I doubt that gmail/hotmail/myspace etc will give you anything, tho if the death is suspicious the police could contact them.
You wouldn't need to crack his root pass, you could just mount his drive in another machine and read his data from it, or change the password, assuming he hasn't encrypted the drive.
You might be able to get into some of his accounts using information pulled from his laptop, and once you have one of his email accounts you might be able to get into other things using reset password links etc..
Also, since you're working for his family, if he's used typically lame "security questions" like mothers maiden name and first pet etc, you should be able to get that information trivially.
Software can compete on microsoft's platform, if microsoft is not trying to compete with that software. Just you try producing a word processor for windows, you will waste thousands of man hours reverse engineering proprietary microsoft formats, instead of improving your product. And even if you do spend the time and effort to produce a product that is both superior and compatible, you will face a serious uphill battle trying to get anyone to use it.
If we had a truly open single platform, progress and innovation would have been a lot faster. It was always inevitable that a more open platform would take over from the myriad of incompatible systems that were available years ago, unfortunately it was only the hardware that was open, or at least competitive, while software became more locked in than ever.
Microsoft have stifled the evolution of the open IBM compatible platform, not helped it. They stalled the transition to 32bit, and are doing the same with the transition to 64. They delayed other valuable technologies like USB and SATA by being way behind everyone else in supporting them. And they are keeping people stuck on the crufty legacy bios, because of their unwillingness to support EFI, or anything else that would be newer and better. How many other good technologies have been delayed or killed completely, simply because microsoft couldnt be bothered to support them, or supported them in such a half assed way as to make people falsely perceive them as useless.
They (along with other closed source vendors) are also stopping people moving to other superior architectures (some of which are more open than x86, but less widely supported because they wont run windows).
Windows required the XO hardware to be expanded, Linux ran on the original (cheaper) design. Linux can be supplied free, Windows costs money, and Microsoft only provide a massively crippled version at low cost, which is still more expensive than linux. Linux encourages and facilitates the kids to learn about the underlying OS, while not everyone will have an interest in doing this, a percentage will, and they will improve the software for their community, as well as providing local support/training to others. Learning about a microsoft platform is far more limited in scope, and not actively encouraged. The XO runs a current version of linux, but an outdated version of windows that microsoft are pushing hard to deprecate. Many windows apps cost money, most linux apps are available at no cost, microsoft won't provide users with a full suite of applications for free, it will just push the price up higher. even if microsoft provide apps cheap/free, they wont be the same ones being used in first world businesses so there's no advantage over linux there.
A lot of software will really need to be adapted to the local markets where the XO is sold, providing the source code will facilitate technically minded kids to assist and/or provide feedback. microsoft wont do much to adapt software to the local markets, they're a "one size fits all" operation.
Apple could still keep using PPC chips for their server range... It scales better (All the way up to POWER6 if you want), and can be more power efficient for the same performance, which matters in large data centers.
I imagine it would have a similar impact on an ipod, since the extra cpu power will be needed to decrypt the files... All the resources being wasted on drm, making players more expensive but inferior (less battery life). DRM is completely anti-consumer, and the sooner the masses wake up and realise the better.
Meanwhile, pirates will continue to enjoy drm-free media on cheaper drm-free audio players (no need to license or implement any drm schemes).
Maintaining windows servers is really quite expensive, even if you don't have to pay for the base OS... You usually need to do regular maintenance, apply patches, keep antivirus up to date etc... And you have to keep patching all those garbage client apps that really have no business being on a server.
Well, Apple had the choice between DRM and being allowed to distribute music... Or no DRM, no itunes store, no music distribution by Apple.
They may not like DRM, but they were forced to use it in order to start distributing music. They could have made the DRM a lot stronger, but as it stands you can circumvent by burning to CD and ripping again. Not sure if any other DRM schemes, like microsoft's, let you do that.
