It was six hours, thirty minutes, not thirty minutes absolute. The linked article is full of vague claims and a few outright mistakes, that being one of them.
I would like to know the guy's methods also, but apparently he's not revealing how he accomplished the escalation (although he does make some rather ridiculous-seeming claims that it would still work against a locked-down machine, which implies remote root-ability).
I agree that local priv escalation exploits are a problem, but they're a different sort of problem than a 30-minute remote-root exploit, which is what the article suggests is the case on first glance.
Personally I would really like to see similar competitions against default-installs of some other OSes: a "workstation" install of Ubuntu perhaps, maybe Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, and Windows XP. I think you'd find that there are quite a few ways to escalate privileges on these systems also, once you have a user account.
I think the protocol here is really not the issue, it's that he was giving away logins.
He could have had telnet access turned on and it wouldn't have made it any more or less secure, since he was giving shell accounts to all comers.
What happened after that was straightforward privilege escalation. Non-root user became root; although how this was accomplished wasn't specified, although some fairly grandiose claims about unpublished vulnerabilities were made.
Yeah, although somewhat suspiciously, the 1337 h4ck3r named "gwerdna" in the ZDNet article fails to mention any details about the "unpublished exploit" that he used to gain access, even though he claims that it's so severe, "There are various Mac OS X hardening guides out there that could have been used to harden the machine, however, it wouldn't have stopped the vulnerability I used to gain access."
Basically, this guy is claiming -- after basically demonstrating a privilege escalation on a box that he had a shell account on -- that he has some secret exploit that lets him root any OS X box connected to the Internet.
I believe that Mac OS X Server has sshd running by default -- if you think of how it's intended to be used, this is not just a feature, but possibly quite necessary. Setting up a rack of headless servers could be quite a PITA if they didn't have ssh running by default -- you'd have to connect to them over the serial port and turn it on for each machine (or create a custom HD image where it was enabled and load it to each machine).
I think there are probably some also remote-administration services running by default on Server, but don't quote me on that. I know for sure that ssh is not running on regular, consumer MacOS, however. (I just set up a new G5 a few days ago and I had to turn it on manually.)
I think it's also worth pointing out that based on my understanding of the article in question here (the second link in the summary doesn't point to what I think it originally did), ssh wasn't just running on the machine, attackers were allowed to log-in as a non-root user. So really what happened wasn't a cracking in the strict sense, but privilege escalation. Still bad -- and I'm rather annoyed that "gwerdna" or whatever his name was didn't tell us what this great "unpublished and unreported vulnerability" was that he used, but I don't think that it means that any box is compromisable simply by virtue of running sshd.
You would never actually run the seawater through the reactor core itself; not only would you have the problem of salt deposits that would clog the thing up rather quickly (you can do the calculation yourself -- figure out the grams of dissolved solids per liter of seawater and figure out how many thousand liters you'd run through before you filled whatever the empty volume of the reactor chamber would be), but also you'd have the issue of making the core area, which is assumedly radioactive, not a sealed unit.
What's generally done in nuclear reactors is that the core cooling is done through a sealed loop; the material which flows through the core never actually goes near the steam turbines. It goes out of the core, into a heat exchanger, and then back into the core. That's it. Barring some sort of disaster, it never leaves this closed loop.
This gives you a lot of additional flexibility in terms of what kind of coolant you want to use, too. It doesn't have to be water -- it can be liquid metal (IIRC the French use or used liquid NaK in their breeder reactors) or even some sort of pressurized gas or something more exotic.
Having an open-loop core cooling system just doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea; I do like the concept of using the waste heat from power generation for some actual purpose though, be it desalination or H2 production or whatever, but I think there are lots of ways to do this without opening up the core to the environment.
I think that iChat is the "official" AIM client on Mac OS X. Back when it first came out, there was much hoopla about Apple having reached some sort of agreement with AOL, which I assume probably involved a gym bag stuffed with cash or a horse's head in somebody's waterbed, that allowed them to make a non-AOL but still completely interoperable client.
You'll notice that unlike Gaim, and like the official AIM client, iChat does all the file transfer and direct connect stuff without problems (almost all the time, so basically in the same situations that the AIM program would).
I think this is why AOL's Mac OS X efforts have been effectively suspended -- Apple is doing it for them.
And frankly, given what a pile of turds the AOL client always was, I'm quite happy that they leave it this way.
Frankly I think a lot of what he suggests strike me as rather "duh" concepts -- things which ought to be rather obvious but are ignored in some of the major office suites. I'm not sure how I feel about an application having a "desktop" which is separate from the actual OS' desktop; it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.
I think it went like this. Apple did a press event, but rather than sending out the usual press releases and all the rest, just sent out some invitations to some select journalists. Rather than assuming that this meant that the products released might be minor, people took this as a sign of Jobs' trademark "one more thing" understatement, and instead thought that they'd be getting Media Macs, 3GHz Minis, (insert favorite white whale product here). When said products didn't materialize, and the whole thing turned out to be fairly minor -- in line with what the original invitations promised -- people got all disappointed.
This wasn't the MacWorld keynote, people! Nothing big was EVER promised or suggested. The people who did, in general, didn't know anything more than you and I. So quit acting disappointed. You got two new products and an overpriced carrying case.
