Then you obviously discovered a new version of MS Blast exploiting a vulnerability that no one has ever heard of. You reported it, right?
You made sure that there weren't other MS Blast infected computers on the network, right? Those it might not block. Off the internet, ICF does block MS Blast.
I don't recall a remote exploit for XP that worked through the firewall. MS Blast propagated by the buffer overrun in the RPC interface. Blocking TCP/135 and UDP/135 should have stopped the problem.
The question was rhetorical. There is no open port for Remote Desktop in Windows Firewall until Remote Desktop has been enabled. After enabling, the open port is necessary for Remote Desktop to work.
Here, try firewalling port 22 on your Linux box with iptables and then see what happens when you attempt to ssh in.
Do they sell even one extra book because of all this?
Well, I suppose that they get lots of press out of it.
Re:Gadget Filled
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't think it's the buzz words so much as the writing. A good edit would have helped that paragraph.
In the first sentence, the narrator knows what is "going down," but in the third he does not. The second sentence is a mess. Is Rodriguez right there in the room dialing up the narrator's pager? And by the fourth sentence, Rodriguez has been demoted from token minority programmer to "nobody." Then in the fifth sentence, "Pocket Assistant" confusingly turns into "Phoenix handheld." Presumably, back in sentence two, he meant "pocket assistant" and not "Pocket Assistant."
If Ubuntu will never play MP3s out of the box, it needs fail gracefully when asked to try. Letting the user know what you've just let me know would probably work fairly well.
I'm leery of installing the Debian menu -- that cripples the best thing about Ubuntu right there. It would be great if programs from universe got shuffled off into a "Misc." menu or something.
I do realize that there is a Synaptic option for editing repositories. The problem is that it is simply a convoluted way of editing it by hand. All I should have to do is make a menu selection. The unsupportedness issue strikes me as foolish. A "Warning: Unsupported Repositories" message would be all that it would take to clear things up. This may in fact even clear up other problems -- I saw nothing about support in the guides on the web that recommended editing sources.list.
And given that you seem to be the answer guy, there was one Ubuntu problem that I forgot to include. Multimedia support. I couldn't play an MP3 without installing new software, to say nothing about avi files. Is that going to be changed in a future release?
To be honest, the reason I posted all this on Slashdot wasn't because I'm having huge problems with Ubuntu. I've been able to tweak it how I want it. But this is all "stuff that should work right from the get-go" type issues. I like Ubuntu and wouldn't mind seeing it improve.
Editing sources.list isn't tricky, you're right. But I shouldn't ever have to do it.
I have had three applications total appear on the menu out of the many I've installed. Nvu, VLC, and Bittornado (but not Bittorrent which I installed first). Freecraft, which I installed yesterday, did not show up on the menu (and had the sound problem) even after an X restart. In fact, no game that I have installed from Synaptic has shown up on the menu.
I agree that old versions of Windows are just as clunky as Ubuntu. But Windows XP came out years ago now. It's secure (keep it updated and don't be stupid), stable (on good hardware), and usable. Linux isn't competing with a monster with gaping flaws anymore. It's competing with a well-made product.
There are some programs that add themselves to menus. For me, this has been the exception. The majority do not.
I have assumed that there is some way to get better navigation. But, as Joe user, why should I have to read up on how to do it? Besides, I've had more important things to waste my time fixing -- the broken sound mainly.
I've been playing with Ubuntu lately, and I like it. There are some problems though:
Sound. I have to kill -9 the ESD process to get some applications to work. A lot of applications had to be tweaked individually after install.
Synaptic. Synaptic does its job, I can say that. But the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I upgraded to Hoary yesterday. Why did that have to involve editing sources.list by hand?
Applications. Why the hell do newly installed applications need to be added to the menus manually? This is Ubuntu's biggest flaw. When you install a new program, you'd better know how to invoke it from the command line -- and good luck finding that out from Synaptic's description, which disappears after install anyway.
Firefox. Ubuntu's web browser of choice, Firefox, is unresponsive after opening new tabs. Firefox is much nicer in Windows. And IE for Windows is far more responsive than either.
Menus. I like the start menu organization. The "Places" menu is great. I was beginning to think that Linux was congenitally incapable of setting up the most important bit of UI on the system. The menu is even better in Hoary.
Folder Navigation. I don't like the fact that there is no back or up arrow when exploring file folders. This is massively stupid UI design.
All in all, it's a nice system. It's a million years behind Windows in usability; there is clunkiness present everywhere. But there are lots of free applications. As usual with Linux, it is so impossible to install or change anything without expert knowledge that you can safely recommend the system to your grandmother without the slightest fear that she will be able to mess anything up.
And while men and women usually enjoy the same forms of entertainment
No they don't. Men and women on average enjoy different movies, different books, different music, and enjoy these things in different quantities. Men and women enjoy different physical activities and different hobbies. It's hard to think of forms of entertainment that don't differentiate by sex.
Most of the reason we see lots of stupid articles about "getting more girls into gaming" is that gamers don't have much experience with women and what they are like. So they listen to the most male-like of women, radical feminist lesbians, because that's the type of male-style thinking they can relate to. Hence the often fervent belief by nerds in absolute equality despite all reality to the contrary.
