Over the last 10 yrs several satelites have suddenly stopped functioning, due to unknown causes. Besides basic failure, "collision with a small object" is listed as probable cause for failure in many of those sats.
Make no mistake, the odds of hitting something up there (with proper planning) is remote, but there are still objects in orbit we don't have on our map, and collision with them creates significant risk. Put in everyday perspective, if getting a flat tire was almost gauranteed to kill everyone in your car, you'd be a lot more interested in street sweeper effectiveness at removing nails from the road.
High profile activities like space shuttle launches will always attract heavy criticism for safety regardless of the precautions taken or the known risks involved, so the people that plan these things have to take every step practical to protect the mission. If tracking space debris takes the risk of a shuttle disaster from 1:2000 to 1:2100, they will spend the bucks for that extra margin of safety.
Try this one at home, kids. Go to your local ATM, feed it your card. (ok, you're brave now) Pin in. Select Transfer, Savings to Checking. Now when it asks for how much, put 0. Yes, zero. Like I did when I realized I didn't know how much I had in savings. (and it doesn't tell you what your limit is... nerf?)
At several banks here in town, you get a ticket that says "Amount error #13", your card pops out, (thankfully!) and "TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE" pops up on the display.
that makes it illegal to pass a law that cannot be enforced, or that cannot be reasonably followed by even 1% of the people it covers.
Re:Rule Number One - Customer First
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
SCO does not have any "willing" customers - they are basically extorting people. Paying a company money so they DON'T sue you is not a people-friendly way to conduct business, but at least in the very short-term, it does work because people are paranoid or naive.
I recall trying to disable flash in Safari. The only way I could really find was to remove the plugin. (I have yet to find a way to mod a style sheet to block flash) Unfortunately this causes Safari to belch up an error message every time it runs into a flash object. I'd rather have it skip rendering silently. Does anyone have a "pacifier" flash plugin for Safari that will just do nothing? Or another solution?
The display model (hollow plastic box) they showed off was significantly shorter than the Mini. Looking at that, I don't see how you could possibly find room (vertically) to put a hard drive in the case. It clearly was meant to imply an optical drive with that slot in it, but at like 2.5" thick there is simply no room to stack a logic board (micro or otherwise) plus a 2.5" HD plus an optical drive (laptop variety) into that space.
As the article said, this was just to "spur creativity" in the community. "Spend a few years and a few million and you might come up with something that looks almost this good".
Also clearly apparent, the cooling in such a small case would simply not work for a useful speed of processor in the PC world. They'd have to put a "mobile" grade processor in the box which would really cramp the user's style.
But in the end, none of the attacks were successful. ... Windows Service Pack 1, or SP 1, however, was another story. ... Microsoft responded that the tests prove that any operating system is vulnerable when not patched.
In reality it appears that the tests indicate that a windows box is vulnerable when not patched? (tho I'm sure had the test been run long enough, most/all of the unpatched boxes would have eventually been owned)
They say "ignorance of the law is no defense", but it would seem that everyone is ignorant of this law because that's well... the law.
"Why did you break the law?" "Because I didn't know the law." "Why didn't you know the law?" "Because you said I wasn't allowed to know the law." "GUILTY!" "This sucks."
Please be aware that many so called "ad ware removers" and "spy ware removers" can cause damage to your computer and may alter your computer in such a way that our automated removal application will not function.
At the present time, there is no third party software which is capable of removing iSearch applications. If you have purchased an application which claims to remove iSearch, we encourage you to contact your credit card company and request an immediate reversal with the reason of "Product Not As Described" and/or contact the Better Business Bureau.
Unless I'm misreading that, iSearch is claiming that no product CAN remove their software, so their Cease And Decist order to get Ad Aware and soforth to NOT be able to remove their software should, by iSearch's own word, already be fact. You can't enforce a cease and decist order to do something you claim has already been done?
Ink can clog the jets in inkjet printers, but toner can also go bad over time. There's a reason it's sealed against air in the package. Humidity gets into the toner over time, and eventually your printouts start taking on a darker shade, as ink is sticking to the page when it shouldn't. This takes several months at least, but is quite noticeable, and necessitates replacement of the toner cart before it's empty.
