I agree that the net has had a huge impact on how much "stuff" people feel they have to store, which just points out that any netbook that's used for more than just email is going to eventually feel mighty cramped with a 32 gig SSD.
Also, you might want to try Yoxos On Demand and see how quickly you can end up with between 1 and 2 gigs with "Create your custom eclipse."
Also, as a dv, you'd also want to keep backups before making any changes on your work, rather than commit every few minutes, right? I like to keep a tarball.gz of the whole directory structure, with (for example) "2008-12-13a-before_modding_for_c99_compliance.tar.gz" or "2008-12-13b-after_modding.tar.gz" - this way, I have my edits by date, with enough info of what I was doing, just in the filename, and can quickly restore and test how something used to work... need space for that...
A "Mac Attack" is news. With Windows, it't not only not news, it's expected. And no, your stats are off - there are WAY mor infected Windows boxes than there are Ubuntu users. Not something to be proud of.
After all, if you have the lions' share of the market, and the revenue that goes with it, you should have the resources to make a more, not less, secure system. It didn't happen, which, if you're familiar with the early history of Windows (pre-3.x), you'd know why it was doomed to fail, security-wise, from the start. Wrong people, wrong mindset, wrong goals.
If they hit 20-30% share, things will start to heat up for OSX, since with a 3:1 or 2:1 ratio - not targeting OSX becomes a significant missed "opportunity" - your botnets would not grow as fast if you just targeted Windows.
Whereas you'd have just as much luck hiding stuff in the registry from the experts as you would in/etc or wherever.
Really? Then explain how you can find a trojans' keys if they're randomly generated for each machine? The only way is to look at the creation/modification date, which is what you have to do to remove AntiVirus2009. Ditto with all files modified around that date - including system files. Have fun restoring afterwards if anything critical was hit, whereas with etc (or any app tht got trashed), you can just grab a copy from a working machine, or hit the repositories - for *any* application.
There's a reason why people are switching... linux is really user-friendly at this point.
That is such a transparent case of wishful thinking... Apache certainly has more than 20% market share - they have more than Microsoft, btw, - but look at the stats of who is the one that gets exploited.
Whatever the case, just remember that you're there to serve programmers...
Actually, this is closer to the truth for MANY jobs than most managers would want to admit.
In many jobs, the line employee has a better idea of what's going on, and the low-level nitty-gritty details of how to best achieve what has to be done, than the manager. Management of programmers should be about saying "these are the requirements', and NOT adding "and this is how you're going to achieve them". Rather, "These are the requirements; what do you need to make it happen, and how do you propose attacking it?"
After all, as the article says
Perhaps I should mention I am in my early 30s while the majority of the team constitute an older, wiser generation.
... also... if you find resistance to the stated goal, maybe it's because they've "been there, done that" and your great idea isn't so hot after all.
Too many people think "management" meand "dictate" instead of "collaborate".
You're right. If you need 1 TB of storage, you won't be buying an SSD soon.
Last I looked, programs were still getting bigger, not smaller. A download of java, eclipse and all the available plugins runs ~2 gigs. That's a serious chunk of real estate out of a 64g SSD, but peanuts for a 500g laptop hd at the same price. Plus, when the disk gets full, you can always pop it out, buy another 500g drive, reinstall your fav. distros' latest release, and you still have all your data intact, and your previous release, that you can fall back onto with a screwdriver and a minute's work.
Do you really want to try upgrading the OS an almost full 64g SSD? It'll probably fail, no matter what OS you have on it.
64 gigs isn't enough any more. my laptops' / partition holds 48 gigs (80 gigs still free), and my/home takes up 80 gigs (78 still free). And no, I don't have movies on it... just programs and data.
When opensuse 11.1 comes out, I'm configuring my laptop as an installation server - it'll be easier to upgrade the other boxes locally - but that will also eat up a lot of disk space, since some of the machines (including the lappy) need the development libraries and header files for c/c++ development.