In a corporate situation, no you wouldn't be a pompous asshat for doing that, you'd just be doing your job.
However if you were an ISP, tasked assumedly with providing connectivity to your customers, and did something similar, then yes, you would be, in my opinion. And there are a fair number of really crummy ISPs who, for one specious reason or another, block various ports and protocols.
And perhaps most unfortunately of all, it's quite common for these ISPs to have regional broadband monopolies, so that a customer doesn't really have the option of just dropping them and switching to a provider that doesn't suck so badly.
I always thought that the high price of ringtones was some sort of a 'stupid tax' designed to protect the general public from having to listen to the latest Snoop Dogg obnoxiousness every time some asshole's phone goes off on the train.
Obviously it's not working. Verizon, would you please, PLEASE increase the price on ringtones? How about $19.95? Wait -- I've got an even better idea -- why don't you bill it at 20 bucks per ring? You'll get right on that? Thanks.
I see your point, but the solution isn't to have the government step in and regulate that.
The radio stations play exactly what they think that the public wants to hear, no more and no less. That's why they spend millions of dollars a year on focus groups and surveys and everything else. If you live in Brooklyn and turn on the radio and hear a lot of urban and rap stations, with maybe some alternative and spanish-language stations thrown in for good measure, it's not because someone in the ClearChannel Secret Underground Lair decided that Ice Cube is "better" than Dierks Bentley, it's because they're trying to play what they think people in that listening area want to hear. I may think their taste in music sucks, but I have no right to legislate my own taste on them instead.
You can argue that the big radio networks do this poorly -- and I might agree with you, to a certain extent (they are after all, limited by the information they take in, which may or may not be accurate) -- or that you personally don't like the music they play, but the market forces encourage the media outlets to play music that will appeal to the greatest number of people. The more people listen to a particular radio station, the more they can charge for advertising on that same station, and thus the more money the station and the station's owner makes.
If ClearChannel actually thought that there was a market for, say, an all-Italian-opera-all-the-time station in downtown Detroit, I have no doubt that they'd be tripping over themselves to supply it (and sell advertising time). But there isn't much of a market for that, outside of what's already delivered by public radio and classical stations, so the big radio conglomerates don't do it.
For the Government to step in and demand that stations play a certain amount of one kind of music is inherently undemocratic -- it's giving the people something they don't want: because if a lot of people did want it, they'd already be listening to it on commercial radio.
I know that hating big media is practically a sport around here, but it's ridiculous to paint them with the Evil brush on everything. Those companies -- in radio, especially -- spend a ton of money and effort trying to puzzle out what the listening public wants, and then delivering it to them. If it doesn't work so well, then it only demonstrates that maybe the top-down management approach is flawed, and they should give more freedom to the individual stations.
Having even MORE top-down regulation -- from the Government instead of from corporate focus groups -- isn't going to help anything. It can only make the situation worse, because if you think a corporation like ClearChannel or Arbitron is a big boat to make turn, the Government is like that times a factor of 1000. (And it's no less corrupt, either.)
I think your comment about the Eastern Front neglects to really appreciate how close the Russians were, at several points, to losing that portion of the war. It's quite believable that if the Germans hadn't had to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously, they would have overcome the Russian resistance.
It's a moot point, obviously, and since it didn't happen we can go back and forth on it all day.... frankly if you want to come up with a trite conclusion as to why we're not all speaking German right now, I think it's really Hitler that should get the credit, for such severe lack of foresight that they invaded Russia at all.
But getting back to your original point, I really don't think that most Americans hate or even really and truly dislike the French -- I think the "anti-French" sentiment is more of a defensive reaction to perceived anti-American sentiment. It boils down to this: "So you don't like us? Well... fuck you, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." I believe it's also the same motivation that drives a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment; with the exception of a few outright racists, I don't think your average middle-class white guy really thinks one thing or the other about Muslim people, but on hearing that they 'all hate America,' and by extension him, they become "dirty shit-colored sand-niggers." And once that decision to dislike is made, it's very hard to reverse.
In general, if you wanted to pick some personality traits for the American body politic, you'd probably want to start off the list with "defensive." I think this is not well appreciated by many foreign people -- the assume that the public opinion of America would not be affected by what other people think of it, but this is patently not the case. In general, it seems as though the widely-accepted reaction, on learning that people in a foreign country generally dislike America, is to 'hate them back' with equal venom. Obviously, I think this just leads into the sort of degenerate spiral you see today, between the US and a whole lot of places.
That'd be impossible to implement. What's to stop me from sending a candidate some very odd amount of money -- say, $6328.41 -- (or better yet, do it repeatedly) and then just mention to them, through some sort of side channel, that all of those "41-cent" contributions were from me, and that if he didn't want to see the tap get shut off, he'd better do what I say. He wouldn't necessarily have to believe me, but I could say in advance that I was going to send a check a week late this month, or something else to prove that I'm behind them. It wouldn't be particularly hard.
There's no way you can have anonymity when the people giving the money don't want it.
It would be more practical just to bar donations outright, because at least then the problem is "just" monitoring a politician's finances to see if he's receiving money from an outside source (it's not easy, but it's something that law enforcement is fairly good at), rather than trying to stop the flow of information -- who's sending large amounts of money to whom, which is a relative impossibility.