From the sounds of it, the colo has a monster generator outside, and no UPS's inside. That sounds like a really bad plan, since generators can't cut in quick enough to stop a box from rebooting. It sounds like the equipment inside the building was unprotected... either that or the breakers tripped and the UPS's started screaming and nobody was there to do anything about it. (or the UPS's had squat for runtime or were overloaded - poor service no matter how you look at it)
With ink (and toner) being a "perishable" item once opened, can you really limit yourself on usage and still get to use all the product before it goes bad? (ink clogs in the heads with age, and toner starts darkening copies with age)
What's unfortunate about this is Lexmark plays the 'Razor Blade Game', a business model where you "don't make money selling razors - give the razors away. Make your money selling BLADES". Lexmark goes by this business model, selling dirt cheap printers. Not just inkjets - they also make laser printers. And then charge a small fortune for the ink or toner, and give you very little of it in each cart. One salesman I know used to joke that "you get more ink in a ballpoint pen than comes with a Lexmark printer". This business model turns sour when your competition (easily) undercuts your (inflated) ink cart prices. The trajedy of this is the consumer usually realizes they are not getting nearly the deal they thought they were until after they've plunked down the money for the printer and their first few replacement ink carts. At that point you have to ask yourself if it's really worth it to chuck your new printer and go buy another one just to "save a few bucks on ink". But then over time those bucks add up easily to more than the price of a new HP or Epson printer.
I'm quite relieved that the DMCA has not proven to assist them in their consumer-lock-in attempts.
The wind tunnel machines that a few of my friends own seem to make most of their noise from the CPU fan. It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop. I can understand needing more cooling when busy ripping MP3s or encoding video or something like that, but running the same heat when browsing a web page is silly. That would also reduce load on the PS, which should allow for the PS fan to spin down a bit. (do any PC power supplies have variable speed fans?)
I dropped into root for a little experiment to make sure I didn't have my foot in my mouth, and indeed, root can ADD the schg flag, but it cannot REMOVE it. You have to be superuser (single user root) to noschg. This is actually somewhat of a good thing, as this means it's possible for a user to lock down their system without getting too geeky, but then it's fairly bulletproof from any outside manipulation. For some reason the analogy that first came to mind is locking one's keys in the car, but that's essentially what OS X lets you do with the schg flag.
D'oh, lost my month's uptime when I booted to superuser...
There is actually a difference between "root" and "superuser" on the mac. Superuser is root in single user mode, and [b]does[/b] have some additional authority. Changing a schg flag is one of those additional abilities. Merely logging into multiuser mode as root (or with sudo) does not allow a schg to be cleared. Been there, tried that, doesn't work. The only near-exception to this is that if you sudo ditto you can copy a file from an external HD that has schg set, and the copy will also have schg. (necessitating booting as superuser to remove the flag, which is why I know root doesn't do the trick)
Has Apple received extra PR attention? Yes. Yes, So much so to show that they are willing to use dirty tactics to supress the first amendment. The target should of been the leak, not the one posting the information.
They are trying to target the leak, but to do that they have to find out who it is. The logical person to ask is the reporter. Apple's secrecy about their new products is a well-known fact, and any reporter that has a "confidential source" approach them with details about Apple's next as-yet-unreleased product knows they are receiving trade-secrets and that this is illegal. The reporter's only possible defense is to claim that they didn't realize they were receiving trade-secret information, and considering that's effectively the purpose of those rumor sites, it's a bit like suprnova claiming they don't knowingly host illegal torrents. "Yeah, right, whatever."
Has Apple made it clear that it can and will do what it takes to suppress any leaks? Yes. Actully, no. There are many other ways to identify leaks - the best being drop multiple hooks to people that are suspected, and watch for the fake hook to be posted. Apple chose to misuse the civil laws for it's own bludgeon instead - Stamping on free speech.
Apple is admittedly going after the easiest target. It's also the most effective target. I wouldn't be surprised if the "anonymous source" received something in return for his information. As long as there's someone willing to hand something out, there will be takers. Apple has already used "hooks" more than once to identify (and terminate) leaks. It's just a game of whack-a-mole though, as there are probably dozens of anonymous sources at work in Apple. The reporters are the other end of the chain, and are stationary targets. Apple is going after both ends of the deal, but really, which one makes more sense to go after, from either a resource perspective OR an effectiveness perspective?
Looked at another way... if my laptop is stolen, and a week later I find it at Joe's Pawn Shop across town, and it still has the nameplate on the lid that says "this laptop is property of (myname), if found, please call (phone number)", I should have every right to be pissed off at the pawn shop owner for not having contacted me, AND I think it's quite fair that I expect the pawn shop owner to turn over the name of the person that pawned it to the police. Accepting stolen property is illegal. Accepting property you resonably believe to be stolen is also illegal. There should not be much difference between property and trade secrets, they should be treated the same for these purposes.
