While switching to Linux is a punishment for MS - pirating their software is not
Of course it is.
Of course it is WHY?
If you merely pirate Microsoft software, you are still allowing them to OWN YOUR DATA. Worse, you perpetuate the status quo of Microsoft's proprietary file formats you are storing your data IN. How many people save their wedding videos in closed file formats without understanding the implications?
I'm sure folks elaborated on the document-formats issue more, but I wanted to highlight an example where you are not creating any file formats: Let say you browse the web in MSIE - you're helping Microsoft.
Most of the smart web developers would LIKE to always target the true standard - the W3.org specs - and then hack in CSS/HTML bugfixes to workaround Microsoft's bugs. But that's an IDEAL. In many corporate environments, you write FOR the Microsoft bugs... and if Firefox does not render the page the same way, ban Firefox. Thankfully this is becoming LESS common, but it's still pervasive. Anyways..
Even today, lots of Intranets still REQUIRE IE6 to access Intranet applications. This came about as the result of short-sighted thinking.. that conformity and monoculture in software is somehow good.
Now, corporations are having their security breached as a result of being locked into the "IE6 format" webpage (see China's "R&D" spyware division..). Good planning...
(BTW, IE8 gets MS some credit. They're still not embracing CSS3 and HTML5, but they've mostly given up on turning the web into an Office
You wouldn't need Flash at all if Youtube would stream one of the many open standards. HTML 5 addresses it, but Youtube is pretty cozy to Adobe. It wasn't always that way... back in the day, you could get streaming video with HARDWARE acceleration. CPU accel is not a big deal on most desktops, but with the new low-wattage Ion/Intel combos or ARM CPUs, it really does matter.
>So when someone makes logical arguments, they are being bought and paid for by big oil??? When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes. It costs money to build and maintain bike lanes.. how can anyone disagree with bike riders paying their fair share to use them???
Who says bikers do not pay their "fair share"? We're all citizens, and paying our share of federal and state taxes.
Oh.. you don't mean to suggest that you BELIEVE the Federal Gas tax actually pays for a majority (or even substantial) portion of the US roadway system, do you? If so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
The US gas tax exists as misdirection - most of the federal government's sourcing of highway funds have come from income taxes, or loans from Saudi Arabia (with their interest in maintaining the US's addiction) , and more recently, China.
You have to remember folks - yesterday's SciFi was made FOR sci-fi fans. How much of today's sci-fi - series or movies - can really claim the same? Compromises are made to attract mainstream, non-scifi audiences and to satisfy Scientology investors and really bad, closet Scientology actors (*cough* Wil Smith *cough*).
Half of the appeal of old sci-fi was lack of (imposed, or self-imposed) censorship. If you made something fantastic and sufficiently intellectual, fewer mainstream people would pay attention, and you could get away with ANYTHING. You could question the morality of the established culture, or at least hold a mirror up to it.. and you would not be blacklisted as a communist or subversive. (For the most part anyways.. the rest of Hollywood suffered, but sci-fi escaped a lot of that treatment).
Twilight Zone TOS, Outer Limits, Start Trek TOS, Logan's Run, and Planet of The Apes all dealt with "human" issues like slavery, race relations, apartheid, the Cold War, resource depletion, "settling" on occupied land uninvited, feminism, the needs of the one vs. the needs of the many.
Not that it was perfect - Gene Roddenberry faced tons of network pressure for his parables about the Cold War, using "Klingons" and "Romulans" as proxies for Soviets and Chinese. You just could not make a show that dealt with these issues in a modern context, period.
I will admit that Battlestar Galactica was a well-done reboot, especially towards the end. I watched some sci-fi friends shift uncomfortable about some of the issues raised, like genocide and torture of prisoners and the effects that has on all parties.
(Mind you, the "kill them all" type considered this an example of the "liberal elite disrespecting the US military" by showcasing the rape of Six so soon after organized rape and torture at Abu Ghraib, etc)
EA was never great, even back then. What made EA huge is they were simply "good" games, and they could raise enough money to buy out all of their competition.