AC:DC converters, as mentioned in the article aren't really that ineffiecient (article itself quotes 90%). AC:DC converters are infact really DC:DC convertors, they just have a rectifier circuit to convert the AC to high volatge DC for DC:DC conversion.
Are you sure about this? It's the opposite of what I've always been told.
Changing the voltage of AC is pretty easy using a transformer, and converting AC to DC isn't terribly hard (not now that we have solid-state diodes), so an AC to DC convertor is pretty simple: just get one transformer, four diodes, and several big filtering capacitors; alternately, you can use a more modern switching design, which actually chop up incoming AC into even higher-frequency signals in order to convert their voltage.
There isn't really such a thing as a "DC:DC convertor" to the best of my knowledge (okay, there are diode ladders, but they're not very practical). They're all just DC:AC:AC:DC convertors, when you count in the high-frequencies used in the switching circuits. You just never really see the AC, because it's all internal.
So if anything, it's the DC voltage convertors which are really DC:AC and AC:DC convertors, not the other way around.
This said, I think running DC in the datacenter seems like a fairly good idea: it's always struck me as a bit wasteful that every 1U rack-mount server has its own power supply (or sometimes two or more); it certainly seems like you could save a lot of space and cooling requirements just by moving the AC rectification to a more central location, even if there wasn't any inherent boost in efficiency.
I think you hit the nail on the head; I would say that I don't own any Sony gear, but that's not entirely true. I have one of their little MiniDV camcorders, because it uses a standard format (MiniDV) and was the best thing I could get for the price at Best Buy when my Panasonic died. But I'd never touch one of their digital cameras with that memory format, and certainly not an MP3 player from them.
It's too bad, because I feel like they're a company that has just great ideas, but then takes those same ideas, throws them up in front of a board meeting in the form of a bad PowerPoint presentation, and horribly mangles them until there's nothing but a glimmer of the original concept left.
Their MiniDisc audio players could have been the Walkmans of the new century, but the first few generations of them were horribly crippled. (Would only record into ATRAC, had to rip CDs using DRM laden software, etc.) It was only in desperation -- after it was too late -- that they actually released a product that consumers would buy. And even now it's lame compared to other offerings.
They ought to spin off their consumer electronics and professional video arms, cut them loose from the Sony Music horror, and let the market do its worst. However I'm not sure that the Japanese conglomerate mentality will ever do that -- they like to envision themselves as the ultimate "whole solution" provider, and consumers just don't want that. (Even if they're not smart enough to know what DRM is or why MemoryStick sucks, they realize it's a bad thing when the replacement power adaptor for a new digital camera costs $60 and you can't buy it at Radio Shack.)
Well said. I think it's a critical mistake to envision corporations as entities like people, that make decisions based on personal belief systems, loyalty, love, etc. Corporations are like water: they follow a very basic set of fundamental laws and their behavior is determined otherwise by their environment.
Expecting a corporation to do something unprofitable is like expecting water to flow uphill.
If you want the water to go to a specific place, or not flow somewhere, you don't try to ask it nicely, you build a dam. Likewise if you want to change how corporations act, you change their incentive structure.
Sure, but in this case the corporation is solely controlled by you, so it's limited by your morality. (Assumedly.) The corporation -- the legal construct itself -- doesn't have any sense of morality, or anything else.
It's when corporations are so big that they're not really controlled by a single individual that their true amorality becomes obvious. Everyone has a very slightly different idea of what is right and wrong, so unless you have one person who is in a position to pull the plug and say "no, that's wrong -- stop," it will basically do anything that's profitable. Unless the action is so grievously immoral that everyone involved in the company's operation can agree that it's wrong. But that rarely happens.
It's really just semantics whether it's the people or the legal construct that are amoral; the point is that the construct gives people the framework necessary to comfortably check their morality at the door.
That said, I don't have a problem with it -- I think that corporations are a useful barometer in society of our incentive structure. When you start to see corporations doing sick things, it's time to revisit your incentive and punishment systems and decide how to fix the basic problem: why is doing bad things more profitable than doing good things?
So while I'm not normally a fan of big government, I could support a piece of legislation like this, because it fixes the playing field to produce fewer undesirable outcomes. That's the right of a capitalist democracy; if you can't do that, what's the point in even having a government.
Lindh was captured fighting with a foreign military, against US forces.
I think that ought to be enough to revoke his citizenship right there. In fact previous to some really boneheaded USSC cases in the late 80s, it would have been.
If you're fighting as a soldier in a hostile military unit and are captured, I don't think you should be able to pull out your US Passport and get special treatment. Go direct to court martial -- do not pass go, do not collect $200.
If you're caught in a combat area, holding a gun and shooting at US troops, you're not a civilian, and you shouldn't be tried in civilian court.
Well, you can't -- not exactly anyway. There's always room for argument in what hardware you compare.
However my point was that the only way you can get a ThinkPad that's less expensive than an iBook is to get a configuration that's below what's commonly considered to be acceptable (or at least, would be to me). I can't imagine running Windows XP in 192 MB of RAM; it would be torturous. If you want something less subjective, you could look around and find reviews of various Windows machines, and see what they recommend for minimum system requirements to run well, and then price out a system at that level, and compare it to an iBook. (The base model iBook is a quite acceptable Mac platform, as long as you don't want to do anything heavy-duty; although I suppose if you really didn't trust me on that either you'd have to look for trusted reviews there as well.)
