This is not an unknown phonominon in computer science circle. It's called NIH or Not Invented Here. It happens when the developers egos grow so big that they think they can do everything better and refuse to look at outside code/ideas except as an example of what not to do. Projects that fall to NIH syndrome suffer massive cost overruns, fail to meet expectations, and are frequently quite buggy as the developers overestimate their abilities and attempt to take on too much.
The only solution is to get better management that forces the developers to consider existing tried and true implementations and some existing practices. Sometimes the prima-donna devs will leave at this point, but in the long run it's better for the project.
I can appreciate the developers want to create a game that is not just a clone of WoW, but there is no sense at all in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If something works really well in WoW that's not a reason to avoid putting it in your game. While there are a lot of ways to improve on the MMO formula, at some level you still have to stick with the formula and the way Blizzard did it might just happen to be really smart.
That's pretty common. Most RFID systems that are implemented for actual security require a second authentication method (usually a pin pad, but sometimes biometric) for this very reason.
Yes, because nobody in a dorm would be able to hear someone screaming for help...
Dorm security is a joke because for the most part it's not necessary. The people who break into dorms aren't sexual predators, they're common thieves trying to make off with a laptop or two. Most of the time they have legitimate access to the dorm anyway so the front door security is useless to begin with. Lock your door when you go to bed or leave the room, that's all there is to it.
If it's any consolation, you can't buy one at any price. Here's the text on the pledge page:
Note: The Media project is specifically NOT offering this for sale, and though I disagree with this position and hope that this pledge may show them that there are enough people who might be interesting in supporting this project, I felt that I should post their position:
The comments below it just reinforce the "not availble for sale" position. You're basically just signing an internet petition with that page. Personally, I think it'd be a good idea even though I'm sure the Media project seriously doesn't want to do tech support for 100,000 doners.
I can just see the security guy now seeing "su -sk * | sort -n", and saying "Looks like DrDitto is trying to exploit su, better pull the shotgun out of storage."
Most people on Unix machines already run as normal users. Granted, since a lot of them are home machines they're also admins, but they don't escalate their privleges unless they need to install software or do some sort of maintenance. In normal day-to-day work they're normal users.
If you're sharing a Unix machine with other people, then you're pretty much guarenteed to be running a user account.
You know why people do this on Unix? Because it works. You don't run into fiddly problems all of the time with software that refuses to run or crashes randomly unless you have admin access. You don't have to go through this annoying logout/login procedure to escalate your privleges. You can just run the one command you need as root and then return to your regular activities.
I have to agree with one of the above posters. Microsoft needs to force their employees to just use usermode on their machines and come up with better ways to do common actions that don't require you to log in as administrator, or at least come up with a Mac OSX like model where you get an onscreen password prompt when you run something like Windows Update, and make sure that password prompt only comes up when it absolutely has to.
I don't think you understand the concept of a natural monopoly. If you wanted to compete with Ticketmaster in any meaningful way, you had to start 20 years ago. Now they have pretty much all of the venues locked down and many of the big acts as well. They're automatically in on the ground floor when any new big venue is proposed as well.
Except that even in Apple's case that just isn't true. There have been plenty of Macs that have just bombed in the market (MacTV, the Cube, Newton, etc...).
A $600 price point is well into the "what are they thinking?" category for me. It's going to take some seriously killer games to convince me to drop that kind of cash on a console.
IMHO, it'd be cruel to start out programmers on an editor that can't at least do some syntax highlighting. I know I started out that way (back in the Turbo Pascal days) and when we upgraded to the version that had syntax highlighting, my frustration with programming dropped immediatly. Computer languages have far too many fiddly rules for students to be expected to memorize all of them on the first day, especially for beginner programmers. Syntax highlighting will allow the users to spot the error right away (although it doesn't give away the answer, forcing them to think and learn!) and avoid the otherwise inevitable 300 error messsages on the first compile of their mostly trivial program.
Heck, most of the features in an IDE won't be useful to a beginner student programmer anyway (it's not like they need to manage multiple libraries or modules or anything like that), so I'm inclined to say let them use what they want. Once a student moves past the beginner stage, then it's even more important that they start to learn what IDEs can do.
I think the bigger worry is not that China is going to steal weaponizable nuclear waste; but rather that Al-Qaeda or some other well organizied terrorist group du-jour will somehow get their hands on it. While I personally don't think this is a likely scenario there are plenty of people who don't want to take the chance.