This gave EA yet more leverage with retail... and when all the indie retail shops and smaller chains folded leaving pretty much just GameSpot... well, that pretty much killed off everything else in the ecosystem. Trip Hawkins was a total douche, and set the stage for who EA is today.
EA is like a corporate amoeba, with all the powers of Microsoft and Monsanto rolled into one. I'm honestly curious why EA hasn't just put out their own hardware platform, but the answer is probably because they don't "need" to, and they're much more powerful controlling all of the platforms from behind the scenes.
EA is pretty much the reason I have AVOIDED consoles, and always stuck with PC games, where you have many more choices. I did get a PS3, mainly for Blu-Ray and as a media center.
Someone gave me a steering wheel and pedal set as a gift, so I bought NASCAR 09 for the PS3.
Here's what I expect of any game: that it will be frozen in time, and obviously not contain 2010 players cars, or information. Putting the "year" in the title should simply designate what year or version I bought... just like say Microsoft Word or Gentoo versions.
What I did NOT expect is that EA had a remote doomsday switch for these games, so they can kill off the old version. If that's the case (and it looks like NASCAR 09 is scheduled for termination in Europe) I'm seriously fucking pissed.
We all say "boycott XXX" and "I'll never buy from XXX", but when a cool game comes out memories get short. But if you shell out a ton of money for a game, it's YOURS.
They can call it "taking down the servers", but I call it theft and when my game stops working, EA will have burned me in a way that I can't EVER forget.
>What's the difference? Is Adobe just not sandboxing Javascript code properly? I've never really used Adobe's products for this... but what's to stop them from just using an established javascript implementation like that used in Firefox or Webkit?
Peer review.
Shine a light (or point enough eyeballs) on a bug, and it becomes transparent. Someone will send a patch in for review, or public debate will force an architecture change to safer methods. This is how open source applications like FireFox work. When ICANN said it was OK to start selling domains in non-latin characters which LOOK like latin, phishers drolled at the prospect of owning something that looks like "paypal.com" in hundreds of different forms (Cyrillic's latin looking characters, etc). Firefox developers voted to revolt, and not display non-latin domain names in a exploitable fashion.
Adobe's security experts (and the community) can give their input to Adobe, but Adobe marketing gets to say what is and what is not "a non-starter". There's a valid concern of repeat vulnerabilities here, and Marketing (correctly so) knows convenience over security means MORE SALES.
Adobe is accountable ONLY to their shareholders, who can legally sue them for not moving the upgrade-treadmill fast enough (shareholder value).
>Use the right tool for the right job: if you need a form to look the same regardless of where it ends up, your best bet is a PDF.
But what does this have to do with form -submission-.
Seriously... this is a task which does not belong in a presentation format. The job can be delegated to a background server process (webserver, proprietary email server, I don't care), or it can offer to fire off a browser (which would need to support this task) and let the browser do the submit.. and I don't mean automatically. You get to proof what the browser is sending, then press submit.
I can't tell you how many PDFs I get which ask me to "fill out this PDF" and NO instructions how to do that. My PDF viewer is on Linux, and it doesn't run Javascript (nor do I want it to).
It's funny... you can design a Javascript application on the web which DEGRADES nicely to plain HTML if the browser does not support Javascript. No problem whatsoever, if your web developer knows what "non-intrusive Javascript" means.
For Adobe to not work out a no-JS solution makes them as bad as Microsoft, willfully flouting standards for control and refusing to fix core vulnerabilities for years and years. Eventually, Adobe is going to be forced to address these issues... but in the meantime they're content to let the bodies pile up in the street.
> (I love helpful responses from idiots that start with "first, edit the/etc/spamassassin.conf file" or whatever.)
>Oh yeah, the other wonderfully helpful stock response "stop using the software if you don't like it". Sure, I'd love to go back to getting 500 spams a day.
"Idiots?"
You might have a point if the ONLY step began with "first". But here you see a bunch of people answered you.. and yes, ALL of them began with editing the "whatever" file.
