Well run the password checker long enough and it'll come up with several possibilities. If your main concern is that you've used the same password elsewhere, I guess any good blackhat will be able to spot which one you've used or spend enough time to try them all.
Re:People will keep using it, regardless...
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Software support is in many cases more important than hardware support. Hardware isn't likely to sport new critical bugs after several years. Software is.
The day somebody finds an easy way to "root" win98 machines remotely, they could potentially use 27% of the internet-reachable machines in the world.
Of course it isn't really so, most of them (I hope) aren't put directly on the internet w/o protection, but there's bound to be some. This is irritating for the owner of the machine who happily surfed and checked email w/o trouble, and might even cause trouble for those who doesn't run win98 through increased traffic or DDoS.
I can't see the headaches involved with browsing the internet and checking email with a working configuration.
That is atleast what most of my friends use their computers for. If you are into games or other software requiring higher performance or something, you'd already upgraded as win98 doesn't support "bleeding" edge hardware anymore.
While I agree on you with on all your points; my experience is that most of the faxes are typed documents or forms that might as well been done electronically. Sending them via email would've saved a lot of paper and ink, and so on. Let's not forget about all those hours spent typing forms (received via fax) into various databases. What if these forms were received via email, it would save a lot pages (the actual form * 2 + receipts at both ends).
You can't verify the sender. You can't verify the recipient. You can't verify whether the contents of the message has been tampered with. You can't verify whether the fax got there intact. You can't verify that it has been read.
Well sure it's not bad, and I can probably come up with more problems with faxing if I spend more than a minute thinking about it. Faxes are as secure as postcards, if you wanna bet your companysecrets on a non-encrypted unsigned service, be my guest.
Why people use fax for signatures and legal documents still elope me. It's the easiest thing in the world to "forge" a fax. Most people would be able to (with the assistance of a manual perhaps) to change the "number" and "name" that's printed on the top of the sheets when sending faxes. With the pixelation on signatures it shouldn't be too hard to make a signature that looks real and it's comming from the "correct" fax-number. I'm willing to bet there are more people able to do this than to make an fake-email look real. Further emails leave you with the option of cryptographically encrypting and signing the message to prove both it's authenticity and that it hasn't been tangled with. Fax leave you with none of these options, it's like sending you contracts by postcard!
Most office-dimwits have used a photocopyer and a phone (not necessarily at the same time;-) so extending to the fax-machine isn't really a stretch for them.
Of course the occational faxer only sending a fax every month or so might go in to the old trap of fucking up the paper, but the nice lady in the reception will be able to use the faxmachine even though her fingernails are approaching infinity. Stick her by the computer and get her to email and you'll be sure to end up with misspelled addresses, wrong recipients, abuse of CC/BCC, etc.
Fax is pretty darn easy to use compared to the alternatives, I guess that's why it's proven to be immortal
Well if it got through is verifiable, but you can't verify if it got through to the right fax (and whether it was written in paper or went of to bitbucket).
That's why telex was such a good option, but never really caught on. Probably because of the much higher costs and the lack of ease-of-use.
The college kid story is from the article that this/.-story is about. And your view is exactly the same as mine. Big companies doesn't benefit from abusing college-students. In the long run it will probably cost them more than using a serious and durable consultant or contractor.
The problem is often PHBs want to save money on every possible opportunity. More often than you think you'll meet the "If it works today, why shouldn't it tomorrow" attitude from non-programming (or maintenance) type middle/upper-management dimwits.
IT and especially internal (and often non-revenue) projects gets the worse end of the budget, in the end resulting in a more expensive cleanup when everything goes up shit-creek.
There are several levels of freedom. "Free as in beer" being one of them. As you so blately point out "Don't make it free", well firstly software that is available online isn't automatically free. More than 9 out of 10 times theres a catch or strings attached. Usually in the file called LICENSE or in the top of all the source files. This is the only thing that separates warez from less than payware.
You can use it on conditions, if you're not smart enough to follow the conditions you should have your brain recalled and your networking-rights revoked. It's a fundamental issue, if you can't stick with the license you are probably breaking the law of your local government and you are a retard!