It may be costing the "traditional" software market 60 billion a year in revenue... But consider therefore, that it's saving customers 60 billion and possibly a lot more (less costly for customers to maintain license compliance etc).
Why? Having.su is not doing anyone any harm... It provides an extra TLD for people to register domains under, which is a good thing since all the common TLDs are ridiculously overcrowded, leaving people forced to register stupidly long and easily forgettable names. And the original idea of TLDs representing countries is long dead, just look at.tv. These days it's simply impossible to use a TLD to determine what country a site is from. Or have a good portion of TV companies from around the world really relocated to Tuvalu? And let's not forget all the radio stations who seem to have moved to the federated state of micronesia. And then there's christmas island, which simply needs no introduction on slashdot.
There's comparatively few.su domains out there... A lot of people have taken to registering under uncommon TLDs in order to get the name they want, since virtually every name anyone might want under the major TLDs have already been taken.
Ofcourse you're right about the vanity, some people just collect domains under weird TLDs...
Do.su domains still require you to hold a passport from a former soviet country?
There's also a.cat domain, but it has quite strict requirements... I tried to register top.cat when it first went live (anyone remember the top cat cartoon?) but i couldn't find anyone who speaks catalan and could help me satisfy their requirements.
smaller more densely populated country, makes it easier and more economical to deploy fibre. Their internal connectivity is great, but bandwidth to sites located outside of japan is quite poor... I would assume they use a lot of caching.
So you're looking at the default proprietary formats... A proprietary version of RTF that never works quite right in any other app... Old formats like wordperfect 6, with filters designed to import well but export badly... Plain ASCII text (works, but you lose all your formatting). HTML, but not exactly standard HTML.
Whatever you do, if you have especially complex documents your chances of getting them loaded and looking the same in another app is quite small.
I'm also curious to see a greater variety of benchmarks, for both 32 and 64bit code... And explanations of wether the code uses SSE functions or not etc... Different processors are faster for different tasks, and i would like to get the best price/performance relative to what i'm doing...
If i'm running purely 64bit code for instance, AMD cpus do quite well, but if i'm running heavy SSE based code Intel chips tend to perform a lot better.
Someone needs to do the same for nvidia graphics cards... I went out and bought an 8600 card, only to find out later that a 7900 is actually faster (despite being lower model number and previous generation tech).
Which means the upgrade is paid for wether they want it or not... And quite often they don't, and only grudgingly accept it when they get forced into it by incompatibility or end of support... The old products did the job 10 years ago, and the job hasn't changed.
Not IQ tests perhaps, but there is generally a test you must pass before you're legally allowed to drive. While a mandatory test to use the internet would help things, not all countries would enforce it at the same time. Plus, you can guarantee that the content of the test would be fucked up somehow. It was better a few years ago, when the only people on the internet were academics and geeks, ie people who are generally fairly smart.
It is... Not only does it make more money for verisign, but it also raises the bar for retailers so that smaller shops can't afford the same certificate, and thus look to be "less secure" than their larger competitors.
A green bar means nothing, what's really needed is for users to make a white list of the sites they use, then when they visit a scam site it will say "this is a new site you've never visited before" as opposed to "this is paypal, one of your frequently visited sites"... The browser can tell the difference between www.paypal.com and www.p4yp4l.scam.cn, it just needs to communicate that to the user in a sensible way. Users need educating too, i can't believe people are still stupid enough to try logging in to paypal when the url bar contains something completely different. Also, it should be impossible to change the status bar (that shows where a link points when you hover over it) and mail clients should ALWAYS do something similar, hyperlinks in html can say one thing but point somewhere completely different, and html mail clients are a lot worse at telling that to the user than browsers.
That's a standard practice across the board... When a piece of commercial software is released, it's usually been tested through internal and external beta programs for a year or two at least... And even then, very few businesses will adopt the latest versions immediately.
