I agree with most of the points in your post, but that one seems kinda weird. As a chemist, our definition of "organic" has more to do with compounds based on C, H, N, O... and not much to do with how the compound was made. "Organic Chemistry" is not the study of the chemistry of vegetables grown without pesticides.
God, I'm sick of that rebuttal.
I was in the military for 7 years. In the military, "organic" means "support under the administrative control of the supported unit", like when a battalion commander is also in charge of his artillery or air support. That doesn't mean organic molecules are secondered to another battalion. It means that the word "organic" has different definitions in different domains. The definition of "organic" in the domain of nutrition and food preparation is (or at least was) very clear, and has nothing to do with the definitions in chemistry, the military, or (sadly) the definition corporate interests lobbied the FDA into changing.
Until the investigators can sort out who *actually* hijacked the planes, saying whether this or that theory is right or paranoid is kind of pointless, don't you think?
When Wal-Mart moves in, undercuts all the local businesses by selling at a loss, drives them out of business, and then raises prices, Wal-Mart is forcing me to buy from Wal-Mart. The town I grew up in is like that. There are literally no pharmacies, hardware stores, or grocery stores left. Wal-Mart ate a loss for about 3 years waiting for them to go out of business, and then raised prices to what the old stores charged. So, when I go back home, I have to buy at Wal-Mart because there's nothing left. That's why I left flyover country.
The whole issue is a rift between the free market advocates and socialists.
Bullshit. You Fox News-types have been insisting for a decade now that anybody who doesn't deep throat huge corporations on demand is a "socialist".
Socialists advocate workers' ownership of farms, factories, and mines.
Regulating businesses is not socialism. Unionizing is not socialism (who brought down European communism? Oh, that's right, the Polish Labor Union). Pointing out corporate misdeeds is not socialism. Taxing corporate profits is not socialism.
Socialism is only workers' ownership of farms, factories, and mines. I know you like to paint everyone to the left of Ayn Rand as a socialist, but saying it doesn't make it so.
They keep wages way too low, straining state welfare systems who have to pick up the slack so that Wal Mart employees can, oh, eat and pay rent, and not die from preventable diseases.
They lobbied relentlessly to weaken the definition of "organic" food, and then started selling food that can now be called "organic" but isn't by any sane definition of the word.
You've really never heard any of these, or other, complaints about Wal-Mart?
I personally think Wal-Mart is one of the best corporations out there. A company that provides value and offers cheap products to everybody? The horror!
A corporation that underpays its workers, illegally locks its cleaning crews in the store at night, illegally prevents unionization attempts by workers.... yeah... great company.
Re:Funny you should mention Laputa.
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Both Sides of Wii
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· Score: 1
Actually, Laputa is the name of the advanced civilization in Gulliver's Travels.
Well, "advanced". One of the professors there is spending his time working on a way to build houses from the roof down. The whole island was kind of a big jab at academia.
And, personally, I have little doubt that Swift knew the double entendre. The whole book is pretty dirty.
So you'd have to do without your build environment...
I didn't get my build environment from an arbitrary source. I got my original toolchain from my distribution and checked the signatures against the GPG keys available from multiple keyservers. The theoretical danger there is so much less than the danger of downloading a screensaver from some site off the Internet that I don't even see a point in making the comparison.
So I took the quiz, and the first 4 questions didn't have the correct answer as an option. The correct answer is "do not download binaries from unknown sources."
Seriously, if you're asking which smiley or screensaver site is "safe", you've completely missed the point. Downloading binary files from arbitrary sources is inherently unsafe. Build from source, or do without whatever it is.
This would allow members to discuss sensitive issues and share information without having to worry that it would be made widely public
Blah blah blah. Suits make a big deal about keeping secrets when they don't have anything special. People with actual money-making ideas are too busy implementing them to worry about if their "secret" is kept. (Hell, most of them patent it, which is the exact opposite of a secret since the invention is then published in its entirety.)
Geez... can we go back to the 19th-century way where the owners didn't have to pretend they knew the first damn thing about how their company works? Now that they do, they come up with all kinds of ridiculous horseshit like this, which all has to be kept secret from our proletarian ears.
