Blocking outgoing ports can't possibly work. What's to prevent the exploit from sending the other packets of the handshake anyway, as if it had received the packets blocked by the firewall?
If you're behind NAT, the remote system can't send reply packets if you didn't initiate the connection, because the router won't associate the incoming replies with an outgoing connection, and won't forward them to the internal machine.
Who cares if it had a multitasking kernel, if you couldn't actually run as many applications on it? Most Windows 95 users would only run a few apps at a time, for fear of crashing the whole system. Sure, apps would launch faster on Windows, and one slow app was less likely to lock up the whole system, but overall the Mac was more usable, and more stable, than Windows 95.
Sorry, Windows 95 was not better than Mac OS 8. For one thing, Mac OS 8 was a hell of a lot more stable, which is pretty disturbing because Mac OS 8 crashed quite a bit, and crashed hard (the whole machine would lock up, requiring a reboot). Windows 95 was worse. I could only use it reliably for about six hours at a time. It was plagued with security problems - I used to have a simple shell script that would crash the network stack of any Windows 95 machine just by entering its IP address.
Windows 95 supported 255-character filenames, but developers seemed afraid to use anything but 8.3, so trying to figure out what anything did was always a mess.
On Mac OS 8, if you installed something and it broke your system, you could bring up the Extensions Manager, find the offending extension or control panel, and temporarily disable it, saving your settings as extension sets that you could easily switch between. It was like Safe Mode done right. On previous versions of the Mac OS that didn't have the Extensions Manager, you could hold down the Option key while booting to get something equivalent to Safe Mode.
And if an application managed to break itself, most of the time you could easily fix it by tossing the preferences file and starting fresh. Of course there was a standard system-wide location for where these preferences files should go, and essentially all Mac software used it, naming the files with something resembling the name of the application they belonged to.
Apple's published Human Interface Guidelines helped application developers give their applications a consistent look and feel, so switching from one application to another felt pretty natural to users. These guidelines even specified details like how many pixels there should be between an "OK" button and a "Cancel" button, and explained why using descriptive button labels like these is far superior to the "Yes" and "No" that Windows applications still seem to prefer. Having one application ask "Would you like to save your document before exiting?" and another ask "Are you sure you'd like to exit without saving your document?" does not make for a good user experience. And I'm still baffled as to why (at least in locales that use left-to-right writing systems) although we typically put a "forward" button on the right side and a "back" button on the left side, dialog boxes on Windows always seem to put the button that continues forward to the left, and the button that cancels or goes back to the previous step to the right. Oh, and why do so many dialog boxes have both "Apply" and "OK" buttons? If you could add up the time people have wasted over the last decade by clicking both buttons (because somehow they've been lead to believe that they have to)...
Something I was always fond of: on the Mac, not only did the icons on my desktop always stay exactly where I left them, but so did all my folder windows. If I opened a folder window, it would open to the same position on the screen where it was when I closed it, and would have the same view settings (e.g. display in icon view or list view, sort by filename or by last modified date, etc.). On Windows 95, sometimes just launching certain applications was enough to make Explorer completely rearrange everything.
I could go on, but I'll spare you.
One other nitpick: you say IE4-6 had a brilliant run, but Microsoft is clueless with IE8. On the contrary, while IE4-6 may arguably have been better than Netscape 4 (which is also an unusable pile of crap by modern standards), with IE8 they're actually putting real effort into making a decent browser. It still sucks, but not because they've lost their way - on the contrary, they've finally found it again, and are genuinely trying to make a better browser. Of course, Mozilla was trying to make a better browser years ago, Apple tried to make an even better browser after that, and Google built a great browser on top of Apple's work (which was in turn built on KDE's work). Microsoft is years behind, and desperately tryin
Jessica, thanks for pasting a poorly-formatted response (and mistyping my UID) which really has very little to do with my comment. I never said anything about upgrading directly from XP to 7.
By the way, I had no major problems upgrading from Vista to the 7 Release Candidate.