With open source, there is greater possibility to use software at a much earlier stage of development, and less cost in updating to the latest version when it comes out. But that doesn't mean all users necessarily want the latest and greatest, it's just good to have the choice.
Yes, that's a valid point.. However, so strong is the marketing surrounding the well known products, that a noname producer has a hard time getting any sales, even if their products are both superior and cheaper. The current system is geared up to keep incumbents at the top, while providing an unnaturally high barrier of entry. Maybe sales and marketing should be banned, and accountable non profit groups set up with experts in particular fields independently reviewing and publishing the results. It should cut down on inferior overpriced products still selling if they're well marketed, and ensuring that the best value products rightfully succeed. Far too often, inferior and more expensive products have succeeded when the only thing going for them was successful marketing.
Not necessarily, it could have a better cooler than the original. The original coolers aren't great and a lot of users replace them anyway. As for packaging, who cares? It just gets thrown away. The warrantee is the only thing to really be concerned about, but with the speed processors become obsolete 1 year isn't too bad anyway.
It's not easy to produce a motherboard, you need specialist equipment and trained staff. It's not like digital media where anyone can produce a free or extremely low cost copy. If the prices of the branded goods weren't artificially inflated, it would be harder to produce cheaper copies. Similarly, if the cheaper copies are actually inferior they will soon earn a reputation for being so, unlike digital media where the cheap copies are often better (removal of unskippable commercials and forced activation/code schemes).
The problem is even worse with designer clothes, these clothes are mass produced in the same factories that produce bargain basement clothing... But the selling price is massively and disproportionately higher, opening up a huge hole for cheap copies. If designed clothes were sold with low profit margins, like regular affordable clothing, it wouldn't be profitable to counterfeit them so it wouldn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that gmail/hotmail/myspace etc will give you anything, tho if the death is suspicious the police could contact them.
You wouldn't need to crack his root pass, you could just mount his drive in another machine and read his data from it, or change the password, assuming he hasn't encrypted the drive.
You might be able to get into some of his accounts using information pulled from his laptop, and once you have one of his email accounts you might be able to get into other things using reset password links etc..
Also, since you're working for his family, if he's used typically lame "security questions" like mothers maiden name and first pet etc, you should be able to get that information trivially.
Software can compete on microsoft's platform, if microsoft is not trying to compete with that software. Just you try producing a word processor for windows, you will waste thousands of man hours reverse engineering proprietary microsoft formats, instead of improving your product. And even if you do spend the time and effort to produce a product that is both superior and compatible, you will face a serious uphill battle trying to get anyone to use it.
If we had a truly open single platform, progress and innovation would have been a lot faster.
It was always inevitable that a more open platform would take over from the myriad of incompatible systems that were available years ago, unfortunately it was only the hardware that was open, or at least competitive, while software became more locked in than ever.
Microsoft have stifled the evolution of the open IBM compatible platform, not helped it. They stalled the transition to 32bit, and are doing the same with the transition to 64. They delayed other valuable technologies like USB and SATA by being way behind everyone else in supporting them. And they are keeping people stuck on the crufty legacy bios, because of their unwillingness to support EFI, or anything else that would be newer and better. How many other good technologies have been delayed or killed completely, simply because microsoft couldnt be bothered to support them, or supported them in such a half assed way as to make people falsely perceive them as useless.
They (along with other closed source vendors) are also stopping people moving to other superior architectures (some of which are more open than x86, but less widely supported because they wont run windows).
Windows required the XO hardware to be expanded, Linux ran on the original (cheaper) design.
Linux can be supplied free, Windows costs money, and Microsoft only provide a massively crippled version at low cost, which is still more expensive than linux.
Linux encourages and facilitates the kids to learn about the underlying OS, while not everyone will have an interest in doing this, a percentage will, and they will improve the software for their community, as well as providing local support/training to others. Learning about a microsoft platform is far more limited in scope, and not actively encouraged.
