What does that have to do with anything? Remember, all property rights are artificial; [...]
Whoa there, no they're not. Physical property rights are based on the very non-artificial principle of "might makes right". As you proceed to note:
[...] that you own your car or house is merely a matter of social compact and your personal ability to defend them from intruders.
"Property rights" are just the government exercising might on your behalf so you don't need to yourself.
Re:It took a long time for this to appear in /.
on
Chefs As Chemists
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· Score: 1
How many of us can say that a certain meal, a sequence of flavor combinations, caused a full-blown epiphany, a mystical experience?
Nowhere near as many as can say they've had the same experience kneeling beside their bed talking to an invisible man...
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit...
on
Chefs As Chemists
·
· Score: 1
It is a peculiar thing that we think it's OK to eat animals.
No, it's not. It's completely and utterly natural. Indeed, given there are some requirements of a healthy diet that are difficult to find in nature other than in meat, it is *not* easting meat that would be classified as "peculiar".
When you really, really get down to it, there's little more inhumane than the breeding of animals for the sole purpose of their later slaughter.
There are many more inhumane things. For example, pretty much any other "use" of animals (clothing, labour, entertainment, comfort, sport) would easily class as more inhumane, because in general it's not providing essential aspects of survival. Not that I personally consider any of these things inherently "inhumane", but on the scale of things humans do to animals[0], eating them is pretty far down the list - not least because it's the same thing other animals do to animals.
Also, there was libel in one portion - I relayed on the fact several people call one of the teachers a pedophile (In the opinion of many people, he's the creepy teacher.. A lot of my female friends have told me tales of him 'perving' on them on free dress days).
No-one "perving" on 16/17/18 year old girls is a paedophile. Creepy, maybe - but even that's dependent on how "hot" said girls think he is.
I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything.
It's bigger than that. Thanks to helicopter parents and widespread litigation, the cottonwool generation are damn near incapable of risk assessment or taking responsibility for their own actions. After all, what do they have to worry about when their parents will bail them out of any trouble and anything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault ?
their blade design is not fully redundant and bigger than the competition while using up more energy. i have no idea why anybody would consider dell blade systems!
Because they cost about half as much. If physical space and a multitude of expandability options are not the highest priorities, that's pretty important.
We have an IBM Blade Centre and a Dell Blade Centre. I dearly wish we'd never bought the IBM one, because it delivers no advantages (to us) over the Dell one, the blades cost about twice as much (for equivalent configurations) and aren't as configuration (eg: want 32G of RAM in your IBM blade ? Sorry, you have to buy an "extended memory" blade that only has a single hard disk - no local RAID for you). For that sort of cost advantage, I can live with slightly more rack space used, especially since we've got plenty of it.
Correct - computers aren't advancing by leaps and bounds as they used to. 10 years ago, processor speed and capability doubled every year or 2. How many years now have we been stuck in the 3 to 4GHz speed?
Several. But now we're getting 2 and 4 CPU cores and much more efficient implementations at similar clockspeeds.
Rest assured that "computing power" is increasing just as fast as it ever was. Today, for the same price (if not less), we buy servers with 4x as many CPU cores and 4x as much RAM than a couple of years ago.
My thought exactly. And the reason behind it is that computers are no longer getting twice as fast every 1.5 years.
Yes, they are. The servers we buy today are easily twice as fast as the ones were were buying 18 months ago. The difference is (for most users) they're now (well, for probably 3 years now) well and truly "fast enough" so that the massive increase in raw power is reflected by a relatively small increase in perceived speed.
My DVR is not perceived as a "computer" because it does not have a keyboard or pointing device.
Your DVR is not perceived as a "computer" for the same reason your micrwave isn't - because it's a single-purpose appliance. The key aspect of a device people refer to as a "computer" is that it is a *general purpose* tool.
The issue here is not whether or not "computers" are going to go away, it's whether or not appliances are going to replace the general purpose PC.
The need to upgrade your PC every 2 years to keep up with the software is passed. The only exception today is Vista [...]
Rubbish. A Ghz-class machine with a gig of RAM (or two if you're a heavy user) and a reasonably modern video card will run Vista, with all the bells and whistles, quite usably.
With the exception of the video card - since Aero uses features that simply didn't exist until ~3 or so years ago (but today are in $30 cards) - that's a PC up to about 7 years old.
This whole "Vista has high hardware requirements" meme needs to die. It's simply false.