Every time you visit my web site, a random quote is displayed. Which quote you get is stored in a session cookie, so every page displays the same quote as long as your browser remains open (this was a better idea when I had fewer quotes in my list; I'll probably change it, but that's irrelevant to this discussion). Another cookie tracks which quotes you've already seen, to ensure that if you come back tomorrow (with a new session), you won't get the same quote you just got yesterday. Once you've cycled through all of the available quotes, of course, it resets.
Because I was extremely bored several years ago, there's some additional logic: if you've been to my site before, and I've added a new quote to the list since then, instead of choosing any quote at random, you'll be given the one that I just added. If you've never been to the site before, it just picks one randomly.
Also, because I was extremely bored even more years ago, my site can be displayed with a variety of themes, most of which are intended to resemble windows on a computer desktop, on a variety of operating systems. The first time you visit the site, a theme is chosen for you based on your platform (as determined by your user_agent string), but you can change it just by selecting another theme from the list. Your preference is saved in a cookie.
I do not track individual users. I have no idea who you are. I don't assign you a unique ID. But I am using cookies.
Usability testing doesn't tell you how customers are actually using your site under normal conditions as part of their daily workflow; it tells you how testers hypothetically could use your site under laboratory conditions. You can certainly get useful feedback from usability testing, but to borrow a phrase, people do breathtakingly stupid things in the wild that nobody would have dreamed of during testing.
Just on my tiny little server I run at home for a handful of friends and family, with one single domain, I block an average of 416 SMTP connections per day based solely on DNSRBLs plus another 876 per day based on a slew of custom rules I've developed. After that, SpamAssassin blocks 82 messages per day and quarantines 48 more.
That's something in the neighborhood of one spam attempt EVERY MINUTE of every day, 24/7/365, on a tiny little personal server hosting only one domain for a small handful of users.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of the scientific process. Unfortunately you are not alone, since this sort of comments pops up in every science thread on this site.
On the contrary, I think it's great that they've done this; I'm not questioning the motivations behind the science. I'm questioning the reaction to it. It's cool that science has confirmed what I thought we all generally sort of assumed. I'm surprised that apparently some people had assumed otherwise.
Yep, I recently discovered this myself. Unfortunately (as with this clever HTML5 hack), it only supports YouTube, so videos on other sites still require Flash.
Do you really think the insurance companies didn't want this? This bill is a huge victory for them. You now have no choice other than to buy their products.
That's why the public option is such a critical component of any good health care reform plan...
Wait, did we actually the cars people traded in? I assumed they were being resold, just like any other used cars (which of course would somewhat defeat the purpose of the gas milage requirement, since you're not taking high-milage cars off the streets, just shuffling them around to people who can't afford new cars).
I support abortion in certain circumstances. For example, fairly unusual cases when the mother's health is jeopardized by the pregnancy. I recognize that the life of one human being is being terminated, but since I don't value that life above the life of the mother (and there's a good chance that if the mother dies or becomes severely ill, the baby will die anyway), I believe this to be a reasonable position.
There are a few who would oppose abortion even in these cases; there are many who support abortion in many more circumstances. We should be able to have this discussion, but it's being drowned out by all the lies, deception and namecalling.
You honestly believe that the minute the spunk hits the egg, it's a murder, do you? I hope you don't believe in God, then, cos you're going to have to think he's quite the callous cunt given how many early miscarriages happen (oh, sorry, murders of defenceless little baby humans by a God with the power and intelligence to know better).
What's the difference between a miscarriage and any of the other bazillion ways a person can naturally die? If you blame God for miscarriages, presumably you also blame God when people die of cancer, or get hit by a bus, or whatever. Human life is lost.
And then you're going to be terrified he's going to send you to hell for thinking he's a callous cunt (even if he is, I guess)
This attitude stems from the false belief that people are generally good, and that we all naturally deserve to go to Heaven. We're not, and we don't. Only perfect people are worthy of entering God's kingdom, and none of us is perfect, so none of us deserve to go to heaven. God does not arbitrarily choose to send certain people to Hell because they're worse than the rest of us. We're just as bad - and God loves us anyway.
In hindsight, all scientific findings are "obvious" and "just common sense". What people forget to mention is that before the finding, there were about 200 competing, equally obvious and common sense based theories on what was happening.
OK, but in this case... were there really 200 competing theories? I thought this was generally assumed (if not proven), going back a couple of decades?