I think that mixing the concept of a Web based desktop and a programable PIM could be the right thing, where programable PIM means that you could program yourself custom node types that appear on the web Desktop as icons and windows, and of course, share them
Hmmm... I, on the other hand, think that a web browser should be used for, oh, I don't know, browsing HTML documents off HTTP servers. And JavaScript should be used on that web browser for calculations that are A) simple enough to be done easily on the client side and B) insecure and unimportant enough to trust any arbitrary client to calculate them. And an FTP client should be used for transferring files to and from FTP servers. And a gopher client should be used for navigating hierarchically-organized files on multiple network servers. And a file browser should be used for browsing mounted filesystems. And an office suite should be used for viewing and editing formatted documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows. And a display manager protocol like XDMCP or RDP should be used for displaying a graphical desktop on a workstation.
I guess I'm a luddite that way, you know? Actually wanting tools to be used in the domain for which they were designed.
Why not just store the username/a hash of the password in a cookie?
The credential check would then be a comparison of the hash and a hashed entry in a database. This way, the password is never stored in plaintext.
I don't think he's talking about storing client passwords; that's a separate beast. He's talking about the password his web application uses to communicate with the database or the merchant account or WebServiceFoo or... you get the idea.
Personally I keep the passwords in an encrypted file that requires a password entry to decrypt on server startup. Yes, this means I have to ssh into a box every time apache dies or the server needs to reboot. To me, with my uses and needs, it's worth it. Whether that applies to TFQ's situation I can't say.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Get off of it. NT has had a fine grained, multi-user security model since it's inception, 13 years ago. In fact, until Unix got ACL's, I would say NTFS has a better file system security model.
He's not talking about filesystem security. And, yes, Linux didn't get ACLs as quickly as Windows did. UNIX, however, has had them for ages, before Windows was a commercial product.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.
Umm... how about all of them? As far as I know everything UNIX-like can run sudo
It isn't just that you can detect it. It's that the very act of intercepting it corrupts it for the intended receiver. If the interceptor has it, the intneded receiver has noise, not the intended message.
Do we know there is no possible MITM compromise for this though? (Honest question; I stopped being current with crypto in about 1989.) If there's not, my naive assumption would be that we now have a great channel for key exchange, and this would solve a lot of the key exchange and management problems in non-quantum ciphersystems.
I am not going to go read an entire manual for every single command or utility that I wish to use. I don't have that sort of time, and I highly doubt many people do.
I'm sorry... are you saying it takes less time to fumble through a bunch of graphical menus or blindly try a bunch of CLI switches than to read a man page? I mean honestly I don't understand what you're saying; how can you "not have time" to read the documentation for the tools you're going to use? Reading documentation makes your work take less time, not more. This isn't really a Linux/Windows issue either: the amount of software that is simply intuitive with no need for documentation, in Windows or Linux, is vanishingly small. I mean, I suppose you could use MS Word as a bloated version of Notepad without reading the docs, but you couldn't do much else with it. Or, you could waste more time clicking through a bunch of menus until you get what you want, but I have trouble imagining that takes less time than RTFMing.
Nothing snarky about your point at all; if the command does not behave as documented, it does not behave as documented. I've found if you go into IRC rooms, etc., with something like "foo(1) claims foo behaves as X, but I am getting behavior Y", you'll get a much more polite response.
As to your particular issue, my guess is that the whatis database needs to be initialized with makewhatis, which often lives in/sbin or/usr/sbin. If your distro didn't do that for you on install, that's something you should point out to them to fix -- I for one take it as a given that the whatis database should be populated on first use.
The worst part is, in your RTFM'ing you were so close to seeing the answer. If you notice that "SEE ALSO" section, apropos(1) listed whatis(1). The whatis(1) page describes makewhatis, and how and when to use it. It's a lot like info (if you haven't used GNU info yet, spend a few days learning it -- it will save you that much time very quickly): information is presented in logically linked nodes that have references to relevant other nodes. If you don't understand a man page, and it says "SEE ALSO: foo(4)", believe it, and go look at that other page too. Don't give up on understanding a piece of documentation until you've followed all the trails the documentation gives you.
How is working with a GUI based system with a cryptic registry translate directly to a command line and ini file based system with cryptic utilities, a totally different hardware system (i.e. mounting drives), and an ugly networking setup?