The XO runs a current version of linux, but an outdated version of windows that microsoft are pushing hard to deprecate.
Many windows apps cost money, most linux apps are available at no cost, microsoft won't provide users with a full suite of applications for free, it will just push the price up higher. even if microsoft provide apps cheap/free, they wont be the same ones being used in first world businesses so there's no advantage over linux there.
A lot of software will really need to be adapted to the local markets where the XO is sold, providing the source code will facilitate technically minded kids to assist and/or provide feedback. microsoft wont do much to adapt software to the local markets, they're a "one size fits all" operation.
Apple could still keep using PPC chips for their server range...
It scales better (All the way up to POWER6 if you want), and can be more power efficient for the same performance, which matters in large data centers.
I imagine it would have a similar impact on an ipod, since the extra cpu power will be needed to decrypt the files...
All the resources being wasted on drm, making players more expensive but inferior (less battery life). DRM is completely anti-consumer, and the sooner the masses wake up and realise the better.
Meanwhile, pirates will continue to enjoy drm-free media on cheaper drm-free audio players (no need to license or implement any drm schemes).
Maintaining windows servers is really quite expensive, even if you don't have to pay for the base OS...
You usually need to do regular maintenance, apply patches, keep antivirus up to date etc... And you have to keep patching all those garbage client apps that really have no business being on a server.
Well, Apple had the choice between DRM and being allowed to distribute music...
Or no DRM, no itunes store, no music distribution by Apple.
They may not like DRM, but they were forced to use it in order to start distributing music. They could have made the DRM a lot stronger, but as it stands you can circumvent by burning to CD and ripping again. Not sure if any other DRM schemes, like microsoft's, let you do that.
It may be costing the "traditional" software market 60 billion a year in revenue...
But consider therefore, that it's saving customers 60 billion and possibly a lot more (less costly for customers to maintain license compliance etc).
And how many NT4 "servers" were sat permanently displaying one of the crappy built in opengl screensavers and using 100% cpu to do it?
Why? Having .su is not doing anyone any harm... .tv. These days it's simply impossible to use a TLD to determine what country a site is from. Or have a good portion of TV companies from around the world really relocated to Tuvalu? And let's not forget all the radio stations who seem to have moved to the federated state of micronesia. And then there's christmas island, which simply needs no introduction on slashdot.
It provides an extra TLD for people to register domains under, which is a good thing since all the common TLDs are ridiculously overcrowded, leaving people forced to register stupidly long and easily forgettable names.
And the original idea of TLDs representing countries is long dead, just look at
There's comparatively few .su domains out there...
.su domains still require you to hold a passport from a former soviet country?
.cat domain, but it has quite strict requirements... I tried to register top.cat when it first went live (anyone remember the top cat cartoon?) but i couldn't find anyone who speaks catalan and could help me satisfy their requirements.
A lot of people have taken to registering under uncommon TLDs in order to get the name they want, since virtually every name anyone might want under the major TLDs have already been taken.
Ofcourse you're right about the vanity, some people just collect domains under weird TLDs...
Do
There's also a
smaller more densely populated country, makes it easier and more economical to deploy fibre.
Their internal connectivity is great, but bandwidth to sites located outside of japan is quite poor... I would assume they use a lot of caching.
You could, but only to the supported formats...
So you're looking at the default proprietary formats...
A proprietary version of RTF that never works quite right in any other app...
Old formats like wordperfect 6, with filters designed to import well but export badly...
Plain ASCII text (works, but you lose all your formatting).
HTML, but not exactly standard HTML.
Whatever you do, if you have especially complex documents your chances of getting them loaded and looking the same in another app is quite small.
There's no support for PDF or ODF by default.
I'm also curious to see a greater variety of benchmarks, for both 32 and 64bit code... And explanations of wether the code uses SSE functions or not etc...
Different processors are faster for different tasks, and i would like to get the best price/performance relative to what i'm doing...