5 years ago, the idea of using a laptop as an installation server would have been laughable - not enough disk space - but now they really are desktop replacements, and more energy-efficient, to boot. The marginal improvement in speed (and only in some cases) from an SSD doesn't cut it. When I find my laptop no longer does the job, I'll just buy another laptop. By then, hard drives will probably come with 32 or 64 meg of cache, which will eliminate any speed advantage from a 64meg SSD.
We already have an item that people use to get at something of similar value. Some of them even have a crypto key of some kind or other on them electronically. It's called a set of car keys. people lose them but it's not as bit an issue as you make out.
Well, that's one solution - drive a car that's worth the same as laptop... you won't need keys - just duct tape to keep it together a la "The Red Green Show.":-)
Then again, if you put enough duct tape on your laptop, nobody's going to steal it, either - "man, that must be some shitty laptop..."
The easily-disposed-of parts of a disassembled laptop are worth as much as the whole lappy.
A thief is not in it only for money. He is in it for easymoney. He rather get 1x500EUR then 6x100EUR. Also the market for new portables is larger then the market for parts.
What's this "thief" do - just steal high-end macs? The market for stolen laptops is going the same way as the market for stolen DVD players... they're getting so cheap that most people will say "Why bother?"
Do you really think they'd be dumb enough to implement a system that you can disable with a switch?
Every alarm system has a switch to disarm it. A "security system" for a retail without a fallback fail mode that is user-friendly will just not be accepted.
As it is, my main point still stands - if the millions of people were running ubuntu, they'd still be infected, it's not really a problem with windows.
Your main point fails - millions of people DO run linux, and macs hold 10% of the market - and neither get this sort of shit happening to them.
As for the registry - most "Windows class" users will have as much difficulty with/var/spool/cron/,/etc, initrd, linuxrc and more, as they would with the windows registry. My mom will have just as much difficulty removing malware entries in the registry as she would removing it from/etc and other places.
Bad comparison. The registry is a single location where all sorts of undocumented cruft sits, with weird variable names parameters./etc,/var,and its' kin are plain text files, and the first few lines are usually instructions as to "#THIS FILE IS foo.conf" , and most of these files are fully commented right in the file.
Never gonna happen.... I simply can't see that ever happening. It would at least partially mean that companies like Sony or Nintendo need to build components and allow interoperability with what is essentially an open platform. It means releasing control, they won't do that.
Besides, unlike Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo is selling their Wiis at a profit - and they're still in short supply, not having dropped their price by even one penny since they were first introduced, unlike the other two.
Business and Law
By Wolfgang Gruener
Thursday, December 11, 2008 22:18
Chicago (IL) - Nintendo has never seen a more successful month of game console shipments than November 2008: We knew before the release of NPD's November 2008 numbers that Nintendo was on track break its November 2007 U.S. sales record of 981,000 sold Wiis, but it we were stunned to see that the company was apparently able move more than 2 million consoles last months. Microsoft also had an excellent month, but Sony's PS3 is clearly trailing its rivals at this time: Only one out of ten game consoles sold was a PS3 in November. Extra: Shipment and Market Share Charts.
Microsoft may have made the most noise after Black Friday, but it was Nintendo that dominated the month and creamed both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. 2,040,000 Wiis were sold in the U.S. in November, according to NPD - which is up from 981,000 units in November 2007 and even shattered the best month of the Wii so far - December 2007 - which saw sales of 1,350,000 units. The Wii is the first game console to break the 2-million barrier.
So, if you're #1 in the marketplace, and, unlike your competitors, you're making a profit on every unit you sell, why would you want to give it up? It's not like you can't find the XBox selling for as low as $199 new, but people would still pay more for a Wii.
In other words, this whole idea detracts from usability and convenience, which is why people get laptops in the first place. Easier to just remove the HD. It's not like it takes more than a minute, or is very large. Most laptops, you don't have to use the screws that hold the drive caddy in place, so just remove the 2 screws holding down the cover, pop the drive out, and your half-terabyte laptop drive is now sitting in your shirt pocket or your purse or hanging from a cord around your neck if you're uber-paranoid.
