No, pre-10.3, Mac OS X stored password hashes in an unencrypted file that could be accesses by any user, even without administrative privileges. A one-line NetInfo dump command in Terminal would display them all. Once students had the hash, they all fed them into Jack the Ripper to get the password. The whole process is actually pretty trivial for anyone with the most passing familiarity with Terminal.
If it's anyone's fault, it's Apple's for leaving such a gaping security hole in OS X. Essentially, any user could quickly crack all the other passwords. I personally got burned by this by a remote hacker who used a "guest" account to quickly root my box. I assume the scheme was left over from NeXT days, when hash cracking was best left to the NSA and their supercomputers. Apple changed it in 10.3, so that the hashes are now shadowed and displayed only to root.
No it doesn't. There are more than 300 times as many dogs in the United States than there are moutain lions. Dogs are more dangerous because there are more of them, not because they are more dangerous per animal. Your family dog is not more likely to kill you than a mountain lion.
Not quite. Your dog is less likely to kill you than any given mountain lion, but since you see your dog far more often than you see a mountain lion, the overall probability is still in favor of being killed by your dog. (Which isn't exactly what the GPP said, but I think is what he meant - would have been more precise to say "be killed by" rather than "to kill you".)
The big problem in drug discovery is finding effective, efficient ways to pick which of the the many, many compounds with interesting in vitro activities actually can be a useful drug. I've run into many academic researchers that are pretty clueless about this problem and none that have made substantial progress in attacking the problem.
Very true, but two points. First, we do have a different definition of "discovery". I would call this "development" - see below for why I consider this distinction important. And two, it's not generally done by the BigPharma companies, anyway. This is exactly the high-risk, hit-or-miss work that's done in small biotech startups, often funded by venture capital. The BigPharma steps in at the properly gamed time - after it's reasonably clear the compound has potential, but before the cost of acquisition gets too high - to fund final clinical development.
But finding compounds with interesting in vitro activity is less than 1% of the effort of discovering a drug (ie, a compound that is FDA approved for sale).
This is a nice talking point that, like most nice talking points, presents a highly skewed version of reality (use of as contextually odd a word as "effort" should be a red flag). First, it ignores the fact that the overwhelming expense in drug development is running huge clinical trials, not the developmental engineering. Someone has to pay for those, but I think it's unfortunate, given the mixed incentives, that for-profit businesses do in this country. Second, it assumes that the only cost of finding that new compound is the month's salary of the post-doc who put it on cells. It completely discounts the huge amount of basic science work that had to be done by someone - other government-funded academics, generally - to define the biology, identify the targets, and create the tools to even make the in vitro assay possible. How much did it cost to "discover" STI571? Conservatively, I'd guess well north of $10 Billion over 30 years. Granted, the knowledge is a sunk cost that can be applied to other drugs, but it makes no sense to ignore the huge public investment that dwarfs even the clinical trial expenses of the company that eventually brought it to market.
I would love to see a relation of the "effort" of development to the "effort" of marketing, advertising, lobbying and litigating post-approval. I would wager that the latter exceeds the former for most approved drugs - probably many times over for "blockbusters". Such data is, of course, tightly held by the folks who would know.
Your post is seriously misleading or pure hyperbole. Do you think you can back your claim up with some statistics on the expenses incurred by pharmaceutical companies?
People much smarter than me have surveyed the issue exhaustively. There are two things of note, I think. The first is that the nine largest pharmaceutical companies spend 2.5x as much on marketing, advertising and administration than on R&D. In fact, their net income is 70% greater than what they spend on R&D - to repeat myself redundantly, they make more in pure profit than they spend on R&D.
The second is that those astronomical profit margins - 15-25%, second only to Microsoft - have been rock-stable for a generation or two. This isn't a boom-and-bust, high-risk-for-high-gain business model. It's high gain, all the time. Unfortunately, the incentives that create that economic model have little to do with helping patients or delivering innovative new drugs. In fact, innovation is often considered a threat to profitability.
I realize that marketing drugs is a major activity of big pharma, but your claim about where innovation goes on and where drug candidates are developed and how they are developed shows complete ignorance about the complexity of the process and the sorts of risks that companies assume in the process of taking thousands of drug candidates through to bring one or two viable drugs to market.