If i'm running purely 64bit code for instance, AMD cpus do quite well, but if i'm running heavy SSE based code Intel chips tend to perform a lot better.
Someone needs to do the same for nvidia graphics cards...
I went out and bought an 8600 card, only to find out later that a 7900 is actually faster (despite being lower model number and previous generation tech).
You can get sshfs for mac, google for macfuse...
Which means the upgrade is paid for wether they want it or not...
And quite often they don't, and only grudgingly accept it when they get forced into it by incompatibility or end of support... The old products did the job 10 years ago, and the job hasn't changed.
Yes, but you are given the opportunity to remove yourself and your personal belongings from the car before you return it.
Not IQ tests perhaps, but there is generally a test you must pass before you're legally allowed to drive.
While a mandatory test to use the internet would help things, not all countries would enforce it at the same time. Plus, you can guarantee that the content of the test would be fucked up somehow.
It was better a few years ago, when the only people on the internet were academics and geeks, ie people who are generally fairly smart.
It is...
Not only does it make more money for verisign, but it also raises the bar for retailers so that smaller shops can't afford the same certificate, and thus look to be "less secure" than their larger competitors.
A green bar means nothing, what's really needed is for users to make a white list of the sites they use, then when they visit a scam site it will say "this is a new site you've never visited before" as opposed to "this is paypal, one of your frequently visited sites"... The browser can tell the difference between www.paypal.com and www.p4yp4l.scam.cn, it just needs to communicate that to the user in a sensible way. Users need educating too, i can't believe people are still stupid enough to try logging in to paypal when the url bar contains something completely different.
Also, it should be impossible to change the status bar (that shows where a link points when you hover over it) and mail clients should ALWAYS do something similar, hyperlinks in html can say one thing but point somewhere completely different, and html mail clients are a lot worse at telling that to the user than browsers.
That's a standard practice across the board...
When a piece of commercial software is released, it's usually been tested through internal and external beta programs for a year or two at least... And even then, very few businesses will adopt the latest versions immediately.
With open source, there is greater possibility to use software at a much earlier stage of development, and less cost in updating to the latest version when it comes out. But that doesn't mean all users necessarily want the latest and greatest, it's just good to have the choice.
Well, you can use something like mpm-peruser for apache, which means every site runs as it's own user, and then use ident auth on postgres with it.
Yes, that's a valid point..
However, so strong is the marketing surrounding the well known products, that a noname producer has a hard time getting any sales, even if their products are both superior and cheaper. The current system is geared up to keep incumbents at the top, while providing an unnaturally high barrier of entry.
Maybe sales and marketing should be banned, and accountable non profit groups set up with experts in particular fields independently reviewing and publishing the results. It should cut down on inferior overpriced products still selling if they're well marketed, and ensuring that the best value products rightfully succeed.
Far too often, inferior and more expensive products have succeeded when the only thing going for them was successful marketing.
Not necessarily, it could have a better cooler than the original. The original coolers aren't great and a lot of users replace them anyway. As for packaging, who cares? It just gets thrown away. The warrantee is the only thing to really be concerned about, but with the speed processors become obsolete 1 year isn't too bad anyway.
It's not easy to produce a motherboard, you need specialist equipment and trained staff. It's not like digital media where anyone can produce a free or extremely low cost copy.
If the prices of the branded goods weren't artificially inflated, it would be harder to produce cheaper copies. Similarly, if the cheaper copies are actually inferior they will soon earn a reputation for being so, unlike digital media where the cheap copies are often better (removal of unskippable commercials and forced activation/code schemes).
The problem is even worse with designer clothes, these clothes are mass produced in the same factories that produce bargain basement clothing... But the selling price is massively and disproportionately higher, opening up a huge hole for cheap copies. If designed clothes were sold with low profit margins, like regular affordable clothing, it wouldn't be profitable to counterfeit them so it wouldn't happen.