if someone breaks into MS WindowsUpdate servers, he could install ANYTHING on millions of computers!
Yup, automatic Windows update is a remote exploit just sitting and waiting to be exploited. If Microsoft will need a mathematically proved update process, now is the time for them to get the mathemeticians cranking away.
Given that an update might take eight hours of download time on a dial-up connection that is reliable for only two or three hours at a time...
That just isn't a recipe for happy customers.
Thankfully, I have all my home computers behind a draconian firewall (its only me using it, so it is damn strict), so keeping each and every internal computer patched up to the latest day-old patch set simply isn't a concern. So my OS is three months out of date...I just don't care...I'd love to see anyone try to connect from the outside. Sure, there's always the splitting-hairs "what if" scenarios of malicious JavaScript, for example, but I'm comfortable with those tremendously miniscule odds.
Many people just want their computer to work, the way their car and dishwasher "just work".
Then, people should just buy a Mac and shut up. Microsoft is the "American car" of the computer world--i.e., the people who buy one should have read Consumer Reports, first.
Well, I'm a developer, and I run Windows 2000 professional at home, with IIS and Visual Studio.Net installed.
Perhaps the problem is that you are a developer that relies on Windows 2000, IIS, and Visual Studio as a development platform? The complexity of these products is so great and so uncontrolled that I'm suprised that they work at all.
I do programming using 20-year-old technology, where the source code of my tools probably hasn't changed in five years. Practically nothing breaks, everything is predictable, and most all my time is geared towards progress rather than troubleshooting my platform of choice (in this case, Solaris).
Ugh. I hate Microsoft.
Yeah, I do, too.
And, I'm a programmer who uses that platform! What does THAT tell you?;)
I long ago decided that I would choose a different career before I would be forced to work full-time with Microsoft's products. So far, I've been successful in staying with Solaris with only brief glimpses of Windows in my SunPCi environment. If this doesn't continue to pan out, and the economy stays in the sewer, I'll go self-employed and take that risk before getting pimped out by Microsoft.
I was unable to fix. After re-installing the OS (and everything else) at great cost to my time, the patch/update worked the second time.
This is the worst part about Windows--it breaks in non-repeatable ways. I don't know where all the dirt collects within Windows, but it appears Microsoft doesn't know, either!
And there should be no need for any patches in the first place.
If the patches were simply for very small bug fixes on a fundamentally sound architecture and implementation, then I would be happy and eager to apply patches. After all, improving an already good thing is good, right? However, Microsoft's patches guarantee no improvement, and, sometimes, they are a step backwards with EULA changes, DRM integration, and potentially broken cofigurations.
The big problem is that Microsoft, historically, has made tremendously awful decisions regarding configuration management in their operating systems. The Registry is an abomination, the windows\system directory is an abomination, their "third party code at fault" smoke and mirrors doesn't help, etc. etc. etc.
According to people like Hobbes and Locke, freedom is the natural state of man.
Geez, Hobbes and Locke were morons. The true natural state of man is binary--one of "horny" or "drunk." I can't believe these guys put forth so much effort and couldn't even figure that out!
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 1
When the government wants to go left (yeah that's gonna happen), pull hard from the right.
While I will cheer when GWB is not elected in 2004, I gravely fear that a Democrat replacement will seriously attempt nationalized health care (holy shit will that be a disaster of US Government proportions).
What we need is someone else, who understands that government meddling--whether Republican or Democrat flavored--is simply bad for both liberty and the economy.
Though I agree the constitution does guarantee the right to bear arms, I don't agree that the definition of "arms" can't be interpreted in a modern context to exclude weapons that fall outside the spirit of the amendment.
There is certainly an element of scale, here. While personal guns and knives are perfectly okay, "weapons of mass destruction" that happen to fit in a back-pack are not.
The issue, here, is defense. Pure defense. Tactical nukes and bags of sarin gas are not defensive weapons, unless they are used as deterrents (meaning they are never used). Deterrents are really only effective on global scales. I don't want to think what would happen one county starts using threats of bioweapons against their neighboring counties (that is insanity!).
In Colonial times "arms" usually meant weapons that could be carried.
I hate to say this, but there are human-portable nuclear weapons out there, I believe. And, if those 1-gram 50 kiloton gamma burst thingies get out...holy shit.
I think a more constrained definition of "arms" would be weapons suitable for personal defense. Even a machine gun can kill only a few people at a time, but nuclear or gamma-burst devices can each take out a city. So, guns, knives, ninja-gear, etc. are fine, but nukes are way out.