Just out of curiosity, have the manual filesystem scans every found anything that the normal auto-check stuff missed? Of couse not counting the one time you run it after you install the software for the first time.
At most it seems like you should only need to run the manual scan after a virus database update, but even that's probably overkill. The tradeoff (especially with scheduled scans) is that it significantly impacts performance.
IMHO, the "no viruses yet" for me isn't very telling. Most Slashdot readers have enough common sense that they would probably never get a virus even if they skipped the virus checkers entirely. I have never had a known virus on any machine I've used since the days of booting DOS off of floppies. Heck, even my parents who manage to load up their machine with spyware don't get viruses anymore (at least nothing the virus checkers actually catch). IMHO, most antivirus software has been useless for years now. It's software like Adaware and Spybot S&D that seem most important.
The worst part is that when something really nasty comes out, the virus scanners don't seem to catch it anyway.
The problem with efficent reactors is that the byproducts they produce are relatively easy to weaponize. The western world has decided that anything that produces or uses nuclear fuel that is easy to weaponize can't be used because of the (admittedly remote) chance that some of it will be lost/stolen and sold to terrorists/rogue states/etc... There is a LOT of paranoia over nuclear materials in the world, and much of it is justified. That's one reason Fusion is so attractive, the waste products are not weaponizable (at least not in the "nuclear bomb" sense).
Why is this so? Where I work there is a constant push to share knowldege across the entire organization. The focus is on making sure everybody is aware of what everybody else is doing not only to avoid redundant workloads, but also to make the employees more rounded and to possibly foster joint and followon projects with the existing projects. In my opinion it's a great strength.
The one thing I really hate is when you get that response and think "well, it won't take too long to get the next version right?" 4 months later another version rolls around and you eagerly grab the bits, only to realize that they didn't fix your bug, they just made it worse. Or, more commongly, it was fixed in the CVS tree 4 months ago, but then another change came around that undid the fix because Open Source programmers in general are terrible at regression testing.
Life can be frustrating. This is one of those times where it's good to know some C, so you can patch it yourself while waiting for the fixes in the CVS version to propagate to release.
I didn't think so, or you wouldn't have made that suggestion. Latency is really killer with SSH sessions and GPRS has enormous latency. It's really designed to serve webpages, not run interactive applications.
Not to mention the US Embassy in Moscow built during the cold war.
This is why there is legitimate concern about this sort of thing. It actually happens. It would make a great spying tool as well. Just add some keylogging logic as well as some storage (perhaps store it on unused sectors of the HDD) to the southbridge as well as a hook into the onboard NIC. When an attacker gets a machine on the network (these machines wouldn't be connected to the internet) somehow, they send out a specially formatted broadcast message (probably in the form of an apparently corrupt Ethernet frame) that causes all of the affected machines to dump the contents of their keylogs to the machine that sent the broadcast. It'd take just seconds and it'd be almost impossible to catch. It would work even if you don't have full access to the network and you wouldn't have to leave a machine conspicuously on the network for a long time. It could even be a PDA or some custom box that can be plugged and unplugged within seconds.
What do I think about the feasability of this attack? Personally, I don't think it's likely that it's in use at the moment. Most laptops just use off of the shelf components. AFAIK, Lenovo doesn't actually manufacture the southbridge themselves, they use existing chips from other companies (like Intel). Adding another chip to the laptop (especially a lot of laptops) would be too risky since eventually some repair monkey is going to notice it, especially if the chip you add fails and causes problems with the laptop. There are still guys out there who know what chips do by their serial number and what they should look like. They'll also know if you have some mislabeled chip that shouldn't be there (Why is there an external UART chip on this laptop? It's a built in feature of the southbridge. Why is it wired to the keyboard lines on the Southbridge?) Thus, such a change would have to be installed strategically, which is difficult when selling in quantities of a thousand to the government.
Eh, some PS2s have notoriously bad spindle motors. Usually they'll last until the warentee runs out though.
Since the mod doesn't involve a soldering iron there's much less chance of permanently wrecking your console. Heck, I think one of the first steps is to take a backup of the firmware so you can fix it if something goes wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not an unknown phonominon in computer science circle. It's called NIH or Not Invented Here. It happens when the developers egos grow so big that they think they can do everything better and refuse to look at outside code/ideas except as an example of what not to do. Projects that fall to NIH syndrome suffer massive cost overruns, fail to meet expectations, and are frequently quite buggy as the developers overestimate their abilities and attempt to take on too much.