You know... paid support for SpamAssassin IS available. I suppose it could even work for someone who doesn't have TIME to "edit the/etc/spamassassin.conf file".
Even during the holidays there are folks like you who have the audacity to demand FREE free support... while pre-emptively demeaning those who would provide it. Unbelievable.
>Then you are a fool. This is exactly what I mean by trusting your ISP. I sympathize with you and your situation (and I understand that it happens), but all your country has to do is implement some system that will change the UDP packets coming from Google DNS to change the answers, thus accomplishing the same censorship. The more people who use Google DNS, the more likely a country or ISP is to do this.
A non-sequitur. More people using Google DNS or any other DNS resolver does NOT make it more likely that a country or corporation can impose censorship.
In your previous statement you even hint that you know this - you suggest that a country could "change the UDP packets coming from Google DNS to change the answers", but why would a country target JUST GOOGLE DNS for censorship?
If you took 30 seconds to Google the world's best known DNS censorship project (http://www.google.com/search?q=great+firewall+of+china) you would know that China does not target *specific* DNS resolvers (such as you suggest might be done with "Google DNS"). No, China hijacks ALL port 53 traffic which should be obvious then that the DNS provider is 100% irrelevant.
In fact, a third party DNS provider is MORE likely to offer DNS resolver service on a non-standard DNS port, thus becoming an ANTI-censorship tool that China can not defeat (not without blocking or filtering ALL ports which kills their Internet entirely).
You should be careful about calling someone else a "fool", when speaking of topics on which you have your facts wrong.
>Just ask yourself one question, if you don't trust your internet provider enough to do DNS correctly, should you trust them at all?
And the logical extension:
if you don't trust your Internet provider at all, should you give them your business?
I can just see it now - masses of folks ditching their Comcrap and Road Runner connections, running self-administered DNS on "dedicated" 128k lines from the phone company.
Assuming you can even GET direct Internet service like that in your area... you think that somehow by using their DNS (or running your own) the DNS infrastructure is "more distributed" than Google? Yes because we all live in a perfect "open market" with 12 ISPs to choose from, and when an ISP crashes everyone bails for the better run ISP.
Give me a f'n break. Anyone opting-in to Google DNS or OpenDNS is at least *thinking* about the issue... so when their ISPs DNS goes down, they are still running. What's wrong with that?
Maybe this will pressure ISPs to look at DNS from a marketing-collection perspective, instead of an "expense". If that makes the ISPs suddenly WANT to provide better DNS service to compete, so be it.
Sci-fi was attacked from all sides by mega-movie plexes, formulamatic (committee) design headed by investors, and the cult of Scientology.
In short, sci-fi is NOT made for geeks anymore.. it's made for mainstream teenagers and stupid parents who couldn't tell you the difference between "fusion" and "fission". They're the only ones who don't object to Will Smith being in what should be sci-fi classics, dumbed down to the Super-Size McDonald's drive through crowd.
Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's.
If we're talking sci-fi games, Fallout (even the remake) have stayed true to their roots.
Books? I haven't come across any modern sci-fi I liked. I'm a stranger in a strange land...
>Image editing is still way behind Windows and Mac OSX, where you have Photoshop for power users and also Paint Shop Pro for less power users, but who still like a full image editing suite.
I don't get it.
If you want Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, why are you suggesting they can not be run under Linux? They both work fine...
And if you WANT Gimp in Ubuntu, you can go to Applications-->Ubuntu Sofwtare Center and just "click" on GIMP.
It's pretty obvious that a lot of comments here are being driven by the sensationalist, deliberately misleading headline. That's not Ubuntu's fault - see the story poster and/. editor about that. Why do people have time to post responses if they were too busy to read the linked article?
FACT: Ubuntu is NOT dropping GIMP. FACT: Sounds like Ubuntu is paring down the list of default applications, to the set users use most. FACT: Ubuntu allows users to opt-in to application usage tracking, so yes people.. they DO know F-Spot is being used most of the time. FACT: The GIMP user interface is challenging to most people. (Yes, so is Photoshop's... but people get accustomed to Photoshop's menus, and learn them. GIMP doesn't even try to keep things in the same place as these users expect). FACT: The name "GIMP" has negative slang connotations. I work at a Linux shop, and if images need resizing or editing, we joke about "bringing out the GIMP". Yes, this is superficial, but the GIMP developers aren't doing themselves any favors.