How is "militia" defined? I would take a true militia to be local citizens organizing for a common defense. To this end, they would wield whatever they could, including their own guns.
I think the money side of people is the evil side, and being an 'investor' sort of splits out this evil side and lets it work on its own.
I wouldn't call it evil. To some people, money is more like a semi-hard drug (they get a hit, then crash, then scramble for another hit, etc.). To other people, money isn't a drug at all; rather, it is a means to an end.
I feel the pervasive drug-like mentality is caused by a lack of education. People, whether alone or with a family, have many significant financial decisions to make even as early has high school. However, schools provide no preparation for these decisions, and I am very thankful that my father gave me early control over my mutual funds and credit cards and taught me about these things. Unfortunately, even that wasn't quite enough, as in hindsight I should have picked a cheaper University (but that problem can be dealt with--it's just very annoying...for the next ten years).
I seriously think that a real finance class should be a top-ranking part of the public school curricula. And I mean real finance, too, not some balance the checkbook Home-Ec nonsense. Even though I am an "engineer" of sorts, I would even put finance slightly above science in the curriculum. Both finance and science can teach decision-making and logic, but hard knowledge about finance would breed a much less gullible or naive public.
If you think that's neat, you should try getting addicted to anti-depressants!
I've seen people who benefit more from the placebo effect of the anti-depressant than the actual medication itself (yeah, they really feel better right away, I'm sure). It's pretty sad.
Anti-depressants are over-prescribed and over-used in the USA. I think the reason people want them so much is that they aren't living up to some manufactured idealism that has no foundation in reality. Should a person feel worthless because they aren't working their asses off making $500,000 per year? I really don't think so. What if they can't join every club in school? No one does that, anyway.
I think the popularity of anti-depressants is actually an indicator that people, in general, have collectively decided that being human isn't good enough. The people who have genuine crippling depression are relatively rare, so why is it that so many people I know can get a prescription so easily? The fact that doctors are so easy is disappointing, especially given that anti-depressants screw around with a person's brain in ways that even psychiatrists can't define.
I figured this was probably true, but the post above was too easy an opportunity for a vi joke (not that it was funny...I'm just that lame).
...if you're that much of a masochist feel free.
I indulge daily. In fact, I even run Emacs in VIPER mode, and have "set editing-mode vi" set for my bash command line! Having learned only one set of commands, I can be very productive in each environment (it makes using Windows a pain in the rear, though--fortunately, Windows doesn't matter).
If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
It's funny how the internet, which was DESIGNED to withstand problems like this (with bits instead of current) has become as fragile,...
It is more accurate to say that the market decided how reliable things should be. Reliability does cost money, which is why a free market stabilizes on some compromise between 0% and 99.999999% reliability. It seems that people would/could/should be satisifed with a 25-year uptime on a power grid with the occasional blips. What is the total cost of a 100% reliable power grid vs. the people who need that reliability spending a little more for UPS and generator setups? I don't know, but it seems that nearly everyone outside of datacenters and hospitals can deal with less than perfect power systems.
For another example, look at PCs vs. big UNIX servers or mainframes. I bet you use a Windows PC (statistically speaking), yet you complain about a less-than-perfect power grid?!? That seems odd to me, given that the market has decided that $1000 mediocre PCs are more desirable, on average, than $3000 super-duper Power Macs or $7000 built-like-tanks UNIX workstations.
So, what do people really want? Expensive perfect power or "good enough" power cheap. Americans tend to choose the latter in everything else (cars, computers, etc.), so why should electricity be any different?
I hate to say this, but heavy-handed regulation is needed, both for the power grid and for IP carriers.:-/
I whole-heartedly disagree with this statement. The government is famous for leaving a path of waste behind them and not solving the fundamental problems at hand. Any half-assed regulation scheme will simply leave a no-mans-land of descruction where only the resulting billion-dollar conglomerates battle it out crushing startups and the consumers' interests.
I would bet that, when the facts are all laid out, that the huge problems we face today with corporate greed are directly the result of the types of regulation you so strongly desire. With such high barriers to entry, I can't imagine how any opportunist can gather the resources to challenge the regulated incumbants. While abolishing all regulation may be too extreme, we would probably benefit immensely by repealing most existing regulations and laws gradually until a truly healthy economy is established.