Huh? A non-technical Windows user should *NOT* be messing around with regedit, cmd, etc. Similarly, a non-technical Linux user should not be messing around with xterm, gconf, or whatever. A "friendly" distro like fedora or SuSE will have graphical tools for mounting drives, searching files (why do you assume grep in a terminal is the only way to search in Linux? You can do the exact same thing you do in Windows: right click a folder, or hit the start button, and select "Search". The only difference is the one in Linux actually works sometimes), doing networking (Linux tends to "just work" in my experience, unlike Windows, as far as networking setup goes)... so honestly, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. You're acting like a Linux user has to open up terminals, edit config files, etc. Many of us do, but I can't think of a conf file that doesn't have a graphical configurator, and as far as I remember SuSE and Fedora have all or most of those into their desktop.
Hrmm... not to veer too far into the particulars of his example, but for a long time NTFS was far better at surviving power loss than anything Linux used. Back around that same time (98-99) I had a mixed cage at my colo of linux (RH 6.3, I think) and Windows NT boxes. Whenever the circuit would fail (we got UPS from them but then they ran it through the building circuit, which would sometimes fail), the Windows boxes would be back up in a few minutes. The Linux boxes would need someone physically in the cage to fsck them. NTFS is one of the better things MS did.
I really agree with GP's point, though: as much as I love Linux I hate to see people who can't admit its failings. There are still things Linux systems don't do well and it will be hard to fix them if we aren't honest about that.
First you need to know NAME of utility you want to use for given task and 2ndly you need to know that there is such utility called man and you can use that to get information of things.
And ironically, if you know even more about the man utility, like the -k and -K switches, as well as the apropos utility, you no longer need to know the name of the utility you want to use, just some keywords to search for.
Incidentally, since we can assume most n00bs will have a "friendly" desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, the system manual is just as intuitive to find as it is on Windows: Start -> Help, and it's much better (have you *used* Windows' "help" feature? If you think man pages are bad...)
*shrug*... poor OS documentation was one of the three things that drove me off windows 7 years ago (the others were bad hardware support and lack of good programming tools). So, it always surprises me a little to hear people talk about man, info, apropos, whatis, etc. being bad. But I maybe Joel on Software was right that people are incapable of reading when they sit at a computer.
For example, say I want to learn how to do something using the command line. Googling a phrase that describes what I want to do rarely yields optimal results. Since I don't know what the command is, I can't type "man thing I want to do".
Read man's man page some time. the -k option is like the apropos command (another thing you should look into), it searches for the word you supply in the title and description of all the manual pages. So man -k format shows you all the pages that have the word "format" in their title or short description. If that still doesn't show you what you need, man -K "some arbitrary string" does a full-text search of the entire manual for "some arbitrary string".
I'm not ragging you for this or anything, I'm just amazed at how few people actually read man's man page.
People usually know how to operate a car when they buy it. The same is not true of Linux.
I think your counterexample is worse than his analogy. It's true that most people don't know how to operate Linux, but those same people for the most part don't know how to operate Windows. They would be just as inept at one as they are at the other, and the rote-learned "skills" *cough* they have translate pretty much exactly from one desktop to the other. So I don't see how their ignorance is an issue, since it affects every operating system pretty much equally.
I guess that's the snobbishness coming in to play...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there may be plenty of buglers but they aren't enlisting. It's a good gig: you get E-6 almost right away.
God, I'm sick of that rebuttal.
I was in the military for 7 years. In the military, "organic" means "support under the administrative control of the supported unit", like when a battalion commander is also in charge of his artillery or air support. That doesn't mean organic molecules are secondered to another battalion. It means that the word "organic" has different definitions in different domains. The definition of "organic" in the domain of nutrition and food preparation is (or at least was) very clear, and has nothing to do with the definitions in chemistry, the military, or (sadly) the definition corporate interests lobbied the FDA into changing.
Except that of the 19 people the FBI said hijacked the planes, 7 have since been found to be alive.
Until the investigators can sort out who *actually* hijacked the planes, saying whether this or that theory is right or paranoid is kind of pointless, don't you think?
When Wal-Mart moves in, undercuts all the local businesses by selling at a loss, drives them out of business, and then raises prices, Wal-Mart is forcing me to buy from Wal-Mart. The town I grew up in is like that. There are literally no pharmacies, hardware stores, or grocery stores left. Wal-Mart ate a loss for about 3 years waiting for them to go out of business, and then raised prices to what the old stores charged. So, when I go back home, I have to buy at Wal-Mart because there's nothing left. That's why I left flyover country.
Bullshit. You Fox News-types have been insisting for a decade now that anybody who doesn't deep throat huge corporations on demand is a "socialist".
