installing Linux - need to understand partitioning, drives and obscure notations - specifically hd (IDE disk) vs sd (originally SCSI, but now also SATA disks). Dual or triple boot requires even more knowledge (like knowing to install Windows first).
Knowing to (or even how to) "install Windows first" is hardly the fault of Linux. Anyway all the bits about understanding partitioning, drives and even obscure notations apply to Windows installs. IME Windows is more likely to require user input at random points midway through an install. Many Linux installers gather all the required information at the start.
obscure program names - xmms means/does what? Compare to Windows Media Player or iTunes - at least I have a clue what they may do.
In what language is it obvious that "Excel" means "spreadsheet"; "PowerPoint" means "presentations" as opposed to "electrical socket"; "Access" means "database" or that "Outlook" has anything to do with email?
And I said that Ubuntu could do it.
And that most Linux distributions can. For free (as in beer).
But feel free to claim that a company with BILLIONS of dollars and hundreds of programmers at their disposal MAY NOT be able to duplicate that feat.
If anything the task should be easier with Windows. Since Windows is entirely the product of one entity. Ubuntu is a collection of software written by hundreds (possibly thousands) of people. Many of whom have no connection with "Ubuntu" at all. Far from being subcontractors of Ubuntu some of the developers may work for "rivals", such as Novell, IBM, Redhat, etc.
The whole point of the article is that they are replacing dives of unknown source and capabilities with encryptes drives which self-wipe on to many access failures.
The supplier of the devices claims that this will happen. There have been similar devices where any protection could be trivially defeated. There's also the issue of how long it would take for the device to "self-wipe" since it would need to carry an onboard power source which would last at least that long.
The reason the state is issuing these new fancy-schmancy thumb drives is that the new ones (claim to) have 256-bit AES encryption and (claim to) self-destruct after 10 consecutive wrong passwords.
In which case they really should verify that this actually is the case before buying more than a sample. This is a business which sells quite a bit of "snake oil". It's also important to remember that any security system is only as secure as it's weakest component.
The/. submission focusses on the confiscated drives being destroyed, which in TFA is a minor note at the end of the article. It appears that the state has to choose between paying someone to wipe all those drives or "destroying" them by some as yet undefined but presumably secure method and of the two, destruction would presumably be the most reliable.
There are a couple of issues the first is can you trust a contractor not to copy any data before they erase the drives? The second is what does it actually take to be sure that data cannot be recovered?
They are "personal" drives as opposed to "enterprise" drives in the sense that the state issued drive has additional features not available to the regular Staples consumer.
If these additional features actually make the drive any more secure is likely to be another matter.
What does the underlying security model have anything to do with idiots running Windows as administrator? No really, what? Please enlighten us. Do you have any idea about the Windows security model or you are just repeating the same old internet cliché "OMGZ WINDOZE IS NOT SECURE!!!1111oneoneeleventyone!!!!"?
The irony is that Windows does actually have good (though complex) underlying security model. The only obvious thing it appears to lack is an easy way to fool an application (not even always an old one) into thinking it is running as a privileged user when it isn't.
Spam affects the little guy. Torrents affect (apparently) the big guy.
It's probably truer to say that spam affects everyone and causes verifiable losses. Where as torrents only affect a few "people" with it being very difficult to verify if there is any consequential loss. The latter being, at least in part, due to the entertainments industry using all sorts of creative accounting to avoid paying the actual creative people.
If a piece of software needs admin privileges for no obvious reason will have lost me (and all the PCs I control) as a customer, at least until they fix their act.
This may be possible in a small business. However in an enterprise environment it's quite likely that software will be bought and paid for prior to anyone even finding this out...
"software that refuses to run without local admin privileges" = An admin who is too lazy to look up the file and registry permissions required to run the (shoddy) software and would rather put the network at risk than do real work.
Or it turns out that not only will the supplier provide no help in identifying these but they will also refuse to support it unless it's run as an admin user. (The concept of "run as" being as beyond their knowlage as changing file/registry key permissions.)
