I dont care if its 1974 ot 1794, human nature doesnt change. Put locks on your (virtual) doors.
Yeah, that seems like great advice now, but hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. As recently as the early 90s, most Unix systems didn't even use shadow passwords.
Admin Guy: "Yeah, so what could happen? Some college kid is going to buy a Unix server and set it up in his dorm room so he can run a brute force attack on/etc/passwd? I'd like to see that one!" LOLZ, snort snort...
The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"... That way kids would be taught from the beginning, and regular people would have time to learn the new system...
Well, no, that wouldn't work on its own. If you think about it, we already have a dual system. Weights and measures of all packaged foods and beverages are printed in both Imperial and metric units. The problem is that the amounts are chosen based on convenience. So "a 12-ounce can of Coke" makes sense, but "354 mL of Coke" sounds off. Similarly, if you went to a butcher and wanted to ask for the same amount of bacon that you get when you buy it prepackaged at the supermarket, 0.454 kilos sounds funny, but a pound sounds about right.
It would be possible to make it so that the metric units were more favorable, but you really do have to pick one and stick with it. If the soft drink makers switched to 500 mL bottles, for example, it would make more sense to go buy a half-liter of Coke than to say "a 16.9 ounce bottle." Similarly, they could package bacon in half-kilo packages. But as it stands, our culture favors the Imperial units, so when the soft drink companies wanted to come out with a larger-sized decanter, they chose 20-ounce bottles instead of half-liters. A 591-mL bottle sounds appealing to no one.
You're right, I forgot about car engines. But that just further proves my point, which was that we'd certainly be capable of using the metric system -- and in fact a liter and a quart are practically the same volume -- but we don't.
and the pricing on the new non US models isn't exactly attractive since it's based on international roaming from AT&T.
How's that? As far as I can tell, the newest models are cheaper than the original Kindle and they offer free wireless connectivity wherever it's available. No roaming charges.
In the U.S., where the pint is a little smaller than in the UK, a pint is basically half a liter. The only time we ever mention liters, though, is when buying soft drinks, like Coke or 7-Up (which all come in two-liter bottles). Seriously -- I can't think of any other product that we'd buy in liters. We'd say quarts (and then two quarts is a half-gallon, etc...)
Maybe it does. See my earlier post about "a black hole."
According to this data from 2003 -- even older than your data -- California middle schools ranked 46th in the nation. Louisiana, West Virginia, and Arkansas are all higher. Trust me, that trend has not reversed.
That's because Californians and Californian companies are some of the greediest mofo's on the planet.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying we're mad because we have to pay taxes. We're mad because we seem to be paying taxes into a black hole.
California has a higher gross state product than any other state. It also has the highest income taxes and state taxes. Simple math will tell you that means California's income is higher than any other state's. And yet we are cutting social services, slashing development budgets, and letting roads fall into disrepair. Our schools used to rank among the best in the nation; now they're at the bottom of the list. Meanwhile we're funding a prison industrial complex fueled by misguided laws and private interests. The problem goes far deeper than "liberal policies" or "Republican greed"... the whole state government is broken.
I'm not the only one who thinks this, either. There is a concerted effort underway right now to call a constitutional convention to reform the state constitution. Californians will probably get to vote for it in November, and if they can, they will.
Agree completely. To further illustrate to people who don't understand what we're talking about, say some group or another puts a measure on the ballot that reads something like this:
After-school sports programs are a valuable part of youth education. They increase socialization among youth, promote general health, and combat the rise of obesity in America. In addition, studies have shown that after-school sports programs typically lower rates of violent crime in affected areas by 29 percent. At present, however, such programs are dangerously underfunded. This bill proposes that California earmark $18 million per year to promote after-school sports programs. As this money will come from the general fund, it will require no new taxes. School district administrators will be required to submit budgets to state agencies for approval of their share of the funds, to ensure full accountability to the taxpayer.
So Joe Voter reads this, goes, "Sure, my lazy-ass kid probably should get out and play sports more," and votes Yes. The bill passes.
What Joe Voter has done is take $18 million per year out of the general fund, where it could have been spent on various under-funded services in tough economic times, and earmarked it for after-school sports programs, come hell or high water. School can't afford books? At least it has an after-school sports program.
