As in... If you put a million grizzly bear in the polar region none of them are going to spontaneously evolve his fur white more like a polar bear because that was the best choice.
However, if any of those bears happened to spontaneously mutate into where their hair turned white making them better hunters so that the seals couldn't see them. Then those species may actually do better than there brown counterparts and may survive in times of hardship where as the browns die out.
Also, the chances of one bear spontaneously mutating to have white hair is equally likely to occur if you put the grizzly bears in the artic, as it would if you'd left them where they were. White fur being advantageous has no bearing on the likelihood of such a random mutation occurring.
My Slackware box was turned into a zombie not too long ago. I created a temporary account that I wanted to play with briefly, with the intention of deleting it as soon as I was done. I foolishly set the username to "temp" and the password to "temp123". I forgot to delete the account, and about two weeks later got a spam complaint from my ISP.
I strongly recommend running SSH on something other than port 22. Take a look at your logs to see why.
I think my idea was a lot better: point www.bluesecurity.com to www.fbi.gov, and see what happens when the spammers take down the FBI's web site.
Sadly, the FBI is a step ahead of me on this: fbi.gov (and dhs.gov and whitehouse.gov) are hosted by Akamai. However, other promising candidates include:
www.senate.gov www.house.gov www.nsa.gov www.cia.gov www.gop.com...with nsa.gov and gop.com being my personal favorites. Note that I am NOT advocating DoSing these sites; I am advocating tricking spammers into sending their existing flood of traffic to these sites instead of wherever they would otherwise be sending it. What the spammers are doing is already illegal, but since Congress doesn't understand the issue and the FBI doesn't have the resources to track it down, the crime goes unpunished. This might draw enough attention to wake some people up!
Hmm, on the other hand, they'll probably pass a law that requires ISPs like BellSouth to charge content providers like Google an extra fee for faster access, in the name of national security and the war on cyberterrorism. Damn it I hate the government sometimes.
Personally I think the constraint is artificial and I wouldn't see any reason for using OS X if it means I have to be using Apple kit to do so.
There are a lot of great apps that are only available for the Mac, that you just can't get on any other platform. Several of them are free. Since you're not a Mac user, you don't know what you're missing.
Plus, obviously, half a dozen programming languages and 700MB of developer documentation preinstalled is appealing to some of us.;-)
Sure, if you were going to run Linux or Windows, then you're only looking at hardware; Apple's is nice, and their service is fantastic if something breaks under warranty, but there are cheaper machines out there (and more flexibility too - if you don't want a webcam, you can choose a cheaper laptop that doesn't have one). You'll pry the Mac OS from my cold dead fingers though.
Of course not! Text in other languages is still text, but a zip file doesn't look very pretty when displayed in a web browser. It's not that hard to tell the difference.
Well, normally they are hidden. Usually the user just sees his home-folder. Of course there are other interesting (and not so interesting) stuff lcated in/, but the user doesn't really have any reason to go poking there. If he wants to investigate, why should we try to artificially try to stop him from doing so?
Note that on XP, doing the equivalent (double-clicking C:\ in the My Computer window) displays a warning message that you really shouldn't go poking around here unless you know what you're doing. I can definitely understand why Microsoft added this warning, but displaying a warning isn't the same as the files being "hidden". Is the grandparent suggesting that Linux should add this kind of warning message?
On Mac OS X, those sorts of files really are hidden./bin and/dev and/usr are right there alongside/Applications and/Library and/System, but the former are not displayed in the Finder. Is the grandparent suggesting that Linux file managers should hide these sorts of things in the same way? That would piss off experienced users pretty quickly.
when I close it, I want it to close. If it doesn't close, or I leave it open, I want an indication of that.
On the Mac, the term for terminating execution of an application is "quit". When you tell an application to quit, it does what you want. Three obvious ways to do this: select the Quit option from the application menu (left-most menu after the Apple menu, showing the name of the application), press Cmd-Q (the keyboard shortcut displayed next to the menu item), or right-click (or control-click or click-and-hold) the Dock icon and choose Quit from the contextual menu.