GIMP needs to study the history of FireFox. FireFox rose in popularity because it was streamlined to what most people need, hiding the rest. Yes, FireFox did "less" than Mozilla (Seamonkey), but in the end... very few people cared.. GIMP has a great library of image functions... it's a shame that it's not being treated as a library, with a simple UI hooking into all that power, in the same way that FireFox just plugged into the Mozilla "Gecko" engine.
Maybe Sony is taking a page from Microsoft, and now trying to boost market share.
Think of it this way: 1) The XBox360 has between a 50 and 50% hardware fail rate 2) Many XBox360 users are on their THIRD purchase.
Because many people will conflate "overall hardware sales" with "installed base", the (till now) higher quality of the PS3 has put Sony at a HUGE DISADVANTAGE.
>If I find a hole in my Government's IT security, I'll keep my mouth shut and let the government hear about it from the Chinese or the Iranians or the S. Koreans or...
Huh? I know it's rarely enforced, but if your network is spewing a DDOS it is your RESPONSIBILITY to cease the abuse. Even if it means "monitoring".
Of course with words like "monitoring traffic", you could be referring to doing the right thing, or snooping on someone's emails. So you are also against ISP's running spam filters on outbound email? THAT is also "monitor traffic".
Poor choice of words if you didn't mean to sound that extreme.
I monitor our email server for abuse. If an alert goes off I verify it's not a false alarm. My job would be SO much easier if every ISP blocked port 25 on their non-business accounts... or at least cutting them off after abuse starts.
(And you would reap the benefit of so much less spam).
I don't even bother reporting Chinese domains to SpamCop anymore....CN knows they can ignore what goes on (and you know THEY monitor traffic, for real).
Doesn't matter anymore... the idiocracy Rupert invaded nations to create, has been created.
In the US anyways, the lower-end of the Fox News demographic ("birthers") gets all their news now from chain emails. The upper end wouldn't mind paying $400 for a glass of scotch, but I think they'll view the non-free websites as some kind of tax or something, and revolt.
Philip Price's awesome series, Alternate Reality: The City, from 1987.
The developers put an unbelievable amount of effort and layered detail into the game engine, and so many "technical firsts" innovating features. 10 years before Doom it had a very similar FPS rendering/viewpoint engine, excellent storyline, awesome music with lyrics, display-list interrupts on the Atari to gain access to 256 colors in higher graphics modes. Even today's Oblivion/Fallout character/RPG engine uses many similar character rules first found in AR. Like many of today's massive games, it attempted to provide "loadless levels" (albeit much more primitively) where it swapped out distant objects, and kept local ones memory resident, so you could go in and out of rooms and (usually) not re-load the scene.
I also loved X-Com and Archon. These both have some brilliant AI, and Archon in particular still sees some time on the 8-bit emulator.
>If people just disabled remote admin (which you should do anyway)
FYI, the exploit is Internet-ready even if you turn off remote management.
It's in the article, if you read it. Webpages (or flash, etc) can just craft a request to exploit this and in the process, turn remote shell ON.
Web-managed routers will always be LESS secure than router types managed via local telnet or ssh. Such designs are immune to browser and cross site attacks... but they're more difficult to manage for novice users, which is why these days only the serious and high-end routers lack web interfaces.
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Of course it is.
Of course it is WHY?
If you merely pirate Microsoft software, you are still allowing them to OWN YOUR DATA.
Worse, you perpetuate the status quo of Microsoft's proprietary file formats you are storing your data IN.
How many people save their wedding videos in closed file formats without understanding the implications?
I'm sure folks elaborated on the document-formats issue more, but I wanted to highlight an example where you are not creating any file formats:
Let say you browse the web in MSIE - you're helping Microsoft.
