Last year I DJ'd for the CanSecWest dinner party, and I was kinda amused to see that a lot of the people who were at the conference were ex-blackhats anyway. A good number of them had criminal records and were now raking in hella money working on the legit side (a shitload more than they made during their blackhat careers). I even met a couple of them at a 2600 meeting once.
Hackers are hackers, regardless of which side of the legal coin they fall on. The exploits used are known to anybody with the resources to find them. In fact, last year nobody took home the Linux box not because they couldn't find any exploits, but because there was so much more effort and time involved in breaking the linux systems that everybody just went for the OSX or Windows machines. Versions of this contest probably exist in the blackhat world, but are a lot less publicized because they don't have industry heavyweights like Cisco or Microsoft sponsoring it.
When you watch gymnastics, and after the competitor does their routine, you hear a bunch of numbers being rattled off like "5.1, 5.4, 5.3, 5.3, 4.0" (fucking Russian judge). Those are the numbers backing up the results, so people can discern for themselves who came in first, second and third. This does not exist in the article, you're basically just taking their word for it.
It also keeps the reader from performing their own benchmarks and comparing their results with those of the article, meaning that this article really can't be looked at in any scrutiny, meaning that the conclusions that they make are about as reliable as the theory of Intelligent Design (that is to say, sure they're possible, but there's no way that we can verify that - hence why ID isn't considered a science).
Telus is about as bad as Telco's get in Canada. The only way to talk to somebody that will get ANYTHING of consequence done for you is by threatening to leave. They suffer frequent brownouts, and the real unfortunate fact of the matter is that they're the only company that really offers nationwide Fiber service. And they don't even really offer that, in fact they just offer it for the areas that they provide telephone to and outsource the rest of the country to other vendors. Makes dealing with them from an IT side can be a real pain, ESPECIALLY if it's in an area handled by a third-party vendor, because then you NEVER can actually speak directly with the technicians working on the issue.
Their ADSL service is even more horrid. Brownouts are even more frequent, and you get network lag at least once an hour. Plus, their enterprise ADSL service (the one they give SO/HOs) still clocks in at speeds below the very base CONSUMER-LEVEL cable speeds that you can get through Shaw.
They hook people into them with shiny promo packages (Get your first year free / get a free ipod / get a free COMPUTER) but then once you're locked into their contract they forget all about you, the consumer.
I'm with Rogers (well, Fido) for my phone and Shaw for my internet. While I've had occasional issue with both, I haven't even had a tenth of the issues from both of them combined that I had when I was a Telus customer.
Seems to me it's following their original corporate strategy: To make all things depicted in Snow Crash come to life.
Well, they already made the CIC database (Google Search/Video/Books/etc.), Earth (they even took the name from it), now the Metaverse.
Something tells me though that Google might be able to succeed in that realm where Second Life failed, just because they would seem more willing to integrate it with stuff like Android to get people to build their own apps for it.
- How to bypass facial recognition scanners - In space, people are held prisoner by Jello. You'd be able to eat your way out, if only you didn't hate Lime. - How to beat anybody at Astro Chicken.
What would you prefer to live in, a country that taxes you for data in light of the unavoidable piracy that the internet brings
OR
a country that allows recording companies to sue their customers for substantially more per CD indiscriminately without attention to proper due process to extort money out of people who can't afford lawyers?
One seems the lesser of two evils. I'm happy with the one I'm given.
I don't see why I got modded as flamebait. The complaints are perfectly valid, and lo and behold I was right.
Not saying that there aren't other OS's that have these problems off the bat, but really Windows has historically been the worst, either with releases or with Service Pack upgrades.
Yeah, okay, retract your "ZEALOT!" claws for a second here and let's just look at their track record over the last four years:
- XP SP2 - for over a year after its release Microsoft had a free support line set up SPECIFICALLY to roll people back to SP1 because the upgrade broke just about everything. Most official support from Microsoft Products (Office, MSN, etc.) involved the following: Are you on SP2? If yes, go to SP2 support to roll back. If no, continue with troubleshooting.
- Vista - Backwards compatibility for applications and drivers broken, UAC interfering in various tasks and regardless of constantly selecting "Allow" you'd still get permission problems, slow performance, original system specs apparently not good enough to run all features.
- Vista SP1 - broke the OS, more compatibility problems, slight performance upgrade but still will not run on lightly powered computers
Conclusions? Best one I can come up with is that Microsoft has no concept how to properly test their products. I'd honestly believe that their concept of alpha testing is "Does it compile?" and I think a lot of their testers are outsourced (this is a guess) offshore because it's cheaper, and this usually results in degraded quality as well as introducing barriers between the developers and those reporting the errors.
