If the exploit is 30k and the time online is measured in minutes (rather than some smaller unit), then the difference between 28.8k dialup and a 500 meg fiber line is miniscule. The two systems will get pwned after about the same time connected (the difference is about two seconds).
The trick is that consumer NAT boxes open zero incoming ports by default. That's a signficant security increase for any unpatched Windows boxes involved (i.e. a fresh Windows XP sp1 is likely to survive the automatic updates to current security patches unhacked if behind a NAT, whereas unpached sp1 tends to get cracked in less than 10 minutes when connected directly to the internet in a broadband IP range)
There is enough evidence that exit polls provide accurate results that they are generally considered to be a valid audit resource. Due to their status as an election auditing standard, it should take more than a random hunch to discount their validity.
However, a third party providing such support is all but impossible with software. A retiree may be more than willing to support software he once worked on on a part time basis, but I imagine that would be all but impossible due to the lack of source code.
If you had chosen your software more carefully you wouldn't have this problem. Using source-unavailable software is a horrible liability.
The point of the new version is to be able to differentiate between different implementations of the feature set they are testing. The old version of futuremark tested most (all?) of the features of the Nvidia 6800s and ATI X800s - so this new version is for testing Nvidia 7800s and 8800s and ATI X1800s and X2800s.
This peice of software is designed to compare the high end graphics cards that will be released for the next two years. Testing today's junk low end graphics card (Up to and including the Nvidia 6800 series and the ATI X800 series) is well covered by the old version.
Right, but in computer jargon a "grammar" is a little more specific than that. It's a formal ly specified ruleset that can be used for validation. As far as I know, no-one's written a full validating english parser yet.
Yea, major defects would suck as expected. The only point I was trying to make is that perfection isn't nessisary. A couple of dead pixels are fine at 8+ megapixels.
It wouldn't need to be defect free at that resolution, as long as the defects were solitary stuck pixels. In fact, you could probably get away with one bad pixel per million as long as they didn't clump. If you want to be twitchy, make it 10 times better than that and no-one reasonable could complain for any application that didn't involve obnoxious zooming / cropping.
Do you really think you'd notice 3 evenly spaced dead pixels on a photo shot by a 3 megapixel camera?
Oil and natural gas are very limited resources. Our current best information indicates that we've already hit peak oil production(1). I'd bet that oil as an energy resource will become uneconomical within the next 20 - 50 years, and there's enough intertia that we'll use up those oil resources reguardless of envionmental initiatives.
On the other hand, we have shitloads of coal. While the oil issue will go away when we run out, coal will take a while longer. We'll use it up over the next few centuries, but every non-coal power plant we build now means that there's a better chance that when we do burn that coal it will be burned cleaner and more efficiently.
The thing that really sucks is that you can make gas out of coal - so, in the future, gas power plants will just be an environmental law hack to get around clean coal regulations.
Gmail is actually pretty good. I've only needed to manually mark 3 messages as spam since 1/1 - that's with a paid up spamcop account that pre-filters my email. For those of us who have had short email addresses for a long time, spam is a legitimate problem that actually takes effort to deal with.
Something like a good Greylisting + SpamAssassin setup is absolutely nessisary to keep a heavily spammed address alive.
Absolutely any technique to generate power will have environmental consequences. Wind power takes wind energy out of the atmosphere, which could cause climate change if used on a large scale. This proposal is about the same.
A very important point to remember is that we will use an increasing amount of energy for the forseable future and that energy will be generated somehow. Coal is the default power technology. Every time a wind / nuclear / tidal / etc power plant doesn't get built another coal plant is built instead. So the question isn't "Is there an environmental impact from this power source?" - we know that answer, there always is - the question is "Is this better than coal?".
If you new about "su", that puts you in the Linux power user category. Given that, you should have been able to figure this one out.
You tried "su" and it didn't work. The next step should have been trying to figure out how the system expected you to do it. The absolutely simplest and most obvious thing you could have done would be to check in the menus. If you had done that there are two things you would have quickly hit that would have solved your problem:
- Under System -> Administration there is a "Users and Groups" tool which you could have used to set your root password. Once you had a root password you could have used "su".