Socialists advocate workers' ownership of farms, factories, and mines.
Regulating businesses is not socialism. Unionizing is not socialism (who brought down European communism? Oh, that's right, the Polish Labor Union). Pointing out corporate misdeeds is not socialism. Taxing corporate profits is not socialism.
Socialism is only workers' ownership of farms, factories, and mines. I know you like to paint everyone to the left of Ayn Rand as a socialist, but saying it doesn't make it so.
You're joking, right?
You've really never heard any of these, or other, complaints about Wal-Mart?
A corporation that underpays its workers, illegally locks its cleaning crews in the store at night, illegally prevents unionization attempts by workers.... yeah... great company.
Well, "advanced". One of the professors there is spending his time working on a way to build houses from the roof down. The whole island was kind of a big jab at academia.
And, personally, I have little doubt that Swift knew the double entendre. The whole book is pretty dirty.
I didn't get my build environment from an arbitrary source. I got my original toolchain from my distribution and checked the signatures against the GPG keys available from multiple keyservers. The theoretical danger there is so much less than the danger of downloading a screensaver from some site off the Internet that I don't even see a point in making the comparison.
So I took the quiz, and the first 4 questions didn't have the correct answer as an option. The correct answer is "do not download binaries from unknown sources."
Seriously, if you're asking which smiley or screensaver site is "safe", you've completely missed the point. Downloading binary files from arbitrary sources is inherently unsafe. Build from source, or do without whatever it is.
Blah blah blah. Suits make a big deal about keeping secrets when they don't have anything special. People with actual money-making ideas are too busy implementing them to worry about if their "secret" is kept. (Hell, most of them patent it, which is the exact opposite of a secret since the invention is then published in its entirety.)
Geez... can we go back to the 19th-century way where the owners didn't have to pretend they knew the first damn thing about how their company works? Now that they do, they come up with all kinds of ridiculous horseshit like this, which all has to be kept secret from our proletarian ears.
Small company? Then either openswan or PPTP on a commodity server. No need to take sledgehammers to a cockroach.
...now, how about stopping attempts to require microchip implants (PDF link; sorry) in livestock which would render the few remaining family farms untenable and complete agritech's stranglehold on our food supply.
Hmmm... I, on the other hand, think that a web browser should be used for, oh, I don't know, browsing HTML documents off HTTP servers. And JavaScript should be used on that web browser for calculations that are A) simple enough to be done easily on the client side and B) insecure and unimportant enough to trust any arbitrary client to calculate them. And an FTP client should be used for transferring files to and from FTP servers. And a gopher client should be used for navigating hierarchically-organized files on multiple network servers. And a file browser should be used for browsing mounted filesystems. And an office suite should be used for viewing and editing formatted documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows. And a display manager protocol like XDMCP or RDP should be used for displaying a graphical desktop on a workstation.
I guess I'm a luddite that way, you know? Actually wanting tools to be used in the domain for which they were designed.
I don't think he's talking about storing client passwords; that's a separate beast. He's talking about the password his web application uses to communicate with the database or the merchant account or WebServiceFoo or... you get the idea.
Personally I keep the passwords in an encrypted file that requires a password entry to decrypt on server startup. Yes, this means I have to ssh into a box every time apache dies or the server needs to reboot. To me, with my uses and needs, it's worth it. Whether that applies to TFQ's situation I can't say.
He's not talking about filesystem security. And, yes, Linux didn't get ACLs as quickly as Windows did. UNIX, however, has had them for ages, before Windows was a commercial product.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.Umm... how about all of them? As far as I know everything UNIX-like can run sudo
Can you say specifically what you don't like about them?
Of course I do. I'm on OpenBSD, which doesn't even have the -K fulltext option. But this guy is on Linux so I told him the Linux switches.
Did you have a point, or did you just want to say man sucks?
Do we know there is no possible MITM compromise for this though? (Honest question; I stopped being current with crypto in about 1989.) If there's not, my naive assumption would be that we now have a great channel for key exchange, and this would solve a lot of the key exchange and management problems in non-quantum ciphersystems.