I don't know how you'd go about comparing a Linux notebook to Apple, on price/performance grounds. There are so many variables on the Linux end (are you running fluxbox, or KDE? Is this going to be a lightweight vterm client, or do you want to run WoW in Wine?) that I don't think it would be possible. So I just stuck with Windows, because first of all that's what most buyers of PC laptops use, and second that's the only thing that Lenovo sells anyway.
Obviously it's always going to be apples-to-oranges, and in reality people choose their OS first and then buy a computer second, within a certain price range. But since the GP was bringing out the tired old line about Apple notebooks being so much more expensive than PCs, thus opening up the whole price-comparison can of worms, I felt that it was acceptable to make a comparison.
My point is only this: there are lots of things you can criticize Apple for (I do fairly frequently, and I own several), but the "bang for your buck" factor of their notebooks isn't really one of them, at least at the low end. Apple's entry-level gear is very competitive, price-wise. Whether you can use what they're offering because of software concerns however, is another question.
This reminds me a little of a system that I saw, when I was working in the E.D. in a local hospital a while back.
They had a live translation service that worked through a "red phone" (it wasn't really red, but it was a dedicated, pick-up-to-talk phone) that connected to a bank of live translators. You picked up the phone and entered codes for what languages you wanted it to translate to and from, say English to Catalan, and it would route you to an operator that could do that translation. Then the patient picked up the other handset, or you put it on speaker, and away you went. I assume the hospital got a fat bill at the end of the month for every use. I always thought this was a pretty slick system, because the translators could be anywhere. I don't know how they handled it in reality, but I had visions of operators sitting around their kitchens or in small callcenters worldwide, with the computer routing them calls when ones in languages whenever they were available.
Granted, I never saw anyone actually use this system, so I can't vouch for it in practice. But conceptually it struck me as being pretty cool.
The point that TFA makes about colloquialisms is right on, however. Even a human translator doesn't take this all out. A good story is one I heard from an EMT friend of mine. He got called to the scene of an older person who had lost consciousness and was unresponsive. When there, he tried to get a history from the wife: she kept saying "He fell out! He just fell out!" And nobody had any idea what she meant. Fell out of where? Of a window? Of a car? Of his chair? Was there a possible head injury? The possibilities were endless.
Turns out, "falling out" is apparently a direct translation of the Quebecois term for "passing out" or "fainting." The lady was just stating the obvious -- the guy had passed out. To the woman, it made perfect sense, but to the EMTs, it didn't. And this was with two people, in person, speaking the same language, with one native speaker and one very competent second-language speaker. Even with human translators, unless you selected them not only for languages, but also for dialect and regionalisms, I could see this being a big problem. (And potentially a lot more serious than my example.) With a machine, the number of problems must skyrocket.
That said, I still think it's a neat development, and I'm sure it'll be an asset for hospitals in areas where the staff can't keep up with the diverse and ever-changing language requirements of their patients.
I find it continually ridiculous that they still allow people to do this -- just carry their kid on their lap for an entire flight. It's so 1955.
If you did that in a car, it would probably be child abuse; but it's okay because it's an airplane?
If seat belts are required at any point during the flight for adults, then seat belts and infant seats (NTSB-certified) should be required for infants at those same times.
(Actually my personal feeling is that infants should be kept somewhere down with the live animals in the baggage compartment, for the comfort of other passengers, but I don't think that's going to go over well. This is why I'm not a parent, either.)
I don't think you'd be the first; I've heard some good stories (pre-TSA) about people who had carryons filled with various sex implements, far in excess of what would be considered 'personal use' (they sold them, were taking them to a conference, etc.) getting hung up in security.
I'd imagine the baggage screeners at most airports have seen some pretty interesting things.
After a really obnoxious flying experience a while back, I've given up on air travel for my Northeast Corridor (Boston/NYC/DC) trips and now just take Amtrak everwhere. When you include the time spent getting to the airport, which always tend to be out in the ass-end of nowhere, the ritual goosing of security, and the seemingly ubquitous delays, I've found rail travel to be just as fast.
And the best part (and what relates to the topic here)... they have quiet cars. I don't know how long they've been doing this for, but it's a great idea. Generally it's either the first or last car on the train, and the rules are you can't use a cellphone (for voice) and you can't talk above a whisper there. It's kind of like travelling in a library. And the train conductors actually enforce it, miraculously enough. I actually saw a guy get asked to leave because he was on his cellphone, attempt to argue with the conductor, and get thrown off the train at the next stop. (Note to self: do not fuck with train conductors, because unlike on an airplane, they can leave you stuck somewhere.)
I'm not sure how you'd replicate something like this on an airplane, but it really makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant. I'd much rather spend three hours in a quiet train car, working on my laptop and using the internet through my GPRS data-capable phone, than spend one hour in a plane cabin between some fat bastard who's oozing across the armrest and a screaming infant.
Hopefully by the time that cellphones are allowed on planes -- which will happen, eventually -- they'll take a cue from the railroads and at least have a "No Cellphone" section for people to go to.
Slashdot Mirror
It was six hours, thirty minutes, not thirty minutes absolute. The linked article is full of vague claims and a few outright mistakes, that being one of them.