Before all the "parent your kid" crowd chimes in... Realize that many municipalities in the USA have ordnances against PUBLIC cursing in front of women or children.
Whilst lacking the expected opposition from feminists... (Or at least the opostion you'd expect were feminist groups being honest about their position on sexism.)
i want a c-chip and for commercials to have a special broadcast flag of their own. that way, i can program the C-Chip in my teevee to automatically blank the screen when a commercial comes on.
How about a rating for commercials which increments by one on every showing and divides by the number of hours since the last showing? Once beyond a certain number an automatic complaint is sent to the broadcaster. (With the viewer seeing an "overplayed ad" placeholder.)
All shows have a rating. Problem is, most electronic guides (in the set tob box) either don't show it, don't show it consistently, or some dumbass who keyed in the data got it wrong.
Or the information is entered correctly, but is itself "wrong" or somehow misleading. To assume that a handful of classifications (made by anonymous strangers) can be very meaningful is, IMHO, very foolish.
As a parent, I generally agree with you. The problem I have is being able to tell what's going to be aired in what show. For myself, I don't care about most requirements. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll (now replaced with swearing) are no big deal - it's not going to change my behaviour one way or the other. But I have stricter guidelines for my children, and how I want them to develop. If the shows have no rating/warning, or don't follow the rating, I'm either not letting my kids watch, or getting pissed when the rating is ignored.
In which case the only sensible thing you can do is record and view yourself before deciding if you childen should watch. No body else can know what your guidelines actually are. Relying on some vague "rating" is going to mean that your children both watch things you do not want them to watch and don't watch things you might have had no issue with. The likes of movie classifications tend to have few or no objective standards. Even factors such as what raters think of the film maker or plot can end up being a major factor.
I share your sense that the values that are being enforced are silly, that obscene language is a ridiculous thing to get upset about.
But I don't share the belief that it is inappropriate to actually regulate air broadcast media. Broadcast frequency spectrum is a limited, and yet very public, resource. It is not like cable or other direct-to-viewer media. Without some kind of regulation, it would become unusable, the equivalent of those ungoverned campus bulletin boards in which every flier you post is covered up by another within minutes.
If a university were to want to prevent this happening if wouldn't make much sense for them to be carrying out such micro-regulation as looking at parts of fonts and chemical analysis of the paper. In the same way that making sure the broadcast spectrum is usable shouldn't require any examination of individual words or single video frames. It would make far more sense to look at a broadcaster's output over a period of days or weeks and ask questions like "Is this news channel actually broadcasting news? Is this live sports channel actually broadcasting live sports?".
The United States Congress was originally structured in such a way that the lawmakers would serve their term of office (a civic responsibility, much like jury duty)
Interestingly the classical Atheneans used randomly selected juries (on a day to day basis) for many government functions.
and then return to their previous lives to live under the very laws they instituted. That very powerful negative feedback loop was opened (to our detriment) when the idea of "career politician" was born.
A career politican may have become disconnected from the "real world" long before he or she has done much legislating.
Now, I don't know enough about England's governmental structures to know if there were any similar controls that have also since lapsed into uselessness.
Whilst the details are different career politicans appear to be a common problem in many parts of the world. It dosn't help that being a career politican is often seen as being a good thing. e.g. how many US presidential candidates in recent years have been anything else?
Honestly, my main worry is not that criminals or other external parties will misuse the information a government gathers, but that the government itself will misuse that information.
There need not even be that much of a distinction. Not only do governments invariably contain criminals they can have all sorts of strange relationships with various entities (not just other governments.) It might well be only an academic distinction between government and a supposedly independent contractor.
It was only today I read someone seriously wondering why people would complain about the police keeping a register of DNA samples and fingerprints of all citizens - their express point of view was that if it helps catch criminals, anything goes.
Of course if they really understood what they were saying they'd realise that the "if" actually needs to be backed up with some hard evidence. Note that there are three possible outcomes, it can help, it can make no difference or it can hinder.