It works like this: If you have in-house testers, you may have one person in between testers and developers at most. It's a lot easier for a tester to speak directly to the developer and answer any questions that the developer might have. When dealing with outsourcing, usually the testers need to report the issues to somebody in-house (supervisor? senior?), who a lot of the time will then need to pass it on to their liason to the client. The liason will then speak to a liason from Microsoft who will then address it to the supervising programmer (or worse yet, the programming supervisor who then passes it to the supervising programmer), and finally it makes its way to the developers.
Then a developer looks at the broken English in the error report as well as all the spin and syllables added by the various managers, and has to go through the chain again to find out wtf the original tester is talking about.
Remember the game "Telephone?" Where everybody sits in a giant line, person on one end whispers something to the person next to them, who does likewise to the person on the other side, and so on and so forth until it gets to the end and the message sounds nothing like what it was originally. It's a lot like that.
This is a real problem in the tech world these days. Globalisation is making it so that left hands never know what right hands are doing because there's way too many layers of flappers between the people with the information and the people who need it. Information gets delayed, lost and misdirected much like airline luggage.
This actually boots directly into the image file that has the kernel installed to it and runs linux natively.
Grub already does this automagically - booting into Windows natively. But there is no option to install Windows as a separate partition within the filesystem (ie as an iso file) or to remove both the file and the boot option via package removal.
If Wubi get's out into the world as "the way to install Ubuntu" noob users will assume they need Windows to install a Linux distro..
Huh? This makes no sense. It's an option, not a requirement. Nowhere in the Ubuntu system recommendations does it say you need Windows... Why in God's name would anybody think that? Use of Wubi is a tool, not a requisite. Frankly if anyone is dumb enough to think that you NEED Windows to run Linux, they're probably Windows users anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the season that was produced for Comedy Central after FOX dropped them.
Given sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.
This is a classic
If a conglomorate offers you a six+ figure salary to do what you essentially do for fun, are you really going to say no?
Last year I DJ'd for the CanSecWest dinner party, and I was kinda amused to see that a lot of the people who were at the conference were ex-blackhats anyway. A good number of them had criminal records and were now raking in hella money working on the legit side (a shitload more than they made during their blackhat careers). I even met a couple of them at a 2600 meeting once.
Hackers are hackers, regardless of which side of the legal coin they fall on. The exploits used are known to anybody with the resources to find them. In fact, last year nobody took home the Linux box not because they couldn't find any exploits, but because there was so much more effort and time involved in breaking the linux systems that everybody just went for the OSX or Windows machines. Versions of this contest probably exist in the blackhat world, but are a lot less publicized because they don't have industry heavyweights like Cisco or Microsoft sponsoring it.
I probably have to reboot every month or two. Or have you forgotten of the concept of a kernel update?
Am I the only one who read that and understood he was worried about chafing?
There are also scores & times to back them up.
When you watch gymnastics, and after the competitor does their routine, you hear a bunch of numbers being rattled off like "5.1, 5.4, 5.3, 5.3, 4.0" (fucking Russian judge). Those are the numbers backing up the results, so people can discern for themselves who came in first, second and third. This does not exist in the article, you're basically just taking their word for it.
It also keeps the reader from performing their own benchmarks and comparing their results with those of the article, meaning that this article really can't be looked at in any scrutiny, meaning that the conclusions that they make are about as reliable as the theory of Intelligent Design (that is to say, sure they're possible, but there's no way that we can verify that - hence why ID isn't considered a science).
I love watching this one happen.
It's funny because no matter what, the only thing a physicist and a mathematician has ever been able to agree on is magic mushrooms.
"Right-wing" was linked to conservatism?
When did it start equating to military rule?
Telus is about as bad as Telco's get in Canada. The only way to talk to somebody that will get ANYTHING of consequence done for you is by threatening to leave. They suffer frequent brownouts, and the real unfortunate fact of the matter is that they're the only company that really offers nationwide Fiber service. And they don't even really offer that, in fact they just offer it for the areas that they provide telephone to and outsource the rest of the country to other vendors. Makes dealing with them from an IT side can be a real pain, ESPECIALLY if it's in an area handled by a third-party vendor, because then you NEVER can actually speak directly with the technicians working on the issue.
Their ADSL service is even more horrid. Brownouts are even more frequent, and you get network lag at least once an hour. Plus, their enterprise ADSL service (the one they give SO/HOs) still clocks in at speeds below the very base CONSUMER-LEVEL cable speeds that you can get through Shaw.
They hook people into them with shiny promo packages (Get your first year free / get a free ipod / get a free COMPUTER) but then once you're locked into their contract they forget all about you, the consumer.
I'm with Rogers (well, Fido) for my phone and Shaw for my internet. While I've had occasional issue with both, I haven't even had a tenth of the issues from both of them combined that I had when I was a Telus customer.
Seems to me it's following their original corporate strategy: To make all things depicted in Snow Crash come to life.