If somebody offers you X thousand codelines for free and all you have to do to make a profit out of them is to alter Y hundred and publish them. You should do that, and not try to eat your cake and have it, too!
well on the other hand if it's a opensource project there usually little or nothing that stops any users from forking their own little tree which doesn't go in the same direction.
Take a look at the busybox-link. Corporations are already using opensource software, modifying it as they are allowed under the GPL (or similar licenses) , profiting from this modified code. and NOT opening up their modifications for the rest of the community.
The problem with this for the open source community is that it's hard to get good evidence that a corporation is using your code in their application(or appliance). It's not easy to see which code was used if it's deployed in a DVD-player. The obvious way to find out is to reverse-engineer the software in the appliance, if possible at all, and compare it to your original software. First of all it's pretty darn impossible to recognise if they made enough modifications and if they wanted to make it hard to recognise it's close to impossible. Secondly the state of (especially) american laws renders the act of doing so illegal under DMCA and probably a plethora of other laws.
Further OpenSource is an international affair, taxes and laws are purely national. I can certainly see problems with a large corporation donating millions of dollars to a project based in some "axis of evil" country or taxhaven somewhere and on the top of getting money out of the country in a pretty nice way getting taxcuts for doing so, too.
Same story here, and I didn't even submit them from my company email. Mostly because I've got personal addresses that surely will last longer than my employment there.
And I don't won't that company to take any credit for the work I did for other projects (and my manager is fine with it, as it adds a layer of secrecy around what they use for production)
I find this article somewhat naive. It's certainly true that there are lot of companies abusing GPL and OSS for commercial purposes some of them probably modify code and never release their changes.
The article also suggest that instead of spending, and I quote "If you replaced 10 $30,000 Nokia firewall with a free NetBSD implementation, but it lacks the ability to report to your management software, why not do something about it?" This is not as easy as it sounds. Nokia probably payed through the nose to get the specs for that management software or signed more NDAs and deals that your company has seen in its lifetime. It's not always an option to do stuff yourself. Further most phb's will automagically raise the (valid) point, who to blame when the shit hits the fan. When something goes haywire and you payed some college kid $500, you can't call him in the middle of his exams and expect him to fix it. You can ask him, but he/she is certainly not obliged to fix it. If you go with Nokia, you can give their tollfree hotline a call and tell them your problem and the chances are that the hotfix/patch is already available.
Things aren't so black/white as the article wants it to be, IMHO it's a pretty shitty article and doesn't really add anything to the scene apart from entropy. The busybox-link however, was interesting;-)
What difference does it make which platform the author choose to build FROM, the big thing here is that he's able to build to several platforms.
Just to be nasty, you didn't really research your objections either did you? The first lines of the buildscript the author posted: crossbuild.sh Complete script for building tools, kernel and userland from another machine
Tested:
NetBSD/i386 -> NetBSD/macppc
NetBSDS/macppc -> NetBSD/i386
MacOSX 10.3.1 -> NetBSD/i386
Notice the first line, it works using i386 too, so you could use i386 as a build system if you like.
The point is it can be done, and it's usually easier to port or fix an existing idea or feature than to implement a whole new one.
This isn't the first attempt at making a computer generate music. Bach, Mozart, etc. they all stuck to pretty rigorous rules when they composed music. Rigorous rules are usually perfect for computers. However what makes a piece spectacular is bending and pushing the rules to the limit, something that does lend it self very well to computers.
So it's impossible for a computer to come up with a great piece of music. They just can't innovate, they just imitate...
Look at it from a different angle, if you don't support GTK+ you're just another consultant that won't be offered to work for ACME Inc which recently deployed a non-Qt distro and needs several million dollars worth of work porting their proprietary applications to their newfound toolkit...
While many regard Qt as the best solution, the pointy-haired-bosses rarely pick the best solution.
Slashdot Mirror
depends whether it reflects or absorbs. If it's coated in something that absorbs the light from the scanner/photocopier then it would come out dark.
Well run the password checker long enough and it'll come up with several possibilities. If your main concern is that you've used the same password elsewhere, I guess any good blackhat will be able to spot which one you've used or spend enough time to try them all.