There is clearly little risk in an industry segment that pays steady 20% margins. They develop few new candidates in house, and those they do are, by now, almost universally derivative. Analysts caught onto this long ago. BigPharma companies are no longer judged by how well their endogenous R&D departments work, but by how effective they are at mass-marketing copycat lifestyle drugs and at filling their pipelines by acquisition of small biotech companies with innovative products. The value of M&A in the industry is judged soley on how the transaction fills the pipeline of the parent company. People involved in the industry know exactly how it works. Academia provides the basic science and the innovative ideas. Small biotech develops those ideas into drug candidates. BigPharma serves as a giant bank to fund clinical trials, market the resulting products, and lobby/litigate to maintain patent rights. It's not a dissimilar food chain to many other industries, but there's a little more at stake in this one.
"...seriously misleading...pure hyperbole...shows complete ignorance..." Couldn't agree more. Oh, were you talking about me?
Something tells me that inputting personal information because of an email does not necessarily qualify as an unlawful order.
It was prima facie unlawful because it came from someone who was impersonating an non-existant officer. I hope soldiers are trained to verify the identity and authority of officers who are completely unknown to them. Even limited to the phishing realm, the implications are much more serious than for your average joe. Next time, the phishing could come from the intelligence arm of the PLA - who would presumably impersonate a real officer. Wouldn't it be nice to read the email of lots of American soldiers? Or maybe they'll seek out technical information, deployment orders, tactical data, access to restricted networks, who knows? Verifying the authenticity of even seemingly-insignificant orders like this one can be an issue of national security.
Right. You better run and go tell the pharmaceutical companies and all the scientist pouring millions of dollars are years of research into this quickly. I am sure they would hate to spend millions of dollars and years of their lives only be told fuck you when they finally develop a cure. If your asinine knee jerk opinion ruled policy, research into new medicines would grind to a halt as scientist and investors go find something better to do with their time.
Pharmaceutical companies do three things, and drug discovery isn't one of them: 1. Marketing 2. Marketing (and bankrolling clinical testing) 3. Marketing (and manufacturing)
Meanwhile, the academics who do the actual drug discovery continue to pop out innovative new ideas with none of the massive financial incentives that BigPharma claims they need to continue their (unproductive and nearly non-existant) "innovative work". I wonder why that is?
Even if they don't have to do basic research for it, there's still the safety testing work that the FDA needs to have done before a new drug is allowed on the market. That's not cheap.
It's not cheap, but it's not particularly innovative. I have yet to hear a good argument why clinical testing is more effective and efficient when run by for-profit companies with decidedly skewed incentives than by disinterested academic or government bodies. I have heard lots of arguments for the reverse.
There aren't many (any?) tall buildings in DC. I think zoning rules restict buildings to six stories. That was originally for asthetic reasons, but security concerns probably play a role in keeping it that way.
Nice argument, but you completely ignore the fact that no one said Apple shouldn't build new machines, just that they should support the ones they sold.
Folks are confused about what, exactly, this means. Apple didn't cancel the machines' warranties. They didn't stop making compatible software. MacOS 8.1, released 1998, still supported 68k machines - and Apple sold their last 68k Mac in 1995. Three years of active updates, and the ability to keep using the computer as long as it lasts, seems perfectly reasonable. Apple didn't sell any hardware upgrades, but then Apple almost never sold hardware upgrades. And there was a significant 3rd party upgrade market for the Q950. You could even drop a PPC601 into it.
Incidentally, the Quadra 950 had already been superceded by the PM 9500 in the summer of 1995 (the 9500 was introduced in May; the 950 wasn't formally discontinued until October). Anyone who spent $12k on a 950 after it's much-superior replacement had been introduced should have known exactly what they were buying - it would be like buying a PowerBook G4 after the IntelBooks are on sale .
If the point is to just print 5 Hello World's, yours is a better way to comment, isn't it? Comments shouldn't explain the language, just get the point across as to what a block of code does - so it can be understood by someone who knows the language, or re-implemented in a different language. Your old boss's way is unhelpfully complex and obfuscating. In short, I think your old boss was a jerk.;)
Re:"evolution of user-centric design"?
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The only feature of IE 7 that strikes me as a nice piece of user interface is the clear and graphical method of creating a new tab.