And what Joe Voter might not have even understood at the time he voted for this measure is that traditionally, after-school sports programs had been managed by local nonprofits, rather than being funded by school districts. Under the language of the new law, school administrators now have the additional administrative burden of producing a budget for after-school sports, or their share of the funding will be cut. And if they take the money but don't spend it on after-school sports, they will be called to task for "accountability." And who wrote this bill? The accounting firm who stands to gain the contract for managing the invoicing and budgeting of the after-school sports programs.
This is a totally made-up example; I don't know the specifics of any bill that resembles this one. It's just to give you an idea. But each election, California ballots have a dozen or so bills that read just like this one, and if you don't read the information carefully, it's easy to make mistakes.
Part of the problem in Silicon Valley is that the venture capital community has become noticeably more risk averse than it was many years ago.
Looking at some of the Web startups that got funded in the 90s, I wouldn't describe the VC community of that era as "less risk averse" so much as "plain stupid." No sane person should have believed some of those businesses would go anywhere, yet VCs were playing a shell game, hoping some bigger company would come along to buy up their stake before the whole thing fell apart.
The role of venture capital should be to capitalize ventures, with the aim of creating wealth through innovation. Instead, VCs of that era were going for short-term profit, and many of them didn't seem to care what happened to their portfolio at all. As soon as they started getting impatient, they'd fire senior management and start dismantling the company in the most expedient way possible.
Bad joke. If California were a separate nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, right after Italy and before Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and on and on. Australia is an entire continent, and its economy is less than half the size of California's. What Californians are pissed about is that we also have some of the highest taxes in the nation, and we have no idea where that money is all going.
That's called an automatic movement. They're quite common.
Less common is a watch like this one, which is a quartz analog watch powered by five independent, shock-dampened micro-sized motors. It does chrono, world time, and alarms. Every night it syncs with the FM radio signal from the atomic clock in Fort Collins, CO (or at least it tries to, several times over several hours) so it always has the correct time. AND the entire face of the watch is a solar panel, which it uses to charge a battery, allowing it to essentially run forever (much like the device in this story).
Steve Jobs announced that Apple was developing its own Web browser in January 2003. Safari 1.0 was released in June 2003. So not only can your throw one together, but it seems you really can do it in a coffee blender if more than 50 percent of your code comes from pre-existing open source projects.
Firefox not on Apple's radar? So they chose to build Safari using the KHTML rendering engine from Konqueror because they had heard of Konqueror but had never heard of Firefox? Try again.
The rest of your comment makes sense though. That, and Camino development always seemed to lag behind Firefox on Windows and Linux, and some people just thought iCab was better, and some people liked Opera, so Web browsing on Mac OS X was kind of a splintered mess, which was bad for standards support on the platform, and it made a lot of sense that Macs should do a good job of supporting Web standards, especially considering IE did such a lousy job of it, so Apple wrote a Web browser.
Not a troll! I am serious -- I use it all the time. I use it to sync files between several computers AND Microsoft's servers, so I have a backup of anything important "in the cloud," accessible by Web browser if I ever need it.
I can't watch Episode 2. It's the worst of the the three to me.
Agree! Episode 2 is absolutely unwatchable. I saw it in the theater, hated it. Later I thought my reaction must have just been because of some kind of prejudice, and that it probably wasn't as bad as I remembered. Then it came on cable and I had to change the channel after about 15 minutes. That movie is a piece of garbage.
I actually kind of like Episode 3, but funnily enough, my favorite scenes are the ones between Anakin and Palpatine. They're quiet and carry real menace. Imagine it's not a science fiction movie, and Palpatine is trying to turn Anakin on to kiddie porn or something. It works. Then Samuel L. Jackson uses the Force to turn Palpatine's face into a bad rubber mask and I lose all interest again. The actions scenes, for the most part, are incredibly tedious.
I used to read some of the Star Wars novels. Kevin Anderson's were the only ones I thought tried to be Star Wars novels in spirit/archetype. Zahn's read like D&D set in Star Wars Land.
When I look at the Star Wars comic books these days, my mind boggles. There is not one thing that is recognizably "Star Wars" in any of them. The costumes, the space ships, the weapons, the aliens... nothing says "Star Wars" to me. It's as if they told the writers and artists, "OK, so you know Star Wars, right? It's basically a pastiche of every shitty space opera written since the 1930s? So just do some more of that."
(Oh, and that whole Palpatine being a clone thing? I think he's actually talking about a plotline from Star Wars comic books. And those were the good ones.)
The reason Lucas made the films in the first place is because everyone was curious about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader.