I would like to know the guy's methods also, but apparently he's not revealing how he accomplished the escalation (although he does make some rather ridiculous-seeming claims that it would still work against a locked-down machine, which implies remote root-ability).
I agree that local priv escalation exploits are a problem, but they're a different sort of problem than a 30-minute remote-root exploit, which is what the article suggests is the case on first glance.
Personally I would really like to see similar competitions against default-installs of some other OSes: a "workstation" install of Ubuntu perhaps, maybe Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, and Windows XP. I think you'd find that there are quite a few ways to escalate privileges on these systems also, once you have a user account.
I think the protocol here is really not the issue, it's that he was giving away logins.
He could have had telnet access turned on and it wouldn't have made it any more or less secure, since he was giving shell accounts to all comers.
What happened after that was straightforward privilege escalation. Non-root user became root; although how this was accomplished wasn't specified, although some fairly grandiose claims about unpublished vulnerabilities were made.
Yeah, although somewhat suspiciously, the 1337 h4ck3r named "gwerdna" in the ZDNet article fails to mention any details about the "unpublished exploit" that he used to gain access, even though he claims that it's so severe, "There are various Mac OS X hardening guides out there that could have been used to harden the machine, however, it wouldn't have stopped the vulnerability I used to gain access."
Basically, this guy is claiming -- after basically demonstrating a privilege escalation on a box that he had a shell account on -- that he has some secret exploit that lets him root any OS X box connected to the Internet.
Right.
I believe that Mac OS X Server has sshd running by default -- if you think of how it's intended to be used, this is not just a feature, but possibly quite necessary. Setting up a rack of headless servers could be quite a PITA if they didn't have ssh running by default -- you'd have to connect to them over the serial port and turn it on for each machine (or create a custom HD image where it was enabled and load it to each machine).
I think there are probably some also remote-administration services running by default on Server, but don't quote me on that. I know for sure that ssh is not running on regular, consumer MacOS, however. (I just set up a new G5 a few days ago and I had to turn it on manually.)
I think it's also worth pointing out that based on my understanding of the article in question here (the second link in the summary doesn't point to what I think it originally did), ssh wasn't just running on the machine, attackers were allowed to log-in as a non-root user. So really what happened wasn't a cracking in the strict sense, but privilege escalation. Still bad -- and I'm rather annoyed that "gwerdna" or whatever his name was didn't tell us what this great "unpublished and unreported vulnerability" was that he used, but I don't think that it means that any box is compromisable simply by virtue of running sshd.
You would never actually run the seawater through the reactor core itself; not only would you have the problem of salt deposits that would clog the thing up rather quickly (you can do the calculation yourself -- figure out the grams of dissolved solids per liter of seawater and figure out how many thousand liters you'd run through before you filled whatever the empty volume of the reactor chamber would be), but also you'd have the issue of making the core area, which is assumedly radioactive, not a sealed unit.
What's generally done in nuclear reactors is that the core cooling is done through a sealed loop; the material which flows through the core never actually goes near the steam turbines. It goes out of the core, into a heat exchanger, and then back into the core. That's it. Barring some sort of disaster, it never leaves this closed loop.
This gives you a lot of additional flexibility in terms of what kind of coolant you want to use, too. It doesn't have to be water -- it can be liquid metal (IIRC the French use or used liquid NaK in their breeder reactors) or even some sort of pressurized gas or something more exotic.
Having an open-loop core cooling system just doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea; I do like the concept of using the waste heat from power generation for some actual purpose though, be it desalination or H2 production or whatever, but I think there are lots of ways to do this without opening up the core to the environment.
I think that iChat is the "official" AIM client on Mac OS X. Back when it first came out, there was much hoopla about Apple having reached some sort of agreement with AOL, which I assume probably involved a gym bag stuffed with cash or a horse's head in somebody's waterbed, that allowed them to make a non-AOL but still completely interoperable client.
You'll notice that unlike Gaim, and like the official AIM client, iChat does all the file transfer and direct connect stuff without problems (almost all the time, so basically in the same situations that the AIM program would).
I think this is why AOL's Mac OS X efforts have been effectively suspended -- Apple is doing it for them.
And frankly, given what a pile of turds the AOL client always was, I'm quite happy that they leave it this way.
If anyone else was looking for the guy's actual proposal that was submitted to the competition, this is it:
r tin_pfeiffer.pdf
http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/ma
Frankly I think a lot of what he suggests strike me as rather "duh" concepts -- things which ought to be rather obvious but are ignored in some of the major office suites. I'm not sure how I feel about an application having a "desktop" which is separate from the actual OS' desktop; it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.
I think it went like this. Apple did a press event, but rather than sending out the usual press releases and all the rest, just sent out some invitations to some select journalists. Rather than assuming that this meant that the products released might be minor, people took this as a sign of Jobs' trademark "one more thing" understatement, and instead thought that they'd be getting Media Macs, 3GHz Minis, (insert favorite white whale product here). When said products didn't materialize, and the whole thing turned out to be fairly minor -- in line with what the original invitations promised -- people got all disappointed.
This wasn't the MacWorld keynote, people! Nothing big was EVER promised or suggested. The people who did, in general, didn't know anything more than you and I. So quit acting disappointed. You got two new products and an overpriced carrying case.
