UAC? It was necessary. Could it have been implemented better? Not really.
Actually, it could have been implemented better quite easily, if Microsoft was willing to learn from people who have already solved the problem.
In principle, UAC isn't that much different from sudo -- so why is sudo effectively painless, while UAC has people screaming in frustration?
Well, lets see. With sudo, you do 'sudo ls', it asks for your password, and then it runs ls. You do 'sudo ls' again, and it doesn't ask for your password.
With UAC, you do something that needs authentication, it asks for your password. You immediately repeat the process... it asks for your password.
I think we've identified both the problem and the solution.
Except that means I have to _leave my house_, deal with traffic (I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, though luckily I rarely have to deal with 635 anymore), find a store that _has_ the game (which admittedly is much easier these days, since most of the chains let you check online), stand in line, deal with a salesclerk who may or may not be competent, and then deal with traffic _again_ coming home.
Or I can start downloading while I'm doing other things, and not deal with any of that hassle. Let me think....
That said, however, I'm still shocked that no one has quoted Tannenbaum's[1] "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". It would seem to be required for this discussion.
[1] Note that Tannenbaum may not actually have been the originator of the quote.
I work in a state courthouse. Here, Windows is set up force new passwords every so often and of ridiculous complexity (numbers + letters + symbols + sanskrit, or something of that nature). So what we have is a situation where 50% of the computers here have little post-it on them with the user's passwords. It does far more harm than good.
There's a fix for that, one that more than one company I've worked for used. The security staff would check cubes at random for passwords, confidential material that wasn't locked up, etc. The first time they found something like that, they left a little note on your desk detailing the violation, with a pointer to the security policies.
I assume that the second or third times management was involved, but I never heard of anyone reaching that point.
I worked for a very large company which rolled out encryption for every laptop over a short period (Less than six months, I think, but it's been a while). I don't know what the encryption software used was, but I didn't notice any slowdown when starting applications.
As for system startup, it took 10-20 minutes anyway, thanks to everything that got fired up on boot; if the encryption added more time to that, it wasn't enough to notice.
What happens when somebody loses their password or keyfile? Or you get an subpoena for a laptop or usb key's content?
There are these things you may have heard of, once or twice, but probably don't use based on your comment.
They're called 'backups'. You know, the things you use if somebody drops the laptop while the disk is in use and the heads remove the surface of the platters, or the drive decides it just doesn't want to spin up anymore, or any number of situations.
I didn't switch to Merb primarily for technical reasons; I switched to Merb because I got tired of being insulted whenever I asked for help on #rubyonrails (my very first experience there was being told to go back to Perl if I didn't understand Ruby (note, not if I didn't _like_ Ruby, if I didn't understand it), and my last was being told to 'drop the gimme gimme gimme attitude' when complaining about something that wasn't documented -- _AND OFFERING TO PROVIDE A DOCUMENTATION PATCH IF SOMEONE WOULD HELP ME UNDERSTAND IT_).
By contrast, both the Merb IRC channels and mailing list have been nothing but helpful. I'm afraid that will change when the two communities merge.
I've _got_ a laptop with a keypad (Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7829), and the keypad is a mistake, because it means the keyboard is off-center from the screen -- the centerline of the keyboard is ~1/3 of the way in from the left.
When I bought it, I thought that the keypad was really nice, but after having used it for a couple of weeks, I think I'd much rather have a larger, centered keyboard rather than the keypad.
Forget the RAM X 2 rule. Capacity of drives are way up, base RAM load is way up. Drive transfer speed isn't up very much. Doesn't really matter how much ram you have, long before you get a Gig of swap utilized the system is going to be trashing to the point of being unusable under any but lab conditions.
Its not like they out and out tried to crash the internet or steal all our credit card numbers.
Actually, that's _exactly_ what they did. For a site which shows up at the _bottom_ of a google search page, they went from a small fraction of people clicking their link (maybe 1/10?) to _every single person_ doing so, at least if they had AVG installed. So, depending on the percentage of people who search for that term who have AVG, your bandwidth usage could go up by a factor of ten -- and this doesn't apply just to one link on the page, but to every link.
This was a bad idea, and anyone who actually thought about it would have realized that. By definition, AVG with linkscanner is _NOT_ a 'fine product', it's a DDOS generator.
Because the access to the pictures is _not_ evenly distributed. Worse, it's also not consistent.
Now, the question is, is it evenly distributed _enough_, or consistent _enough_. My guess is that it is, at best, _barely_ so, to the point that each backend system needs to be able to handle 2-3 times what the peak would be if it was evenly distributed; that's just a WAG, though. Hopefully the presentation answers that question.