"Close" means closing a window, usually without quitting the application (there are some single-window applications that will quit when you close the window; this behavior could be confusing but eventually you get used to it I guess). This means I can close all browser windows in Firefox, and Firefox will keep running, so the next time I want to use it, I don't have to wait for it to launch again.
I'm aware that the distinction is confusing to newbies.
As for the indication you mentioned, there's a small black triangle that indicates an application is open. Not very obvious, but it's definitely there if you know to look for it. Of course you can just hit Cmd-Tab to see what's running.
Yes, I probably should have mentioned something about that. A couple of problems:
1) do you want to send two separate HTTP requests for every page (HEAD and GET) just so if the HEAD request indicates something that should be downloaded, you can send it to a download manager?
2) what if the file to be downloaded is not a link, but rather the result of a POST? Sending a HEAD request isn't gonna work, and since the POST data could include a credit card transaction, you'd better not POST it again.
3) sometimes it may be a good idea to not trust the MIME type the server gives you, because misconfigured servers are so prevalent. When the server says text/plain, sometimes you should probably download the file anyway. Mozilla trusts the server in more cases than most other browsers, but I don't remember if it might make some exceptions when the server says the MIME type is text/plain and the file content is obviously something else. Personally I think it should, in some cases (but IE's behavior sucks ass, so don't copy that).
I don't understand why my web browser--designed to browse web pages--needs to also be a download manager.
Simple: while browsing web pages with your web browser, you may encounter a download link. The problem is that to the browser, this download link looks exactly the same as a link to any other web page. The only way for your browser to tell the difference is to start downloading the file. At that point, it might as well just keep going.
What I called "popularity" is basically how many other web sites there are that link to a particular page.
I think it not the willingness to pay that is measured, but the assumation that if a respected firm *takes* the advert then it is somehow more legitimate.
I can see your point, but I don't think the average person consciously makes this distinction, because the only places they see advertisements (except for spam) are respected firms who have accepted the ad.
I didn't say that switching to Intel has made it easier, I said it will make it easier; I expect to start seeing Intel-only games pretty soon, while other apps will be universal for a long time.
Although this sort of mechanism has been around for years in various other processor architectures such as Sun's SPARC, Alpha, IBM's PowerPC, and even Intel's IA-64 architecture...
What purpose would publishing the details on his site serve, other than as a kind of security vulnerability "first post!" type of thing?
In theory, it's possible that black-hats have already discovered the flaw, and will exploit it without telling anyone. If they've already figured it out, then releasing details to the public won't make the situation significantly worse. However, public embarassment will prompt the company to release a fix more quickly.
and there is debate about whether Apple's shift to the same Intel architecture used by Microsoft Windows will change the security posture of Mac systems.
Let's settle this debate.
No.
Changing CPU architectures will have absolutely effect on security.
Switching to Intel will make it easier for game developers to port their code, which will lead to more games available for the Mac. This, combined with the ability to dual-boot to Windows and eventually the ability to run Windows apps through virtualization, makes the Mac platform more appealing to consumers, which will probably lead to an increase in Apple's market share. This could lead to more malware creators taking an interest in the Mac platform, which would lead to more security holes in Mac OS X being exploited (which is not the same as more security holes existing).
I see you've never used Mac OS X. It's not bloatware. It's the lack of bloatware. I get spellcheck in an AIM client, an IRC client, an e-mail client, a text editor, a browser... but it's not five different spell checkers, each one adding bloat. It's just one spell checker, that works where I want it... except in Firefox, my default browser du jour.
Are users really depending on search engines to protect them? Even foolish users?
It's actually a pretty smart thing to do. Novices can't tell the difference between a legitimate site and a scam just by looking at them, but if they know Google ranks search results by popularity, they can assume the legitimate site will be more popular (and thus rank higher) than any scams. Also, businesses willing to pay for advertising (not including spam) are usually legitimate.
There are still some users who are too dumb to do even this, and will just append ".com" to whatever random thing they're looking for in the address bar.
