host". It varies as to who gets to be the host, but the point is there is no dedicated server other than the one doing authentication and charging your credit card.
I like how congress gets all up in arms claiming the executive branch violated the constitution by searching a congressional office. I didn't see most of them raising a fuss when they found out that Americans were being wiretapped without warrants or collecting a database of every phone call. Now that there offices can be searched by the FBI they are scared and will have to find a new place to hide their skeletons.
That isn't the point. See what happens if you send a Congressional Subpoena over to the White House, or try and send the FBI to serve a search warrant there. The President, Vice President or staffers would (and HAVE) scream "Executive Privilege" in a heartbeat.
This is really a case of "what is good for the goose is good for the gander".
Want bugs fixed faster? Quit bitching and start testing.
/.
.tar.gz or .zip of an executable. THAT they can test.
Typical I-have-no-life-but-my-project response.
Here is the typical "test" from a user perspective.
1. Website has dire warnings about stable vs unstable, so user gets stable version.
2. User finds bug and reports it. Often they provide no useful information other than "feature X doesn't work".
3. Odd are, user just e-mailed someone which means this now needs to be entered into development bugtracking system, like bugzilla. User is pointed to bugzilla and/or proper bug reporting method.
4a. If the user is worth a damn, they will attempt to report it properly.
4b. Other users bitch about FOSS software quality and leave to flame on
5. User spends days trying to figure out the proper way to report a bug via bugzilla. Here is a tip to developers -- Bugzilla is NOT USER FRIENDLY AT ALL if you are not a developer. It sucks like a Dyson. If you're a developer, KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING and use it daily, it is great. If not, it is a bitch.
6. User offers to test, gets development version.
7. User finds out that all the real action is in CVS/Subversion and spends the next 6 weeks trying to figure that mess out.
8. User finally gets CVS source, takes the next few days trying to understand the code.
9. By the time user understands the code enough to make a change, someone else has changed something and they have to resync. Loop to 8 at infinitum.
Moral of the story? Testers are NOT developers. If you want quality TEST people then never EVER send them to Bugzilla and never EVER give them CVS/Subversion. Give them a SIMPLE form to fill out for reporting bugs that can then be parsed by someone who knows Bugzilla or your bug reporting system.
Don't assume testers have a development toolchain. Don't expect them to use CVS or compile/link anything. Give them a
If you're moving so fast in development that this is unreasonable, then don't be asking for non-development testers.
Since a one-time pad is totally random, each potential key is equally possible. Would you not be able to generate another pad that will return a totally different, but quite possibly meaningful, result?
For example, if your plaintext was:
Mary had a little lamb.
A onetime pad could transform that into:
Xualgneehktfilawltbendn
For which we could generate a reverse pad that turns it into:
The rain isn't in Spain
You'd need two "keys" to whatever it was you were encrypting, and you'd have to spend some time to create a second plaintext of the exact same length that was plausable but harmless. When you're done, if you have to, give out the second key (pad).
So you mean that if you take a IP packet stream and analyze the headers you can reconstruct the communications??? When did this madness start? What kind of voodoo magic are they using up there?
The kind that allows you to do that in real time, on a 10 Gbps stream of data, with multiple target filters.
Sort of like tcpdump, netsed and grep on a metric asston of steroids.
All else being equal, the bad guys win more often than the good guys because they are willing to cheat and use tactics that are out of bounds for the good guys.