Software support is in many cases more important than hardware support. Hardware isn't likely to sport new critical bugs after several years. Software is.
The day somebody finds an easy way to "root" win98 machines remotely, they could potentially use 27% of the internet-reachable machines in the world.
Of course it isn't really so, most of them (I hope) aren't put directly on the internet w/o protection, but there's bound to be some. This is irritating for the owner of the machine who happily surfed and checked email w/o trouble, and might even cause trouble for those who doesn't run win98 through increased traffic or DDoS.
I guess your win98 server doesn't sustain much of a load...
I can't see the headaches involved with browsing the internet and checking email with a working configuration.
That is atleast what most of my friends use their computers for. If you are into games or other software requiring higher performance or something, you'd already upgraded as win98 doesn't support "bleeding" edge hardware anymore.
OS X, it's like Linux but a lot more expensive...
And all the windows98 users would have to buy a new computer as OS X doesn't run on i386.
Also saving you the cost of having an extra machine of every architechture in your serverpark to maintain.
While I agree on you with on all your points; my experience is that most of the faxes are typed documents or forms that might as well been done electronically.
Sending them via email would've saved a lot of paper and ink, and so on.
Let's not forget about all those hours spent typing forms (received via fax) into various databases. What if these forms were received via email, it would save a lot pages (the actual form * 2 + receipts at both ends).
Secure my ass.
You can't verify the sender.
You can't verify the recipient.
You can't verify whether the contents of the message has been tampered with.
You can't verify whether the fax got there intact.
You can't verify that it has been read.
Well sure it's not bad, and I can probably come up with more problems with faxing if I spend more than a minute thinking about it. Faxes are as secure as postcards, if you wanna bet your companysecrets on a non-encrypted unsigned service, be my guest.
Why people use fax for signatures and legal documents still elope me. It's the easiest thing in the world to "forge" a fax.
Most people would be able to (with the assistance of a manual perhaps) to change the "number" and "name" that's printed on the top of the sheets when sending faxes. With the pixelation on signatures it shouldn't be too hard to make a signature that looks real and it's comming from the "correct" fax-number.
I'm willing to bet there are more people able to do this than to make an fake-email look real.
Further emails leave you with the option of cryptographically encrypting and signing the message to prove both it's authenticity and that it hasn't been tangled with.
Fax leave you with none of these options, it's like sending you contracts by postcard!
Most office-dimwits have used a photocopyer and a phone (not necessarily at the same time ;-) so extending to the fax-machine isn't really a stretch for them.
Of course the occational faxer only sending a fax every month or so might go in to the old trap of fucking up the paper, but the nice lady in the reception will be able to use the faxmachine even though her fingernails are approaching infinity.
Stick her by the computer and get her to email and you'll be sure to end up with misspelled addresses, wrong recipients, abuse of CC/BCC, etc.
Fax is pretty darn easy to use compared to the alternatives, I guess that's why it's proven to be immortal
Well if it got through is verifiable, but you can't verify if it got through to the right fax (and whether it was written in paper or went of to bitbucket).
That's why telex was such a good option, but never really caught on. Probably because of the much higher costs and the lack of ease-of-use.
The college kid story is from the article that this /.-story is about. And your view is exactly the same as mine. Big companies doesn't benefit from abusing college-students. In the long run it will probably cost them more than using a serious and durable consultant or contractor.
The problem is often PHBs want to save money on every possible opportunity. More often than you think you'll meet the "If it works today, why shouldn't it tomorrow" attitude from non-programming (or maintenance) type middle/upper-management dimwits.
IT and especially internal (and often non-revenue) projects gets the worse end of the budget, in the end resulting in a more expensive cleanup when everything goes up shit-creek.
There are several levels of freedom. "Free as in beer" being one of them.
As you so blately point out "Don't make it free", well firstly software that is available online isn't automatically free. More than 9 out of 10 times theres a catch or strings attached. Usually in the file called LICENSE or in the top of all the source files.
This is the only thing that separates warez from less than payware.
You can use it on conditions, if you're not smart enough to follow the conditions you should have your brain recalled and your networking-rights revoked. It's a fundamental issue, if you can't stick with the license you are probably breaking the law of your local government and you are a retard!