However, politicians have done much, much worse, kept their positions, and in some cases even been re-elected. (For crying out loud, the Valerie Plame incident could easily be construed as treason)
Rather "high treason".The concept behind high crimes is that government officials not only have the ability to do more damage than the average member of the public they are also more likely to have the ability to impede any a criminal investigation.
Do we want a President/Governor who steals candy from convenience stores? No. However, if he's doing an apt job of managing foreign affairs and the economy, it might do considerably less damage to ignore it, and turn your head the other way.
Assuming he or she is not in taking bribes from foreign governments, big business or organised crime.
People in power really don't have as much to hide.
I'm not convinced this is the case, especially anywhere which has "celebrity status" attached to politicans. Let alone that this group of people often appears to have a higher than average proportion of crooks, liers and hypocrits.
I think there is a very simple solution to the SPAM problem. Migrate the email platform to one that uses micropayments. Each person can set a price for delivery into their inbox. For example, I can decide that to send me a message costs 10 cents. Now every time someone sends me an email, they are charged 10 cents (after a confirmation of course) and I earn 10 cents. You could decide to set a higher price or a lower one. But the point is that people have to pay you to send you email, or it simply doesn't arrive in your inbox.
The problem with this is that you need to first set up a planet wide system for such a micropayments system. It had also better cope with large companies shuffling their email servers according tom the currency markets. Then you have the problem of what happens when the spammers start using the accounts from compromised machines or even set up throw away accounts then just don't pay the bills. (Which have probably been sent to a park bench, telephone kiosk, derelict building, someone who is going to be elsewhere for 6 weeks, etc. ) A similar idea would be to have the sending machine perform some computational task, such as encrypting the email with a specific public key. Again this tends not to have the desired effect if a spammer has hacked into someone else's machine.
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The trick is to find out the hardware ID
A Knoppix or SystemRescue disk can be very useful here.
installing Linux - need to understand partitioning, drives and obscure notations - specifically hd (IDE disk) vs sd (originally SCSI, but now also SATA disks). Dual or triple boot requires even more knowledge (like knowing to install Windows first).
Knowing to (or even how to) "install Windows first" is hardly the fault of Linux. Anyway all the bits about understanding partitioning, drives and even obscure notations apply to Windows installs. IME Windows is more likely to require user input at random points midway through an install. Many Linux installers gather all the required information at the start.
obscure program names - xmms means/does what? Compare to Windows Media Player or iTunes - at least I have a clue what they may do.
In what language is it obvious that "Excel" means "spreadsheet"; "PowerPoint" means "presentations" as opposed to "electrical socket"; "Access" means "database" or that "Outlook" has anything to do with email?
And I said that Ubuntu could do it.
And that most Linux distributions can. For free (as in beer).
But feel free to claim that a company with BILLIONS of dollars and hundreds of programmers at their disposal MAY NOT be able to duplicate that feat.
If anything the task should be easier with Windows. Since Windows is entirely the product of one entity. Ubuntu is a collection of software written by hundreds (possibly thousands) of people. Many of whom have no connection with "Ubuntu" at all. Far from being subcontractors of Ubuntu some of the developers may work for "rivals", such as Novell, IBM, Redhat, etc.
This is about getting PATCHES in place. Not whether you have an unsupported CD-ROM and, therefore, you will not be allowed to apply the OTHER patches.
Or maybe Microsoft are trying to claim that Vista is "The least modular version of Windows yet".
The whole point of the article is that they are replacing dives of unknown source and capabilities with encryptes drives which self-wipe on to many access failures.
The supplier of the devices claims that this will happen. There have been similar devices where any protection could be trivially defeated. There's also the issue of how long it would take for the device to "self-wipe" since it would need to carry an onboard power source which would last at least that long.
The reason the state is issuing these new fancy-schmancy thumb drives is that the new ones (claim to) have 256-bit AES encryption and (claim to) self-destruct after 10 consecutive wrong passwords.
In which case they really should verify that this actually is the case before buying more than a sample. This is a business which sells quite a bit of "snake oil". It's also important to remember that any security system is only as secure as it's weakest component.