- Under Applications -> System Tools there is a "Run as different user" menu item. The next obvious step would be to run "gnome-terminal" as root.
So, you should have been able to figure it out without any documentation - just by messing with obvious menu items. But, you complained about the quality of the documentation. For Ubuntu, there are three primary sources for documentation / support: The Wiki, The Forums, and IRC. I tried all three, and I was able to immediately find this answer in each of the three places. It's not that Ubuntu has poor documentation - it's that you never checked it.
I get a theoretical ~225 gigs per dollar with my broadband connection. I don't actually manage to use all of it, but that's mid range american DSL line. If I had even Verizon FIOS, I'd manage to outdo 50gigs/dollar easy.
What's hard about installing the nvidia graphics drivers on Ubuntu?
1.) Open the package manager from the menu.
2.) Type in your password when prompted.
3.) Search for "nvidia".
4.) Select the package(s) you want.
5.) Hit the apply button.
6.) Wait for the stuff to install.
7.) Close the update thing.
8.) Reboot (or just restart X).
I'm really not seeing the "built by geeks" issue here. It looks like a normal, easy to use, GUI install.
When I just right clicked on my "Applications" menu under Gnome, it gave me an "edit menus" option - which opens the GUI menu editing tool. Stop complaining about issues from last century.
It's still hard to get whitebox laptops on the same time scale as Dell / HP laptops, but it's usually not impossible.
In the case of your specific requirements, the Sager NP9750 from Powernotebooks.com should be a good place to start. It's got everything that you want in your price range.
If you want one or four computers, a small computer store should be able to handle your demand. If you want more than that, you can afford to hire someone to build your computer from parts (or just do it yourself). Newegg (or at higher volume, a wholesaler) is cheaper than Dell - and in house support is more useful than Dell support.
If they wanted to they could eat these fines out of current cash reserves for 40 years. Given that business forcasts tend to be on a scale of years, and that elected governments cycle every five years or so, chances are that things will change before they run out of money at 2.4 million/day - and that's completely ignoring the fact that they have income.
The answer to all your questions is "Money".
The people trying to market stevia in the USA can't get enough money together to get it approved because they don't have patents on it (and thus won't be obscenely profitable) and the manufacturers of existing patented artifical sweeterners lobby against it because it would undercut their massive patent-supported fixed prices on artifical sweeteners.
Now, it's possible that there really is some hidden health hazard in stevia, but the fact that it's legal in japan makes that seem unlikely to me.
The work for a video game can be divided quite a bit. The issue is more that game programmers are used to programming for single CPU processors because 99.9% of computers and consoles had only a single processor - hopefully the XBox 360 & PS2 will change that.
Yes, but again another work around, seems like Linux is just one work around after another, where Windows just works.
It's not that Windows just works, but that you're used to the work arounds that Windows requires. Try zipping up a Windows install from the first IDE harddrive on one computer and unzipping it onto the second drive of another and getting it working again. When you do a new Windows install, how many reboots and driver installs are nessisary? Can you automate software installs, or do you need to click "next" a bunch of times? Have you ever tried to run two versions of Microsoft IIS on the same computer? Can you run a network where the users don't have admin rights, or do you constantly need to make exceptions for badly written programs?
If a given desktop machine isn't used for heavy video games or specific desktop software that licences for thousands of dollars a seat then it can be easily replaced with a Linux box. There are no real hardware or software problems in the vast majority of cases.
The retraining costs are overblown. For most office workers you can just switch them over with no more effort than upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Office would entail.
If a government website requires internet explorer, there's usually a work around (such as calling them). Even if your business requires that website, you can access it through a legacy interface machine running Windows.
It's true that some businesses have dug themselves into a "Microsoft Solutions" hole but right now is a perfect time to notice the issues with being locked in to a vendor and start working on fixing it. For a heavily locked in workplace, the benifits of switching to Linux may not be clear on a scale of months, but it's worth starting work on making it possible to switch later if it makes sense then. As soon as Microsoft stops selling the version of office you use and stops supporting the new version of office on the version of Windows you use you'll be happy you have another choice.