In a corporate situation, no you wouldn't be a pompous asshat for doing that, you'd just be doing your job.
However if you were an ISP, tasked assumedly with providing connectivity to your customers, and did something similar, then yes, you would be, in my opinion. And there are a fair number of really crummy ISPs who, for one specious reason or another, block various ports and protocols.
And perhaps most unfortunately of all, it's quite common for these ISPs to have regional broadband monopolies, so that a customer doesn't really have the option of just dropping them and switching to a provider that doesn't suck so badly.
I always thought that the high price of ringtones was some sort of a 'stupid tax' designed to protect the general public from having to listen to the latest Snoop Dogg obnoxiousness every time some asshole's phone goes off on the train.
Obviously it's not working. Verizon, would you please, PLEASE increase the price on ringtones? How about $19.95? Wait -- I've got an even better idea -- why don't you bill it at 20 bucks per ring? You'll get right on that? Thanks.
I see your point, but the solution isn't to have the government step in and regulate that.
The radio stations play exactly what they think that the public wants to hear, no more and no less. That's why they spend millions of dollars a year on focus groups and surveys and everything else. If you live in Brooklyn and turn on the radio and hear a lot of urban and rap stations, with maybe some alternative and spanish-language stations thrown in for good measure, it's not because someone in the ClearChannel Secret Underground Lair decided that Ice Cube is "better" than Dierks Bentley, it's because they're trying to play what they think people in that listening area want to hear. I may think their taste in music sucks, but I have no right to legislate my own taste on them instead.
You can argue that the big radio networks do this poorly -- and I might agree with you, to a certain extent (they are after all, limited by the information they take in, which may or may not be accurate) -- or that you personally don't like the music they play, but the market forces encourage the media outlets to play music that will appeal to the greatest number of people. The more people listen to a particular radio station, the more they can charge for advertising on that same station, and thus the more money the station and the station's owner makes.
If ClearChannel actually thought that there was a market for, say, an all-Italian-opera-all-the-time station in downtown Detroit, I have no doubt that they'd be tripping over themselves to supply it (and sell advertising time). But there isn't much of a market for that, outside of what's already delivered by public radio and classical stations, so the big radio conglomerates don't do it.
For the Government to step in and demand that stations play a certain amount of one kind of music is inherently undemocratic -- it's giving the people something they don't want: because if a lot of people did want it, they'd already be listening to it on commercial radio.
I know that hating big media is practically a sport around here, but it's ridiculous to paint them with the Evil brush on everything. Those companies -- in radio, especially -- spend a ton of money and effort trying to puzzle out what the listening public wants, and then delivering it to them. If it doesn't work so well, then it only demonstrates that maybe the top-down management approach is flawed, and they should give more freedom to the individual stations.
Having even MORE top-down regulation -- from the Government instead of from corporate focus groups -- isn't going to help anything. It can only make the situation worse, because if you think a corporation like ClearChannel or Arbitron is a big boat to make turn, the Government is like that times a factor of 1000. (And it's no less corrupt, either.)
I think your comment about the Eastern Front neglects to really appreciate how close the Russians were, at several points, to losing that portion of the war. It's quite believable that if the Germans hadn't had to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously, they would have overcome the Russian resistance.
... fuck you, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." I believe it's also the same motivation that drives a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment; with the exception of a few outright racists, I don't think your average middle-class white guy really thinks one thing or the other about Muslim people, but on hearing that they 'all hate America,' and by extension him, they become "dirty shit-colored sand-niggers." And once that decision to dislike is made, it's very hard to reverse.
It's a moot point, obviously, and since it didn't happen we can go back and forth on it all day.... frankly if you want to come up with a trite conclusion as to why we're not all speaking German right now, I think it's really Hitler that should get the credit, for such severe lack of foresight that they invaded Russia at all.
But getting back to your original point, I really don't think that most Americans hate or even really and truly dislike the French -- I think the "anti-French" sentiment is more of a defensive reaction to perceived anti-American sentiment. It boils down to this: "So you don't like us? Well
In general, if you wanted to pick some personality traits for the American body politic, you'd probably want to start off the list with "defensive." I think this is not well appreciated by many foreign people -- the assume that the public opinion of America would not be affected by what other people think of it, but this is patently not the case. In general, it seems as though the widely-accepted reaction, on learning that people in a foreign country generally dislike America, is to 'hate them back' with equal venom. Obviously, I think this just leads into the sort of degenerate spiral you see today, between the US and a whole lot of places.
That'd be impossible to implement. What's to stop me from sending a candidate some very odd amount of money -- say, $6328.41 -- (or better yet, do it repeatedly) and then just mention to them, through some sort of side channel, that all of those "41-cent" contributions were from me, and that if he didn't want to see the tap get shut off, he'd better do what I say. He wouldn't necessarily have to believe me, but I could say in advance that I was going to send a check a week late this month, or something else to prove that I'm behind them. It wouldn't be particularly hard.
There's no way you can have anonymity when the people giving the money don't want it.
It would be more practical just to bar donations outright, because at least then the problem is "just" monitoring a politician's finances to see if he's receiving money from an outside source (it's not easy, but it's something that law enforcement is fairly good at), rather than trying to stop the flow of information -- who's sending large amounts of money to whom, which is a relative impossibility.