Re:So the concern is.....
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 0
If SHA1 is used to hash login data being sent over insecure lines, (ATM for instance?) and SHA1 has been broken, and someone taps into that line, they could concievably glean the cleartext (pre-salted/hashed) password and thus be able to masquerade as one of the participants, or even act as a man-in-the-middle.
The customers paid for access to the internet. It's low of the ISPs to block any part of your internet access they deem "less proffitable". Many broadband providers have already TOS'd out the ability to run servers, and that's just another extension of the shady business practice. The difference now is instead of 1% of the customers wanting to run servers, it's more like 15% of the customers wanting VOIP. You can't take the low road with a significant percentage of the population and get away with it.
I can appreciate that it's going to take some upgrading on the part of the ISPs to handle the increase in traffic, but good grief, that is what you're being paid for. If you could, would you have implemented blocking of port 80 (www) had you known how much traffic it was going to "leech" off your system? Really, what's the difference? All those evil web servers out there leeching off your system. I'm sure a "disproportionately large" chunk of your network traffic is www, surely you are justified in blocking port 80 in the interest of conserving your network's limited resources?
I believe your justifications are unfounded. It looks more like cable companies are trying to block other VOIP from getting a good start until they can get their own VOIP going.
Both asexual and sexual reproduction offer the benefit of mutation, which is the key to adaptation and evolution. Asexual reproduction offers the addditional benefit of efficiency, but restriccts you to the (benefitial) mutations within your single parent and their ancestors. Sexual reproduction has a penalty for efficiency, but allows your offspring to benefit from the mutations from two separate gene pools. In many cases, with larger life forms, it also offers the additional benefit of more than one parent to care for the offspring and teach them. (the ability to teach is basically a non-genetic form of evolution, and is much more rapid than genetic evolution) The faster you can evolve, the more successful your species is likely to be.
Asexual is "preferred" by microscopic life because even a poorly evolved microbe can still do well if it can reproduce rapidly and efficiently. In the larger kingdoms though, sexual reproduction encourages more rapid evolution, which is key when competing for the more limited resources of the macro world.
and what's the point of placing the computer in a fairly well-protected case and then have KNOBS sticking out the end of the case? Those won't survive even a week's real-world use before getting snapped off. You don't put fragile bits sticking out the ends of a carrying case.
Slashdot Mirror
Over the last 10 yrs several satelites have suddenly stopped functioning, due to unknown causes. Besides basic failure, "collision with a small object" is listed as probable cause for failure in many of those sats.
Make no mistake, the odds of hitting something up there (with proper planning) is remote, but there are still objects in orbit we don't have on our map, and collision with them creates significant risk. Put in everyday perspective, if getting a flat tire was almost gauranteed to kill everyone in your car, you'd be a lot more interested in street sweeper effectiveness at removing nails from the road.
High profile activities like space shuttle launches will always attract heavy criticism for safety regardless of the precautions taken or the known risks involved, so the people that plan these things have to take every step practical to protect the mission. If tracking space debris takes the risk of a shuttle disaster from 1:2000 to 1:2100, they will spend the bucks for that extra margin of safety.
Try this one at home, kids. Go to your local ATM, feed it your card. (ok, you're brave now) Pin in. Select Transfer, Savings to Checking. Now when it asks for how much, put 0. Yes, zero. Like I did when I realized I didn't know how much I had in savings. (and it doesn't tell you what your limit is... nerf?)
At several banks here in town, you get a ticket that says "Amount error #13", your card pops out, (thankfully!) and "TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE" pops up on the display.
Whoopsie!
that makes it illegal to pass a law that cannot be enforced, or that cannot be reasonably followed by even 1% of the people it covers.
SCO does not have any "willing" customers - they are basically extorting people. Paying a company money so they DON'T sue you is not a people-friendly way to conduct business, but at least in the very short-term, it does work because people are paranoid or naive.
I don't think firewalls work that way... at least not the one built into OS X.
I recall trying to disable flash in Safari. The only way I could really find was to remove the plugin. (I have yet to find a way to mod a style sheet to block flash) Unfortunately this causes Safari to belch up an error message every time it runs into a flash object. I'd rather have it skip rendering silently. Does anyone have a "pacifier" flash plugin for Safari that will just do nothing? Or another solution?
The display model (hollow plastic box) they showed off was significantly shorter than the Mini. Looking at that, I don't see how you could possibly find room (vertically) to put a hard drive in the case. It clearly was meant to imply an optical drive with that slot in it, but at like 2.5" thick there is simply no room to stack a logic board (micro or otherwise) plus a 2.5" HD plus an optical drive (laptop variety) into that space.
