PS2 has finally gone sub-$100 refurbed, and there are more games for it than ET cartridges buried in Arizona, including classics of just about any genre. Multitap purchase needed for more than two player games though.
Xbox is around $50 refurbed, has many PC ports in a much more friendly multiplayer environment than the PC, the Xbox version of just about any used game is going to be significantly less than any other version, 4 controller ports if you've ever get friends coming over.
GameCube is $30 refurbed, has a lot of good multiplayer games as well, but less overall selection than either of the other two, and the game prices are higher in general.
Any of these options will end up being better than trying to find PC games that will let you replicate a console like that. If you're set on doing it, the only real way to emulate a console experience is frankly emulation.
One bright little commenter on El Reg suggested that another reason for Apple buying this company could be for a console release, as Apple recently acquired a patent which could be for console gaming.
This rumor keeps swirling around Apple circles, even in more insider ones. My father is an Apple Consultants Network member, reads the mailing lists you get on when you're one of them, and follows all kinds of Apple news sites and he keeps telling me that Apple has some kind of big gaming "thing" in its skunkworks. It's reasonably well known that Apple is less than happy with game publisher's efforts on the platform so far, though whether they have realistic expectations of the publishers is another argument. Suffice it to say, they're not happy with the current state of the art, and to an extent, they're right.
Brief exposition: I've had Macs since I was a kid, and played every game for it that I could get my grubby little hands on. Back in the early days, this wasn't so awful. Yeah, you didn't get many of the super popular titles, and the ones you did get you got late, but I learned a deep appreciation for smaller, well crafted games (Dark Castle, Dungeon of Doom, Scarab of Ra, Quarterstaff, lots of interactive fiction, an old build of Hack, Escape Velocity, Exile, I'll stop here before the nostalgia takes over...) that persists today in my current library. When I got my current Mac, which is a pretty robust machine, I went looking for games, and the prices and cut corners were appalling. I ended up buying Civ 4 at more than double the price for Windows (because I love Civ, and it's a great laptop game IMHO), but it just wasn't worth it much past that (Sim City 4 was still, last I checked, $50 for Mac, and under $20 for Windows...wtf?). Other games I was considering, like Age of Empires III, you can only play other Mac-version owners in the online multiplayer, which is a complete deal breaker, especially since the people I'd be playing it with don't have Macs. Blizzard is the only major game company I've found with actual, real, no corners cut Mac support for its games, and this earns them a LOT of loyalty from Mac owners. (OK, maybe you could put id in that too, but their Mac ports are often way later than even the Linux ports)
So Apple looks at this, and they look at the EAs and Ubisofts of the world and say, "why in the world can't you be like Blizzard?" and they get good answers that they don't like ("the Mac market is too small and risky for us to care about, they can install Windows if they want to play a game"... sound familliar Linux people?), shoddy solutions (like the various Cider-based 'ports' EA has done, and the atrocious EVE Online port), and half-hearted attempts (months and years-late buggy ports released by Aspyr, MacSoft and the other traditional Mac-game-port houses). Apple under Jobs has one real response when no one is doing things they way they think they should be done, they try to find a way to do it themselves, hence a lot of grumbling and noise coming out of Infinite Loop over it, which tends to be the sign of something whirring under the surface, since Apple uses the rumor mill as a tool, for all the effort it makes trying to shut it down.
Now, my father, and the non-gamers he hears the information from think that, because it's Apple, whatever they're thinking of doing is going to change everything in the gaming world, some brand new, never before seen type of gaming platform that's going to revolutionize everything. Personally, I'm pretty sure that's a bunch of Apple fanboyism. There really isn't anywhere totally new to go. The Wii and DS are the first salvos in the full motion and touch realms, as well as online handheld gaming. The online higher-end console gaming market is Microsoft's to lose at this moment after they jumped in with both feet with the Xbox. Handheld/console interaction and integration has been done a lot, if not particularly well, with Nintendo and Sony. Sony's got multimedia sewn (mostly) u
I realize these are theoretical questions, and I'm not expecting rock solid legal opinions in answer. These questions do seem important given what I see (and what's been talked about as the implication) and I'm just curious whether there are any "Of course not, you idiot, INSERT_BLOODY_OBVIOUS_LEGAL_PRINCIPLE_HERE means they can't do that, even if they're immune from copyright lawsuit."
1. Would this decision make it possible, for example, for state governments (lets say, the state governments involved in the past Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit) to undertake a project to reverse-engineer the source to Windows and Office and use/modify that source?
2. If so, would they be able to work with each other on such a project (ie, the governments of various states forming an organization run by them to do this on behalf of all of them)? Would they be allowed to give the derived code to other state governments that didn't participate in the? (Congress DOES have regulatory authority over insterstate commerce, does that include inter-governmental stuff?)
3. If so, does this allow them to distribute that source or binaries, and for citizens of the state to use it without being hit by MS personally for copyright infringement in a federal proceeding (IE, could the state of MA give out "Massachussetts Windows" to its citizens? Or anyone it damn well feels like?)