The only solution is to get better management that forces the developers to consider existing tried and true implementations and some existing practices. Sometimes the prima-donna devs will leave at this point, but in the long run it's better for the project.
I can appreciate the developers want to create a game that is not just a clone of WoW, but there is no sense at all in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If something works really well in WoW that's not a reason to avoid putting it in your game. While there are a lot of ways to improve on the MMO formula, at some level you still have to stick with the formula and the way Blizzard did it might just happen to be really smart.
That's pretty common. Most RFID systems that are implemented for actual security require a second authentication method (usually a pin pad, but sometimes biometric) for this very reason.
Yes, because nobody in a dorm would be able to hear someone screaming for help...
Dorm security is a joke because for the most part it's not necessary. The people who break into dorms aren't sexual predators, they're common thieves trying to make off with a laptop or two. Most of the time they have legitimate access to the dorm anyway so the front door security is useless to begin with. Lock your door when you go to bed or leave the room, that's all there is to it.
Or the advent of modern technologies (like the internet) has allowed them to be counted more accurately.
Most "hate speech groups" are a small handful of angry rednecks scapegoating their current situation on "them durn (insert group here)".
Ouch 100,000 signers in 5 months? They'd better get the word out some more. I would not know about this except through Slashdot.
Yes, losing teeth negatively impacts your survival chances, even in modern times.
Thank you for exposing this communist plot General Jack D. Ripper. We'll get right on it.
I can just see the security guy now seeing "su -sk * | sort -n", and saying "Looks like DrDitto is trying to exploit su, better pull the shotgun out of storage."
Most people on Unix machines already run as normal users. Granted, since a lot of them are home machines they're also admins, but they don't escalate their privleges unless they need to install software or do some sort of maintenance. In normal day-to-day work they're normal users.
If you're sharing a Unix machine with other people, then you're pretty much guarenteed to be running a user account.
You know why people do this on Unix? Because it works. You don't run into fiddly problems all of the time with software that refuses to run or crashes randomly unless you have admin access. You don't have to go through this annoying logout/login procedure to escalate your privleges. You can just run the one command you need as root and then return to your regular activities.
I have to agree with one of the above posters. Microsoft needs to force their employees to just use usermode on their machines and come up with better ways to do common actions that don't require you to log in as administrator, or at least come up with a Mac OSX like model where you get an onscreen password prompt when you run something like Windows Update, and make sure that password prompt only comes up when it absolutely has to.
I don't think you understand the concept of a natural monopoly. If you wanted to compete with Ticketmaster in any meaningful way, you had to start 20 years ago. Now they have pretty much all of the venues locked down and many of the big acts as well. They're automatically in on the ground floor when any new big venue is proposed as well.
The G4 Mac Mini (Cube) came out after the first generation iPods (I think, it's been awhile).
I can't help it if Apple hasn't released any noteworthy dogs lately.
Except that even in Apple's case that just isn't true. There have been plenty of Macs that have just bombed in the market (MacTV, the Cube, Newton, etc...).
A $600 price point is well into the "what are they thinking?" category for me. It's going to take some seriously killer games to convince me to drop that kind of cash on a console.
I don't know, that was the most emo oil slick ever.
IMHO, it'd be cruel to start out programmers on an editor that can't at least do some syntax highlighting. I know I started out that way (back in the Turbo Pascal days) and when we upgraded to the version that had syntax highlighting, my frustration with programming dropped immediatly. Computer languages have far too many fiddly rules for students to be expected to memorize all of them on the first day, especially for beginner programmers. Syntax highlighting will allow the users to spot the error right away (although it doesn't give away the answer, forcing them to think and learn!) and avoid the otherwise inevitable 300 error messsages on the first compile of their mostly trivial program.
Heck, most of the features in an IDE won't be useful to a beginner student programmer anyway (it's not like they need to manage multiple libraries or modules or anything like that), so I'm inclined to say let them use what they want. Once a student moves past the beginner stage, then it's even more important that they start to learn what IDEs can do.
I think the bigger worry is not that China is going to steal weaponizable nuclear waste; but rather that Al-Qaeda or some other well organizied terrorist group du-jour will somehow get their hands on it. While I personally don't think this is a likely scenario there are plenty of people who don't want to take the chance.