Most of the smart web developers would LIKE to always target the true standard - the W3.org specs - and then hack in CSS/HTML bugfixes to workaround Microsoft's bugs. But that's an IDEAL. In many corporate environments, you write FOR the Microsoft bugs... and if Firefox does not render the page the same way, ban Firefox. Thankfully this is becoming LESS common, but it's still pervasive. Anyways..
Even today, lots of Intranets still REQUIRE IE6 to access Intranet applications.
This came about as the result of short-sighted thinking.. that conformity and monoculture in software is somehow good.
Now, corporations are having their security breached as a result of being locked into the "IE6 format" webpage (see China's "R&D" spyware division..).
Good planning...
(BTW, IE8 gets MS some credit. They're still not embracing CSS3 and HTML5, but they've mostly given up on turning the web into an Office
Well the difference you are struggling to NOT understand is, only under MS do these exploits get to install ROOTKITS.
You wouldn't need Flash at all if Youtube would stream one of the many open standards.
HTML 5 addresses it, but Youtube is pretty cozy to Adobe.
It wasn't always that way... back in the day, you could get streaming video with HARDWARE acceleration.
CPU accel is not a big deal on most desktops, but with the new low-wattage Ion/Intel combos or ARM CPUs, it really does matter.
>So when someone makes logical arguments, they are being bought and paid for by big oil??? When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes. It costs money to build and maintain bike lanes .. how can anyone disagree with bike riders paying their fair share to use them???
Who says bikers do not pay their "fair share"? We're all citizens, and paying our share of federal and state taxes.
Oh.. you don't mean to suggest that you BELIEVE the Federal Gas tax actually pays for a majority (or even substantial) portion of the US roadway system, do you? If so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
The US gas tax exists as misdirection - most of the federal government's sourcing of highway funds have come from income taxes, or loans from Saudi Arabia (with their interest in maintaining the US's addiction) , and more recently, China.
You have to remember folks - yesterday's SciFi was made FOR sci-fi fans.
How much of today's sci-fi - series or movies - can really claim the same?
Compromises are made to attract mainstream, non-scifi audiences and to satisfy Scientology investors and really bad, closet Scientology actors (*cough* Wil Smith *cough*).
Half of the appeal of old sci-fi was lack of (imposed, or self-imposed) censorship.
If you made something fantastic and sufficiently intellectual, fewer mainstream people would pay attention, and you could get away with ANYTHING.
You could question the morality of the established culture, or at least hold a mirror up to it.. and you would not be blacklisted as a communist or subversive.
(For the most part anyways.. the rest of Hollywood suffered, but sci-fi escaped a lot of that treatment).
Twilight Zone TOS, Outer Limits, Start Trek TOS, Logan's Run, and Planet of The Apes all dealt with "human" issues like slavery, race relations, apartheid, the Cold War, resource depletion, "settling" on occupied land uninvited, feminism, the needs of the one vs. the needs of the many.
Not that it was perfect - Gene Roddenberry faced tons of network pressure for his parables about the Cold War, using "Klingons" and "Romulans" as proxies for Soviets and Chinese. You just could not make a show that dealt with these issues in a modern context, period.
I will admit that Battlestar Galactica was a well-done reboot, especially towards the end. I watched some sci-fi friends shift uncomfortable about some of the issues raised, like genocide and torture of prisoners and the effects that has on all parties.
(Mind you, the "kill them all" type considered this an example of the "liberal elite disrespecting the US military" by showcasing the rape of Six so soon after organized rape and torture at Abu Ghraib, etc)
EA was never great, even back then. What made EA huge is they were simply "good" games, and they could raise enough money to buy out all of their competition.
This gave EA yet more leverage with retail... and when all the indie retail shops and smaller chains folded leaving pretty much just GameSpot... well, that pretty much killed off everything else in the ecosystem. Trip Hawkins was a total douche, and set the stage for who EA is today.