If any of the above are true, it would seem to nullify the bulk, but not all, of the concerns of so many state governments have about important historical documents in MS Word format. If they can't be sued for it, they can buy one copy of Office and Windows (convenience, and likelyhood that it'll be cleaner binaries than downloaded from the Internet) and decompile the entire thing, and they have the keys to the file formats. If the latter are the case, it would appear that an extremely nasty looking Sword of Damocles is suspended over Microsoft's corporate neck, and they are probably going to play a lot nicer than they have been with state governments.
Couldn't this process (modified of course) do the same thing to any update for any software at all?
How exactly is this news? I mean, I should update my software when there's a new patch anyway, but now that THIS has been developed I...need to update my software when there's a new patch... Automating it is a pretty neat trick, and it pretty much destroys any argument for security through obscurity, since it means you couldn't patch any hole to maintain the obscurity, but it's not like security through obscurity in the computer software realm has that amazing a track record in any case.
Don't forget Mac OS X being unready. I have to do a ton of terminal-based maintenance on Macs (to the point where I've put Terminal in the Docks of many of my clients so I can get to it faster when I need to use it).
Actually, I know someone with a plum job at Google. He barely made it through college (he was at an arts school, not a technical school, music was his true passion as far as I know), spent most of the time between when he got out and when he was hired at Google hanging out in Southeast Asia (was in Bali when the nightclub bombings happened), then doing not much on the east coast with his twerp of a girlfriend. Damn near 100% self-taught programmer. To the point where, when my girlfriend told him I messed about a lot with Nintendo ROMs, and was looking for a way to organize them, he sent me a program to extract the name and other information from it as a way of starting the conversation. Applied at Google because it was local to him, and he can code, he started on the ground floor, though is significantly higher now (unless they just send assistant network grunts off to Ireland and Japan for fun).
Problem is that none of them really will work in the Real World (RW).
No, the real problem is that nothing really works in the Real World. Not a thing. Who was it that originally said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy? That's a pretty good truism for every endeavor (well, at least when you're dealing with competent planners, the incompetent tend to keep banging their heads into walls). Take just about any of the really serious problems humans have ever had to deal with, are dealing with, or will be forced to deal with in the future. Climate change, welfare, political conflict (from shooting war to economic embargo), and frankly, spam e-mail. I'd love to see someone come up with an impossible-to-avoid checklist of how "Your idea to fix global warming won't work because..." every time someone posts with an opinion about how to mitigate global warming, or extricate my country from Iraq without letting Iraq descend into a full on shooting war, or help people who can't afford medical care to get it, because just like spam e-mail, there is no possible solution that's totally workable for everyone concerned with the discussion. However, that does not relieve us of the need to do something, because leaving things how they are is even worse than a bad solution. Those stupid checklists that get posted every time there's a discussion about spam are contributing to the problem of spam continuing for longer than making hard choices about a fix.
And frankly, those hard choices need to be made sooner rather than later for an awful lot of people. Under 1% of the e-mail I receive on a WEEKLY basis is spam. Daily it's often 0% non-spam. At this point, I'm seriously considering getting rid of normal POP/IMAP e-mail altogether, or setting up an extreme draconian whitelist/DNSBL arrangement, because the problems, frustrations, and financial costs it incurs to me are far greater than any possible benefit. At least when I get spam on my yahoo account, it doesn't cost me money on my host for storage and bandwidth.
What I don't understand is why Cisco dumped the 5000 series concentrator, which was technically superior in every way I could find, and had client support for just about everything (including MacOS, pre X) for the craptastic 3000 series, which supported Windows only, supported fewer tunnels at less speed, and had a really, really bad UI. I was working with a team of other contractors to spec a big VPN network for a very big company, had been working with Cisco for months on it, and delivered our spec for 5000 series concentrators, just as the Cisco SEs came in and let us know that they were dropping the 5000 line. They didn't know (or wouldn't tell us) why, and appeared to not be very happy with it themselves (especially after working pretty damn hard with us to get us test hardware). Even the hardware VPN modules for the 1000 and 7000 series routers were better than any of the 3000 series boxes we had.
Right. So credit cards serve what purpose, exactly?
Bankrupting the credit card companies when the credit crunch wave, and the wave of a rapidly rising credit card default rate crash into them at roughly the same time?
I didn't say verifiable, I said falsifiable. Science isn't about verifiability, it is about falsifiability. Your "hypothesis" is only valid until a religious person who doesn't "kill, main, and generally act shitty toward one another using their religion as a justification" is found, and if you haven't found one, your research skills are poor, or you're willfully ignoring them. There are plenty more than one, but even one means that the hypothesis has been falsified, and needs to be changed to fit the facts. A hypothesis stating that those kinds of people exist is certainly true, but ex post facto predictions don't earn you many points.