AC:DC converters, as mentioned in the article aren't really that ineffiecient (article itself quotes 90%). AC:DC converters are infact really DC:DC convertors, they just have a rectifier circuit to convert the AC to high volatge DC for DC:DC conversion.
Are you sure about this? It's the opposite of what I've always been told.
Changing the voltage of AC is pretty easy using a transformer, and converting AC to DC isn't terribly hard (not now that we have solid-state diodes), so an AC to DC convertor is pretty simple: just get one transformer, four diodes, and several big filtering capacitors; alternately, you can use a more modern switching design, which actually chop up incoming AC into even higher-frequency signals in order to convert their voltage.
There isn't really such a thing as a "DC:DC convertor" to the best of my knowledge (okay, there are diode ladders, but they're not very practical). They're all just DC:AC:AC:DC convertors, when you count in the high-frequencies used in the switching circuits. You just never really see the AC, because it's all internal.
So if anything, it's the DC voltage convertors which are really DC:AC and AC:DC convertors, not the other way around.
This said, I think running DC in the datacenter seems like a fairly good idea: it's always struck me as a bit wasteful that every 1U rack-mount server has its own power supply (or sometimes two or more); it certainly seems like you could save a lot of space and cooling requirements just by moving the AC rectification to a more central location, even if there wasn't any inherent boost in efficiency.
You think that sucked? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them...
But would it run Linux?
...and what did they do with Utah?
Do we care?
I think you hit the nail on the head; I would say that I don't own any Sony gear, but that's not entirely true. I have one of their little MiniDV camcorders, because it uses a standard format (MiniDV) and was the best thing I could get for the price at Best Buy when my Panasonic died. But I'd never touch one of their digital cameras with that memory format, and certainly not an MP3 player from them.
It's too bad, because I feel like they're a company that has just great ideas, but then takes those same ideas, throws them up in front of a board meeting in the form of a bad PowerPoint presentation, and horribly mangles them until there's nothing but a glimmer of the original concept left.
Their MiniDisc audio players could have been the Walkmans of the new century, but the first few generations of them were horribly crippled. (Would only record into ATRAC, had to rip CDs using DRM laden software, etc.) It was only in desperation -- after it was too late -- that they actually released a product that consumers would buy. And even now it's lame compared to other offerings.
They ought to spin off their consumer electronics and professional video arms, cut them loose from the Sony Music horror, and let the market do its worst. However I'm not sure that the Japanese conglomerate mentality will ever do that -- they like to envision themselves as the ultimate "whole solution" provider, and consumers just don't want that. (Even if they're not smart enough to know what DRM is or why MemoryStick sucks, they realize it's a bad thing when the replacement power adaptor for a new digital camera costs $60 and you can't buy it at Radio Shack.)
Well said. I think it's a critical mistake to envision corporations as entities like people, that make decisions based on personal belief systems, loyalty, love, etc. Corporations are like water: they follow a very basic set of fundamental laws and their behavior is determined otherwise by their environment.
Expecting a corporation to do something unprofitable is like expecting water to flow uphill.
If you want the water to go to a specific place, or not flow somewhere, you don't try to ask it nicely, you build a dam. Likewise if you want to change how corporations act, you change their incentive structure.
Sure, but in this case the corporation is solely controlled by you, so it's limited by your morality. (Assumedly.) The corporation -- the legal construct itself -- doesn't have any sense of morality, or anything else.
It's when corporations are so big that they're not really controlled by a single individual that their true amorality becomes obvious. Everyone has a very slightly different idea of what is right and wrong, so unless you have one person who is in a position to pull the plug and say "no, that's wrong -- stop," it will basically do anything that's profitable. Unless the action is so grievously immoral that everyone involved in the company's operation can agree that it's wrong. But that rarely happens.
It's really just semantics whether it's the people or the legal construct that are amoral; the point is that the construct gives people the framework necessary to comfortably check their morality at the door.
That said, I don't have a problem with it -- I think that corporations are a useful barometer in society of our incentive structure. When you start to see corporations doing sick things, it's time to revisit your incentive and punishment systems and decide how to fix the basic problem: why is doing bad things more profitable than doing good things?
So while I'm not normally a fan of big government, I could support a piece of legislation like this, because it fixes the playing field to produce fewer undesirable outcomes. That's the right of a capitalist democracy; if you can't do that, what's the point in even having a government.
Lindh was captured fighting with a foreign military, against US forces.
I think that ought to be enough to revoke his citizenship right there. In fact previous to some really boneheaded USSC cases in the late 80s, it would have been.
If you're fighting as a soldier in a hostile military unit and are captured, I don't think you should be able to pull out your US Passport and get special treatment. Go direct to court martial -- do not pass go, do not collect $200.
If you're caught in a combat area, holding a gun and shooting at US troops, you're not a civilian, and you shouldn't be tried in civilian court.
Well, you can't -- not exactly anyway. There's always room for argument in what hardware you compare.
However my point was that the only way you can get a ThinkPad that's less expensive than an iBook is to get a configuration that's below what's commonly considered to be acceptable (or at least, would be to me). I can't imagine running Windows XP in 192 MB of RAM; it would be torturous. If you want something less subjective, you could look around and find reviews of various Windows machines, and see what they recommend for minimum system requirements to run well, and then price out a system at that level, and compare it to an iBook. (The base model iBook is a quite acceptable Mac platform, as long as you don't want to do anything heavy-duty; although I suppose if you really didn't trust me on that either you'd have to look for trusted reviews there as well.)