EA is like a corporate amoeba, with all the powers of Microsoft and Monsanto rolled into one. I'm honestly curious why EA hasn't just put out their own hardware platform, but the answer is probably because they don't "need" to, and they're much more powerful controlling all of the platforms from behind the scenes.
EA is pretty much the reason I have AVOIDED consoles, and always stuck with PC games, where you have many more choices. I did get a PS3, mainly for Blu-Ray and as a media center.
Someone gave me a steering wheel and pedal set as a gift, so I bought NASCAR 09 for the PS3.
Here's what I expect of any game: that it will be frozen in time, and obviously not contain 2010 players cars, or information.
Putting the "year" in the title should simply designate what year or version I bought... just like say Microsoft Word or Gentoo versions.
What I did NOT expect is that EA had a remote doomsday switch for these games, so they can kill off the old version.
If that's the case (and it looks like NASCAR 09 is scheduled for termination in Europe) I'm seriously fucking pissed.
We all say "boycott XXX" and "I'll never buy from XXX", but when a cool game comes out memories get short.
But if you shell out a ton of money for a game, it's YOURS.
They can call it "taking down the servers", but I call it theft and when my game stops working, EA will have burned me in a way that I can't EVER forget.
>What's the difference? Is Adobe just not sandboxing Javascript code properly? I've never really used Adobe's products for this... but what's to stop them from just using an established javascript implementation like that used in Firefox or Webkit?
Peer review.
Shine a light (or point enough eyeballs) on a bug, and it becomes transparent. Someone will send a patch in for review, or public debate will force an architecture change to safer methods. This is how open source applications like FireFox work. When ICANN said it was OK to start selling domains in non-latin characters which LOOK like latin, phishers drolled at the prospect of owning something that looks like "paypal.com" in hundreds of different forms (Cyrillic's latin looking characters, etc). Firefox developers voted to revolt, and not display non-latin domain names in a exploitable fashion.
Adobe's security experts (and the community) can give their input to Adobe, but Adobe marketing gets to say what is and what is not "a non-starter". There's a valid concern of repeat vulnerabilities here, and Marketing (correctly so) knows convenience over security means MORE SALES.
Adobe is accountable ONLY to their shareholders, who can legally sue them for not moving the upgrade-treadmill fast enough (shareholder value).
>Use the right tool for the right job: if you need a form to look the same regardless of where it ends up, your best bet is a PDF.
But what does this have to do with form -submission-.
Seriously... this is a task which does not belong in a presentation format.
The job can be delegated to a background server process (webserver, proprietary email server, I don't care), or it
can offer to fire off a browser (which would need to support this task) and let the browser do the submit.. and I don't mean automatically. You get to proof what the browser is sending, then press submit.
I can't tell you how many PDFs I get which ask me to "fill out this PDF" and NO instructions how to do that. My PDF viewer is on Linux, and it doesn't run Javascript (nor do I want it to).
It's funny... you can design a Javascript application on the web which DEGRADES nicely to plain HTML if the browser does not support Javascript. No problem whatsoever, if your web developer knows what "non-intrusive Javascript" means.
For Adobe to not work out a no-JS solution makes them as bad as Microsoft, willfully flouting standards for control and refusing to fix core vulnerabilities for years and years. Eventually, Adobe is going to be forced to address these issues... but in the meantime they're content to let the bodies pile up in the street.
> (I love helpful responses from idiots that start with "first, edit the /etc/spamassassin.conf file" or whatever.)
>Oh yeah, the other wonderfully helpful stock response "stop using the software if you don't like it". Sure, I'd love to go back to getting 500 spams a day.
"Idiots?"
You might have a point if the ONLY step began with "first". But here you see a bunch of people answered you.. and yes, ALL of them began with editing the "whatever" file.
You know... paid support for SpamAssassin IS available. /etc/spamassassin.conf file".
I suppose it could even work for someone who doesn't have TIME to "edit the
Even during the holidays there are folks like you who have the audacity to demand FREE free support... while pre-emptively demeaning those who would provide it. Unbelievable.
>Browser down.
>OS next.
Whaddya mean... the browser's NOT part of the OS? That's unpossible!