Speak for yourself. In Star Wars, Darth Vader was the bad guy. He wore black. He did mean things. He was a scary guy. Every fable has a bad guy, and in Star Wars, Darth Vader was it. Never, not for one moment, did I ever think to myself, "Gee, I wonder what Darth Vader was like when he was a little kid?"
I don't need to know what animals in what pretend farm my acquaintances from highschool just "bought" in some pathetic online farming game.
How come nobody seems to be able to figure out that if you just click the "Hide" button next to one of those updates you can opt to never hear anything about Farmville ever again, from anyone?
If you're American, would you buy Canadian potatoes or Idaho potatoes?
For the record, I'm both.
Unfortunately, I have no idea where my produce comes from. I live in California, one of the biggest agricultural markets in the U.S., but I can all but guarantee you that my tomatoes don't come from the San Joaquin Valley -- not all the varieties, anyway, and not all year round. Welcome to the new global economy.
Things got like that, of course, because as a practical matter you can't source everything from one location. If I actually can't buy something from a source in my local area -- something like decent Web hosting, for example -- then it seems justifiable to seek it elsewhere, especially if the location of the resource isn't particularly important.
If you can put aside the whole patriotism thing (since Canadian companies don't seem to be willing to offer you what you want), the physical distance shouldn't be that much of a factor. Montreal is 1,516 miles (2,439 km) from Dallas. But San Francisco is 1,485 miles (2,389 km) from Dallas -- so I'm not dealing with much more geographic distance than you. The really funny thing is, I swear my latency to my current hosting provider is way better than it was to my last one, even though I think they have their servers in the same datacenter in Dallas. Go figure. What I'm saying, I guess, is that when looking for a hosting provider, I've learned it pays to shop around.
And as others have pointed out, the ADA makes accessibility legally mandatory rather than optional for lots of government deployment scenarios.
That's why I'm thinking Novell or Red Hat. You think they don't wanna sell Linux desktops to government customers? Oracle has invested plenty into Linux, but the desktop area isn't so much its concern.
Slashdot Mirror
It is immature and reeks of disorganization.
What a strange thing to say about a group that originated on 4chan.
I dont care if its 1974 ot 1794, human nature doesnt change. Put locks on your (virtual) doors.
Yeah, that seems like great advice now, but hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. As recently as the early 90s, most Unix systems didn't even use shadow passwords.
Admin Guy: "Yeah, so what could happen? Some college kid is going to buy a Unix server and set it up in his dorm room so he can run a brute force attack on /etc/passwd? I'd like to see that one!" LOLZ, snort snort...
The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"... That way kids would be taught from the beginning, and regular people would have time to learn the new system...
Well, no, that wouldn't work on its own. If you think about it, we already have a dual system. Weights and measures of all packaged foods and beverages are printed in both Imperial and metric units. The problem is that the amounts are chosen based on convenience. So "a 12-ounce can of Coke" makes sense, but "354 mL of Coke" sounds off. Similarly, if you went to a butcher and wanted to ask for the same amount of bacon that you get when you buy it prepackaged at the supermarket, 0.454 kilos sounds funny, but a pound sounds about right.
It would be possible to make it so that the metric units were more favorable, but you really do have to pick one and stick with it. If the soft drink makers switched to 500 mL bottles, for example, it would make more sense to go buy a half-liter of Coke than to say "a 16.9 ounce bottle." Similarly, they could package bacon in half-kilo packages. But as it stands, our culture favors the Imperial units, so when the soft drink companies wanted to come out with a larger-sized decanter, they chose 20-ounce bottles instead of half-liters. A 591-mL bottle sounds appealing to no one.
You're right, I forgot about car engines. But that just further proves my point, which was that we'd certainly be capable of using the metric system -- and in fact a liter and a quart are practically the same volume -- but we don't.
and the pricing on the new non US models isn't exactly attractive since it's based on international roaming from AT&T.
How's that? As far as I can tell, the newest models are cheaper than the original Kindle and they offer free wireless connectivity wherever it's available. No roaming charges.
The nominal reason for this is fuel charges, right?
Wrong. As mentioned many times in this thread, the nominal reason is safety and the comfort of other passengers. He's too big to fit in one seat.
In the U.S., where the pint is a little smaller than in the UK, a pint is basically half a liter. The only time we ever mention liters, though, is when buying soft drinks, like Coke or 7-Up (which all come in two-liter bottles). Seriously -- I can't think of any other product that we'd buy in liters. We'd say quarts (and then two quarts is a half-gallon, etc...)