If you believe that religion is bad because some people use it as a justification to do bad things, that's perfectly fine, and understandable. However, claiming that as scientific proof is ridiculous, and flies in the face of the scientific method. The violent suppression of religious people by the atheist government of China, and previously by the USSR government is just as understandable an argument that atheism is bad, and that's not scientific proof either.
Davies is an unabashed athiest, so the fact that Dawkins agreed to come on is probably quite exciting for him. I imagine there's a bit of hyperbole in what he said, since I imagine you get a bit blinded when one of your heroes is right in front of you, but I'm sure Davies has brought plenty of like-minded people into the Doctor Who production team. Being married to Lalla Ward is a natural connection to the Doctor Who universe (she's done many Big Finish audio productions of Doctor Who stories) and I expect that had as much to do with Dawkins getting on the show as Davies' admiration of him. Foot in the door sort of thing.
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of Doctor Who fans who aren't athiests. My gf is a pretty devout Catholic, really dislikes Dawkins quite a lot, and is the most rabid Doctor Who fan you're likely to find outside of Great Britain (can name all of the companions, in order, with how long they were on the show, spent months knitting a gigantic full-size replica of one of Tom Baker's scarves from his era on the show). Life is going to be...interesting...for me when that epsisode airs.
I don't particularly like Dawkins much, and think his attempts to use the results of other science to prove the non-existance of a diety are as ridiculous as the intelligent design quacks attempting to use science to prove that there is a diety. Specific claims of people that believe in dieties can be, and if you want to infer from those results that there is no diety, then that's fine. His contributions to biology have been pretty constructive and useful. His contributions to religious dialogue have been not especially constructive or useful. His hostility toward religion (not his athiesm, but his claims that religion is in and of itself a bad thing) isn't based on the actual, rigorous testing of any falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore, it's not science. It's in the end a religious belief, it just doesn't happen to be part of a religion that recognizes the existance of a deity.
...and I hope they get the daylights scared out of them by the judge in the case. This lawsuit is ridiculous on its face. I'd be shocked to see this thrown back at them and have their own trademark actually canceled, but if it did happen it would be well deserved.
I'm really surprised at a lot of Apple's moves lately. Pushing new Safari installs as an "update", and this idiotic lawsuit make it sound like there was some turnover in Apple's legal department. They've certainly always been bareknuckled, and unapologetic about suing over anything, but generally they at least have arguments, whether you agree with them or not. This is just stupid, though.
...which from my (limited) understanding, an MBR is set aside, but not actually used for booting anything. I guess technically it's free space, so another hiding place, but nothing normally accesses that record, so would this kind of thing have any effect? You know, on computers like Intel Macs, which all use EFI.
The second rule of war is if you have to go to war make yourself invulnerable before you attack.
Poppycock, balderdash, bullcookies, bollucks, . If you got that out of any of the strategy classics I've read, you need to reread them. If you passed a military studies course with that as what you took out of it, your professor should be fired. If you're in a position of command in the US military, you should be stripped of it and put in a position where you will do less damage to my country, like cleaning the latrines.
You can never make yourself invulnerable in a real live conflict situation. It doesn't happen, it can't happen, and the one of the first signs of weakness in any kind of conflict is too great a concern with bolstering your defenses, or a belief that you are invulnerable. "Attack is the best defense" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. If you are being attacked, the best way to defend yourself is to find a way to get an attacker's attention drawn to something other than you. The best way to do that is to attack a target that's valuable enough to force your adversary to defend it with the forces that are currently attacking you. It does not mean attacking willy nilly at whomever pokes their head above the sand.
Until recently, the US military, under orders from the incompetents in the White House, has in fact been carrying out your "second rule of war", and the utterly hopeless situation we're in now is testament to how stupid that concept is. Force protection (that is, the soldiers protecting themselves and each other) was the highest priority, specifically set over saving civilian lives. We didn't lose a single military installation in open combat. Even Fallujah we eventually razed (TWICE) with losses that while high for this conflict were piddly in terms of urban warfare in history. All that defense and invulnerability in combat didn't get us anywhere in actually winning the war. What's at least temporarily saved our bacon is having someone with the wisdom to see that fundamental failing put in charge, and actually start attacking, and stop the insane focus on self protection.
Public broadcasting's embrace of podcasting has been quite the boon to me, personally. There are many public radio shows that I wouldn't be listening to at all any more if it weren't for podcasting (since I moved out of a market that broadcast them, or have been moved to a time slot that isn't particularly convenient on my local station), and thanks to the horrible OTA TV reception in my area, many PBS shows I wouldn't even get to hear, let alone see, Frankly, what is the effective difference between watching the News Hour, or Nightly Business report, and listening to it? (though I wish they'd just podcast the entire News Hour instead of just segments...*grumble*) It may not be the buzzword on everyone's lips, but perhaps that's because it's actually an effective and useful technology, as opposed to something generally useless (or extremely specialized), like most buzzwords.