One of the major factors of the energy problem is NIMBY
This is very true (and not unexpected among selfish humans). This is also why I really like the idea of each house or neighborhood having its own solar/fuel-cell setup. This means it's literally in everyone's back yard but in a form that no one would object to. A utility building with fuel cells is much better than those massive buzzing transmission towers that make nearby real estate values plummet.
Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
They probably discovered what happens when you ignore a piece of machinery until you need it most.
Nothing is more ironic to have a precious expensive generator fail to start or sieze up due to stupid owners who neglected every maintaince bullet point in the owner's manual.
On the other hand, I am a resident of California and a customer of San Diego Gas and Electric and I can assure you that electric utilities have been deregulated and that our bills did, in many cases, triple.
There must be some reason beyond deregulation that drove the prices higher. Deregulation, in itself, is benign. The "deregulated" utilities either were already corrupt (as in the earlier article) or there were artifically high costs leftover from the "regulated" past. From what little I've seen about California, it isn't really a matter of regulation vs. deregulation but a matter of corruption in the government and in the regulated energy companies. When the foundation is rotten, there is no way to expect that prices could be controlled reasonably for years until the market sorts things out.
Kill long term viability in favor of short term profits. Get the profits. CEO uses the new profits to get a higher paying job elsewhere, leaving the new CEO with a mess on his hands...
Fundamentally, why is this mentality so common? If shareholders really cared, then they would keep the CEO from taking the company through a roller-coaster ride.
Do existing regulations from people like the SEC encourage this behavior? There has to be a reason, because corporations killing themselves over short-term gains is counter-intuitive. Any businessman should recognize that, unless there is a framework in place that steers him off-course.
While I'm sure the UltraSPARC-based laptops are nice, they are constrained to 650MHz CPUs, which makes them very useful for Solaris shops but not terribly useful as regular personal computers (for the price).
Also, I can't understand why they come with a fingerpad instead of one of those mouse-sticks (I just find the touch-pads very very clumsy).
Slashdot Mirror
if someone breaks into MS WindowsUpdate servers, he could install ANYTHING on millions of computers!
Yup, automatic Windows update is a remote exploit just sitting and waiting to be exploited. If Microsoft will need a mathematically proved update process, now is the time for them to get the mathemeticians cranking away.
Dialup can only be worse.
Given that an update might take eight hours of download time on a dial-up connection that is reliable for only two or three hours at a time...
That just isn't a recipe for happy customers.
Thankfully, I have all my home computers behind a draconian firewall (its only me using it, so it is damn strict), so keeping each and every internal computer patched up to the latest day-old patch set simply isn't a concern. So my OS is three months out of date...I just don't care...I'd love to see anyone try to connect from the outside. Sure, there's always the splitting-hairs "what if" scenarios of malicious JavaScript, for example, but I'm comfortable with those tremendously miniscule odds.
Many people just want their computer to work, the way their car and dishwasher "just work".
Then, people should just buy a Mac and shut up. Microsoft is the "American car" of the computer world--i.e., the people who buy one should have read Consumer Reports, first.
Well, I'm a developer, and I run Windows 2000 professional at home, with IIS and Visual Studio .Net installed.
;)
Perhaps the problem is that you are a developer that relies on Windows 2000, IIS, and Visual Studio as a development platform? The complexity of these products is so great and so uncontrolled that I'm suprised that they work at all.
I do programming using 20-year-old technology, where the source code of my tools probably hasn't changed in five years. Practically nothing breaks, everything is predictable, and most all my time is geared towards progress rather than troubleshooting my platform of choice (in this case, Solaris).
Ugh. I hate Microsoft.
Yeah, I do, too.
And, I'm a programmer who uses that platform! What does THAT tell you?
I long ago decided that I would choose a different career before I would be forced to work full-time with Microsoft's products. So far, I've been successful in staying with Solaris with only brief glimpses of Windows in my SunPCi environment. If this doesn't continue to pan out, and the economy stays in the sewer, I'll go self-employed and take that risk before getting pimped out by Microsoft.
I was unable to fix. After re-installing the OS (and everything else) at great cost to my time, the patch/update worked the second time.
This is the worst part about Windows--it breaks in non-repeatable ways. I don't know where all the dirt collects within Windows, but it appears Microsoft doesn't know, either!
And there should be no need for any patches in the first place.
If the patches were simply for very small bug fixes on a fundamentally sound architecture and implementation, then I would be happy and eager to apply patches. After all, improving an already good thing is good, right? However, Microsoft's patches guarantee no improvement, and, sometimes, they are a step backwards with EULA changes, DRM integration, and potentially broken cofigurations.