That's such an interesting throwback of a UI idea. Way back in the original MacOS, before it had a true heirachical file system, each disk had an empty folder named "Empty Folder" at the root level. To make a new folder, you would select Empty Folder and rename it. A new Empty Folder would then appear to replace the renamed one.
Obviously, the Empty Folder didn't last long. Aside from the problems introduced with a hierachical file system (every folder and sub-folder would need its own Emtpy Folder?), the interface folks quickly realized that using a menu or keyboard combo was much more consistent with the rest of the OS. Conflating a "rename" or "select" action with a "create new" action was just confusing. I wonder how long until Microsoft re-learns the same lesson?
we expect to improve the design drastically, so that it is no longer the most complicated pieces of machinery ever built
moore's law works on the shuttle too. if only NASA, and the government goons, would open the development and research funding to the public market.
This is totally funny, because the whole point of Moore's Law is that complexity increases at an exponential rate. Unless you think G5's and Pentium M's are radically simpler than an 4004?
Most copies of Windows come with a brand new computer. Dell probably pays less than $25 a pop for these, which is not a ton of revenue. When you factor in the costs of R&D, it's a shitty profit margin. They make their big bucks from applications like Office.
They make plenty of bucks from Windows, too. In fact, the operating margin for the Windows client division (77% last year) is actually higher than for the Office division (72%). $25 x (almost every computer sold in the world) is a LOT of money, and they get all those sales "for free"; whereas they actually have to convince people to proactively buy and/or upgrade Office to get that money.
Microsoft only works because they're a monopoly.
Yup, operating margins like that only come to monopolies.:)
You know, the only way Old/New/Third could make any sense is if the Old World is the old world; the New World is the Americas; and the Third World, that which is neither Old nor New, includes Australia, NZ, and Antarctica.:)
If you're going to be pedantic, you should get it right.
Old World: Europe, Asia, and a little bit of North Africa; New World: North and South America; Third World: Everywhere else. The meanings and connotations have been re-arranged a lot since those terms were first coined, but the true pedant should be holding out for the original terminology.
Bzzt. Pedants don't make shit up just so they can sound snarky. There's no indication that "Third World" was ever used in connection with Old and New (which would make no sense on a number of levels, anyway), and no record of its use before the mid-20th century. The OED lists its first recorded use as:
[1956 G. BALANDIER Tiers Monde 369 La conférence tenue à Bandoeng en avril 1955, par les délégués de vingt-neuf nations asiatiques et africaines..manifeste l'accès, au premier plan de la scène politique internationale, de ces peuples qui constituent un 'Tiers Monde' entre les deux 'blocs', selon l'expression d'A. Sauvy.]
The difference is that the US may be highly indebted, but only to its own citizens. Poor countries are indebted to other countries.
Erm, we're highly indebted to the central banks of China and Japan. Americans are wallowing in oceans of consumer debt, and our savings rate is net negative - how would we be able to finance our government's debt?
Uhh.. Apple Revenue rose 75% to $3.52 billion from $2.01 billion, while MS rose 8% to $39.79 billion. That 8% increase alone is more that Apple's total Revenue, its all relative.
Apple's number is quarterly; Microsoft's is for the entire year. For the last twelve months, Apple's revenues were $11.1 billion. It's incredible that Apple is up to around 1/4-1/3 of MS's revenues after their recent growth spurt - quite respectable. Of course, they're still not anywhere close to as profitable, but no one else gets away with literally printing (pressing?) money like Microsoft.
The Boston Tea party did not protest against a democratic and elected government, but against a monarch taxing unrepresented citizens.
That sounds like a bit of revisionist history, which I'm surprised no Brit called you out on. First, it was Parliament that enacted the tax, not the monarch. The British monarch had no direct powers of taxation at that time. One of the fundamental principles of British government was that Parliament held the purse strings.
Second, the issue of representation was very much open to debate. Most British lawmakers agreed with the principle of Virtual Representation, by which each MP was supposed to represent the interests of *all* British citizens, not just the voters who elected him. In an age of very limited white, male, property-owning franchise, this seemed a very liberal and farsighted notion (in fact, I wish our Congressmen still felt the same way today!). In any event, all parties concerned acknowledged that representing the colonies in Parliament was, in practical terms, impossible and, each for their own reasons, undesirable anyway.