Call the BSA. I've considered it about one company I've dealt with, but the fallout would be personal, not just professional, and no amount of confidentiality would hide that it was me doing it. Even if the BSA is lying about their claims of confidentiality (which from everything I've seen they don't appear to be) and you get fired over it, you've got many lawsuits for unfair termination just screaming to be made, plus they generally give a reward. That is, if you care that it's being used unlicensed. If you don't care, your ass isn't realistically the one on the line if someone else does the turning in, so I wouldn't worry.
You may see KDE as good, highly configurable and modern. Plenty enough people don't. I am currently using KDE 3.5 because I'm effectively forced to (long freaking story), and I hate it. Konquerer as file system browser was as stupid a call as Internet Explorer was for Microsoft. The requirement of using Kwallet to save passwords for Kopete and KMail is crap for more reasons than I can go into right now. The prepending of the letter "K" to EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION NAME makes me want to scream every time I open the KDE start menu. It makes the "i" fixation of Apple look like a passing fancy. "It's not Free Software unless it's K!" Picking a default web browser other than Konqueror is more obscured than even Windows and MacOS. The useless eyecandy enabled by default drives me insane, and none of the four default options at setup was even close to how I wanted it to act.
One might as well ask why Linux hasn't become the operating system of choice for major corporations. The answer will be the same, "lots and lots of reasons."
The review author mentioned that he'd read other good books on computer forensics, could anyone offer a small list of titles for starting a small but good library in this field? I'm not likely or especially interested to get into the forensics field, but there have been more than a few occasions where some applied knowledge about computer forensics would've been helpful. I'm gonna take a look at this book, but a pointer to something related to Linux, MacOS, or anything else that'd be useful would be appreciated as well.
Microsoft is certainly from the USA, but that does not absolve other countries from the responsibility of preventing damage by Microsoft within their borders. It is the fault of the countries involved, not the United States, that their governments cave to Microsoft. The EU has stood up before, indeed it seemed that until now the EU was the only entity with the guts to say "no" to Microsoft.
I would imagine that raising a public stink about American Hegemony being extended (or rogue American terrorist corporations or whatever) through a corporate proxy in Microsoft would be a really productive political stink in most of the countries that apparently have officials that were corrupted by Microsoft. I would recommend cleaning your own houses before you recommend cleaning up America's house. As an American, we made that mistake already, and we're dealing with an extremely painful cleanup from it. I would recommend that you learn a few lessons from our crumbling political, physical, and economic infrastructure. All symptoms of worrying too much about what happens outside our borders, and too little about what is happening inside them.
Well if they don't know about it, how do you expect them to answer?
Legally, they're required to know about everything, even the stuff they don't know about. If they don't know about someone installing an illicit copy of MS Office on their work laptop, and that person is caught, they're certainly likely to fire the employee, but that doesn't stop them from being liable. Ask all the companies that the BSA's raided over the years.
I actually just finished uninstalling anything Apple from my Windows XP install, this story ended up pushing me to, since it's pretty obvious from what we do know about this vulnerability that Apple has totally dropped the ball. I don't use Safari on my Macs (and am constantly angered by the fact that Apple has taken a page from Microsoft's book of shame by requiring you to set default Internet applications from within Safari's preferences) because it's a flat out bad web browser. If I could delete it, I would. Pretty damn galling that they can miss something so obvious and dangerous that it takes only a week to find it and two minutes to execute it. I've got a lot of egg on my face because of this, and I'm not going to let it happen again.
They will, however, get better grades with less native ability. Perhaps the arrogance you feel is more often than not resentment?
I dunno. Art students, when they get into the film industry, aren't generally responsible for creating things that, if they break, have the potential to cause great economic disruption or kill people. At worst, you get a lot of people laughing at you and calling you a crappy artists. Heck, good artists get that treatment.
Engineers, however, are quite often tasked with making extremely dangerous things safe enough for complete novices to use without killing everyone that gets near it. I think someone with THAT kind of responsibility damn well better be held to a MUCH higher standard than someone who wants to make the next Great American Film, or write the Great American Novel, or paint the Great American Painting. If any engineering students out there reading that feel that's unfair, too bad. I tried and failed really early at being an engineer, because I can't meet that higher standard. Anyone that can't or doesn't want to meet that standard shouldn't be one either.
Moral relativism != philosophical relativism, also insert discussion on the nature of "truth".
Moral right and wrong cannot be proven without assumptions, and none of the assumptions of any moral system I've encountered are based merely on facts (facts being one of the few things that every definition of truth I've come across has included). Goodness or badness isn't something you can test an object for. Entities have to define the conditions for good or bad. Within those assumed conditions you can do the moral calculus, but those conditions are not (nor are they based on) physical laws or properties of matter. Even if you theorize a "goodness" and "evilness" property of matter or different types of energy, the fact that those forces obviously have vastly different effects on individuals would make the case for moral relativism.