You'd think with the amount of computer literacy children are growing up with these days, they'd have an inkling of paranoia about meeting people from MySpace and other sources.
I think you misunderstand what's going on. The issue isn't that creepy 40-yr-old men are preying upon 16-yr-old girls while pretending to be 17-yr-old boys, promising to shower them with flowers and romance, then meeting up and kidnapping the sweet innocent girl. No, the issue is that horny 16-yr-old girls are actively seeking out 40-yr-old men to have sex with, and the men are going along with it. It's consentual. The problem is that 16-yr-old girls shouldn't be seeking out 40-yr-old men, but blocking access to MySpace won't stop them from doing so. Having parents that actually love and care for their children usually does the trick, though.
Specifically, on Peter Lada's design, the text of the articles needs to be larger; I'm happy with all the stuff on the sides being the way it is. Everything seems to work OK when I increase my browser's text size though, which is a good sign.
Another minor adjustment for Peter: the department line should be darker; medium grey against light grey is hard to see.
I think Michael Johnson's design has too much white; not enough visual separation between things. Jason Porritt's entry looks like an evolutionary improvement over the current design; good, but I like Peter's better.
2. All three are a mess on IE 6.0. Please don't ask why I'm still using it.
Once everything works in Firefox/Safari/Opera, then each IE bug can be hacked around, one at a time. It's very difficult to develop a stylesheet when you're not sure whether the problem you're seeing in IE is a bug in your CSS code or a bug in the browser; with anything other than IE, you can usually assume it's a bug in your code. Making it work in IE was one of the contest requirements, so don't worry.
Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't especially high-resolution, but it's definitely there. It's been several years since I've seen that; they may have improved it in recent versions.
Slashdot Mirror
As in... If you put a million grizzly bear in the polar region none of them are going to spontaneously evolve his fur white more like a polar bear because that was the best choice.
However, if any of those bears happened to spontaneously mutate into where their hair turned white making them better hunters so that the seals couldn't see them. Then those species may actually do better than there brown counterparts and may survive in times of hardship where as the browns die out.
Also, the chances of one bear spontaneously mutating to have white hair is equally likely to occur if you put the grizzly bears in the artic, as it would if you'd left them where they were. White fur being advantageous has no bearing on the likelihood of such a random mutation occurring.
My Slackware box was turned into a zombie not too long ago. I created a temporary account that I wanted to play with briefly, with the intention of deleting it as soon as I was done. I foolishly set the username to "temp" and the password to "temp123". I forgot to delete the account, and about two weeks later got a spam complaint from my ISP.
I strongly recommend running SSH on something other than port 22. Take a look at your logs to see why.
There have been
several
previous
articles about the situation; some of us have been paying attention.
I think my idea was a lot better: point www.bluesecurity.com to www.fbi.gov, and see what happens when the spammers take down the FBI's web site.
...with nsa.gov and gop.com being my personal favorites. Note that I am NOT advocating DoSing these sites; I am advocating tricking spammers into sending their existing flood of traffic to these sites instead of wherever they would otherwise be sending it. What the spammers are doing is already illegal, but since Congress doesn't understand the issue and the FBI doesn't have the resources to track it down, the crime goes unpunished. This might draw enough attention to wake some people up!
Sadly, the FBI is a step ahead of me on this: fbi.gov (and dhs.gov and whitehouse.gov) are hosted by Akamai. However, other promising candidates include:
www.senate.gov
www.house.gov
www.nsa.gov
www.cia.gov
www.gop.com
Hmm, on the other hand, they'll probably pass a law that requires ISPs like BellSouth to charge content providers like Google an extra fee for faster access, in the name of national security and the war on cyberterrorism. Damn it I hate the government sometimes.
Personally I think the constraint is artificial and I wouldn't see any reason for using OS X if it means I have to be using Apple kit to do so.
;-)
There are a lot of great apps that are only available for the Mac, that you just can't get on any other platform. Several of them are free. Since you're not a Mac user, you don't know what you're missing.