>Then you are a fool. This is exactly what I mean by trusting your ISP. I sympathize with you and your situation (and I understand that it happens), but all your country has to do is implement some system that will change the UDP packets coming from Google DNS to change the answers, thus accomplishing the same censorship. The more people who use Google DNS, the more likely a country or ISP is to do this.
A non-sequitur. More people using Google DNS or any other DNS resolver does NOT make it more likely that a country or corporation can impose censorship.
In your previous statement you even hint that you know this - you suggest that a country could "change the UDP packets coming from Google DNS to change the answers", but why would a country target JUST GOOGLE DNS for censorship?
If you took 30 seconds to Google the world's best known DNS censorship project (http://www.google.com/search?q=great+firewall+of+china) you would know that China does not target *specific* DNS resolvers (such as you suggest might be done with "Google DNS"). No, China hijacks ALL port 53 traffic which should be obvious then that the DNS provider is 100% irrelevant.
In fact, a third party DNS provider is MORE likely to offer DNS resolver service on a non-standard DNS port, thus becoming an ANTI-censorship tool that China can not defeat (not without blocking or filtering ALL ports which kills their Internet entirely).
You should be careful about calling someone else a "fool", when speaking of topics on which you have your facts wrong.
>Just ask yourself one question, if you don't trust your internet provider enough to do DNS correctly, should you trust them at all?
And the logical extension:
if you don't trust your Internet provider at all, should you give them your business?
I can just see it now - masses of folks ditching their Comcrap and Road Runner connections, running self-administered DNS on "dedicated" 128k lines from the phone company.
Assuming you can even GET direct Internet service like that in your area... you think that somehow by using their DNS (or running your own) the DNS infrastructure is "more distributed" than Google? Yes because we all live in a perfect "open market" with 12 ISPs to choose from, and when an ISP crashes everyone bails for the better run ISP.
Give me a f'n break. Anyone opting-in to Google DNS or OpenDNS is at least *thinking* about the issue... so when their ISPs DNS goes down, they are still running. What's wrong with that?
Maybe this will pressure ISPs to look at DNS from a marketing-collection perspective, instead of an "expense". If that makes the ISPs suddenly WANT to provide better DNS service to compete, so be it.
Sci-fi was attacked from all sides by mega-movie plexes, formulamatic (committee) design headed by investors, and the cult of Scientology.
In short, sci-fi is NOT made for geeks anymore.. it's made for mainstream teenagers and stupid parents who couldn't tell you the difference between "fusion" and "fission".
They're the only ones who don't object to Will Smith being in what should be sci-fi classics, dumbed down to the Super-Size McDonald's drive through crowd.
Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's.
If we're talking sci-fi games, Fallout (even the remake) have stayed true to their roots.
Books? I haven't come across any modern sci-fi I liked. I'm a stranger in a strange land...
>Image editing is still way behind Windows and Mac OSX, where you have Photoshop for power users and also Paint Shop Pro for less power users, but who still like a full image editing suite.
I don't get it.
If you want Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, why are you suggesting they can not be run under Linux? They both work fine...
And if you WANT Gimp in Ubuntu, you can go to Applications-->Ubuntu Sofwtare Center and just "click" on GIMP.
It's pretty obvious that a lot of comments here are being driven by the sensationalist, deliberately misleading headline. That's not Ubuntu's fault - see the story poster and /. editor about that. Why do people have time to post responses if they were too busy to read the linked article?
FACT: Ubuntu is NOT dropping GIMP.
FACT: Sounds like Ubuntu is paring down the list of default applications, to the set users use most.
FACT: Ubuntu allows users to opt-in to application usage tracking, so yes people.. they DO know F-Spot is being used most of the time.
FACT: The GIMP user interface is challenging to most people. (Yes, so is Photoshop's... but people get accustomed to Photoshop's menus, and learn them. GIMP doesn't even try to keep things in the same place as these users expect).