And even merely assuming that facts are just a part of truth, then Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would strongly suggest that we actually can't know all possible facts, and therefore the full nature of truth is in fact out of reach no matter how good we get at looking at existence.
Slashdot Mirror
PS2 has finally gone sub-$100 refurbed, and there are more games for it than ET cartridges buried in Arizona, including classics of just about any genre. Multitap purchase needed for more than two player games though.
Xbox is around $50 refurbed, has many PC ports in a much more friendly multiplayer environment than the PC, the Xbox version of just about any used game is going to be significantly less than any other version, 4 controller ports if you've ever get friends coming over.
GameCube is $30 refurbed, has a lot of good multiplayer games as well, but less overall selection than either of the other two, and the game prices are higher in general.
Any of these options will end up being better than trying to find PC games that will let you replicate a console like that. If you're set on doing it, the only real way to emulate a console experience is frankly emulation.
This rumor keeps swirling around Apple circles, even in more insider ones. My father is an Apple Consultants Network member, reads the mailing lists you get on when you're one of them, and follows all kinds of Apple news sites and he keeps telling me that Apple has some kind of big gaming "thing" in its skunkworks. It's reasonably well known that Apple is less than happy with game publisher's efforts on the platform so far, though whether they have realistic expectations of the publishers is another argument. Suffice it to say, they're not happy with the current state of the art, and to an extent, they're right.
Brief exposition: I've had Macs since I was a kid, and played every game for it that I could get my grubby little hands on. Back in the early days, this wasn't so awful. Yeah, you didn't get many of the super popular titles, and the ones you did get you got late, but I learned a deep appreciation for smaller, well crafted games (Dark Castle, Dungeon of Doom, Scarab of Ra, Quarterstaff, lots of interactive fiction, an old build of Hack, Escape Velocity, Exile, I'll stop here before the nostalgia takes over...) that persists today in my current library. When I got my current Mac, which is a pretty robust machine, I went looking for games, and the prices and cut corners were appalling. I ended up buying Civ 4 at more than double the price for Windows (because I love Civ, and it's a great laptop game IMHO), but it just wasn't worth it much past that (Sim City 4 was still, last I checked, $50 for Mac, and under $20 for Windows...wtf?). Other games I was considering, like Age of Empires III, you can only play other Mac-version owners in the online multiplayer, which is a complete deal breaker, especially since the people I'd be playing it with don't have Macs. Blizzard is the only major game company I've found with actual, real, no corners cut Mac support for its games, and this earns them a LOT of loyalty from Mac owners. (OK, maybe you could put id in that too, but their Mac ports are often way later than even the Linux ports)
So Apple looks at this, and they look at the EAs and Ubisofts of the world and say, "why in the world can't you be like Blizzard?" and they get good answers that they don't like ("the Mac market is too small and risky for us to care about, they can install Windows if they want to play a game"... sound familliar Linux people?), shoddy solutions (like the various Cider-based 'ports' EA has done, and the atrocious EVE Online port), and half-hearted attempts (months and years-late buggy ports released by Aspyr, MacSoft and the other traditional Mac-game-port houses). Apple under Jobs has one real response when no one is doing things they way they think they should be done, they try to find a way to do it themselves, hence a lot of grumbling and noise coming out of Infinite Loop over it, which tends to be the sign of something whirring under the surface, since Apple uses the rumor mill as a tool, for all the effort it makes trying to shut it down.
Now, my father, and the non-gamers he hears the information from think that, because it's Apple, whatever they're thinking of doing is going to change everything in the gaming world, some brand new, never before seen type of gaming platform that's going to revolutionize everything. Personally, I'm pretty sure that's a bunch of Apple fanboyism. There really isn't anywhere totally new to go. The Wii and DS are the first salvos in the full motion and touch realms, as well as online handheld gaming. The online higher-end console gaming market is Microsoft's to lose at this moment after they jumped in with both feet with the Xbox. Handheld/console interaction and integration has been done a lot, if not particularly well, with Nintendo and Sony. Sony's got multimedia sewn (mostly) u
We can find someone to do your job cheaper in China or India?
I realize these are theoretical questions, and I'm not expecting rock solid legal opinions in answer. These questions do seem important given what I see (and what's been talked about as the implication) and I'm just curious whether there are any "Of course not, you idiot, INSERT_BLOODY_OBVIOUS_LEGAL_PRINCIPLE_HERE means they can't do that, even if they're immune from copyright lawsuit."
1. Would this decision make it possible, for example, for state governments (lets say, the state governments involved in the past Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit) to undertake a project to reverse-engineer the source to Windows and Office and use/modify that source?
2. If so, would they be able to work with each other on such a project (ie, the governments of various states forming an organization run by them to do this on behalf of all of them)? Would they be allowed to give the derived code to other state governments that didn't participate in the? (Congress DOES have regulatory authority over insterstate commerce, does that include inter-governmental stuff?)