Well, they already made the CIC database (Google Search/Video/Books/etc.), Earth (they even took the name from it), now the Metaverse.
Something tells me though that Google might be able to succeed in that realm where Second Life failed, just because they would seem more willing to integrate it with stuff like Android to get people to build their own apps for it.
Things I learned from Space Quest:
- How to bypass facial recognition scanners
- In space, people are held prisoner by Jello. You'd be able to eat your way out, if only you didn't hate Lime.
- How to beat anybody at Astro Chicken.
Steal a picture of the CEO, photocopy, put it back, hold up in front of your face when trying to access the secret room and let it scan you.
God I wasted so many damn hours on that game.
The data tariff covers hard drives too, which I'm assuming is where you're downloading your p2p network fodder to.
What would you prefer to live in, a country that taxes you for data in light of the unavoidable piracy that the internet brings
OR
a country that allows recording companies to sue their customers for substantially more per CD indiscriminately without attention to proper due process to extort money out of people who can't afford lawyers?
One seems the lesser of two evils. I'm happy with the one I'm given.
Really I do
I don't see why I got modded as flamebait. The complaints are perfectly valid, and lo and behold I was right.
Not saying that there aren't other OS's that have these problems off the bat, but really Windows has historically been the worst, either with releases or with Service Pack upgrades.
Why? Because this is Microsoft.
Yeah, okay, retract your "ZEALOT!" claws for a second here and let's just look at their track record over the last four years:
- XP SP2 - for over a year after its release Microsoft had a free support line set up SPECIFICALLY to roll people back to SP1 because the upgrade broke just about everything. Most official support from Microsoft Products (Office, MSN, etc.) involved the following: Are you on SP2? If yes, go to SP2 support to roll back. If no, continue with troubleshooting.
- Vista - Backwards compatibility for applications and drivers broken, UAC interfering in various tasks and regardless of constantly selecting "Allow" you'd still get permission problems, slow performance, original system specs apparently not good enough to run all features.
- Vista SP1 - broke the OS, more compatibility problems, slight performance upgrade but still will not run on lightly powered computers
Conclusions? Best one I can come up with is that Microsoft has no concept how to properly test their products. I'd honestly believe that their concept of alpha testing is "Does it compile?" and I think a lot of their testers are outsourced (this is a guess) offshore because it's cheaper, and this usually results in degraded quality as well as introducing barriers between the developers and those reporting the errors.
It works like this: If you have in-house testers, you may have one person in between testers and developers at most. It's a lot easier for a tester to speak directly to the developer and answer any questions that the developer might have. When dealing with outsourcing, usually the testers need to report the issues to somebody in-house (supervisor? senior?), who a lot of the time will then need to pass it on to their liason to the client. The liason will then speak to a liason from Microsoft who will then address it to the supervising programmer (or worse yet, the programming supervisor who then passes it to the supervising programmer), and finally it makes its way to the developers.
Then a developer looks at the broken English in the error report as well as all the spin and syllables added by the various managers, and has to go through the chain again to find out wtf the original tester is talking about.
Remember the game "Telephone?" Where everybody sits in a giant line, person on one end whispers something to the person next to them, who does likewise to the person on the other side, and so on and so forth until it gets to the end and the message sounds nothing like what it was originally. It's a lot like that.
This is a real problem in the tech world these days. Globalisation is making it so that left hands never know what right hands are doing because there's way too many layers of flappers between the people with the information and the people who need it. Information gets delayed, lost and misdirected much like airline luggage.
This actually boots directly into the image file that has the kernel installed to it and runs linux natively.
Grub already does this automagically - booting into Windows natively. But there is no option to install Windows as a separate partition within the filesystem (ie as an iso file) or to remove both the file and the boot option via package removal.
If Wubi get's out into the world as "the way to install Ubuntu" noob users will assume they need Windows to install a Linux distro..
Huh? This makes no sense. It's an option, not a requirement. Nowhere in the Ubuntu system recommendations does it say you need Windows... Why in God's name would anybody think that? Use of Wubi is a tool, not a requisite. Frankly if anyone is dumb enough to think that you NEED Windows to run Linux, they're probably Windows users anyways.
You don't use notepad to browse in Windows do you?
Klondike is hardly the only solitaire card game, and once it becomes multiplayer it, by definition, ceases to be a solitaire game.
I used to play two-player Klondike a bunch IRL, but we never called it solitaire.
Which was a direct competition to Google's entire revenue model, AdSense.
I love how Microsoft never improves anything, they just add syllables.
Lying in an official police statement is the same as lying under oath. Basically you're obstructing justice by lying, therefore perjury.
Finally, they've developed a robot that can do what Aquaman does, only MORE useless.
You'd better hurry, the raptors are breaking through the doors....