I don't know how you'd go about comparing a Linux notebook to Apple, on price/performance grounds. There are so many variables on the Linux end (are you running fluxbox, or KDE? Is this going to be a lightweight vterm client, or do you want to run WoW in Wine?) that I don't think it would be possible. So I just stuck with Windows, because first of all that's what most buyers of PC laptops use, and second that's the only thing that Lenovo sells anyway.
Obviously it's always going to be apples-to-oranges, and in reality people choose their OS first and then buy a computer second, within a certain price range. But since the GP was bringing out the tired old line about Apple notebooks being so much more expensive than PCs, thus opening up the whole price-comparison can of worms, I felt that it was acceptable to make a comparison.
My point is only this: there are lots of things you can criticize Apple for (I do fairly frequently, and I own several), but the "bang for your buck" factor of their notebooks isn't really one of them, at least at the low end. Apple's entry-level gear is very competitive, price-wise. Whether you can use what they're offering because of software concerns however, is another question.
This reminds me a little of a system that I saw, when I was working in the E.D. in a local hospital a while back.
They had a live translation service that worked through a "red phone" (it wasn't really red, but it was a dedicated, pick-up-to-talk phone) that connected to a bank of live translators. You picked up the phone and entered codes for what languages you wanted it to translate to and from, say English to Catalan, and it would route you to an operator that could do that translation. Then the patient picked up the other handset, or you put it on speaker, and away you went. I assume the hospital got a fat bill at the end of the month for every use. I always thought this was a pretty slick system, because the translators could be anywhere. I don't know how they handled it in reality, but I had visions of operators sitting around their kitchens or in small callcenters worldwide, with the computer routing them calls when ones in languages whenever they were available.
Granted, I never saw anyone actually use this system, so I can't vouch for it in practice. But conceptually it struck me as being pretty cool.
The point that TFA makes about colloquialisms is right on, however. Even a human translator doesn't take this all out. A good story is one I heard from an EMT friend of mine. He got called to the scene of an older person who had lost consciousness and was unresponsive. When there, he tried to get a history from the wife: she kept saying "He fell out! He just fell out!" And nobody had any idea what she meant. Fell out of where? Of a window? Of a car? Of his chair? Was there a possible head injury? The possibilities were endless.
Turns out, "falling out" is apparently a direct translation of the Quebecois term for "passing out" or "fainting." The lady was just stating the obvious -- the guy had passed out. To the woman, it made perfect sense, but to the EMTs, it didn't. And this was with two people, in person, speaking the same language, with one native speaker and one very competent second-language speaker. Even with human translators, unless you selected them not only for languages, but also for dialect and regionalisms, I could see this being a big problem. (And potentially a lot more serious than my example.) With a machine, the number of problems must skyrocket.
That said, I still think it's a neat development, and I'm sure it'll be an asset for hospitals in areas where the staff can't keep up with the diverse and ever-changing language requirements of their patients.
I find it continually ridiculous that they still allow people to do this -- just carry their kid on their lap for an entire flight. It's so 1955.
If you did that in a car, it would probably be child abuse; but it's okay because it's an airplane?
If seat belts are required at any point during the flight for adults, then seat belts and infant seats (NTSB-certified) should be required for infants at those same times.
(Actually my personal feeling is that infants should be kept somewhere down with the live animals in the baggage compartment, for the comfort of other passengers, but I don't think that's going to go over well. This is why I'm not a parent, either.)
I don't think you'd be the first; I've heard some good stories (pre-TSA) about people who had carryons filled with various sex implements, far in excess of what would be considered 'personal use' (they sold them, were taking them to a conference, etc.) getting hung up in security.
I'd imagine the baggage screeners at most airports have seen some pretty interesting things.
After a really obnoxious flying experience a while back, I've given up on air travel for my Northeast Corridor (Boston/NYC/DC) trips and now just take Amtrak everwhere. When you include the time spent getting to the airport, which always tend to be out in the ass-end of nowhere, the ritual goosing of security, and the seemingly ubquitous delays, I've found rail travel to be just as fast.
... they have quiet cars. I don't know how long they've been doing this for, but it's a great idea. Generally it's either the first or last car on the train, and the rules are you can't use a cellphone (for voice) and you can't talk above a whisper there. It's kind of like travelling in a library. And the train conductors actually enforce it, miraculously enough. I actually saw a guy get asked to leave because he was on his cellphone, attempt to argue with the conductor, and get thrown off the train at the next stop. (Note to self: do not fuck with train conductors, because unlike on an airplane, they can leave you stuck somewhere.)
And the best part (and what relates to the topic here)
I'm not sure how you'd replicate something like this on an airplane, but it really makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant. I'd much rather spend three hours in a quiet train car, working on my laptop and using the internet through my GPRS data-capable phone, than spend one hour in a plane cabin between some fat bastard who's oozing across the armrest and a screaming infant.
Hopefully by the time that cellphones are allowed on planes -- which will happen, eventually -- they'll take a cue from the railroads and at least have a "No Cellphone" section for people to go to.