Didn't it say "in the last trimester"? Abortions after 24 weeks are illegal.
But this delineation is entirely arbitrary, based on "what would make a significant number of people uncomfortable" rather than on science. Are they human beings at 25 weeks? Not human beings at 23?
This study doesn't show it, but there are ways of testing for that. For example, I know someone who was born in China and adopted by American parents. Genetically she's 100% Chinese, but culturally 100% American. Now, let's say she marries a guy who's also genetically Chinese but speaks English, and they have kids. Their children will not be exposed to Chinese language prior to birth. I would expect that the babies, while genetically 100% Chinese, will cry like Americans (insert joke here).
Quite often, the Accept-Language header is NOT set to the language the user actually prefers. Users could change it, but this would require knowing how to use a computer. Users who are perfectly comfortable with whatever bizarre interface any random web site chooses to implement will balk at touching anything on their computer beyond the bare minimum required to get to the Web. This includes browser preferences, OS preferences, bundled applications, etc.
Because most web sites ignore the setting, users don't expect that the setting will have any effect, so when it does, they're confused and annoyed and don't know how to fix it if it's wrong. This puts pressure on other sites to continue ignoring it.
OK, I chose poorly when I thought of a random substance. Still, you see my point - there are things you could apply to a burn that would soothe it, that don't contain anything the FDA would call an "active ingredient".
No active ingredient? They did apply a cream. If you've had painful heat applied to your arm, rubbing butter on it will make it feel better; lidocaine would feel MORE better*, but this isn't a sugar pill.
Well, people did complain that when they switched from XP to Vista, tons of stuff didn't work anymore. I guess this means the upgrade to Windows 7 is going more smoothly?
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You probably haven't been given moderator points, in which case you can't mod anything yet - you're not missing it.
Blocking outgoing ports can't possibly work. What's to prevent the exploit from sending the other packets of the handshake anyway, as if it had received the packets blocked by the firewall?
If you're behind NAT, the remote system can't send reply packets if you didn't initiate the connection, because the router won't associate the incoming replies with an outgoing connection, and won't forward them to the internal machine.
This is 911.
Help, I am being attacked!
Hold on sir, I will--
Sir, are you still there?
Sir? Hello? Gurgle, gurgle.
(Bloody mess on ground...)
Congratulations, you win our haiku contest!
Who cares if it had a multitasking kernel, if you couldn't actually run as many applications on it? Most Windows 95 users would only run a few apps at a time, for fear of crashing the whole system. Sure, apps would launch faster on Windows, and one slow app was less likely to lock up the whole system, but overall the Mac was more usable, and more stable, than Windows 95.
Sorry, Windows 95 was not better than Mac OS 8. For one thing, Mac OS 8 was a hell of a lot more stable, which is pretty disturbing because Mac OS 8 crashed quite a bit, and crashed hard (the whole machine would lock up, requiring a reboot). Windows 95 was worse. I could only use it reliably for about six hours at a time. It was plagued with security problems - I used to have a simple shell script that would crash the network stack of any Windows 95 machine just by entering its IP address.
Windows 95 supported 255-character filenames, but developers seemed afraid to use anything but 8.3, so trying to figure out what anything did was always a mess.
On Mac OS 8, if you installed something and it broke your system, you could bring up the Extensions Manager, find the offending extension or control panel, and temporarily disable it, saving your settings as extension sets that you could easily switch between. It was like Safe Mode done right. On previous versions of the Mac OS that didn't have the Extensions Manager, you could hold down the Option key while booting to get something equivalent to Safe Mode.
And if an application managed to break itself, most of the time you could easily fix it by tossing the preferences file and starting fresh. Of course there was a standard system-wide location for where these preferences files should go, and essentially all Mac software used it, naming the files with something resembling the name of the application they belonged to.