No, actually, I haven't, and when I looked for commercially available options for using LEDs for lighting in my house (I live in Texas -- every watt of heat produced by a light bulb is a watt of heat I have to remove from my house with prejudice), I couldn't find anything that was workable, much less feasible from a cost basis.
Admittedly, it's been a couple of years; have things changed?
You're completely and utterly wrong. Copyright on letters remains with the writer, and the recipient does not have the right to reproduce them (see any number of court cases involving letters from celebrities).
Luckily, I don't think we have to worry much about that last one. I'm pretty sure that wasting a good single-malt on a teetotaler is illegal pretty much anywhere you'd actually try a single-malt from. I mean, it probably isn't in Utah, but... would you buy a single-malt made in Utah?
1) KISS principle -- Keept It Simple, Stupid. You don't need to make every friggin' thing customizable and you don't want to overwhelm your users with a multitude of options. WRONG! Wrong, wrong, wrongity WRONG.
Yes, you do need to make every friggin' thing customizable. Hide it behind an 'advanced options' button if you must, or put it in a config file, but make it customizable.
You don't know what I'd like best -- I'll guarantee that, because the things that make an interface usable for me make it unusable for others.
I dropped Gnome when Gnome removed all the config options I used to use. No, they don't know what I want better than I do, and neither do you.
"I understand that these guys have biceps bigger than my thighs but they also have massive fat filled bellies. Muscles are nice but they are not a magic bullet to prevent heart disease if you are carrying a barrel sized belly."
That sounds to _me_ remarkably like the problem is the fat, not the BMI.
Is it? After you take out the deaths caused by damage from the sport, both immediate (eg, broken necks) and delayed (eg, cumulative brain damage from repeated concussions)?
I have a hard time believing that any difference in life expectancy isn't _far_ more related to the damage done to their body rather than their BMI. You also, of course, have to account for the damage done by illegal steroid use....
It is my considered opinion that any doctor who promotes the use of the BMI should have their medical license suspended while their fitness to practice medicine is investigated.
Unless you really believe that I, as a sedentary system administrator, weighing 196 pounds at 5'11 and having a BMI of 27.3, am really more healthy than D'Anthony Batiste (Offensive Guard for the Dallas Cowboys, 6'5, 318 pounds, BMI 38.7) or D'Qwell Jackson (Linebacker for the Cleveland Browns, 6'1, 231 pounds, BMI 30.5).
Think about it a second.
Me: lazy-ass, sedentary programmer. Them: professional football players.
MS Word asian girlfriend is actually nouveau riche white trash with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery, but she's already done the entire city and she's got a collection of diseases that would make the CDC jealous.
Guns a positive factor in the tragedy
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
I think it was a *very* good thing that the kids had guns available to them. They were *already* using explosives -- do you *really* think that they would have just not bothered if they hadn't had guns? I very seriously doubt it. I strongly suspect that had they lacked guns, *none* of the people in the school would have survived -- because they would have simply blown the entire place up. You can run and hide from someone with a gun. You can't hide from an explosion. Especially if you don't know it's coming.
>Gun control is the first step in getting these >weapons off the streets.
Won't work. How hard is it for even children to get ahold of drugs?
>All this nonsense of having a gun to protect >one's self is foolish. Owning a gun doesn't >protect anyone. Actually, most gun owners who >attempt to protect themselves with a gun increase >their own chances of being shot and also increase >the danger to their families. Why? Because most >gun owners find, in the moment when they most >need to, that pulling a trigger is a very >difficult thing to do.
Got a cite for that? Lots of people *do* protect themselves, and in even more cases the mere presence of a weapon causes the would-be robbers to flee.
>We have to work to combat the culture of violence >and to help people understand the pain of a >bullet wound. Hollywood, video games, the NRA, >and a host of other forces work hard to blot out >the pain of violence. So far they are winning. We >are buying into the culture of violence with >millions of dollars and finding our streets more >and more littered with the bodies of the victims.
Nope. There is an obvious and undeniable link to the violence in our society: the War on (some) Drugs. And it's bee worse than this. Take a look at Prohibition -- in some places the police had machine guns mounted on their cars -- because they needed them. People will kill for money. This is a given. When killing someone will get them a few dollars, it's unlikely, but some people will do it. When it will get them several tens of thousands of dollars....a lot more people will do it.
Slashdot Mirror
UAC? It was necessary. Could it have been implemented better? Not really.
Actually, it could have been implemented better quite easily, if Microsoft was willing to learn from people who have already solved the problem.
In principle, UAC isn't that much different from sudo -- so why is sudo effectively painless, while UAC has people screaming in frustration?