FACT: The name "GIMP" has negative slang connotations. I work at a Linux shop, and if images need resizing or editing, we joke about "bringing out the GIMP". Yes, this is superficial, but the GIMP developers aren't doing themselves any favors.
GIMP needs to study the history of FireFox.
FireFox rose in popularity because it was streamlined to what most people need, hiding the rest.
Yes, FireFox did "less" than Mozilla (Seamonkey), but in the end... very few people cared..
GIMP has a great library of image functions... it's a shame that it's not being treated as a library, with a simple UI hooking into all that power, in the same way that FireFox just plugged into the Mozilla "Gecko" engine.
Maybe Sony is taking a page from Microsoft, and now trying to boost market share.
Think of it this way:
1) The XBox360 has between a 50 and 50% hardware fail rate
2) Many XBox360 users are on their THIRD purchase.
Because many people will conflate "overall hardware sales" with "installed base", the (till now) higher quality of the PS3 has put Sony at a HUGE DISADVANTAGE.
It's all about numbers, folks. ;-)
>If I find a hole in my Government's IT security, I'll keep my mouth shut and let the government hear about it from the Chinese or the Iranians or the S. Koreans or ...
That's right. You welcome our new overlords.
Microsoft's answer to botnets is it is the user's fault they are infected, specifically:
1) users who are choosing NOT to install automatic updates
2) PIRATED installs of Windows, who can't get updates.
Huh? I know it's rarely enforced, but if your network is spewing a DDOS it is your RESPONSIBILITY to cease the abuse.
Even if it means "monitoring".
Of course with words like "monitoring traffic", you could be referring to doing the right thing, or snooping on someone's emails.
So you are also against ISP's running spam filters on outbound email? THAT is also "monitor traffic".
Poor choice of words if you didn't mean to sound that extreme.
I monitor our email server for abuse. If an alert goes off I verify it's not a false alarm.
My job would be SO much easier if every ISP blocked port 25 on their non-business accounts... or at least cutting them off after abuse starts.
(And you would reap the benefit of so much less spam).
I don't even bother reporting Chinese domains to SpamCop anymore... .CN knows they can ignore what goes on (and you know THEY monitor traffic, for real).
Yes, with IE you get TONS of porn in the form of pop-ups... even when you're offline.
Great idea.
Except Rupert Murdoch's "base" have moved past News Corp properties. They now subsist on chain emails....
At least Obama is looking to rebuild America with that money, and he's guided by a cabinet that's not all from ONE STATE.
Doesn't matter anymore... the idiocracy Rupert invaded nations to create, has been created.
In the US anyways, the lower-end of the Fox News demographic ("birthers") gets all their news now from chain emails. The upper end wouldn't mind paying $400 for a glass of scotch, but I think they'll view the non-free websites as some kind of tax or something, and revolt.
He told his wife he had to fly out, to meet the other CentOS developers... in Buenos Aires...
Philip Price's awesome series, Alternate Reality: The City, from 1987.
The developers put an unbelievable amount of effort and layered detail into the game engine, and so many "technical firsts" innovating features.
10 years before Doom it had a very similar FPS rendering/viewpoint engine, excellent storyline, awesome music with lyrics, display-list interrupts on the Atari to gain access to 256 colors in higher graphics modes. Even today's Oblivion/Fallout character/RPG engine uses many similar character rules first found in AR. Like many of today's massive games, it attempted to provide "loadless levels" (albeit much more primitively) where it swapped out distant objects, and kept local ones memory resident, so you could go in and out of rooms and (usually) not re-load the scene.
I also loved X-Com and Archon. These both have some brilliant AI, and Archon in particular still sees some time on the 8-bit emulator.
>If people just disabled remote admin (which you should do anyway)
FYI, the exploit is Internet-ready even if you turn off remote management.
It's in the article, if you read it. Webpages (or flash, etc) can just craft a request to exploit this and in the process, turn remote shell ON.
Web-managed routers will always be LESS secure than router types managed via local telnet or ssh. Such designs are immune to browser and cross site attacks... but they're more difficult to manage for novice users, which is why these days only the serious and high-end routers lack web interfaces.