Home users actually want stuff like this.
But they don't understand why or how (sigh).
The big problem is that Microsoft, historically, has made tremendously awful decisions regarding configuration management in their operating systems. The Registry is an abomination, the windows\system directory is an abomination, their "third party code at fault" smoke and mirrors doesn't help, etc. etc. etc.
According to people like Hobbes and Locke, freedom is the natural state of man.
Geez, Hobbes and Locke were morons. The true natural state of man is binary--one of "horny" or "drunk." I can't believe these guys put forth so much effort and couldn't even figure that out!
When the government wants to go left (yeah that's gonna happen), pull hard from the right.
While I will cheer when GWB is not elected in 2004, I gravely fear that a Democrat replacement will seriously attempt nationalized health care (holy shit will that be a disaster of US Government proportions).
What we need is someone else, who understands that government meddling--whether Republican or Democrat flavored--is simply bad for both liberty and the economy.
Though I agree the constitution does guarantee the right to bear arms, I don't agree that the definition of "arms" can't be interpreted in a modern context to exclude weapons that fall outside the spirit of the amendment.
There is certainly an element of scale, here. While personal guns and knives are perfectly okay, "weapons of mass destruction" that happen to fit in a back-pack are not.
The issue, here, is defense. Pure defense. Tactical nukes and bags of sarin gas are not defensive weapons, unless they are used as deterrents (meaning they are never used). Deterrents are really only effective on global scales. I don't want to think what would happen one county starts using threats of bioweapons against their neighboring counties (that is insanity!).
In Colonial times "arms" usually meant weapons that could be carried.
I hate to say this, but there are human-portable nuclear weapons out there, I believe. And, if those 1-gram 50 kiloton gamma burst thingies get out...holy shit.
I think a more constrained definition of "arms" would be weapons suitable for personal defense. Even a machine gun can kill only a few people at a time, but nuclear or gamma-burst devices can each take out a city. So, guns, knives, ninja-gear, etc. are fine, but nukes are way out.
...state militia.
How is "militia" defined? I would take a true militia to be local citizens organizing for a common defense. To this end, they would wield whatever they could, including their own guns.
I think the money side of people is the evil side, and being an 'investor' sort of splits out this evil side and lets it work on its own.
I wouldn't call it evil. To some people, money is more like a semi-hard drug (they get a hit, then crash, then scramble for another hit, etc.). To other people, money isn't a drug at all; rather, it is a means to an end.
I feel the pervasive drug-like mentality is caused by a lack of education. People, whether alone or with a family, have many significant financial decisions to make even as early has high school. However, schools provide no preparation for these decisions, and I am very thankful that my father gave me early control over my mutual funds and credit cards and taught me about these things. Unfortunately, even that wasn't quite enough, as in hindsight I should have picked a cheaper University (but that problem can be dealt with--it's just very annoying...for the next ten years).
I seriously think that a real finance class should be a top-ranking part of the public school curricula. And I mean real finance, too, not some balance the checkbook Home-Ec nonsense. Even though I am an "engineer" of sorts, I would even put finance slightly above science in the curriculum. Both finance and science can teach decision-making and logic, but hard knowledge about finance would breed a much less gullible or naive public.
They put those handles there for a reason!
I thought the handles were for owners, who, uh, really like their new G5.
If you think that's neat, you should try getting addicted to anti-depressants!
I've seen people who benefit more from the placebo effect of the anti-depressant than the actual medication itself (yeah, they really feel better right away, I'm sure). It's pretty sad.
Anti-depressants are over-prescribed and over-used in the USA. I think the reason people want them so much is that they aren't living up to some manufactured idealism that has no foundation in reality. Should a person feel worthless because they aren't working their asses off making $500,000 per year? I really don't think so. What if they can't join every club in school? No one does that, anyway.
I think the popularity of anti-depressants is actually an indicator that people, in general, have collectively decided that being human isn't good enough. The people who have genuine crippling depression are relatively rare, so why is it that so many people I know can get a prescription so easily? The fact that doctors are so easy is disappointing, especially given that anti-depressants screw around with a person's brain in ways that even psychiatrists can't define.
Anyway, vi is in the standard OSX install too...
...if you're that much of a masochist feel free.
I figured this was probably true, but the post above was too easy an opportunity for a vi joke (not that it was funny...I'm just that lame).