Well, lets see. With sudo, you do 'sudo ls', it asks for your password, and then it runs ls. You do 'sudo ls' again, and it doesn't ask for your password.
With UAC, you do something that needs authentication, it asks for your password. You immediately repeat the process... it asks for your password.
I think we've identified both the problem and the solution.
Except that means I have to _leave my house_, deal with traffic (I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, though luckily I rarely have to deal with 635 anymore), find a store that _has_ the game (which admittedly is much easier these days, since most of the chains let you check online), stand in line, deal with a salesclerk who may or may not be competent, and then deal with traffic _again_ coming home.
Or I can start downloading while I'm doing other things, and not deal with any of that hassle. Let me think....
That said, however, I'm still shocked that no one has quoted Tannenbaum's[1] "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". It would seem to be required for this discussion.
[1] Note that Tannenbaum may not actually have been the originator of the quote.
I work in a state courthouse. Here, Windows is set up force new passwords every so often and of ridiculous complexity (numbers + letters + symbols + sanskrit, or something of that nature). So what we have is a situation where 50% of the computers here have little post-it on them with the user's passwords. It does far more harm than good.
There's a fix for that, one that more than one company I've worked for used. The security staff would check cubes at random for passwords, confidential material that wasn't locked up, etc. The first time they found something like that, they left a little note on your desk detailing the violation, with a pointer to the security policies.
I assume that the second or third times management was involved, but I never heard of anyone reaching that point.
I worked for a very large company which rolled out encryption for every laptop over a short period (Less than six months, I think, but it's been a while). I don't know what the encryption software used was, but I didn't notice any slowdown when starting applications.
As for system startup, it took 10-20 minutes anyway, thanks to everything that got fired up on boot; if the encryption added more time to that, it wasn't enough to notice.
TrueCrypt in an enterprise? Hahaha!
What happens when somebody loses their password or keyfile? Or you get an subpoena for a laptop or usb key's content?
There are these things you may have heard of, once or twice, but probably don't use based on your comment.
They're called 'backups'. You know, the things you use if somebody drops the laptop while the disk is in use and the heads remove the surface of the platters, or the drive decides it just doesn't want to spin up anymore, or any number of situations.
I didn't switch to Merb primarily for technical reasons; I switched to Merb because I got tired of being insulted whenever I asked for help on #rubyonrails (my very first experience there was being told to go back to Perl if I didn't understand Ruby (note, not if I didn't _like_ Ruby, if I didn't understand it), and my last was being told to 'drop the gimme gimme gimme attitude' when complaining about something that wasn't documented -- _AND OFFERING TO PROVIDE A DOCUMENTATION PATCH IF SOMEONE WOULD HELP ME UNDERSTAND IT_).
By contrast, both the Merb IRC channels and mailing list have been nothing but helpful. I'm afraid that will change when the two communities merge.
I've _got_ a laptop with a keypad (Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7829), and the keypad is a mistake, because it means the keyboard is off-center from the screen -- the centerline of the keyboard is ~1/3 of the way in from the left.
When I bought it, I thought that the keypad was really nice, but after having used it for a couple of weeks, I think I'd much rather have a larger, centered keyboard rather than the keypad.
No, I've got ~700M used. According to the OP, my system should be thrashing....
Forget the RAM X 2 rule. Capacity of drives are way up, base RAM load is way up. Drive transfer speed isn't up very much. Doesn't really matter how much ram you have, long before you get a Gig of swap utilized the system is going to be trashing to the point of being unusable under any but lab conditions.
Really?
dstar@pele:/home/public/dls% free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 902908 873320 29588 0 187536 149356
-/+ buffers/cache: 536428 366480
Swap: 2931820 675860 2255960
And my system is nice and snappy. Any other wild claims you'd like to make?
That's why Dell went under years ago, before they'd ever even really gotten started.
Its not like they out and out tried to crash the internet or steal all our credit card numbers.
Actually, that's _exactly_ what they did. For a site which shows up at the _bottom_ of a google search page, they went from a small fraction of people clicking their link (maybe 1/10?) to _every single person_ doing so, at least if they had AVG installed. So, depending on the percentage of people who search for that term who have AVG, your bandwidth usage could go up by a factor of ten -- and this doesn't apply just to one link on the page, but to every link.
This was a bad idea, and anyone who actually thought about it would have realized that. By definition, AVG with linkscanner is _NOT_ a 'fine product', it's a DDOS generator.
Because the access to the pictures is _not_ evenly distributed. Worse, it's also not consistent.