As the article said, this was just to "spur creativity" in the community. "Spend a few years and a few million and you might come up with something that looks almost this good".
Also clearly apparent, the cooling in such a small case would simply not work for a useful speed of processor in the PC world. They'd have to put a "mobile" grade processor in the box which would really cramp the user's style.
But in the end, none of the attacks were successful.
...
Windows Service Pack 1, or SP 1, however, was another story.
...
Microsoft responded that the tests prove that any operating system is vulnerable when not patched.
In reality it appears that the tests indicate that a windows box is vulnerable when not patched? (tho I'm sure had the test been run long enough, most/all of the unpatched boxes would have eventually been owned)
They say "ignorance of the law is no defense", but it would seem that everyone is ignorant of this law because that's well... the law.
"Why did you break the law?" "Because I didn't know the law." "Why didn't you know the law?" "Because you said I wasn't allowed to know the law." "GUILTY!" "This sucks."
Unless I'm misreading that, iSearch is claiming that no product CAN remove their software, so their Cease And Decist order to get Ad Aware and soforth to NOT be able to remove their software should, by iSearch's own word, already be fact. You can't enforce a cease and decist order to do something you claim has already been done?
Ink can clog the jets in inkjet printers, but toner can also go bad over time. There's a reason it's sealed against air in the package. Humidity gets into the toner over time, and eventually your printouts start taking on a darker shade, as ink is sticking to the page when it shouldn't. This takes several months at least, but is quite noticeable, and necessitates replacement of the toner cart before it's empty.
From the sounds of it, the colo has a monster generator outside, and no UPS's inside. That sounds like a really bad plan, since generators can't cut in quick enough to stop a box from rebooting. It sounds like the equipment inside the building was unprotected... either that or the breakers tripped and the UPS's started screaming and nobody was there to do anything about it. (or the UPS's had squat for runtime or were overloaded - poor service no matter how you look at it)
With ink (and toner) being a "perishable" item once opened, can you really limit yourself on usage and still get to use all the product before it goes bad? (ink clogs in the heads with age, and toner starts darkening copies with age)
What's unfortunate about this is Lexmark plays the 'Razor Blade Game', a business model where you "don't make money selling razors - give the razors away. Make your money selling BLADES". Lexmark goes by this business model, selling dirt cheap printers. Not just inkjets - they also make laser printers. And then charge a small fortune for the ink or toner, and give you very little of it in each cart. One salesman I know used to joke that "you get more ink in a ballpoint pen than comes with a Lexmark printer". This business model turns sour when your competition (easily) undercuts your (inflated) ink cart prices. The trajedy of this is the consumer usually realizes they are not getting nearly the deal they thought they were until after they've plunked down the money for the printer and their first few replacement ink carts. At that point you have to ask yourself if it's really worth it to chuck your new printer and go buy another one just to "save a few bucks on ink". But then over time those bucks add up easily to more than the price of a new HP or Epson printer.
I'm quite relieved that the DMCA has not proven to assist them in their consumer-lock-in attempts.
The wind tunnel machines that a few of my friends own seem to make most of their noise from the CPU fan. It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop. I can understand needing more cooling when busy ripping MP3s or encoding video or something like that, but running the same heat when browsing a web page is silly. That would also reduce load on the PS, which should allow for the PS fan to spin down a bit. (do any PC power supplies have variable speed fans?)
Or so you'd think by listening to the descent radar. Not sure if it's more closely related to Pitfall or ET though?
I dropped into root for a little experiment to make sure I didn't have my foot in my mouth, and indeed, root can ADD the schg flag, but it cannot REMOVE it. You have to be superuser (single user root) to noschg. This is actually somewhat of a good thing, as this means it's possible for a user to lock down their system without getting too geeky, but then it's fairly bulletproof from any outside manipulation. For some reason the analogy that first came to mind is locking one's keys in the car, but that's essentially what OS X lets you do with the schg flag.
D'oh, lost my month's uptime when I booted to superuser...
There is actually a difference between "root" and "superuser" on the mac. Superuser is root in single user mode, and [b]does[/b] have some additional authority. Changing a schg flag is one of those additional abilities. Merely logging into multiuser mode as root (or with sudo) does not allow a schg to be cleared. Been there, tried that, doesn't work. The only near-exception to this is that if you sudo ditto you can copy a file from an external HD that has schg set, and the copy will also have schg. (necessitating booting as superuser to remove the flag, which is why I know root doesn't do the trick)
Has Apple received extra PR attention? Yes.