3. If so, does this allow them to distribute that source or binaries, and for citizens of the state to use it without being hit by MS personally for copyright infringement in a federal proceeding (IE, could the state of MA give out "Massachussetts Windows" to its citizens? Or anyone it damn well feels like?)
If any of the above are true, it would seem to nullify the bulk, but not all, of the concerns of so many state governments have about important historical documents in MS Word format. If they can't be sued for it, they can buy one copy of Office and Windows (convenience, and likelyhood that it'll be cleaner binaries than downloaded from the Internet) and decompile the entire thing, and they have the keys to the file formats. If the latter are the case, it would appear that an extremely nasty looking Sword of Damocles is suspended over Microsoft's corporate neck, and they are probably going to play a lot nicer than they have been with state governments.
Couldn't this process (modified of course) do the same thing to any update for any software at all?
How exactly is this news? I mean, I should update my software when there's a new patch anyway, but now that THIS has been developed I...need to update my software when there's a new patch... Automating it is a pretty neat trick, and it pretty much destroys any argument for security through obscurity, since it means you couldn't patch any hole to maintain the obscurity, but it's not like security through obscurity in the computer software realm has that amazing a track record in any case.
Don't forget Mac OS X being unready. I have to do a ton of terminal-based maintenance on Macs (to the point where I've put Terminal in the Docks of many of my clients so I can get to it faster when I need to use it).
Actually, I know someone with a plum job at Google. He barely made it through college (he was at an arts school, not a technical school, music was his true passion as far as I know), spent most of the time between when he got out and when he was hired at Google hanging out in Southeast Asia (was in Bali when the nightclub bombings happened), then doing not much on the east coast with his twerp of a girlfriend. Damn near 100% self-taught programmer. To the point where, when my girlfriend told him I messed about a lot with Nintendo ROMs, and was looking for a way to organize them, he sent me a program to extract the name and other information from it as a way of starting the conversation. Applied at Google because it was local to him, and he can code, he started on the ground floor, though is significantly higher now (unless they just send assistant network grunts off to Ireland and Japan for fun).
No, the real problem is that nothing really works in the Real World. Not a thing. Who was it that originally said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy? That's a pretty good truism for every endeavor (well, at least when you're dealing with competent planners, the incompetent tend to keep banging their heads into walls). Take just about any of the really serious problems humans have ever had to deal with, are dealing with, or will be forced to deal with in the future. Climate change, welfare, political conflict (from shooting war to economic embargo), and frankly, spam e-mail. I'd love to see someone come up with an impossible-to-avoid checklist of how "Your idea to fix global warming won't work because..." every time someone posts with an opinion about how to mitigate global warming, or extricate my country from Iraq without letting Iraq descend into a full on shooting war, or help people who can't afford medical care to get it, because just like spam e-mail, there is no possible solution that's totally workable for everyone concerned with the discussion. However, that does not relieve us of the need to do something, because leaving things how they are is even worse than a bad solution. Those stupid checklists that get posted every time there's a discussion about spam are contributing to the problem of spam continuing for longer than making hard choices about a fix.
And frankly, those hard choices need to be made sooner rather than later for an awful lot of people. Under 1% of the e-mail I receive on a WEEKLY basis is spam. Daily it's often 0% non-spam. At this point, I'm seriously considering getting rid of normal POP/IMAP e-mail altogether, or setting up an extreme draconian whitelist/DNSBL arrangement, because the problems, frustrations, and financial costs it incurs to me are far greater than any possible benefit. At least when I get spam on my yahoo account, it doesn't cost me money on my host for storage and bandwidth.
As a former EVE player, I wouldn't be surprised if some people actually tried this.
What I don't understand is why Cisco dumped the 5000 series concentrator, which was technically superior in every way I could find, and had client support for just about everything (including MacOS, pre X) for the craptastic 3000 series, which supported Windows only, supported fewer tunnels at less speed, and had a really, really bad UI. I was working with a team of other contractors to spec a big VPN network for a very big company, had been working with Cisco for months on it, and delivered our spec for 5000 series concentrators, just as the Cisco SEs came in and let us know that they were dropping the 5000 line. They didn't know (or wouldn't tell us) why, and appeared to not be very happy with it themselves (especially after working pretty damn hard with us to get us test hardware). Even the hardware VPN modules for the 1000 and 7000 series routers were better than any of the 3000 series boxes we had.
Bankrupting the credit card companies when the credit crunch wave, and the wave of a rapidly rising credit card default rate crash into them at roughly the same time?
I didn't say verifiable, I said falsifiable. Science isn't about verifiability, it is about falsifiability. Your "hypothesis" is only valid until a religious person who doesn't "kill, main, and generally act shitty toward one another using their religion as a justification" is found, and if you haven't found one, your research skills are poor, or you're willfully ignoring them. There are plenty more than one, but even one means that the hypothesis has been falsified, and needs to be changed to fit the facts. A hypothesis stating that those kinds of people exist is certainly true, but ex post facto predictions don't earn you many points.