Apple's published Human Interface Guidelines helped application developers give their applications a consistent look and feel, so switching from one application to another felt pretty natural to users. These guidelines even specified details like how many pixels there should be between an "OK" button and a "Cancel" button, and explained why using descriptive button labels like these is far superior to the "Yes" and "No" that Windows applications still seem to prefer. Having one application ask "Would you like to save your document before exiting?" and another ask "Are you sure you'd like to exit without saving your document?" does not make for a good user experience. And I'm still baffled as to why (at least in locales that use left-to-right writing systems) although we typically put a "forward" button on the right side and a "back" button on the left side, dialog boxes on Windows always seem to put the button that continues forward to the left, and the button that cancels or goes back to the previous step to the right. Oh, and why do so many dialog boxes have both "Apply" and "OK" buttons? If you could add up the time people have wasted over the last decade by clicking both buttons (because somehow they've been lead to believe that they have to)...
Something I was always fond of: on the Mac, not only did the icons on my desktop always stay exactly where I left them, but so did all my folder windows. If I opened a folder window, it would open to the same position on the screen where it was when I closed it, and would have the same view settings (e.g. display in icon view or list view, sort by filename or by last modified date, etc.). On Windows 95, sometimes just launching certain applications was enough to make Explorer completely rearrange everything.
I could go on, but I'll spare you.
One other nitpick: you say IE4-6 had a brilliant run, but Microsoft is clueless with IE8. On the contrary, while IE4-6 may arguably have been better than Netscape 4 (which is also an unusable pile of crap by modern standards), with IE8 they're actually putting real effort into making a decent browser. It still sucks, but not because they've lost their way - on the contrary, they've finally found it again, and are genuinely trying to make a better browser. Of course, Mozilla was trying to make a better browser years ago, Apple tried to make an even better browser after that, and Google built a great browser on top of Apple's work (which was in turn built on KDE's work). Microsoft is years behind, and desperately tryin
Jessica, thanks for pasting a poorly-formatted response (and mistyping my UID) which really has very little to do with my comment. I never said anything about upgrading directly from XP to 7.
By the way, I had no major problems upgrading from Vista to the 7 Release Candidate.
All kinds of things.
Every time you visit my web site, a random quote is displayed. Which quote you get is stored in a session cookie, so every page displays the same quote as long as your browser remains open (this was a better idea when I had fewer quotes in my list; I'll probably change it, but that's irrelevant to this discussion). Another cookie tracks which quotes you've already seen, to ensure that if you come back tomorrow (with a new session), you won't get the same quote you just got yesterday. Once you've cycled through all of the available quotes, of course, it resets.
Because I was extremely bored several years ago, there's some additional logic: if you've been to my site before, and I've added a new quote to the list since then, instead of choosing any quote at random, you'll be given the one that I just added. If you've never been to the site before, it just picks one randomly.
Also, because I was extremely bored even more years ago, my site can be displayed with a variety of themes, most of which are intended to resemble windows on a computer desktop, on a variety of operating systems. The first time you visit the site, a theme is chosen for you based on your platform (as determined by your user_agent string), but you can change it just by selecting another theme from the list. Your preference is saved in a cookie.
I do not track individual users. I have no idea who you are. I don't assign you a unique ID. But I am using cookies.
Usability testing doesn't tell you how customers are actually using your site under normal conditions as part of their daily workflow; it tells you how testers hypothetically could use your site under laboratory conditions. You can certainly get useful feedback from usability testing, but to borrow a phrase, people do breathtakingly stupid things in the wild that nobody would have dreamed of during testing.
Just on my tiny little server I run at home for a handful of friends and family, with one single domain, I block an average of 416 SMTP connections per day based solely on DNSRBLs plus another 876 per day based on a slew of custom rules I've developed. After that, SpamAssassin blocks 82 messages per day and quarantines 48 more.
That's something in the neighborhood of one spam attempt EVERY MINUTE of every day, 24/7/365, on a tiny little personal server hosting only one domain for a small handful of users.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of the scientific process. Unfortunately you are not alone, since this sort of comments pops up in every science thread on this site.
On the contrary, I think it's great that they've done this; I'm not questioning the motivations behind the science. I'm questioning the reaction to it. It's cool that science has confirmed what I thought we all generally sort of assumed. I'm surprised that apparently some people had assumed otherwise.
Yep, I recently discovered this myself. Unfortunately (as with this clever HTML5 hack), it only supports YouTube, so videos on other sites still require Flash.