The real exception to "hardware is fast enough", is games.
No, it's not. Really. There are a whole suite of memory and CPU testers in both the open source world and in the commercial market. Power supplies are one of the *least* likely components to fail: memory is the most vulnerable, CPU's are second especially with cooling issues. The failure to use silver thermal compound on an expensive and not well-ventilated CPU, for example, is a great source of transient CPU failures where the CPU's never show flaws on the test bench, and the flaws under load are intermittent.
This sounds like a commentary from someone who deals mostly with DIY, or DIY-by-proxy (cheap whitebox vendors), hardware.
Bullshit. Remember 4.8 kbps modems which managed to transfer 4800 bps? What's the throughput of what's commonly referred to as Gigabit Ethernet, while we're on it? 1024 Mibps or more like 1'000'0 00'000 bps? What about an 1.5 Gbps SATA link?
Your examples do not contradict the point. Bits are not bytes.
I repeat, the usage of 2^X powers within the computing industry has been consistent and logical. The *only* ones who have created confusion are those with agendas.
Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.
Such terminology grossly misrepresents the scale of the "colloquial" usage of the SI prefixes to denote 2^X values, because it makes it sound like it's limited to the kind of people who work out the back in mom-and-pop computer stores fixing PCs, when in fact that usage has been widespread and common throughout the entire industry for 30+ years. Pretty much the *only* ones insisting on 10^x usage were hard disk manufacturers (starting from about the late 80s) and arseholes feeling the need to look superior (starting from a few seconds after the SI 2^x prefixes were formalised).
Hard drive manufacturers have always used the ISO specification for defining the capacity of hard drives.
No, they haven't. Their nomenclature changed around the late 80s/early 90s, roughly the same time as monitor manufacturers started marketing their screens based on the size of the tube, rather than the visible area, to make them look bigger.
People are being confused by two incompatible definitions. Is that not a reason to change?
People are only being confused because hard disk manufacturers changed how their drives were labelled in the late 80s/early 90s. Everyone else except them uses KB/MB/TB/etc in a consistent - if not SI-compliant - fashion.
Exactly the same thing happened - around the same time, interestingly enough - when monitor manufacturers started to market their monitors according to the tube size rather than the visible area.
From this, one might be inclined to draw the conclusion that a market's maturity is inversely related to the honesty of those selling to it.
That's a great idea, of course if you start doing that we might start acting like imperialists and conquer a few countries, instead of just defeating them and then turning them free (I'm looking at you Germany and Japan).
Mac OS X has no root user by default, and as a potential victim you need to type in an admin password in order to install the trojan.
OS X most certainly does have a root user, it's *interactive* logins by root that are disabled by default. Every time you type in your "admin password" or run 'sudo somecommand', those things are being run as the root user.
Yes they can. But they still depend upon a browser vulnerability in that scenario. Microsoft's decisions with IE (ActiveX, "integrating" it into the OS) means that the exploits are worse with IE than with, say, Firefox.
While the ActiveX part is debatable, IE being "integrated" doesn't make exploiting it inherently any more damaging than Firefox. There's nothing IE can do that Firefox can't (and in many cases it can't do as much, since in some configuration IE runs with decreased privileges by default).
If the infection rate is below the disinfection rate, the trojan dies "in the wild".
It dies when no machine still has it installed. This is an independent factor to "rates".
So far, this trojan has demonstrated that Mac's are extremely secure. The trojan is not spreading.
Market share has a massive impact on propogation rates. It cannot be dismissed out of hand.
After three months, both of the AV-free PCs were completely fine, and one of the machines that had the anti-virus was running a botnet spammer (the outgoing spam was being blocked by the firewall). The most amazing bit though, was that the fear of not having anti-virus protection had stopped users of those two machines from doing most of the non-viral bad stuff that average windows users do. There was no proliferation of toolbars, no weatherbug.... They didn't even have realPlayer
Why aren't they running as non-Admin users ? It's not a difficult thing to do with a managed environment.
Not that IT does not deserve it.
Any stupid, prudish, paranoid or sometimes outright insane request can become a policy item in a matter of minutes.
Example (happened to me). A new HR director comes in horrified wanting to talk to you how do you dare not having a content filter to stop inappropriate content from being viewed.
The usual IT professional goes and implements it straight away. [...]
It is not the job of the IT department to create or enforce (from the HR perspective of enforce) policy, merely to implement it. Ergo, it's not IT's fault if people either a) don't follow policies or b) don't know about them.