If you believe that religion is bad because some people use it as a justification to do bad things, that's perfectly fine, and understandable. However, claiming that as scientific proof is ridiculous, and flies in the face of the scientific method. The violent suppression of religious people by the atheist government of China, and previously by the USSR government is just as understandable an argument that atheism is bad, and that's not scientific proof either.
Davies is an unabashed athiest, so the fact that Dawkins agreed to come on is probably quite exciting for him. I imagine there's a bit of hyperbole in what he said, since I imagine you get a bit blinded when one of your heroes is right in front of you, but I'm sure Davies has brought plenty of like-minded people into the Doctor Who production team. Being married to Lalla Ward is a natural connection to the Doctor Who universe (she's done many Big Finish audio productions of Doctor Who stories) and I expect that had as much to do with Dawkins getting on the show as Davies' admiration of him. Foot in the door sort of thing.
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of Doctor Who fans who aren't athiests. My gf is a pretty devout Catholic, really dislikes Dawkins quite a lot, and is the most rabid Doctor Who fan you're likely to find outside of Great Britain (can name all of the companions, in order, with how long they were on the show, spent months knitting a gigantic full-size replica of one of Tom Baker's scarves from his era on the show). Life is going to be...interesting...for me when that epsisode airs.
I don't particularly like Dawkins much, and think his attempts to use the results of other science to prove the non-existance of a diety are as ridiculous as the intelligent design quacks attempting to use science to prove that there is a diety. Specific claims of people that believe in dieties can be, and if you want to infer from those results that there is no diety, then that's fine. His contributions to biology have been pretty constructive and useful. His contributions to religious dialogue have been not especially constructive or useful. His hostility toward religion (not his athiesm, but his claims that religion is in and of itself a bad thing) isn't based on the actual, rigorous testing of any falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore, it's not science. It's in the end a religious belief, it just doesn't happen to be part of a religion that recognizes the existance of a deity.
...and I hope they get the daylights scared out of them by the judge in the case. This lawsuit is ridiculous on its face. I'd be shocked to see this thrown back at them and have their own trademark actually canceled, but if it did happen it would be well deserved.
I'm really surprised at a lot of Apple's moves lately. Pushing new Safari installs as an "update", and this idiotic lawsuit make it sound like there was some turnover in Apple's legal department. They've certainly always been bareknuckled, and unapologetic about suing over anything, but generally they at least have arguments, whether you agree with them or not. This is just stupid, though.
...which from my (limited) understanding, an MBR is set aside, but not actually used for booting anything. I guess technically it's free space, so another hiding place, but nothing normally accesses that record, so would this kind of thing have any effect? You know, on computers like Intel Macs, which all use EFI.
Poppycock, balderdash, bullcookies, bollucks, . If you got that out of any of the strategy classics I've read, you need to reread them. If you passed a military studies course with that as what you took out of it, your professor should be fired. If you're in a position of command in the US military, you should be stripped of it and put in a position where you will do less damage to my country, like cleaning the latrines.
You can never make yourself invulnerable in a real live conflict situation. It doesn't happen, it can't happen, and the one of the first signs of weakness in any kind of conflict is too great a concern with bolstering your defenses, or a belief that you are invulnerable. "Attack is the best defense" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. If you are being attacked, the best way to defend yourself is to find a way to get an attacker's attention drawn to something other than you. The best way to do that is to attack a target that's valuable enough to force your adversary to defend it with the forces that are currently attacking you. It does not mean attacking willy nilly at whomever pokes their head above the sand.
Until recently, the US military, under orders from the incompetents in the White House, has in fact been carrying out your "second rule of war", and the utterly hopeless situation we're in now is testament to how stupid that concept is. Force protection (that is, the soldiers protecting themselves and each other) was the highest priority, specifically set over saving civilian lives. We didn't lose a single military installation in open combat. Even Fallujah we eventually razed (TWICE) with losses that while high for this conflict were piddly in terms of urban warfare in history. All that defense and invulnerability in combat didn't get us anywhere in actually winning the war. What's at least temporarily saved our bacon is having someone with the wisdom to see that fundamental failing put in charge, and actually start attacking, and stop the insane focus on self protection.
Public broadcasting's embrace of podcasting has been quite the boon to me, personally. There are many public radio shows that I wouldn't be listening to at all any more if it weren't for podcasting (since I moved out of a market that broadcast them, or have been moved to a time slot that isn't particularly convenient on my local station), and thanks to the horrible OTA TV reception in my area, many PBS shows I wouldn't even get to hear, let alone see, Frankly, what is the effective difference between watching the News Hour, or Nightly Business report, and listening to it? (though I wish they'd just podcast the entire News Hour instead of just segments...*grumble*) It may not be the buzzword on everyone's lips, but perhaps that's because it's actually an effective and useful technology, as opposed to something generally useless (or extremely specialized), like most buzzwords.