The /. submission focusses on the confiscated drives being destroyed, which in TFA is a minor note at the end of the article. It appears that the state has to choose between paying someone to wipe all those drives or "destroying" them by some as yet undefined but presumably secure method and of the two, destruction would presumably be the most reliable.
There are a couple of issues the first is can you trust a contractor not to copy any data before they erase the drives? The second is what does it actually take to be sure that data cannot be recovered?
They are "personal" drives as opposed to "enterprise" drives in the sense that the state issued drive has additional features not available to the regular Staples consumer.
If these additional features actually make the drive any more secure is likely to be another matter.
What does the underlying security model have anything to do with idiots running Windows as administrator? No really, what? Please enlighten us. Do you have any idea about the Windows security model or you are just repeating the same old internet cliché "OMGZ WINDOZE IS NOT SECURE!!!1111oneoneeleventyone!!!!"?
The irony is that Windows does actually have good (though complex) underlying security model. The only obvious thing it appears to lack is an easy way to fool an application (not even always an old one) into thinking it is running as a privileged user when it isn't.
Spam affects the little guy. Torrents affect (apparently) the big guy.
It's probably truer to say that spam affects everyone and causes verifiable losses. Where as torrents only affect a few "people" with it being very difficult to verify if there is any consequential loss. The latter being, at least in part, due to the entertainments industry using all sorts of creative accounting to avoid paying the actual creative people.
Why can't they focus thier efforts and resources on shaping traffic to block this kind of nonsense, rather than Torrents?
Or even sending law enforcement after them. Freezing bank accounts, etc.
If a piece of software needs admin privileges for no obvious reason will have lost me (and all the PCs I control) as a customer, at least until they fix their act.
This may be possible in a small business. However in an enterprise environment it's quite likely that software will be bought and paid for prior to anyone even finding this out...
"software that refuses to run without local admin privileges" = An admin who is too lazy to look up the file and registry permissions required to run the (shoddy) software and would rather put the network at risk than do real work.
Or it turns out that not only will the supplier provide no help in identifying these but they will also refuse to support it unless it's run as an admin user. (The concept of "run as" being as beyond their knowlage as changing file/registry key permissions.)
As for a supposed right to not be offended in a public place, there's just no such animal.
Which is just as well otherwise the first people to claim such "rights" would be bigots.
Before all the "parent your kid" crowd chimes in... Realize that many municipalities in the USA have ordnances against PUBLIC cursing in front of women or children.
Whilst lacking the expected opposition from feminists... (Or at least the opostion you'd expect were feminist groups being honest about their position on sexism.)
i want a c-chip and for commercials to have a special broadcast flag of their own. that way, i can program the C-Chip in my teevee to automatically blank the screen when a commercial comes on.
How about a rating for commercials which increments by one on every showing and divides by the number of hours since the last showing? Once beyond a certain number an automatic complaint is sent to the broadcaster. (With the viewer seeing an "overplayed ad" placeholder.)
All shows have a rating. Problem is, most electronic guides (in the set tob box) either don't show it, don't show it consistently, or some dumbass who keyed in the data got it wrong.
Or the information is entered correctly, but is itself "wrong" or somehow misleading. To assume that a handful of classifications (made by anonymous strangers) can be very meaningful is, IMHO, very foolish.
As a parent, I generally agree with you. The problem I have is being able to tell what's going to be aired in what show. For myself, I don't care about most requirements. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll (now replaced with swearing) are no big deal - it's not going to change my behaviour one way or the other. But I have stricter guidelines for my children, and how I want them to develop. If the shows have no rating/warning, or don't follow the rating, I'm either not letting my kids watch, or getting pissed when the rating is ignored.
In which case the only sensible thing you can do is record and view yourself before deciding if you childen should watch. No body else can know what your guidelines actually are. Relying on some vague "rating" is going to mean that your children both watch things you do not want them to watch and don't watch things you might have had no issue with. The likes of movie classifications tend to have few or no objective standards. Even factors such as what raters think of the film maker or plot can end up being a major factor.
I share your sense that the values that are being enforced are silly, that obscene language is a ridiculous thing to get upset about.