Do you really think the insurance companies didn't want this? This bill is a huge victory for them. You now have no choice other than to buy their products.
That's why the public option is such a critical component of any good health care reform plan...
Wait, did we actually the cars people traded in? I assumed they were being resold, just like any other used cars (which of course would somewhat defeat the purpose of the gas milage requirement, since you're not taking high-milage cars off the streets, just shuffling them around to people who can't afford new cars).
Very well said.
I support abortion in certain circumstances. For example, fairly unusual cases when the mother's health is jeopardized by the pregnancy. I recognize that the life of one human being is being terminated, but since I don't value that life above the life of the mother (and there's a good chance that if the mother dies or becomes severely ill, the baby will die anyway), I believe this to be a reasonable position.
There are a few who would oppose abortion even in these cases; there are many who support abortion in many more circumstances. We should be able to have this discussion, but it's being drowned out by all the lies, deception and namecalling.
Stopping its development before it has a chance to become a full, talking, walking human being is not as bad as killing a new born baby.
Just thought I should point out, a new born baby also hasn't had a chance to become a full, talking, walking human being yet.
You honestly believe that the minute the spunk hits the egg, it's a murder, do you? I hope you don't believe in God, then, cos you're going to have to think he's quite the callous cunt given how many early miscarriages happen (oh, sorry, murders of defenceless little baby humans by a God with the power and intelligence to know better).
What's the difference between a miscarriage and any of the other bazillion ways a person can naturally die? If you blame God for miscarriages, presumably you also blame God when people die of cancer, or get hit by a bus, or whatever. Human life is lost.
And then you're going to be terrified he's going to send you to hell for thinking he's a callous cunt (even if he is, I guess)
This attitude stems from the false belief that people are generally good, and that we all naturally deserve to go to Heaven. We're not, and we don't. Only perfect people are worthy of entering God's kingdom, and none of us is perfect, so none of us deserve to go to heaven. God does not arbitrarily choose to send certain people to Hell because they're worse than the rest of us. We're just as bad - and God loves us anyway.
In hindsight, all scientific findings are "obvious" and "just common sense". What people forget to mention is that before the finding, there were about 200 competing, equally obvious and common sense based theories on what was happening.
OK, but in this case... were there really 200 competing theories? I thought this was generally assumed (if not proven), going back a couple of decades?
Didn't it say "in the last trimester"? Abortions after 24 weeks are illegal.
But this delineation is entirely arbitrary, based on "what would make a significant number of people uncomfortable" rather than on science. Are they human beings at 25 weeks? Not human beings at 23?
This study doesn't show it, but there are ways of testing for that. For example, I know someone who was born in China and adopted by American parents. Genetically she's 100% Chinese, but culturally 100% American. Now, let's say she marries a guy who's also genetically Chinese but speaks English, and they have kids. Their children will not be exposed to Chinese language prior to birth. I would expect that the babies, while genetically 100% Chinese, will cry like Americans (insert joke here).
I'm glad we have scientific evidence to back it up, but did anyone believe this wasn't the case? Is anybody surprised by these findings?
Quite often, the Accept-Language header is NOT set to the language the user actually prefers. Users could change it, but this would require knowing how to use a computer. Users who are perfectly comfortable with whatever bizarre interface any random web site chooses to implement will balk at touching anything on their computer beyond the bare minimum required to get to the Web. This includes browser preferences, OS preferences, bundled applications, etc.
Because most web sites ignore the setting, users don't expect that the setting will have any effect, so when it does, they're confused and annoyed and don't know how to fix it if it's wrong. This puts pressure on other sites to continue ignoring it.
OK, I chose poorly when I thought of a random substance. Still, you see my point - there are things you could apply to a burn that would soothe it, that don't contain anything the FDA would call an "active ingredient".
They are a reputable company, in that they have a reputation.
No active ingredient? They did apply a cream. If you've had painful heat applied to your arm, rubbing butter on it will make it feel better; lidocaine would feel MORE better*, but this isn't a sugar pill.
* "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
Well, people did complain that when they switched from XP to Vista, tons of stuff didn't work anymore. I guess this means the upgrade to Windows 7 is going more smoothly?