Looks like it goes to education
Maybe it does. See my earlier post about "a black hole."
According to this data from 2003 -- even older than your data -- California middle schools ranked 46th in the nation. Louisiana, West Virginia, and Arkansas are all higher. Trust me, that trend has not reversed.
That's because Californians and Californian companies are some of the greediest mofo's on the planet.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying we're mad because we have to pay taxes. We're mad because we seem to be paying taxes into a black hole.
California has a higher gross state product than any other state. It also has the highest income taxes and state taxes. Simple math will tell you that means California's income is higher than any other state's. And yet we are cutting social services, slashing development budgets, and letting roads fall into disrepair. Our schools used to rank among the best in the nation; now they're at the bottom of the list. Meanwhile we're funding a prison industrial complex fueled by misguided laws and private interests. The problem goes far deeper than "liberal policies" or "Republican greed"... the whole state government is broken.
I'm not the only one who thinks this, either. There is a concerted effort underway right now to call a constitutional convention to reform the state constitution. Californians will probably get to vote for it in November, and if they can, they will.
Agree completely. To further illustrate to people who don't understand what we're talking about, say some group or another puts a measure on the ballot that reads something like this:
After-school sports programs are a valuable part of youth education. They increase socialization among youth, promote general health, and combat the rise of obesity in America. In addition, studies have shown that after-school sports programs typically lower rates of violent crime in affected areas by 29 percent. At present, however, such programs are dangerously underfunded. This bill proposes that California earmark $18 million per year to promote after-school sports programs. As this money will come from the general fund, it will require no new taxes. School district administrators will be required to submit budgets to state agencies for approval of their share of the funds, to ensure full accountability to the taxpayer.
So Joe Voter reads this, goes, "Sure, my lazy-ass kid probably should get out and play sports more," and votes Yes. The bill passes.
What Joe Voter has done is take $18 million per year out of the general fund, where it could have been spent on various under-funded services in tough economic times, and earmarked it for after-school sports programs, come hell or high water. School can't afford books? At least it has an after-school sports program.
And what Joe Voter might not have even understood at the time he voted for this measure is that traditionally, after-school sports programs had been managed by local nonprofits, rather than being funded by school districts. Under the language of the new law, school administrators now have the additional administrative burden of producing a budget for after-school sports, or their share of the funding will be cut. And if they take the money but don't spend it on after-school sports, they will be called to task for "accountability." And who wrote this bill? The accounting firm who stands to gain the contract for managing the invoicing and budgeting of the after-school sports programs.
This is a totally made-up example; I don't know the specifics of any bill that resembles this one. It's just to give you an idea. But each election, California ballots have a dozen or so bills that read just like this one, and if you don't read the information carefully, it's easy to make mistakes.
Part of the problem in Silicon Valley is that the venture capital community has become noticeably more risk averse than it was many years ago.
Looking at some of the Web startups that got funded in the 90s, I wouldn't describe the VC community of that era as "less risk averse" so much as "plain stupid." No sane person should have believed some of those businesses would go anywhere, yet VCs were playing a shell game, hoping some bigger company would come along to buy up their stake before the whole thing fell apart.
The role of venture capital should be to capitalize ventures, with the aim of creating wealth through innovation. Instead, VCs of that era were going for short-term profit, and many of them didn't seem to care what happened to their portfolio at all. As soon as they started getting impatient, they'd fire senior management and start dismantling the company in the most expedient way possible.
We're talking about California, what money?
Bad joke. If California were a separate nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, right after Italy and before Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and on and on. Australia is an entire continent, and its economy is less than half the size of California's. What Californians are pissed about is that we also have some of the highest taxes in the nation, and we have no idea where that money is all going.
That's called an automatic movement. They're quite common.
Less common is a watch like this one, which is a quartz analog watch powered by five independent, shock-dampened micro-sized motors. It does chrono, world time, and alarms. Every night it syncs with the FM radio signal from the atomic clock in Fort Collins, CO (or at least it tries to, several times over several hours) so it always has the correct time. AND the entire face of the watch is a solar panel, which it uses to charge a battery, allowing it to essentially run forever (much like the device in this story).
Cool. I knew about dropbox but this one is new to me.
Haha, "in a coffee blender." I think that's where my brain is this afternoon.
Steve Jobs announced that Apple was developing its own Web browser in January 2003. Safari 1.0 was released in June 2003. So not only can your throw one together, but it seems you really can do it in a coffee blender if more than 50 percent of your code comes from pre-existing open source projects.