I indulge daily. In fact, I even run Emacs in VIPER mode, and have "set editing-mode vi" set for my bash command line! Having learned only one set of commands, I can be very productive in each environment (it makes using Windows a pain in the rear, though--fortunately, Windows doesn't matter).
If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
:-/
It's funny how the internet, which was DESIGNED to withstand problems like this (with bits instead of current) has become as fragile,...
It is more accurate to say that the market decided how reliable things should be. Reliability does cost money, which is why a free market stabilizes on some compromise between 0% and 99.999999% reliability. It seems that people would/could/should be satisifed with a 25-year uptime on a power grid with the occasional blips. What is the total cost of a 100% reliable power grid vs. the people who need that reliability spending a little more for UPS and generator setups? I don't know, but it seems that nearly everyone outside of datacenters and hospitals can deal with less than perfect power systems.
For another example, look at PCs vs. big UNIX servers or mainframes. I bet you use a Windows PC (statistically speaking), yet you complain about a less-than-perfect power grid?!? That seems odd to me, given that the market has decided that $1000 mediocre PCs are more desirable, on average, than $3000 super-duper Power Macs or $7000 built-like-tanks UNIX workstations.
So, what do people really want? Expensive perfect power or "good enough" power cheap. Americans tend to choose the latter in everything else (cars, computers, etc.), so why should electricity be any different?
I hate to say this, but heavy-handed regulation is needed, both for the power grid and for IP carriers.
I whole-heartedly disagree with this statement. The government is famous for leaving a path of waste behind them and not solving the fundamental problems at hand. Any half-assed regulation scheme will simply leave a no-mans-land of descruction where only the resulting billion-dollar conglomerates battle it out crushing startups and the consumers' interests.
I would bet that, when the facts are all laid out, that the huge problems we face today with corporate greed are directly the result of the types of regulation you so strongly desire. With such high barriers to entry, I can't imagine how any opportunist can gather the resources to challenge the regulated incumbants. While abolishing all regulation may be too extreme, we would probably benefit immensely by repealing most existing regulations and laws gradually until a truly healthy economy is established.
One of the major factors of the energy problem is NIMBY
This is very true (and not unexpected among selfish humans). This is also why I really like the idea of each house or neighborhood having its own solar/fuel-cell setup. This means it's literally in everyone's back yard but in a form that no one would object to. A utility building with fuel cells is much better than those massive buzzing transmission towers that make nearby real estate values plummet.
Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
They probably discovered what happens when you ignore a piece of machinery until you need it most.
Nothing is more ironic to have a precious expensive generator fail to start or sieze up due to stupid owners who neglected every maintaince bullet point in the owner's manual.
On the other hand, I am a resident of California and a customer of San Diego Gas and Electric and I can assure you that electric utilities have been deregulated and that our bills did, in many cases, triple.
There must be some reason beyond deregulation that drove the prices higher. Deregulation, in itself, is benign. The "deregulated" utilities either were already corrupt (as in the earlier article) or there were artifically high costs leftover from the "regulated" past. From what little I've seen about California, it isn't really a matter of regulation vs. deregulation but a matter of corruption in the government and in the regulated energy companies. When the foundation is rotten, there is no way to expect that prices could be controlled reasonably for years until the market sorts things out.
Kill long term viability in favor of short term profits. Get the profits. CEO uses the new profits to get a higher paying job elsewhere, leaving the new CEO with a mess on his hands...
Fundamentally, why is this mentality so common? If shareholders really cared, then they would keep the CEO from taking the company through a roller-coaster ride.
Do existing regulations from people like the SEC encourage this behavior? There has to be a reason, because corporations killing themselves over short-term gains is counter-intuitive. Any businessman should recognize that, unless there is a framework in place that steers him off-course.
Now (64bit sparc laptop)
While I'm sure the UltraSPARC-based laptops are nice, they are constrained to 650MHz CPUs, which makes them very useful for Solaris shops but not terribly useful as regular personal computers (for the price).
Also, I can't understand why they come with a fingerpad instead of one of those mouse-sticks (I just find the touch-pads very very clumsy).
E-macs (not to be confused with emacs, although it is included)...
vi is too good for them, anyway!
I don't live in the Northern Hemisphere, you insesitive clod!
Why don't you just go back to staring at the swirlies in the toilet! You know they are wrong, but you can't do anything about it! HAHAHAHAHA!!!
This is more proof that rich people spend lots of money, because they can.