Plus, obviously, half a dozen programming languages and 700MB of developer documentation preinstalled is appealing to some of us.
Sure, if you were going to run Linux or Windows, then you're only looking at hardware; Apple's is nice, and their service is fantastic if something breaks under warranty, but there are cheaper machines out there (and more flexibility too - if you don't want a webcam, you can choose a cheaper laptop that doesn't have one). You'll pry the Mac OS from my cold dead fingers though.
This might be helpful to you, particularly the "Welcome to Aqua" section.
Of course not! Text in other languages is still text, but a zip file doesn't look very pretty when displayed in a web browser. It's not that hard to tell the difference.
Well, normally they are hidden. Usually the user just sees his home-folder. Of course there are other interesting (and not so interesting) stuff lcated in /, but the user doesn't really have any reason to go poking there. If he wants to investigate, why should we try to artificially try to stop him from doing so?
/bin and /dev and /usr are right there alongside /Applications and /Library and /System, but the former are not displayed in the Finder. Is the grandparent suggesting that Linux file managers should hide these sorts of things in the same way? That would piss off experienced users pretty quickly.
Note that on XP, doing the equivalent (double-clicking C:\ in the My Computer window) displays a warning message that you really shouldn't go poking around here unless you know what you're doing. I can definitely understand why Microsoft added this warning, but displaying a warning isn't the same as the files being "hidden". Is the grandparent suggesting that Linux should add this kind of warning message?
On Mac OS X, those sorts of files really are hidden.
A Windows user in front of a Mac with a one-button mouse would never figure out intuitively that control-click opens a contextual menu.
when I close it, I want it to close. If it doesn't close, or I leave it open, I want an indication of that.
On the Mac, the term for terminating execution of an application is "quit". When you tell an application to quit, it does what you want. Three obvious ways to do this: select the Quit option from the application menu (left-most menu after the Apple menu, showing the name of the application), press Cmd-Q (the keyboard shortcut displayed next to the menu item), or right-click (or control-click or click-and-hold) the Dock icon and choose Quit from the contextual menu.
"Close" means closing a window, usually without quitting the application (there are some single-window applications that will quit when you close the window; this behavior could be confusing but eventually you get used to it I guess). This means I can close all browser windows in Firefox, and Firefox will keep running, so the next time I want to use it, I don't have to wait for it to launch again.
I'm aware that the distinction is confusing to newbies.
As for the indication you mentioned, there's a small black triangle that indicates an application is open. Not very obvious, but it's definitely there if you know to look for it. Of course you can just hit Cmd-Tab to see what's running.
Yes, I probably should have mentioned something about that. A couple of problems:
1) do you want to send two separate HTTP requests for every page (HEAD and GET) just so if the HEAD request indicates something that should be downloaded, you can send it to a download manager?
2) what if the file to be downloaded is not a link, but rather the result of a POST? Sending a HEAD request isn't gonna work, and since the POST data could include a credit card transaction, you'd better not POST it again.
3) sometimes it may be a good idea to not trust the MIME type the server gives you, because misconfigured servers are so prevalent. When the server says text/plain, sometimes you should probably download the file anyway. Mozilla trusts the server in more cases than most other browsers, but I don't remember if it might make some exceptions when the server says the MIME type is text/plain and the file content is obviously something else. Personally I think it should, in some cases (but IE's behavior sucks ass, so don't copy that).
I don't understand why my web browser--designed to browse web pages--needs to also be a download manager.
Simple: while browsing web pages with your web browser, you may encounter a download link. The problem is that to the browser, this download link looks exactly the same as a link to any other web page. The only way for your browser to tell the difference is to start downloading the file. At that point, it might as well just keep going.
Of course Google try to keep their Page Rank system secret, but I am not sure that "popularity" comes into it. Also how would they measure it ?
Wikipedia entry on PageRank
What I called "popularity" is basically how many other web sites there are that link to a particular page.
I think it not the willingness to pay that is measured, but the assumation that if a respected firm *takes* the advert then it is somehow more legitimate.