Depending on the environment, you might be able to get away with technical and/or budgetary and/or business arguments against various forms of filtering (this is certainly how we avoid blocking all but the most high-profile and blatant timewasters like facebook and myspace), but those are the _only_ avenues IT has. "Because people are reading Cosmo in the breakout room" (ie: use common fucking sense) is, tragically, not a line of reasoning that will be paid attention to.
I rarely respond to Cowards, much less those who start out as you did, but your post betrays such a serious misunderstanding - that someone who runs a server must RTFM in order to get it to work. Why does a server need a special somebody to tend to it, pamper it, water it every now and then? Why can't one just buy a server, switch it on and let it get on with doing what it is supposed to do?
Because IT infrastructure - due in no small part to the industry's immaturity (although that's far from the only reason) - is _complicated_ once you move outside of trivial environments involving a few dozen clients, a few servers and basic services like email and file/printer sharing.
Your question is akin to asking "why do I need to go and see $SPECIALIST_DOCTOR ? Why can't my GP just fix me up ?". Well, the answer depends on what's wrong with you, but if it's more than something relatively common and simple, a GP won't be much help.
I understand that IT departments have a vested interest in self-preservation, but truth be told, Apple demonstrates that IT doesn't have to be complicated and that, in particular, a server can be something that normal people can use.
No, Apple demonstrates that simple environments don't need complex management (tools or people) - but they're not doing anything special in that regard, as Microsoft have been doing the same thing for a decade, in particular with products like Small Business Server.
If you've got a network full of Macs, an Xserve is a good investment. For anything else, it's rarely a good choice - Windows will do a better job in a primarily Windows environment, and Linux *BSD offer much more flexibility and compatibility (and potentially much lower costs, depending on the requirements).
I said 'hackers', Any scheme like that WILL be hacked. Maybe I need to be more obvious.
Apple don't care about the 1% of the user base who have the patience and knowledge to "make it work", they care about 99% of people who will be happy to pay a bit of money so it "just works".
Slashdot Mirror
What does that have to do with anything? Remember, all property rights are artificial; [...]
Whoa there, no they're not. Physical property rights are based on the very non-artificial principle of "might makes right". As you proceed to note:
[...] that you own your car or house is merely a matter of social compact and your personal ability to defend them from intruders.
"Property rights" are just the government exercising might on your behalf so you don't need to yourself.
How many of us can say that a certain meal, a sequence of flavor combinations, caused a full-blown epiphany, a mystical experience?
Nowhere near as many as can say they've had the same experience kneeling beside their bed talking to an invisible man...
It is a peculiar thing that we think it's OK to eat animals.
No, it's not. It's completely and utterly natural. Indeed, given there are some requirements of a healthy diet that are difficult to find in nature other than in meat, it is *not* easting meat that would be classified as "peculiar".
When you really, really get down to it, there's little more inhumane than the breeding of animals for the sole purpose of their later slaughter.
There are many more inhumane things. For example, pretty much any other "use" of animals (clothing, labour, entertainment, comfort, sport) would easily class as more inhumane, because in general it's not providing essential aspects of survival. Not that I personally consider any of these things inherently "inhumane", but on the scale of things humans do to animals[0], eating them is pretty far down the list - not least because it's the same thing other animals do to animals.
[0] Yes, I know, "humans are animals, too".
Also, there was libel in one portion - I relayed on the fact several people call one of the teachers a pedophile (In the opinion of many people, he's the creepy teacher.. A lot of my female friends have told me tales of him 'perving' on them on free dress days).
No-one "perving" on 16/17/18 year old girls is a paedophile. Creepy, maybe - but even that's dependent on how "hot" said girls think he is.
I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything.
It's bigger than that. Thanks to helicopter parents and widespread litigation, the cottonwool generation are damn near incapable of risk assessment or taking responsibility for their own actions. After all, what do they have to worry about when their parents will bail them out of any trouble and anything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault ?
their blade design is not fully redundant and bigger than the competition while using up more energy. i have no idea why anybody would consider dell blade systems!
Because they cost about half as much. If physical space and a multitude of expandability options are not the highest priorities, that's pretty important.
We have an IBM Blade Centre and a Dell Blade Centre. I dearly wish we'd never bought the IBM one, because it delivers no advantages (to us) over the Dell one, the blades cost about twice as much (for equivalent configurations) and aren't as configuration (eg: want 32G of RAM in your IBM blade ? Sorry, you have to buy an "extended memory" blade that only has a single hard disk - no local RAID for you). For that sort of cost advantage, I can live with slightly more rack space used, especially since we've got plenty of it.