But I don't share the belief that it is inappropriate to actually regulate air broadcast media. Broadcast frequency spectrum is a limited, and yet very public, resource. It is not like cable or other direct-to-viewer media. Without some kind of regulation, it would become unusable, the equivalent of those ungoverned campus bulletin boards in which every flier you post is covered up by another within minutes.
If a university were to want to prevent this happening if wouldn't make much sense for them to be carrying out such micro-regulation as looking at parts of fonts and chemical analysis of the paper.
In the same way that making sure the broadcast spectrum is usable shouldn't require any examination of individual words or single video frames. It would make far more sense to look at a broadcaster's output over a period of days or weeks and ask questions like "Is this news channel actually broadcasting news? Is this live sports channel actually broadcasting live sports?".
The United States Congress was originally structured in such a way that the lawmakers would serve their term of office (a civic responsibility, much like jury duty)
Interestingly the classical Atheneans used randomly selected juries (on a day to day basis) for many government functions.
and then return to their previous lives to live under the very laws they instituted. That very powerful negative feedback loop was opened (to our detriment) when the idea of "career politician" was born.
A career politican may have become disconnected from the "real world" long before he or she has done much legislating.
Now, I don't know enough about England's governmental structures to know if there were any similar controls that have also since lapsed into uselessness.
Whilst the details are different career politicans appear to be a common problem in many parts of the world. It dosn't help that being a career politican is often seen as being a good thing. e.g. how many US presidential candidates in recent years have been anything else?
Honestly, my main worry is not that criminals or other external parties will misuse the information a government gathers, but that the government itself will misuse that information.
There need not even be that much of a distinction. Not only do governments invariably contain criminals they can have all sorts of strange relationships with various entities (not just other governments.) It might well be only an academic distinction between government and a supposedly independent contractor.
It was only today I read someone seriously wondering why people would complain about the police keeping a register of DNA samples and fingerprints of all citizens - their express point of view was that if it helps catch criminals, anything goes.
Of course if they really understood what they were saying they'd realise that the "if" actually needs to be backed up with some hard evidence. Note that there are three possible outcomes, it can help, it can make no difference or it can hinder.
However, politicians have done much, much worse, kept their positions, and in some cases even been re-elected. (For crying out loud, the Valerie Plame incident could easily be construed as treason)
Rather "high treason".The concept behind high crimes is that government officials not only have the ability to do more damage than the average member of the public they are also more likely to have the ability to impede any a criminal investigation.
Do we want a President/Governor who steals candy from convenience stores? No. However, if he's doing an apt job of managing foreign affairs and the economy, it might do considerably less damage to ignore it, and turn your head the other way.
Assuming he or she is not in taking bribes from foreign governments, big business or organised crime.
People in power really don't have as much to hide.
I'm not convinced this is the case, especially anywhere which has "celebrity status" attached to politicans. Let alone that this group of people often appears to have a higher than average proportion of crooks, liers and hypocrits.
When governments go bad, good people have everything to hide.
Maybe all current MP, all candidates standing as MP, all serving police officers and anyone applying to the police should be put in the database.
I think there is a very simple solution to the SPAM problem. Migrate the email platform to one that uses micropayments. Each person can set a price for delivery into their inbox. For example, I can decide that to send me a message costs 10 cents. Now every time someone sends me an email, they are charged 10 cents (after a confirmation of course) and I earn 10 cents. You could decide to set a higher price or a lower one. But the point is that people have to pay you to send you email, or it simply doesn't arrive in your inbox.
The problem with this is that you need to first set up a planet wide system for such a micropayments system. It had also better cope with large companies shuffling their email servers according tom the currency markets. Then you have the problem of what happens when the spammers start using the accounts from compromised machines or even set up throw away accounts then just don't pay the bills. (Which have probably been sent to a park bench, telephone kiosk, derelict building, someone who is going to be elsewhere for 6 weeks, etc. )
A similar idea would be to have the sending machine perform some computational task, such as encrypting the email with a specific public key. Again this tends not to have the desired effect if a spammer has hacked into someone else's machine.