Now, the question is, is it evenly distributed _enough_, or consistent _enough_. My guess is that it is, at best, _barely_ so, to the point that each backend system needs to be able to handle 2-3 times what the peak would be if it was evenly distributed; that's just a WAG, though. Hopefully the presentation answers that question.
I don't suppose there's a transcript of this anywhere, is there? That + slides would be infinitely more useful....
No, actually, I haven't, and when I looked for commercially available options for using LEDs for lighting in my house (I live in Texas -- every watt of heat produced by a light bulb is a watt of heat I have to remove from my house with prejudice), I couldn't find anything that was workable, much less feasible from a cost basis.
Admittedly, it's been a couple of years; have things changed?
Does this take into account the fact that LEDs are extremely directional?
Okay.
You're completely and utterly wrong. Copyright on letters remains with the writer, and the recipient does not have the right to reproduce them (see any number of court cases involving letters from celebrities).
Luckily, I don't think we have to worry much about that last one. I'm pretty sure that wasting a good single-malt on a teetotaler is illegal pretty much anywhere you'd actually try a single-malt from. I mean, it probably isn't in Utah, but... would you buy a single-malt made in Utah?
Have you actually looked at the Start->Programs menu on Vista?
If you think that's good design, you're an idiot.
Yes, you do need to make every friggin' thing customizable. Hide it behind an 'advanced options' button if you must, or put it in a config file, but make it customizable.
You don't know what I'd like best -- I'll guarantee that, because the things that make an interface usable for me make it unusable for others.
I dropped Gnome when Gnome removed all the config options I used to use. No, they don't know what I want better than I do, and neither do you.
"I understand that these guys have biceps bigger than my thighs but they also have massive fat filled bellies. Muscles are nice but they are not a magic bullet to prevent heart disease if you are carrying a barrel sized belly."
That sounds to _me_ remarkably like the problem is the fat, not the BMI.
Is it? After you take out the deaths caused by damage from the sport, both immediate (eg, broken necks) and delayed (eg, cumulative brain damage from repeated concussions)?
I have a hard time believing that any difference in life expectancy isn't _far_ more related to the damage done to their body rather than their BMI. You also, of course, have to account for the damage done by illegal steroid use....
It is my considered opinion that any doctor who promotes the use of the BMI should have their medical license suspended while their fitness to practice medicine is investigated.
Unless you really believe that I, as a sedentary system administrator, weighing 196 pounds at 5'11 and having a BMI of 27.3, am really more healthy than D'Anthony Batiste (Offensive Guard for the Dallas Cowboys, 6'5, 318 pounds, BMI 38.7) or D'Qwell Jackson (Linebacker for the Cleveland Browns, 6'1, 231 pounds, BMI 30.5).
Think about it a second.
Me: lazy-ass, sedentary programmer. Them: professional football players.
Who do you _really_ think is in better shape?
MS Word asian girlfriend is actually nouveau riche white trash with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery, but she's already done the entire city and she's got a collection of diseases that would make the CDC jealous.
I think it was a *very* good thing that the kids had guns available to them. They were *already* using explosives -- do you *really* think that they would have just not bothered if they hadn't had guns?
I very seriously doubt it. I strongly suspect that had they lacked guns, *none* of the people in the school would have survived -- because they would have simply blown the entire place up. You can run and hide from someone with a gun.
You can't hide from an explosion. Especially if you don't know it's coming.
Shalon Wood
>Gun control is the first step in getting these >weapons off the streets.
Won't work. How hard is it for even children to get ahold of drugs?
>All this nonsense of having a gun to protect >one's self is foolish. Owning a gun doesn't >protect anyone. Actually, most gun owners who >attempt to protect themselves with a gun increase >their own chances of being shot and also increase
>the danger to their families. Why? Because most >gun owners find, in the moment when they most >need to, that pulling a trigger is a very >difficult thing to do.
Got a cite for that? Lots of people *do* protect themselves, and in even more cases the mere presence of a weapon causes the would-be robbers to flee.
>We have to work to combat the culture of violence >and to help people understand the pain of a >bullet wound. Hollywood, video games, the NRA, >and a host of other forces work hard to blot out >the pain of violence. So far they are winning. We >are buying into the culture of violence with >millions of dollars and finding our streets more >and more littered with the bodies of the victims.
Nope. There is an obvious and undeniable link to the violence in our society: the War on (some) Drugs. And it's bee worse than this. Take a look at Prohibition -- in some places the police had machine guns mounted on their cars -- because they needed them.
People will kill for money. This is a given. When killing someone will get them a few dollars, it's unlikely, but some people will do it. When it will get them several tens of thousands of dollars....a lot more people will do it.
Shalon Wood