It'll become a source for used/spare parts. Need a battery? A charger? A new screen because you left your lappy on the car roof and drove off? A new keyboard because you spilled crap on it? A bigger hard drive? Extra ram? A new case? A spare drive caddy and connector? A cheap DVD/Blu-Ray upgrade?
The easily-disposed-of parts of a disassembled laptop are worth as much as the whole lappy.
Scratch that, just remove the mobile broadband chip while its off (possibly sleeping or hibernating) then have fun either reinstalling an OS on it for personal use or decrypting the hard drive and having your way with the user's data.
... or just move the little switch on the front of the laptop (I didn't even notice it was there until one day I accidently turned it off and I couldn't get the wireless working).
Removing the chip on recent HP laptops is really easy - almost as easy as upgrading ram - it's in the same compartment, and you can just snip the lead if you want to leave the chip in there...
Terrible idea. Now you have yet another failure point - losing the off-drive crypto keys. You don't even need to physically lose the USB key - just break it, have it die from static discharge, etc.
People lose things a lot more expensive all the time - ask anyone who's ever lost a cell phone, or left a laptop on the roof of their car, or lost their wallet or purse.
Wouldn't it have been a lot more fun for the author to do the benchmarks on an Intel 915 chipset?
I have a better idea - benchmark it against DOS 5.0/Win3.1. That old POS will certainly score points for booting faster, if it boots at all. And points for lower ram usage, and quicker shutdown as well. Heck, you can probably boot it off a CD quicker than Win7 can boot of a hard drive.
This post should be modded -1 flamebait as long as it has that sig.
It's DESIGNED to inflame in any topic.
It's not different then if I said:
I can sum it up in 3 words: God is a lie.
That would also inflame.
Both phrases have 4 words in them. Or are they both inflammatory because they make fun of the "don't know how to count past two without pulling down my pants" crowd?
Besides, God IS a lie. Nothing inflammatory in that. Ask pretty much any religion about other religions' gods, and you'll get the same answer. Atheists just take it to one god more than most.
Another shameless public masturbation bought to you by Microsoft.
Since its both "quicker", AND "pre-beta", I think it's probably more like the premature ejaculation scene from American Pie. All the fanbois watching via their webcams, and... OOPS! AW!!! UCK! Shit, dude, you are SUCH a LOSER!
If these millions of people were running Ubuntu they'd still be infected by malware.
Why? Because these people thought the malware was _good_ software. They would do whatever seems reasonable to them to install it. If it means downloading and executing something, or even entering an admin password, they would do it.
Wrong - the trojan that installs this crap (and I'm referring specifically to the malware that is mentioned in TFA) is a drive-by, Windows-flaw-only download, not something that they installed because they, or one of their friends, thought it was "good software."
Also, there's no registry in linux to hide all sorts of stupidity in. The registry was the worst idea ever. It sucked in Windows 3x, quickly became a place for software vendors to hide stuff in to try to prevent piracy, and from there, it was just a small step for malware developers to do the same.
No, it means my internet is 5 times slower when used under Linux. Nice try though.
Then there's something not right, and it should be easy enough to track down. "BAck in the days", Windows network throughput was only ~10% of linux on the same hardware. Obviously, that got fixed by the end of the last century, but there's no reason for linux to be that slow. What I've found is that, with distros that incorporated beagle and were stupid enough to start it by default on bootup, the machine was SO slow that it was useless. Most people blamed linux - it would pretty much kill machines from 5 years ago even with a couple of gigs of ram.
The trojan can't be detected by antivirus software because it isn't installed right away. Instead, a randomly-named file is dropped on your drive, then run. The AV software can't find the rile, since it doesn't know what to look for. I removed it from my daughters' laptop by looking for files with modified dates ~ the day it started, +/- 1 week. You have to check the whole machine, not just the Windows directory tree. Also, do a search through the registry manually looking for any run= that looks suspicious (for example, an adjacent key has a blank value).