Re:Check out Rob Pike's thoughts on code commentin
on
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A function in C that can return an error condition is still a procedure. Consider it as being exactly equivilent to a procedure that throws an exception. Specifically, it's not returning a function result - it's using the value return mechanism to pass an error flag.
Unfortunately, there's no simple way to just make all periferals supported under Linux. It's impossible.
Fortunately, 99% of users can easily do what they need to do with the existing hardware support. Also fortunately, there's only a small window of users that frequently buy their own hardware but can't handle checking a hardware compatibility list.
The only devices that this issue actually comes up with frequently are printers, scanners, and digital cameras. Other devices either just work, or require enough technical expertise to install and use that there isn't an issue. Luckily, many of those devices work perfectly under Linux by default and there are easily available lists to check compatibility.
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If the exploit is 30k and the time online is measured in minutes (rather than some smaller unit), then the difference between 28.8k dialup and a 500 meg fiber line is miniscule. The two systems will get pwned after about the same time connected (the difference is about two seconds).
The trick is that consumer NAT boxes open zero incoming ports by default. That's a signficant security increase for any unpatched Windows boxes involved (i.e. a fresh Windows XP sp1 is likely to survive the automatic updates to current security patches unhacked if behind a NAT, whereas unpached sp1 tends to get cracked in less than 10 minutes when connected directly to the internet in a broadband IP range)
There is enough evidence that exit polls provide accurate results that they are generally considered to be a valid audit resource. Due to their status as an election auditing standard, it should take more than a random hunch to discount their validity.
If you had chosen your software more carefully you wouldn't have this problem. Using source-unavailable software is a horrible liability.
The point of the new version is to be able to differentiate between different implementations of the feature set they are testing. The old version of futuremark tested most (all?) of the features of the Nvidia 6800s and ATI X800s - so this new version is for testing Nvidia 7800s and 8800s and ATI X1800s and X2800s. This peice of software is designed to compare the high end graphics cards that will be released for the next two years. Testing today's junk low end graphics card (Up to and including the Nvidia 6800 series and the ATI X800 series) is well covered by the old version.
Right, but in computer jargon a "grammar" is a little more specific than that. It's a formal ly specified ruleset that can be used for validation. As far as I know, no-one's written a full validating english parser yet.
The current SOTA goatse link is:
http://members.on.nimp.org/?u=timecop
Yea, major defects would suck as expected. The only point I was trying to make is that perfection isn't nessisary. A couple of dead pixels are fine at 8+ megapixels.
Do you really think you'd notice 3 evenly spaced dead pixels on a photo shot by a 3 megapixel camera?
On the other hand, we have shitloads of coal. While the oil issue will go away when we run out, coal will take a while longer. We'll use it up over the next few centuries, but every non-coal power plant we build now means that there's a better chance that when we do burn that coal it will be burned cleaner and more efficiently.
The thing that really sucks is that you can make gas out of coal - so, in the future, gas power plants will just be an environmental law hack to get around clean coal regulations.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
Something like a good Greylisting + SpamAssassin setup is absolutely nessisary to keep a heavily spammed address alive.
A very important point to remember is that we will use an increasing amount of energy for the forseable future and that energy will be generated somehow. Coal is the default power technology. Every time a wind / nuclear / tidal / etc power plant doesn't get built another coal plant is built instead. So the question isn't "Is there an environmental impact from this power source?" - we know that answer, there always is - the question is "Is this better than coal?".
You tried "su" and it didn't work. The next step should have been trying to figure out how the system expected you to do it. The absolutely simplest and most obvious thing you could have done would be to check in the menus. If you had done that there are two things you would have quickly hit that would have solved your problem:
- Under System -> Administration there is a "Users and Groups" tool which you could have used to set your root password. Once you had a root password you could have used "su".
- Under Applications -> System Tools there is a "Run as different user" menu item. The next obvious step would be to run "gnome-terminal" as root.
So, you should have been able to figure it out without any documentation - just by messing with obvious menu items. But, you complained about the quality of the documentation. For Ubuntu, there are three primary sources for documentation / support: The Wiki, The Forums, and IRC. I tried all three, and I was able to immediately find this answer in each of the three places. It's not that Ubuntu has poor documentation - it's that you never checked it.