Call the BSA. I've considered it about one company I've dealt with, but the fallout would be personal, not just professional, and no amount of confidentiality would hide that it was me doing it. Even if the BSA is lying about their claims of confidentiality (which from everything I've seen they don't appear to be) and you get fired over it, you've got many lawsuits for unfair termination just screaming to be made, plus they generally give a reward. That is, if you care that it's being used unlicensed. If you don't care, your ass isn't realistically the one on the line if someone else does the turning in, so I wouldn't worry.
You may see KDE as good, highly configurable and modern. Plenty enough people don't. I am currently using KDE 3.5 because I'm effectively forced to (long freaking story), and I hate it. Konquerer as file system browser was as stupid a call as Internet Explorer was for Microsoft. The requirement of using Kwallet to save passwords for Kopete and KMail is crap for more reasons than I can go into right now. The prepending of the letter "K" to EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION NAME makes me want to scream every time I open the KDE start menu. It makes the "i" fixation of Apple look like a passing fancy. "It's not Free Software unless it's K!" Picking a default web browser other than Konqueror is more obscured than even Windows and MacOS. The useless eyecandy enabled by default drives me insane, and none of the four default options at setup was even close to how I wanted it to act.
One might as well ask why Linux hasn't become the operating system of choice for major corporations. The answer will be the same, "lots and lots of reasons."
The review author mentioned that he'd read other good books on computer forensics, could anyone offer a small list of titles for starting a small but good library in this field? I'm not likely or especially interested to get into the forensics field, but there have been more than a few occasions where some applied knowledge about computer forensics would've been helpful. I'm gonna take a look at this book, but a pointer to something related to Linux, MacOS, or anything else that'd be useful would be appreciated as well.
Microsoft is certainly from the USA, but that does not absolve other countries from the responsibility of preventing damage by Microsoft within their borders. It is the fault of the countries involved, not the United States, that their governments cave to Microsoft. The EU has stood up before, indeed it seemed that until now the EU was the only entity with the guts to say "no" to Microsoft.
I would imagine that raising a public stink about American Hegemony being extended (or rogue American terrorist corporations or whatever) through a corporate proxy in Microsoft would be a really productive political stink in most of the countries that apparently have officials that were corrupted by Microsoft. I would recommend cleaning your own houses before you recommend cleaning up America's house. As an American, we made that mistake already, and we're dealing with an extremely painful cleanup from it. I would recommend that you learn a few lessons from our crumbling political, physical, and economic infrastructure. All symptoms of worrying too much about what happens outside our borders, and too little about what is happening inside them.
Legally, they're required to know about everything, even the stuff they don't know about. If they don't know about someone installing an illicit copy of MS Office on their work laptop, and that person is caught, they're certainly likely to fire the employee, but that doesn't stop them from being liable. Ask all the companies that the BSA's raided over the years.
I actually just finished uninstalling anything Apple from my Windows XP install, this story ended up pushing me to, since it's pretty obvious from what we do know about this vulnerability that Apple has totally dropped the ball. I don't use Safari on my Macs (and am constantly angered by the fact that Apple has taken a page from Microsoft's book of shame by requiring you to set default Internet applications from within Safari's preferences) because it's a flat out bad web browser. If I could delete it, I would. Pretty damn galling that they can miss something so obvious and dangerous that it takes only a week to find it and two minutes to execute it. I've got a lot of egg on my face because of this, and I'm not going to let it happen again.
I dunno. Art students, when they get into the film industry, aren't generally responsible for creating things that, if they break, have the potential to cause great economic disruption or kill people. At worst, you get a lot of people laughing at you and calling you a crappy artists. Heck, good artists get that treatment.
Engineers, however, are quite often tasked with making extremely dangerous things safe enough for complete novices to use without killing everyone that gets near it. I think someone with THAT kind of responsibility damn well better be held to a MUCH higher standard than someone who wants to make the next Great American Film, or write the Great American Novel, or paint the Great American Painting. If any engineering students out there reading that feel that's unfair, too bad. I tried and failed really early at being an engineer, because I can't meet that higher standard. Anyone that can't or doesn't want to meet that standard shouldn't be one either.
Moral relativism != philosophical relativism, also insert discussion on the nature of "truth".
Moral right and wrong cannot be proven without assumptions, and none of the assumptions of any moral system I've encountered are based merely on facts (facts being one of the few things that every definition of truth I've come across has included). Goodness or badness isn't something you can test an object for. Entities have to define the conditions for good or bad. Within those assumed conditions you can do the moral calculus, but those conditions are not (nor are they based on) physical laws or properties of matter. Even if you theorize a "goodness" and "evilness" property of matter or different types of energy, the fact that those forces obviously have vastly different effects on individuals would make the case for moral relativism.
And even merely assuming that facts are just a part of truth, then Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would strongly suggest that we actually can't know all possible facts, and therefore the full nature of truth is in fact out of reach no matter how good we get at looking at existence.