If I sell lock picking devices and say: "makes it so easy to break into your neighbor's house and take his stuff," I'd expect to get sued when it happens.
If I sell lock picking devices and say: "makes it so easy to get back into your house or car when you've locked the keys inside," I'd expect protection from lawsuits.
At the same time, this makes the legal environment that technology producers have to deal with more unfriendly. Companies are going to start including DMA when they otherwise might not have, just to make sure they duck lawsuits. Copyright is good. But technology is more important than copyright. I don't like the idea of effectively suppressing technology to protect content producers.
Well, hopefully the chilling effect won't be that huge. Hopefully only egregious cases like Grokster will be seen in the courts. I'm holding my breath.
A final word on all of this comes from Frank McGurrin, the world's first known touch-typist:
Let an operator take a new sentence and see how fast he can write it. Then, after practicing the sentence, time himself again, and he will find he can write it much faster: and further practice on the particular sentence will increase the speed on it to nearly or quite double that on the new matter. Now let the operator take another new sentence, and he will find his speed has dropped back to about what it was before he commenced practicing the first sentence. Why is this? The fingers are capable of the same rapidity. It is because the mind is not so familiar with the keys.45
Of course, performance in any physical activity can presumably be improved with practice. But the limitations of typing speed, in McGurrin's experiment, appear to have something to do with a mental or, at least, neurological skill and fairly little to do with the limitations on the speeds at which the fingers can complete their required motions.
I just tried it and got 75 WPM on a Qwerty keyboard.
I've thought of DVORAK once or twice, but I've seen a couple of studies suggesting that if you're already a reasonably good typer (60-70 WPM or above) DVORAK's benefits are small.
Let me blow your nitpick out of the water: You assume that everyone would, or could, take the pill. And you assume that it would have the same effect on everyone.
Since this is the second time you've mentioned this in reply to one of my posts, I'll further point out that when people talk about "rising IQ" in connection with the Flynn effect, everyone knows what they are talking about, despite the fact that the mean remains 100. Maybe the slashdot dictionary needs to add the term "IQ Nazi" in addition to "Spelling Nazi." Might be misunderstood though.;)
Homosexuality is routinely observed in pretty much all primates that have been studied.
Non-exclusive homosexuality with little fitness hit. Exclusive homosexuality, with a huge fitness hit is rarely seen. One species other than humans where it is seen, however, is sheep.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you obviously discovered a new version of MS Blast exploiting a vulnerability that no one has ever heard of. You reported it, right?
You made sure that there weren't other MS Blast infected computers on the network, right? Those it might not block. Off the internet, ICF does block MS Blast.
I don't recall a remote exploit for XP that worked through the firewall. MS Blast propagated by the buffer overrun in the RPC interface. Blocking TCP/135 and UDP/135 should have stopped the problem.
The question was rhetorical. There is no open port for Remote Desktop in Windows Firewall until Remote Desktop has been enabled. After enabling, the open port is necessary for Remote Desktop to work.
Here, try firewalling port 22 on your Linux box with iptables and then see what happens when you attempt to ssh in.
Maybe you could explain how remote desktop could listen for incoming connections without an open port.
But how much are they overcharging the military for these things?
I'm not sure that copyright law in America is such that it can restrict you from selling a copyrighted work that you have obtained legally.
What an author can do is say something like this: You are not permitted to make copies for the purpose of selling them.
I read the article and was confused by some of the code examples.
The '=' have been replaced by '-' signs. (In Acrobat 7 on Windows anyway.) The code makes a heck of a lot more sense once you realize this.
Do they sell even one extra book because of all this?
Well, I suppose that they get lots of press out of it.
I don't think it's the buzz words so much as the writing. A good edit would have helped that paragraph.
In the first sentence, the narrator knows what is "going down," but in the third he does not. The second sentence is a mess. Is Rodriguez right there in the room dialing up the narrator's pager? And by the fourth sentence, Rodriguez has been demoted from token minority programmer to "nobody." Then in the fifth sentence, "Pocket Assistant" confusingly turns into "Phoenix handheld." Presumably, back in sentence two, he meant "pocket assistant" and not "Pocket Assistant."
If Ubuntu will never play MP3s out of the box, it needs fail gracefully when asked to try. Letting the user know what you've just let me know would probably work fairly well.
I'm leery of installing the Debian menu -- that cripples the best thing about Ubuntu right there. It would be great if programs from universe got shuffled off into a "Misc." menu or something.
I do realize that there is a Synaptic option for editing repositories. The problem is that it is simply a convoluted way of editing it by hand. All I should have to do is make a menu selection. The unsupportedness issue strikes me as foolish. A "Warning: Unsupported Repositories" message would be all that it would take to clear things up. This may in fact even clear up other problems -- I saw nothing about support in the guides on the web that recommended editing sources.list.
And given that you seem to be the answer guy, there was one Ubuntu problem that I forgot to include. Multimedia support. I couldn't play an MP3 without installing new software, to say nothing about avi files. Is that going to be changed in a future release?