I get a theoretical ~225 gigs per dollar with my broadband connection. I don't actually manage to use all of it, but that's mid range american DSL line. If I had even Verizon FIOS, I'd manage to outdo 50gigs/dollar easy.
What's hard about installing the nvidia graphics drivers on Ubuntu?
1.) Open the package manager from the menu.
2.) Type in your password when prompted.
3.) Search for "nvidia".
4.) Select the package(s) you want.
5.) Hit the apply button.
6.) Wait for the stuff to install.
7.) Close the update thing.
8.) Reboot (or just restart X).
I'm really not seeing the "built by geeks" issue here. It looks like a normal, easy to use, GUI install.
When I just right clicked on my "Applications" menu under Gnome, it gave me an "edit menus" option - which opens the GUI menu editing tool. Stop complaining about issues from last century.
In the case of your specific requirements, the Sager NP9750 from Powernotebooks.com should be a good place to start. It's got everything that you want in your price range.
If you want one or four computers, a small computer store should be able to handle your demand. If you want more than that, you can afford to hire someone to build your computer from parts (or just do it yourself). Newegg (or at higher volume, a wholesaler) is cheaper than Dell - and in house support is more useful than Dell support.
If they wanted to they could eat these fines out of current cash reserves for 40 years. Given that business forcasts tend to be on a scale of years, and that elected governments cycle every five years or so, chances are that things will change before they run out of money at 2.4 million/day - and that's completely ignoring the fact that they have income.
The answer to all your questions is "Money". The people trying to market stevia in the USA can't get enough money together to get it approved because they don't have patents on it (and thus won't be obscenely profitable) and the manufacturers of existing patented artifical sweeterners lobby against it because it would undercut their massive patent-supported fixed prices on artifical sweeteners. Now, it's possible that there really is some hidden health hazard in stevia, but the fact that it's legal in japan makes that seem unlikely to me.
The work for a video game can be divided quite a bit. The issue is more that game programmers are used to programming for single CPU processors because 99.9% of computers and consoles had only a single processor - hopefully the XBox 360 & PS2 will change that.
It's not that Windows just works, but that you're used to the work arounds that Windows requires. Try zipping up a Windows install from the first IDE harddrive on one computer and unzipping it onto the second drive of another and getting it working again. When you do a new Windows install, how many reboots and driver installs are nessisary? Can you automate software installs, or do you need to click "next" a bunch of times? Have you ever tried to run two versions of Microsoft IIS on the same computer? Can you run a network where the users don't have admin rights, or do you constantly need to make exceptions for badly written programs?
If a given desktop machine isn't used for heavy video games or specific desktop software that licences for thousands of dollars a seat then it can be easily replaced with a Linux box. There are no real hardware or software problems in the vast majority of cases.
The retraining costs are overblown. For most office workers you can just switch them over with no more effort than upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Office would entail.
If a government website requires internet explorer, there's usually a work around (such as calling them). Even if your business requires that website, you can access it through a legacy interface machine running Windows.
It's true that some businesses have dug themselves into a "Microsoft Solutions" hole but right now is a perfect time to notice the issues with being locked in to a vendor and start working on fixing it. For a heavily locked in workplace, the benifits of switching to Linux may not be clear on a scale of months, but it's worth starting work on making it possible to switch later if it makes sense then. As soon as Microsoft stops selling the version of office you use and stops supporting the new version of office on the version of Windows you use you'll be happy you have another choice.
A function in C that can return an error condition is still a procedure. Consider it as being exactly equivilent to a procedure that throws an exception. Specifically, it's not returning a function result - it's using the value return mechanism to pass an error flag.
Fortunately, 99% of users can easily do what they need to do with the existing hardware support. Also fortunately, there's only a small window of users that frequently buy their own hardware but can't handle checking a hardware compatibility list.
The only devices that this issue actually comes up with frequently are printers, scanners, and digital cameras. Other devices either just work, or require enough technical expertise to install and use that there isn't an issue. Luckily, many of those devices work perfectly under Linux by default and there are easily available lists to check compatibility.