That particular machine will be running linux in the new year.
except for the odd little fact that anonyminity turns perfectly regular folks into asshats.
Anonymity obviously isn't needed. Look at the examole from the article:
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, describes anonymity on the Internet as similar to abortion: a bad practice that people should still have rights to.
Dyson wasn't acting anonymously when she made the inflammatory comparison between anonymity and abortion - and only an asshole would do that.
I can be equally effective w/o being churlish: "Esther Dyson's opinions are a bad practice that she still has rights to." There, see - I didn't compare her opinions to abortion.
Contrast it with this: "Esther Dyson expressing an opinion is similar to an abortion: a bad practice that she should still have rights to." Big difference!
As I point out elsewhere, most people think that their computer is useless if they can't view wmf files, or yutube videos. For the former, there's "install all windows codecs" which uses the dackman.de repository; for the latter, if they want the latest flash player, they have to include the non-oss repositories for their distro.
Then they can get rickrolled to their hearts' content, play those flash games, etc.
Nah, it's because "I've tried several distros and trying to use the internet is unusable on any of them." means that he didn't know where to clock get the flash player to get rckrolled.
And they didn't select "install all Windows media codecs from packman.de", so they can't watch streaming video...
For many people, if they can't get youtube and can't play those wmf files their friends send them via email, it's game over...
Condoms aren't going to do squat about herpes simplex cold sores. Also, testing after the fact doesn't prevent STDs. Even prior testing doesn't - there's an incubation period.
It's like the trojan in the article that claims "You have nnn viruses" - once you see that, even if you inow it's a scam, you also know that your computer has been compromised. You can never be 100% sure, short of a wipe and fresh install, that there's not something else "ticking away under the hood" just waiting to release its' payload.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the net has had a huge impact on how much "stuff" people feel they have to store, which just points out that any netbook that's used for more than just email is going to eventually feel mighty cramped with a 32 gig SSD.
Also, you might want to try Yoxos On Demand and see how quickly you can end up with between 1 and 2 gigs with "Create your custom eclipse."
Also, as a dv, you'd also want to keep backups before making any changes on your work, rather than commit every few minutes, right? I like to keep a tarball.gz of the whole directory structure, with (for example) "2008-12-13a-before_modding_for_c99_compliance.tar.gz" or "2008-12-13b-after_modding.tar.gz" - this way, I have my edits by date, with enough info of what I was doing, just in the filename, and can quickly restore and test how something used to work ... need space for that ...
Then there's graphics ...
A "Mac Attack" is news. With Windows, it't not only not news, it's expected. And no, your stats are off - there are WAY mor infected Windows boxes than there are Ubuntu users. Not something to be proud of.
After all, if you have the lions' share of the market, and the revenue that goes with it, you should have the resources to make a more, not less, secure system. It didn't happen, which, if you're familiar with the early history of Windows (pre-3.x), you'd know why it was doomed to fail, security-wise, from the start. Wrong people, wrong mindset, wrong goals.
Really? Then explain how you can find a trojans' keys if they're randomly generated for each machine? The only way is to look at the creation/modification date, which is what you have to do to remove AntiVirus2009. Ditto with all files modified around that date - including system files. Have fun restoring afterwards if anything critical was hit, whereas with etc (or any app tht got trashed), you can just grab a copy from a working machine, or hit the repositories - for *any* application.
There's a reason why people are switching ... linux is really user-friendly at this point.
That is such a transparent case of wishful thinking ... Apache certainly has more than 20% market share - they have more than Microsoft, btw, - but look at the stats of who is the one that gets exploited.
Actually, this is closer to the truth for MANY jobs than most managers would want to admit.