Just out of curiosity, have the manual filesystem scans every found anything that the normal auto-check stuff missed? Of couse not counting the one time you run it after you install the software for the first time.
At most it seems like you should only need to run the manual scan after a virus database update, but even that's probably overkill. The tradeoff (especially with scheduled scans) is that it significantly impacts performance.
IMHO, the "no viruses yet" for me isn't very telling. Most Slashdot readers have enough common sense that they would probably never get a virus even if they skipped the virus checkers entirely. I have never had a known virus on any machine I've used since the days of booting DOS off of floppies. Heck, even my parents who manage to load up their machine with spyware don't get viruses anymore (at least nothing the virus checkers actually catch). IMHO, most antivirus software has been useless for years now. It's software like Adaware and Spybot S&D that seem most important.
The worst part is that when something really nasty comes out, the virus scanners don't seem to catch it anyway.
The problem with efficent reactors is that the byproducts they produce are relatively easy to weaponize. The western world has decided that anything that produces or uses nuclear fuel that is easy to weaponize can't be used because of the (admittedly remote) chance that some of it will be lost/stolen and sold to terrorists/rogue states/etc... There is a LOT of paranoia over nuclear materials in the world, and much of it is justified. That's one reason Fusion is so attractive, the waste products are not weaponizable (at least not in the "nuclear bomb" sense).
Why is this so? Where I work there is a constant push to share knowldege across the entire organization. The focus is on making sure everybody is aware of what everybody else is doing not only to avoid redundant workloads, but also to make the employees more rounded and to possibly foster joint and followon projects with the existing projects. In my opinion it's a great strength.
The one thing I really hate is when you get that response and think "well, it won't take too long to get the next version right?" 4 months later another version rolls around and you eagerly grab the bits, only to realize that they didn't fix your bug, they just made it worse. Or, more commongly, it was fixed in the CVS tree 4 months ago, but then another change came around that undid the fix because Open Source programmers in general are terrible at regression testing.
Life can be frustrating. This is one of those times where it's good to know some C, so you can patch it yourself while waiting for the fixes in the CVS version to propagate to release.
But the "picture was superior" argument goes right out the window if you record at the slow speed.
Have you ever used SSH over a GPRS network?
I didn't think so, or you wouldn't have made that suggestion. Latency is really killer with SSH sessions and GPRS has enormous latency. It's really designed to serve webpages, not run interactive applications.
Not to mention the US Embassy in Moscow built during the cold war.
This is why there is legitimate concern about this sort of thing. It actually happens. It would make a great spying tool as well. Just add some keylogging logic as well as some storage (perhaps store it on unused sectors of the HDD) to the southbridge as well as a hook into the onboard NIC. When an attacker gets a machine on the network (these machines wouldn't be connected to the internet) somehow, they send out a specially formatted broadcast message (probably in the form of an apparently corrupt Ethernet frame) that causes all of the affected machines to dump the contents of their keylogs to the machine that sent the broadcast. It'd take just seconds and it'd be almost impossible to catch. It would work even if you don't have full access to the network and you wouldn't have to leave a machine conspicuously on the network for a long time. It could even be a PDA or some custom box that can be plugged and unplugged within seconds.
What do I think about the feasability of this attack? Personally, I don't think it's likely that it's in use at the moment. Most laptops just use off of the shelf components. AFAIK, Lenovo doesn't actually manufacture the southbridge themselves, they use existing chips from other companies (like Intel). Adding another chip to the laptop (especially a lot of laptops) would be too risky since eventually some repair monkey is going to notice it, especially if the chip you add fails and causes problems with the laptop. There are still guys out there who know what chips do by their serial number and what they should look like. They'll also know if you have some mislabeled chip that shouldn't be there (Why is there an external UART chip on this laptop? It's a built in feature of the southbridge. Why is it wired to the keyboard lines on the Southbridge?) Thus, such a change would have to be installed strategically, which is difficult when selling in quantities of a thousand to the government.
Eh, some PS2s have notoriously bad spindle motors. Usually they'll last until the warentee runs out though.
Since the mod doesn't involve a soldering iron there's much less chance of permanently wrecking your console. Heck, I think one of the first steps is to take a backup of the firmware so you can fix it if something goes wrong.