Yes, So much so to show that they are willing to use dirty tactics to supress the first amendment. The target should of been the leak, not the one posting the information.
They are trying to target the leak, but to do that they have to find out who it is. The logical person to ask is the reporter. Apple's secrecy about their new products is a well-known fact, and any reporter that has a "confidential source" approach them with details about Apple's next as-yet-unreleased product knows they are receiving trade-secrets and that this is illegal. The reporter's only possible defense is to claim that they didn't realize they were receiving trade-secret information, and considering that's effectively the purpose of those rumor sites, it's a bit like suprnova claiming they don't knowingly host illegal torrents. "Yeah, right, whatever."
Has Apple made it clear that it can and will do what it takes to suppress any leaks? Yes.
Actully, no. There are many other ways to identify leaks - the best being drop multiple hooks to people that are suspected, and watch for the fake hook to be posted. Apple chose to misuse the civil laws for it's own bludgeon instead - Stamping on free speech.
Apple is admittedly going after the easiest target. It's also the most effective target. I wouldn't be surprised if the "anonymous source" received something in return for his information. As long as there's someone willing to hand something out, there will be takers. Apple has already used "hooks" more than once to identify (and terminate) leaks. It's just a game of whack-a-mole though, as there are probably dozens of anonymous sources at work in Apple. The reporters are the other end of the chain, and are stationary targets. Apple is going after both ends of the deal, but really, which one makes more sense to go after, from either a resource perspective OR an effectiveness perspective?
Looked at another way... if my laptop is stolen, and a week later I find it at Joe's Pawn Shop across town, and it still has the nameplate on the lid that says "this laptop is property of (myname), if found, please call (phone number)", I should have every right to be pissed off at the pawn shop owner for not having contacted me, AND I think it's quite fair that I expect the pawn shop owner to turn over the name of the person that pawned it to the police. Accepting stolen property is illegal. Accepting property you resonably believe to be stolen is also illegal. There should not be much difference between property and trade secrets, they should be treated the same for these purposes.
If SHA1 is used to hash login data being sent over insecure lines, (ATM for instance?) and SHA1 has been broken, and someone taps into that line, they could concievably glean the cleartext (pre-salted/hashed) password and thus be able to masquerade as one of the participants, or even act as a man-in-the-middle.
If that were the case, nobody would buy cars anymore. ("Check Engine")
The customers paid for access to the internet. It's low of the ISPs to block any part of your internet access they deem "less proffitable". Many broadband providers have already TOS'd out the ability to run servers, and that's just another extension of the shady business practice. The difference now is instead of 1% of the customers wanting to run servers, it's more like 15% of the customers wanting VOIP. You can't take the low road with a significant percentage of the population and get away with it.
I can appreciate that it's going to take some upgrading on the part of the ISPs to handle the increase in traffic, but good grief, that is what you're being paid for. If you could, would you have implemented blocking of port 80 (www) had you known how much traffic it was going to "leech" off your system? Really, what's the difference? All those evil web servers out there leeching off your system. I'm sure a "disproportionately large" chunk of your network traffic is www, surely you are justified in blocking port 80 in the interest of conserving your network's limited resources?
I believe your justifications are unfounded. It looks more like cable companies are trying to block other VOIP from getting a good start until they can get their own VOIP going.
the term "Money-grubbing SCUM" comes immediately to mind.
Both asexual and sexual reproduction offer the benefit of mutation, which is the key to adaptation and evolution. Asexual reproduction offers the addditional benefit of efficiency, but restriccts you to the (benefitial) mutations within your single parent and their ancestors. Sexual reproduction has a penalty for efficiency, but allows your offspring to benefit from the mutations from two separate gene pools. In many cases, with larger life forms, it also offers the additional benefit of more than one parent to care for the offspring and teach them. (the ability to teach is basically a non-genetic form of evolution, and is much more rapid than genetic evolution) The faster you can evolve, the more successful your species is likely to be.
Asexual is "preferred" by microscopic life because even a poorly evolved microbe can still do well if it can reproduce rapidly and efficiently. In the larger kingdoms though, sexual reproduction encourages more rapid evolution, which is key when competing for the more limited resources of the macro world.
and what's the point of placing the computer in a fairly well-protected case and then have KNOBS sticking out the end of the case? Those won't survive even a week's real-world use before getting snapped off. You don't put fragile bits sticking out the ends of a carrying case.