If somebody offers you X thousand codelines for free and all you have to do to make a profit out of them is to alter Y hundred and publish them. You should do that, and not try to eat your cake and have it, too!
well on the other hand if it's a opensource project there usually little or nothing that stops any users from forking their own little tree which doesn't go in the same direction.
Eg: Gimp vs. Cinepaint/FilmGimp.
Take a look at the busybox-link. Corporations are already using opensource software, modifying it as they are allowed under the GPL (or similar licenses) , profiting from this modified code.
and NOT opening up their modifications for the rest of the community.
The problem with this for the open source community is that it's hard to get good evidence that a corporation is using your code in their application(or appliance). It's not easy to see which code was used if it's deployed in a DVD-player.
The obvious way to find out is to reverse-engineer the software in the appliance, if possible at all, and compare it to your original software.
First of all it's pretty darn impossible to recognise if they made enough modifications and if they wanted to make it hard to recognise it's close to impossible.
Secondly the state of (especially) american laws renders the act of doing so illegal under DMCA and probably a plethora of other laws.
Further OpenSource is an international affair, taxes and laws are purely national.
I can certainly see problems with a large corporation donating millions of dollars to a project based in some "axis of evil" country or taxhaven somewhere and on the top of getting money out of the country in a pretty nice way getting taxcuts for doing so, too.
Same story here, and I didn't even submit them from my company email. Mostly because I've got personal addresses that surely will last longer than my employment there.
And I don't won't that company to take any credit for the work I did for other projects (and my manager is fine with it, as it adds a layer of secrecy around what they use for production)
I find this article somewhat naive. It's certainly true that there are lot of companies abusing GPL and OSS for commercial purposes some of them probably modify code and never release their changes.
;-)
The article also suggest that instead of spending, and I quote
"If you replaced 10 $30,000 Nokia firewall with a free NetBSD implementation, but it lacks the ability to report to your management software, why not do something about it?"
This is not as easy as it sounds. Nokia probably payed through the nose to get the specs for that management software or signed more NDAs and deals that your company has seen in its lifetime. It's not always an option to do stuff yourself. Further most phb's will automagically raise the (valid) point, who to blame when the shit hits the fan. When something goes haywire and you payed some college kid $500, you can't call him in the middle of his exams and expect him to fix it. You can ask him, but he/she is certainly not obliged to fix it.
If you go with Nokia, you can give their tollfree hotline a call and tell them your problem and the chances are that the hotfix/patch is already available.
Things aren't so black/white as the article wants it to be, IMHO it's a pretty shitty article and doesn't really add anything to the scene apart from entropy. The busybox-link however, was interesting
I always prefer mirroring to striping, it gives me better redundancy
What difference does it make which platform the author choose to build FROM, the big thing here is that he's able to build to several platforms.
:
Just to be nasty, you didn't really research your objections either did you? The first lines of the buildscript the author posted:
crossbuild.sh Complete script for building tools, kernel and userland from another machine
Tested
NetBSD/i386 -> NetBSD/macppc
NetBSDS/macppc -> NetBSD/i386
MacOSX 10.3.1 -> NetBSD/i386
Notice the first line, it works using i386 too, so you could use i386 as a build system if you like.
The point is it can be done, and it's usually easier to port or fix an existing idea or feature than to implement a whole new one.
As always.
This isn't the first attempt at making a computer generate music. Bach, Mozart, etc. they all stuck to pretty rigorous rules when they composed music. Rigorous rules are usually perfect for computers. However what makes a piece spectacular is bending and pushing the rules to the limit, something that does lend it self very well to computers.
So it's impossible for a computer to come up with a great piece of music. They just can't innovate, they just imitate...
But could you get that dimwit blonde in reception just as "productive" using XFCE4 as she would be using KDE/Gnome/Windows?
Look at it from a different angle, if you don't support GTK+ you're just another consultant that won't be offered to work for ACME Inc which recently deployed a non-Qt distro and needs several million dollars worth of work porting their proprietary applications to their newfound toolkit...
While many regard Qt as the best solution, the pointy-haired-bosses rarely pick the best solution.