Oh, blah. That's the best you could do - not even a single grammatical error in my long-winded grammar-correcting post? I think you lose this game. Point for my English teachers...
Well-expressed -- of course I'm referring to the way you kept referring.
...who might also point out that you're missing a comma, and probably a period as well. [whack!];P
No, AC is right. We can get away with a lot of things in American English, but switching the subject from plural to singular in mid-sentence isn't among them.
I assume you were referring to the difference between UK and US usage when referring to collective nouns (teams, companies, etc.). But that's irrelevant here, because the company names aren't the subject of their clause - "people" is the subject, paired with "are". But then he uses "it" to refer back to "people", which is incorrect (and makes no sense).
[I had several wonderful English teachers who would give the GGPP a sound thwacking with a ruler, before making him diagram his sentence on the board a hundred times.]
This is fine. Personally I think Google the company is going to do just fine but I think Google the $300+ stock is in a lot of trouble. To justify that price every dollar spent has to be focused like a laser on extracting $$$ from customers.
This is what I just don't get about the markets. Google sold a bunch of stock to the public at a certain price last year. They got a bunch of cash in return. Since then, all those random strangers have been bidding themselves into a frenzy for ownership of that public stock. But why should Google itself care? They get no new money out of the frenzy (except for getting a higher price should they sell more of their private shares) and they have little or no way to substantially influence it. Yet conventional wisdom, as you state, is that they need to change their behavior to "justify" a frenzy they have little to do with, and no way to control. In a sane world, shouldn't they simply ignore it, continue doing what they've been doing (succesfully!), and let all these random crazy people do whatever it is they're going to do?
Dramatically changing your behavior to meet the whims of a mob of insane speculators seems a sure path to speedy doom...
Also, don't get too high and mighty about security. MacOS is a security time-bomb waiting to go off. The moronic concept of poping up a window to enter your administrator password is a trojan writers dream to steal passwords and root boxes. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of WHEN the first trojans start taking advantage of this. End users have gotten so used to entering their administrative password every time it asks for them, they've stopped thinking about it. This will be bad. Very bad.
I'm not sure I understand the logic there. Is it better to permit any application to be installed and then to execute any command without any sort of permission or authentication? Asking for the password, and explaining why it is required, should help prevent a trojan from being installed in the first place...
Because end users (on OS X) very rarely have to supply their administrator password; mostly when installing new applications that modify system resources. It's a very UNIX-y setup - as long as other users won't be affected, no authentication is needed (and why should it be?). When authentication is required, it's usually very clear to the user what action of theirs prompted it (they just double-clicked on that installer, for example). Random windows popping up on their web browser, asking for a password, will not fool very many users.
In particular, the study of RNA-based regulation in mammals has exploded in the past few years, and it looks like a huge amount of regulation takes place without proteins. I would bet that many of the things which are done crudely in plants with proteins are done in extremely complicated fashions with RNA-based regulation in mammals.
Plants have equally interesting RNA-based regulatory mechanisms. Some of the early RNAi-based gene silencing work was done in plants. And recently, there was a suggestion that plants might carry an RNA backup copy of their genome.
In fact, RNAi was first discovered in the lowly worm, and the pathways are fully formed in even-lowlier yeast. RNA-based regulation might go way back - a relic of the RNA world, when proteins were new (or nonexistant). We mammals might have a few claims to fame, but RNA-based regulation isn't one of them.:)
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No, pre-10.3, Mac OS X stored password hashes in an unencrypted file that could be accesses by any user, even without administrative privileges. A one-line NetInfo dump command in Terminal would display them all. Once students had the hash, they all fed them into Jack the Ripper to get the password. The whole process is actually pretty trivial for anyone with the most passing familiarity with Terminal.
If it's anyone's fault, it's Apple's for leaving such a gaping security hole in OS X. Essentially, any user could quickly crack all the other passwords. I personally got burned by this by a remote hacker who used a "guest" account to quickly root my box. I assume the scheme was left over from NeXT days, when hash cracking was best left to the NSA and their supercomputers. Apple changed it in 10.3, so that the hashes are now shadowed and displayed only to root.
Cool, man. Thanks.