To be honest, the reason I posted all this on Slashdot wasn't because I'm having huge problems with Ubuntu. I've been able to tweak it how I want it. But this is all "stuff that should work right from the get-go" type issues. I like Ubuntu and wouldn't mind seeing it improve.
Editing sources.list isn't tricky, you're right. But I shouldn't ever have to do it.
I have had three applications total appear on the menu out of the many I've installed. Nvu, VLC, and Bittornado (but not Bittorrent which I installed first). Freecraft, which I installed yesterday, did not show up on the menu (and had the sound problem) even after an X restart. In fact, no game that I have installed from Synaptic has shown up on the menu.
I agree that old versions of Windows are just as clunky as Ubuntu. But Windows XP came out years ago now. It's secure (keep it updated and don't be stupid), stable (on good hardware), and usable. Linux isn't competing with a monster with gaping flaws anymore. It's competing with a well-made product.
There are some programs that add themselves to menus. For me, this has been the exception. The majority do not.
I have assumed that there is some way to get better navigation. But, as Joe user, why should I have to read up on how to do it? Besides, I've had more important things to waste my time fixing -- the broken sound mainly.
I've been playing with Ubuntu lately, and I like it. There are some problems though:
Sound. I have to kill -9 the ESD process to get some applications to work. A lot of applications had to be tweaked individually after install.
Synaptic. Synaptic does its job, I can say that. But the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I upgraded to Hoary yesterday. Why did that have to involve editing sources.list by hand?
Applications. Why the hell do newly installed applications need to be added to the menus manually? This is Ubuntu's biggest flaw. When you install a new program, you'd better know how to invoke it from the command line -- and good luck finding that out from Synaptic's description, which disappears after install anyway.
Firefox. Ubuntu's web browser of choice, Firefox, is unresponsive after opening new tabs. Firefox is much nicer in Windows. And IE for Windows is far more responsive than either.
Menus. I like the start menu organization. The "Places" menu is great. I was beginning to think that Linux was congenitally incapable of setting up the most important bit of UI on the system. The menu is even better in Hoary.
Folder Navigation. I don't like the fact that there is no back or up arrow when exploring file folders. This is massively stupid UI design.
All in all, it's a nice system. It's a million years behind Windows in usability; there is clunkiness present everywhere. But there are lots of free applications. As usual with Linux, it is so impossible to install or change anything without expert knowledge that you can safely recommend the system to your grandmother without the slightest fear that she will be able to mess anything up.
If that's what they say about Windows applications, I'd hate to see what they think of Linux applications.
"Menu hierarchy like an Escher illustration."
"The fonts are making my eyes bleed."
"Spall checker leaves a little to be desired."
Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, wrote a book describing this a year or two back. The title is Human Accomplishment.
And while men and women usually enjoy the same forms of entertainment
No they don't. Men and women on average enjoy different movies, different books, different music, and enjoy these things in different quantities. Men and women enjoy different physical activities and different hobbies. It's hard to think of forms of entertainment that don't differentiate by sex.
Most of the reason we see lots of stupid articles about "getting more girls into gaming" is that gamers don't have much experience with women and what they are like. So they listen to the most male-like of women, radical feminist lesbians, because that's the type of male-style thinking they can relate to. Hence the often fervent belief by nerds in absolute equality despite all reality to the contrary.
DRM. What the hell did I mean by DMA?
If I sell lock picking devices and say: "makes it so easy to break into your neighbor's house and take his stuff," I'd expect to get sued when it happens.
If I sell lock picking devices and say: "makes it so easy to get back into your house or car when you've locked the keys inside," I'd expect protection from lawsuits.
At the same time, this makes the legal environment that technology producers have to deal with more unfriendly. Companies are going to start including DMA when they otherwise might not have, just to make sure they duck lawsuits. Copyright is good. But technology is more important than copyright. I don't like the idea of effectively suppressing technology to protect content producers.
Well, hopefully the chilling effect won't be that huge. Hopefully only egregious cases like Grokster will be seen in the courts. I'm holding my breath.
We've been discussing this over at Gene Expression for a bit now.
TypingTest.com
I just tried it and got 75 WPM on a Qwerty keyboard.
I've thought of DVORAK once or twice, but I've seen a couple of studies suggesting that if you're already a reasonably good typer (60-70 WPM or above) DVORAK's benefits are small.
Is it spinal muscular atrophy by any chance? There does seem to be an IQ boost effect going on with SMA.
Let me blow your nitpick out of the water: You assume that everyone would, or could, take the pill. And you assume that it would have the same effect on everyone.
;)
Since this is the second time you've mentioned this in reply to one of my posts, I'll further point out that when people talk about "rising IQ" in connection with the Flynn effect, everyone knows what they are talking about, despite the fact that the mean remains 100. Maybe the slashdot dictionary needs to add the term "IQ Nazi" in addition to "Spelling Nazi." Might be misunderstood though.
Homosexuality is routinely observed in pretty much all primates that have been studied.
Non-exclusive homosexuality with little fitness hit. Exclusive homosexuality, with a huge fitness hit is rarely seen. One species other than humans where it is seen, however, is sheep.