Firefox not on Apple's radar? So they chose to build Safari using the KHTML rendering engine from Konqueror because they had heard of Konqueror but had never heard of Firefox? Try again.
The rest of your comment makes sense though. That, and Camino development always seemed to lag behind Firefox on Windows and Linux, and some people just thought iCab was better, and some people liked Opera, so Web browsing on Mac OS X was kind of a splintered mess, which was bad for standards support on the platform, and it made a lot of sense that Macs should do a good job of supporting Web standards, especially considering IE did such a lousy job of it, so Apple wrote a Web browser.
You should try Live Mesh.
Not a troll! I am serious -- I use it all the time. I use it to sync files between several computers AND Microsoft's servers, so I have a backup of anything important "in the cloud," accessible by Web browser if I ever need it.
I can't watch Episode 2. It's the worst of the the three to me.
Agree! Episode 2 is absolutely unwatchable. I saw it in the theater, hated it. Later I thought my reaction must have just been because of some kind of prejudice, and that it probably wasn't as bad as I remembered. Then it came on cable and I had to change the channel after about 15 minutes. That movie is a piece of garbage.
I actually kind of like Episode 3, but funnily enough, my favorite scenes are the ones between Anakin and Palpatine. They're quiet and carry real menace. Imagine it's not a science fiction movie, and Palpatine is trying to turn Anakin on to kiddie porn or something. It works. Then Samuel L. Jackson uses the Force to turn Palpatine's face into a bad rubber mask and I lose all interest again. The actions scenes, for the most part, are incredibly tedious.
I used to read some of the Star Wars novels. Kevin Anderson's were the only ones I thought tried to be Star Wars novels in spirit/archetype. Zahn's read like D&D set in Star Wars Land.
When I look at the Star Wars comic books these days, my mind boggles. There is not one thing that is recognizably "Star Wars" in any of them. The costumes, the space ships, the weapons, the aliens... nothing says "Star Wars" to me. It's as if they told the writers and artists, "OK, so you know Star Wars, right? It's basically a pastiche of every shitty space opera written since the 1930s? So just do some more of that."
(Oh, and that whole Palpatine being a clone thing? I think he's actually talking about a plotline from Star Wars comic books. And those were the good ones.)
The reason Lucas made the films in the first place is because everyone was curious about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader.
Speak for yourself. In Star Wars, Darth Vader was the bad guy. He wore black. He did mean things. He was a scary guy. Every fable has a bad guy, and in Star Wars, Darth Vader was it. Never, not for one moment, did I ever think to myself, "Gee, I wonder what Darth Vader was like when he was a little kid?"
I've never seen anybody comment on a Farmville update. Most of my inane (but enjoyable) conversation is attached to status updates, photos, or links.
I don't need to know what animals in what pretend farm my acquaintances from highschool just "bought" in some pathetic online farming game.
How come nobody seems to be able to figure out that if you just click the "Hide" button next to one of those updates you can opt to never hear anything about Farmville ever again, from anyone?
If you're American, would you buy Canadian potatoes or Idaho potatoes?
For the record, I'm both.
Unfortunately, I have no idea where my produce comes from. I live in California, one of the biggest agricultural markets in the U.S., but I can all but guarantee you that my tomatoes don't come from the San Joaquin Valley -- not all the varieties, anyway, and not all year round. Welcome to the new global economy.
Things got like that, of course, because as a practical matter you can't source everything from one location. If I actually can't buy something from a source in my local area -- something like decent Web hosting, for example -- then it seems justifiable to seek it elsewhere, especially if the location of the resource isn't particularly important.
If you can put aside the whole patriotism thing (since Canadian companies don't seem to be willing to offer you what you want), the physical distance shouldn't be that much of a factor. Montreal is 1,516 miles (2,439 km) from Dallas. But San Francisco is 1,485 miles (2,389 km) from Dallas -- so I'm not dealing with much more geographic distance than you. The really funny thing is, I swear my latency to my current hosting provider is way better than it was to my last one, even though I think they have their servers in the same datacenter in Dallas. Go figure. What I'm saying, I guess, is that when looking for a hosting provider, I've learned it pays to shop around.
And as others have pointed out, the ADA makes accessibility legally mandatory rather than optional for lots of government deployment scenarios.
That's why I'm thinking Novell or Red Hat. You think they don't wanna sell Linux desktops to government customers? Oracle has invested plenty into Linux, but the desktop area isn't so much its concern.