I would love to see a relation of the "effort" of development to the "effort" of marketing, advertising, lobbying and litigating post-approval. I would wager that the latter exceeds the former for most approved drugs - probably many times over for "blockbusters". Such data is, of course, tightly held by the folks who would know.
The second is that those astronomical profit margins - 15-25%, second only to Microsoft - have been rock-stable for a generation or two. This isn't a boom-and-bust, high-risk-for-high-gain business model. It's high gain, all the time. Unfortunately, the incentives that create that economic model have little to do with helping patients or delivering innovative new drugs. In fact, innovation is often considered a threat to profitability. There is clearly little risk in an industry segment that pays steady 20% margins. They develop few new candidates in house, and those they do are, by now, almost universally derivative. Analysts caught onto this long ago. BigPharma companies are no longer judged by how well their endogenous R&D departments work, but by how effective they are at mass-marketing copycat lifestyle drugs and at filling their pipelines by acquisition of small biotech companies with innovative products. The value of M&A in the industry is judged soley on how the transaction fills the pipeline of the parent company. People involved in the industry know exactly how it works. Academia provides the basic science and the innovative ideas. Small biotech develops those ideas into drug candidates. BigPharma serves as a giant bank to fund clinical trials, market the resulting products, and lobby/litigate to maintain patent rights. It's not a dissimilar food chain to many other industries, but there's a little more at stake in this one.
"...seriously misleading...pure hyperbole...shows complete ignorance..." Couldn't agree more. Oh, were you talking about me?
1. Marketing
2. Marketing (and bankrolling clinical testing)
3. Marketing (and manufacturing)
Meanwhile, the academics who do the actual drug discovery continue to pop out innovative new ideas with none of the massive financial incentives that BigPharma claims they need to continue their (unproductive and nearly non-existant) "innovative work". I wonder why that is?
There aren't many (any?) tall buildings in DC. I think zoning rules restict buildings to six stories. That was originally for asthetic reasons, but security concerns probably play a role in keeping it that way.
Incidentally, the Quadra 950 had already been superceded by the PM 9500 in the summer of 1995 (the 9500 was introduced in May; the 950 wasn't formally discontinued until October). Anyone who spent $12k on a 950 after it's much-superior replacement had been introduced should have known exactly what they were buying - it would be like buying a PowerBook G4 after the IntelBooks are on sale .
Obviously, the Empty Folder didn't last long. Aside from the problems introduced with a hierachical file system (every folder and sub-folder would need its own Emtpy Folder?), the interface folks quickly realized that using a menu or keyboard combo was much more consistent with the rest of the OS. Conflating a "rename" or "select" action with a "create new" action was just confusing. I wonder how long until Microsoft re-learns the same lesson?
Second, the issue of representation was very much open to debate. Most British lawmakers agreed with the principle of Virtual Representation, by which each MP was supposed to represent the interests of *all* British citizens, not just the voters who elected him. In an age of very limited white, male, property-owning franchise, this seemed a very liberal and farsighted notion (in fact, I wish our Congressmen still felt the same way today!). In any event, all parties concerned acknowledged that representing the colonies in Parliament was, in practical terms, impossible and, each for their own reasons, undesirable anyway.
I assume you were referring to the difference between UK and US usage when referring to collective nouns (teams, companies, etc.). But that's irrelevant here, because the company names aren't the subject of their clause - "people" is the subject, paired with "are". But then he uses "it" to refer back to "people", which is incorrect (and makes no sense).
[I had several wonderful English teachers who would give the GGPP a sound thwacking with a ruler, before making him diagram his sentence on the board a hundred times.]
Dramatically changing your behavior to meet the whims of a mob of insane speculators seems a sure path to speedy doom...
Because end users (on OS X) very rarely have to supply their administrator password; mostly when installing new applications that modify system resources. It's a very UNIX-y setup - as long as other users won't be affected, no authentication is needed (and why should it be?). When authentication is required, it's usually very clear to the user what action of theirs prompted it (they just double-clicked on that installer, for example). Random windows popping up on their web browser, asking for a password, will not fool very many users.
In fact, RNAi was first discovered in the lowly worm, and the pathways are fully formed in even-lowlier yeast. RNA-based regulation might go way back - a relic of the RNA world, when proteins were new (or nonexistant). We mammals might have a few claims to fame, but RNA-based regulation isn't one of them.