I can see your point, but I don't think the average person consciously makes this distinction, because the only places they see advertisements (except for spam) are respected firms who have accepted the ad.
I didn't say that switching to Intel has made it easier, I said it will make it easier; I expect to start seeing Intel-only games pretty soon, while other apps will be universal for a long time.
Although this sort of mechanism has been around for years in various other processor architectures such as Sun's SPARC, Alpha, IBM's PowerPC, and even Intel's IA-64 architecture...
And if none arise even after the vulnerabilities are made public..?
What purpose would publishing the details on his site serve, other than as a kind of security vulnerability "first post!" type of thing?
In theory, it's possible that black-hats have already discovered the flaw, and will exploit it without telling anyone. If they've already figured it out, then releasing details to the public won't make the situation significantly worse. However, public embarassment will prompt the company to release a fix more quickly.
I'm not saying I agree with this theory.
and there is debate about whether Apple's shift to the same Intel architecture used by Microsoft Windows will change the security posture of Mac systems.
Let's settle this debate.
No.
Changing CPU architectures will have absolutely effect on security.
Switching to Intel will make it easier for game developers to port their code, which will lead to more games available for the Mac. This, combined with the ability to dual-boot to Windows and eventually the ability to run Windows apps through virtualization, makes the Mac platform more appealing to consumers, which will probably lead to an increase in Apple's market share. This could lead to more malware creators taking an interest in the Mac platform, which would lead to more security holes in Mac OS X being exploited (which is not the same as more security holes existing).
I see you've never used Mac OS X. It's not bloatware. It's the lack of bloatware. I get spellcheck in an AIM client, an IRC client, an e-mail client, a text editor, a browser... but it's not five different spell checkers, each one adding bloat. It's just one spell checker, that works where I want it... except in Firefox, my default browser du jour.
Are users really depending on search engines to protect them? Even foolish users?
It's actually a pretty smart thing to do. Novices can't tell the difference between a legitimate site and a scam just by looking at them, but if they know Google ranks search results by popularity, they can assume the legitimate site will be more popular (and thus rank higher) than any scams. Also, businesses willing to pay for advertising (not including spam) are usually legitimate.
There are still some users who are too dumb to do even this, and will just append ".com" to whatever random thing they're looking for in the address bar.
You'd think with the amount of computer literacy children are growing up with these days, they'd have an inkling of paranoia about meeting people from MySpace and other sources.
I think you misunderstand what's going on. The issue isn't that creepy 40-yr-old men are preying upon 16-yr-old girls while pretending to be 17-yr-old boys, promising to shower them with flowers and romance, then meeting up and kidnapping the sweet innocent girl. No, the issue is that horny 16-yr-old girls are actively seeking out 40-yr-old men to have sex with, and the men are going along with it. It's consentual. The problem is that 16-yr-old girls shouldn't be seeking out 40-yr-old men, but blocking access to MySpace won't stop them from doing so. Having parents that actually love and care for their children usually does the trick, though.
Specifically, on Peter Lada's design, the text of the articles needs to be larger; I'm happy with all the stuff on the sides being the way it is. Everything seems to work OK when I increase my browser's text size though, which is a good sign.
Another minor adjustment for Peter: the department line should be darker; medium grey against light grey is hard to see.
I think Michael Johnson's design has too much white; not enough visual separation between things. Jason Porritt's entry looks like an evolutionary improvement over the current design; good, but I like Peter's better.
2. All three are a mess on IE 6.0. Please don't ask why I'm still using it.
Once everything works in Firefox/Safari/Opera, then each IE bug can be hacked around, one at a time. It's very difficult to develop a stylesheet when you're not sure whether the problem you're seeing in IE is a bug in your CSS code or a bug in the browser; with anything other than IE, you can usually assume it's a bug in your code. Making it work in IE was one of the contest requirements, so don't worry.
Those are all Apple IP addresses in the subject line (Apple owns all IP addresses that start with 17).
Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't especially high-resolution, but it's definitely there. It's been several years since I've seen that; they may have improved it in recent versions.