Correct - computers aren't advancing by leaps and bounds as they used to. 10 years ago, processor speed and capability doubled every year or 2. How many years now have we been stuck in the 3 to 4GHz speed?
Several. But now we're getting 2 and 4 CPU cores and much more efficient implementations at similar clockspeeds.
Rest assured that "computing power" is increasing just as fast as it ever was. Today, for the same price (if not less), we buy servers with 4x as many CPU cores and 4x as much RAM than a couple of years ago.
My thought exactly. And the reason behind it is that computers are no longer getting twice as fast every 1.5 years.
Yes, they are. The servers we buy today are easily twice as fast as the ones were were buying 18 months ago. The difference is (for most users) they're now (well, for probably 3 years now) well and truly "fast enough" so that the massive increase in raw power is reflected by a relatively small increase in perceived speed.
My DVR is not perceived as a "computer" because it does not have a keyboard or pointing device.
Your DVR is not perceived as a "computer" for the same reason your micrwave isn't - because it's a single-purpose appliance. The key aspect of a device people refer to as a "computer" is that it is a *general purpose* tool.
The issue here is not whether or not "computers" are going to go away, it's whether or not appliances are going to replace the general purpose PC.
The need to upgrade your PC every 2 years to keep up with the software is passed. The only exception today is Vista [...]
Rubbish. A Ghz-class machine with a gig of RAM (or two if you're a heavy user) and a reasonably modern video card will run Vista, with all the bells and whistles, quite usably.
With the exception of the video card - since Aero uses features that simply didn't exist until ~3 or so years ago (but today are in $30 cards) - that's a PC up to about 7 years old.
This whole "Vista has high hardware requirements" meme needs to die. It's simply false.
The real exception to "hardware is fast enough", is games.
No, it's not. Really. There are a whole suite of memory and CPU testers in both the open source world and in the commercial market. Power supplies are one of the *least* likely components to fail: memory is the most vulnerable, CPU's are second especially with cooling issues. The failure to use silver thermal compound on an expensive and not well-ventilated CPU, for example, is a great source of transient CPU failures where the CPU's never show flaws on the test bench, and the flaws under load are intermittent.
This sounds like a commentary from someone who deals mostly with DIY, or DIY-by-proxy (cheap whitebox vendors), hardware.
Bullshit. Remember 4.8 kbps modems which managed to transfer 4800 bps? What's the throughput of what's commonly referred to as Gigabit Ethernet, while we're on it? 1024 Mibps or more like 1'000'0 00'000 bps? What about an 1.5 Gbps SATA link?
Your examples do not contradict the point. Bits are not bytes.
I repeat, the usage of 2^X powers within the computing industry has been consistent and logical. The *only* ones who have created confusion are those with agendas.
Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.
Such terminology grossly misrepresents the scale of the "colloquial" usage of the SI prefixes to denote 2^X values, because it makes it sound like it's limited to the kind of people who work out the back in mom-and-pop computer stores fixing PCs, when in fact that usage has been widespread and common throughout the entire industry for 30+ years. Pretty much the *only* ones insisting on 10^x usage were hard disk manufacturers (starting from about the late 80s) and arseholes feeling the need to look superior (starting from a few seconds after the SI 2^x prefixes were formalised).
Hard drive manufacturers have always used the ISO specification for defining the capacity of hard drives.
No, they haven't. Their nomenclature changed around the late 80s/early 90s, roughly the same time as monitor manufacturers started marketing their screens based on the size of the tube, rather than the visible area, to make them look bigger.
People are being confused by two incompatible definitions. Is that not a reason to change?
People are only being confused because hard disk manufacturers changed how their drives were labelled in the late 80s/early 90s. Everyone else except them uses KB/MB/TB/etc in a consistent - if not SI-compliant - fashion.
Exactly the same thing happened - around the same time, interestingly enough - when monitor manufacturers started to market their monitors according to the tube size rather than the visible area.
From this, one might be inclined to draw the conclusion that a market's maturity is inversely related to the honesty of those selling to it.
Iraq was/is a disaster, but we are working with the international community to find acceptable solutions to the problems with Iran and North Korea.
"Ok, guys, we're going to work as a team - doing it my way."