In many jobs, the line employee has a better idea of what's going on, and the low-level nitty-gritty details of how to best achieve what has to be done, than the manager. Management of programmers should be about saying "these are the requirements', and NOT adding "and this is how you're going to achieve them". Rather, "These are the requirements; what do you need to make it happen, and how do you propose attacking it?"
After all, as the article says
Too many people think "management" meand "dictate" instead of "collaborate".
Last I looked, programs were still getting bigger, not smaller. A download of java, eclipse and all the available plugins runs ~2 gigs. That's a serious chunk of real estate out of a 64g SSD, but peanuts for a 500g laptop hd at the same price. Plus, when the disk gets full, you can always pop it out, buy another 500g drive, reinstall your fav. distros' latest release, and you still have all your data intact, and your previous release, that you can fall back onto with a screwdriver and a minute's work.
Do you really want to try upgrading the OS an almost full 64g SSD? It'll probably fail, no matter what OS you have on it.
64 gigs isn't enough any more. my laptops' / partition holds 48 gigs (80 gigs still free), and my /home takes up 80 gigs (78 still free). And no, I don't have movies on it ... just programs and data.
When opensuse 11.1 comes out, I'm configuring my laptop as an installation server - it'll be easier to upgrade the other boxes locally - but that will also eat up a lot of disk space, since some of the machines (including the lappy) need the development libraries and header files for c/c++ development.
5 years ago, the idea of using a laptop as an installation server would have been laughable - not enough disk space - but now they really are desktop replacements, and more energy-efficient, to boot. The marginal improvement in speed (and only in some cases) from an SSD doesn't cut it. When I find my laptop no longer does the job, I'll just buy another laptop. By then, hard drives will probably come with 32 or 64 meg of cache, which will eliminate any speed advantage from a 64meg SSD.
Well, that's one solution - drive a car that's worth the same as laptop ... you won't need keys - just duct tape to keep it together a la "The Red Green Show." :-)
Then again, if you put enough duct tape on your laptop, nobody's going to steal it, either - "man, that must be some shitty laptop ..."
What's this "thief" do - just steal high-end macs? The market for stolen laptops is going the same way as the market for stolen DVD players ... they're getting so cheap that most people will say "Why bother?"
Every alarm system has a switch to disarm it. A "security system" for a retail without a fallback fail mode that is user-friendly will just not be accepted.
Your main point fails - millions of people DO run linux, and macs hold 10% of the market - and neither get this sort of shit happening to them.
Bad comparison. The registry is a single location where all sorts of undocumented cruft sits, with weird variable names parameters. /etc, /var,and its' kin are plain text files, and the first few lines are usually instructions as to "#THIS FILE IS foo.conf" , and most of these files are fully commented right in the file.
Besides, unlike Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo is selling their Wiis at a profit - and they're still in short supply, not having dropped their price by even one penny since they were first introduced, unlike the other two.
Thursday,December11,200822:18
So, if you're #1 in the marketplace, and, unlike your competitors, you're making a profit on every unit you sell, why would you want to give it up? It's not like you can't find the XBox selling for as low as $199 new, but people would still pay more for a Wii.
So why not just keep the laptop there instead?
Answer: Because I want to USE it.
In other words, this whole idea detracts from usability and convenience, which is why people get laptops in the first place. Easier to just remove the HD. It's not like it takes more than a minute, or is very large. Most laptops, you don't have to use the screws that hold the drive caddy in place, so just remove the 2 screws holding down the cover, pop the drive out, and your half-terabyte laptop drive is now sitting in your shirt pocket or your purse or hanging from a cord around your neck if you're uber-paranoid.
The easily-disposed-of parts of a disassembled laptop are worth as much as the whole lappy.
Removing the chip on recent HP laptops is really easy - almost as easy as upgrading ram - it's in the same compartment, and you can just snip the lead if you want to leave the chip in there ...
Terrible idea. Now you have yet another failure point - losing the off-drive crypto keys. You don't even need to physically lose the USB key - just break it, have it die from static discharge, etc.