I'm sorry... are you saying it takes less time to fumble through a bunch of graphical menus or blindly try a bunch of CLI switches than to read a man page? I mean honestly I don't understand what you're saying; how can you "not have time" to read the documentation for the tools you're going to use? Reading documentation makes your work take less time, not more. This isn't really a Linux/Windows issue either: the amount of software that is simply intuitive with no need for documentation, in Windows or Linux, is vanishingly small. I mean, I suppose you could use MS Word as a bloated version of Notepad without reading the docs, but you couldn't do much else with it. Or, you could waste more time clicking through a bunch of menus until you get what you want, but I have trouble imagining that takes less time than RTFMing.
Nothing snarky about your point at all; if the command does not behave as documented, it does not behave as documented. I've found if you go into IRC rooms, etc., with something like "foo(1) claims foo behaves as X, but I am getting behavior Y", you'll get a much more polite response.
As to your particular issue, my guess is that the whatis database needs to be initialized with makewhatis, which often lives in /sbin or /usr/sbin. If your distro didn't do that for you on install, that's something you should point out to them to fix -- I for one take it as a given that the whatis database should be populated on first use.
The worst part is, in your RTFM'ing you were so close to seeing the answer. If you notice that "SEE ALSO" section, apropos(1) listed whatis(1). The whatis(1) page describes makewhatis, and how and when to use it. It's a lot like info (if you haven't used GNU info yet, spend a few days learning it -- it will save you that much time very quickly): information is presented in logically linked nodes that have references to relevant other nodes. If you don't understand a man page, and it says "SEE ALSO: foo(4)", believe it, and go look at that other page too. Don't give up on understanding a piece of documentation until you've followed all the trails the documentation gives you.
Huh? A non-technical Windows user should *NOT* be messing around with regedit, cmd, etc. Similarly, a non-technical Linux user should not be messing around with xterm, gconf, or whatever. A "friendly" distro like fedora or SuSE will have graphical tools for mounting drives, searching files (why do you assume grep in a terminal is the only way to search in Linux? You can do the exact same thing you do in Windows: right click a folder, or hit the start button, and select "Search". The only difference is the one in Linux actually works sometimes), doing networking (Linux tends to "just work" in my experience, unlike Windows, as far as networking setup goes)... so honestly, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. You're acting like a Linux user has to open up terminals, edit config files, etc. Many of us do, but I can't think of a conf file that doesn't have a graphical configurator, and as far as I remember SuSE and Fedora have all or most of those into their desktop.
Hrmm... not to veer too far into the particulars of his example, but for a long time NTFS was far better at surviving power loss than anything Linux used. Back around that same time (98-99) I had a mixed cage at my colo of linux (RH 6.3, I think) and Windows NT boxes. Whenever the circuit would fail (we got UPS from them but then they ran it through the building circuit, which would sometimes fail), the Windows boxes would be back up in a few minutes. The Linux boxes would need someone physically in the cage to fsck them. NTFS is one of the better things MS did.
I really agree with GP's point, though: as much as I love Linux I hate to see people who can't admit its failings. There are still things Linux systems don't do well and it will be hard to fix them if we aren't honest about that.
And ironically, if you know even more about the man utility, like the -k and -K switches, as well as the apropos utility, you no longer need to know the name of the utility you want to use, just some keywords to search for.
Incidentally, since we can assume most n00bs will have a "friendly" desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, the system manual is just as intuitive to find as it is on Windows: Start -> Help, and it's much better (have you *used* Windows' "help" feature? If you think man pages are bad...)
*shrug*... poor OS documentation was one of the three things that drove me off windows 7 years ago (the others were bad hardware support and lack of good programming tools). So, it always surprises me a little to hear people talk about man, info, apropos, whatis, etc. being bad. But I maybe Joel on Software was right that people are incapable of reading when they sit at a computer.
Read man's man page some time. the -k option is like the apropos command (another thing you should look into), it searches for the word you supply in the title and description of all the manual pages. So man -k format shows you all the pages that have the word "format" in their title or short description. If that still doesn't show you what you need, man -K "some arbitrary string" does a full-text search of the entire manual for "some arbitrary string".
I'm not ragging you for this or anything, I'm just amazed at how few people actually read man's man page.
I think your counterexample is worse than his analogy. It's true that most people don't know how to operate Linux, but those same people for the most part don't know how to operate Windows. They would be just as inept at one as they are at the other, and the rote-learned "skills" *cough* they have translate pretty much exactly from one desktop to the other. So I don't see how their ignorance is an issue, since it affects every operating system pretty much equally.
I guess that's the snobbishness coming in to play...