That's a great idea, of course if you start doing that we might start acting like imperialists and conquer a few countries, instead of just defeating them and then turning them free (I'm looking at you Germany and Japan).
Hey, no-one said you were any good at it :).
Mac OS X has no root user by default, and as a potential victim you need to type in an admin password in order to install the trojan.
OS X most certainly does have a root user, it's *interactive* logins by root that are disabled by default. Every time you type in your "admin password" or run 'sudo somecommand', those things are being run as the root user.
Yes they can. But they still depend upon a browser vulnerability in that scenario. Microsoft's decisions with IE (ActiveX, "integrating" it into the OS) means that the exploits are worse with IE than with, say, Firefox.
While the ActiveX part is debatable, IE being "integrated" doesn't make exploiting it inherently any more damaging than Firefox. There's nothing IE can do that Firefox can't (and in many cases it can't do as much, since in some configuration IE runs with decreased privileges by default).
If the infection rate is below the disinfection rate, the trojan dies "in the wild".
It dies when no machine still has it installed. This is an independent factor to "rates".
So far, this trojan has demonstrated that Mac's are extremely secure. The trojan is not spreading.
Market share has a massive impact on propogation rates. It cannot be dismissed out of hand.
You can still install a lot of things as a regular user.
Regular users don't have write privileges to system directories.
Unless you've got them in the "Power Users" group...
After three months, both of the AV-free PCs were completely fine, and one of the machines that had the anti-virus was running a botnet spammer (the outgoing spam was being blocked by the firewall). The most amazing bit though, was that the fear of not having anti-virus protection had stopped users of those two machines from doing most of the non-viral bad stuff that average windows users do. There was no proliferation of toolbars, no weatherbug.... They didn't even have realPlayer
Why aren't they running as non-Admin users ? It's not a difficult thing to do with a managed environment.
Not that IT does not deserve it.
Any stupid, prudish, paranoid or sometimes outright insane request can become a policy item in a matter of minutes.
Example (happened to me). A new HR director comes in horrified wanting to talk to you how do you dare not having a content filter to stop inappropriate content from being viewed.
The usual IT professional goes and implements it straight away. [...]
It is not the job of the IT department to create or enforce (from the HR perspective of enforce) policy, merely to implement it. Ergo, it's not IT's fault if people either a) don't follow policies or b) don't know about them.
Depending on the environment, you might be able to get away with technical and/or budgetary and/or business arguments against various forms of filtering (this is certainly how we avoid blocking all but the most high-profile and blatant timewasters like facebook and myspace), but those are the _only_ avenues IT has. "Because people are reading Cosmo in the breakout room" (ie: use common fucking sense) is, tragically, not a line of reasoning that will be paid attention to.
I rarely respond to Cowards, much less those who start out as you did, but your post betrays such a serious misunderstanding - that someone who runs a server must RTFM in order to get it to work. Why does a server need a special somebody to tend to it, pamper it, water it every now and then? Why can't one just buy a server, switch it on and let it get on with doing what it is supposed to do?
Because IT infrastructure - due in no small part to the industry's immaturity (although that's far from the only reason) - is _complicated_ once you move outside of trivial environments involving a few dozen clients, a few servers and basic services like email and file/printer sharing.
Your question is akin to asking "why do I need to go and see $SPECIALIST_DOCTOR ? Why can't my GP just fix me up ?". Well, the answer depends on what's wrong with you, but if it's more than something relatively common and simple, a GP won't be much help.
I understand that IT departments have a vested interest in self-preservation, but truth be told, Apple demonstrates that IT doesn't have to be complicated and that, in particular, a server can be something that normal people can use.
No, Apple demonstrates that simple environments don't need complex management (tools or people) - but they're not doing anything special in that regard, as Microsoft have been doing the same thing for a decade, in particular with products like Small Business Server.
If you've got a network full of Macs, an Xserve is a good investment. For anything else, it's rarely a good choice - Windows will do a better job in a primarily Windows environment, and Linux *BSD offer much more flexibility and compatibility (and potentially much lower costs, depending on the requirements).
Seriously, what does an apple server offer over linux? Are there any advantages?
Same thing a Windows server does. Ease of use and better integration, *especially* if you have a network full of Macs.
I said 'hackers', Any scheme like that WILL be hacked. Maybe I need to be more obvious.
Apple don't care about the 1% of the user base who have the patience and knowledge to "make it work", they care about 99% of people who will be happy to pay a bit of money so it "just works".