People lose things a lot more expensive all the time - ask anyone who's ever lost a cell phone, or left a laptop on the roof of their car, or lost their wallet or purse.
Sure - just check the "Sony Battery" option.
Sounded like head lice to me...
I for one don't welcome our brain-screwing electrode overlords.
I have a better idea - benchmark it against DOS 5.0/Win3.1. That old POS will certainly score points for booting faster, if it boots at all. And points for lower ram usage, and quicker shutdown as well. Heck, you can probably boot it off a CD quicker than Win7 can boot of a hard drive.
Both phrases have 4 words in them. Or are they both inflammatory because they make fun of the "don't know how to count past two without pulling down my pants" crowd?
Besides, God IS a lie. Nothing inflammatory in that. Ask pretty much any religion about other religions' gods, and you'll get the same answer. Atheists just take it to one god more than most.
Since its both "quicker", AND "pre-beta", I think it's probably more like the premature ejaculation scene from American Pie. All the fanbois watching via their webcams, and ... OOPS! AW!!! UCK! Shit, dude, you are SUCH a LOSER!
Wrong - the trojan that installs this crap (and I'm referring specifically to the malware that is mentioned in TFA) is a drive-by, Windows-flaw-only download, not something that they installed because they, or one of their friends, thought it was "good software."
Also, there's no registry in linux to hide all sorts of stupidity in. The registry was the worst idea ever. It sucked in Windows 3x, quickly became a place for software vendors to hide stuff in to try to prevent piracy, and from there, it was just a small step for malware developers to do the same.
Then there's something not right, and it should be easy enough to track down. "BAck in the days", Windows network throughput was only ~10% of linux on the same hardware. Obviously, that got fixed by the end of the last century, but there's no reason for linux to be that slow. What I've found is that, with distros that incorporated beagle and were stupid enough to start it by default on bootup, the machine was SO slow that it was useless. Most people blamed linux - it would pretty much kill machines from 5 years ago even with a couple of gigs of ram.
The trojan can't be detected by antivirus software because it isn't installed right away. Instead, a randomly-named file is dropped on your drive, then run. The AV software can't find the rile, since it doesn't know what to look for. I removed it from my daughters' laptop by looking for files with modified dates ~ the day it started, +/- 1 week. You have to check the whole machine, not just the Windows directory tree. Also, do a search through the registry manually looking for any run= that looks suspicious (for example, an adjacent key has a blank value).
That particular machine will be running linux in the new year.
Anonymity obviously isn't needed. Look at the examole from the article:
Dyson wasn't acting anonymously when she made the inflammatory comparison between anonymity and abortion - and only an asshole would do that.
I can be equally effective w/o being churlish: "Esther Dyson's opinions are a bad practice that she still has rights to." There, see - I didn't compare her opinions to abortion.
Contrast it with this: "Esther Dyson expressing an opinion is similar to an abortion: a bad practice that she should still have rights to." Big difference!
As I point out elsewhere, most people think that their computer is useless if they can't view wmf files, or yutube videos. For the former, there's "install all windows codecs" which uses the dackman.de repository; for the latter, if they want the latest flash player, they have to include the non-oss repositories for their distro.
Then they can get rickrolled to their hearts' content, play those flash games, etc.
Nah, it's because "I've tried several distros and trying to use the internet is unusable on any of them." means that he didn't know where to clock get the flash player to get rckrolled.
And they didn't select "install all Windows media codecs from packman.de", so they can't watch streaming video ...
For many people, if they can't get youtube and can't play those wmf files their friends send them via email, it's game over ...
Condoms aren't going to do squat about herpes simplex cold sores. Also, testing after the fact doesn't prevent STDs. Even prior testing doesn't - there's an incubation period.
It's like the trojan in the article that claims "You have nnn viruses" - once you see that, even if you inow it's a scam, you also know that your computer has been compromised. You can never be 100% sure, short of a wipe and fresh install, that there's not something else "ticking away under the hood" just waiting to release its' payload.