breaks plain-text urls (exacerbated by the "Slashdot doesn't automatically turn URLs into links" bug)
IMHO, I'd prefer that plin-text not be HTML-ized. Those sorts of features are the ones that tend to lead to strange scripting vulnerabilities being executed on hapless viewers.
If Slashdot used a simple layout or a CSS layout, a single wide post would not cause other posts to wrap off of the screen.
What kind of layout would you prefer, based on the varying nature of/.'s content delivery?
Slashdot's use of tables also makes IE users wait for the entire page to load before they can read the first comment,
If I'm not mistaken, that rendering issue dissapeared in IE 5 (or was it 5.5?). It was Netscape Communicator that had issues with tables (ie; pages with table layouts that were missing a single </TABLE> directive would show as blank, waiting for the entire page to download (including all images if HEIGHT and WIDTH weren't used), etc.)
I've used IE on dialup to visit large(r) pages using table layouts, and haven't noticed a problem. If it does still exist, however, isn't that more of a browser deficiency than a website problem?
See also: More reasons to avoid using tables for layout [webmasterworld.com] rather than only using tables for tabular data.
Most of the reasons given lend to poor website design, not the use of tables. I've always opposed static pixel width/height designes in almost all circumstances, regardless of the use of tables. All sites I design use percentages, or wildcards (SIZE="120,*") if, for example, I have 120px navigation buttons.
If you design a website properly, it'll look good at 640x480 through to 1600x1200 (with the only problem at the higher resolutions being lack of content making paragraphs/sections look really thin, IME), regardless of window size, browser accessories, colour depth, etc..
It just goes to prove the old addage; it's easier to do it right the first time, etc..
The workaround is to disable the onunload handler. This is the kind of workaround that breaks legitimate applications.
Perhaps my lack of knowledge of JavaScript (I've never used it much beyond very simple applications; changing list boxes based on a selection, mouseovers, etc..), but what exactly constitutes a legitimate use of onUnLoad?
I've always seen it used to provide more pop-ups (which, of course, I have disabled anyways) and do other nasties with cookies, re-directs, etc..
Yes, but I can apply that patch to my test machine and pound the living daylights out of it. If it doesn't break, I have SOMETHING to apply to my front-line servers.
In the CSS world, I have to wait for a corporation to perform the tests I could be doing myself, in-house. Besides that - how are they going to know what areas of my servers I need heavily tested, and what areas are less important?
Getting a live server back takes more than just typing./configure. IOW, you need a smarter and therefore more expensive administrator to actually enjoy this power.
Would you rather have a Minesweeper Certified Solitaire Engineer point IE6 to Windows Update and re-boot the server(s)?
Incidentally, Gentoo (mentioned above) supports all those nifty package management features while allowing me to compile from source.
You're not running your web servers on 386s, are you? {smile}
Seriously, though, I'm sure it's more than possible (and I'll be putting this to a practical test very shortly) to install Gentoo where the compilers et al. reside on an NFS-mounted compile machine and can be mounted when required, then promptly unmounted and access forbidden.
Of course, there are also the precautions of having one's compilers and libraries accessible only from a select group of trusted users which, of course, do not include one's daemon users / groups.
Not anyone who runs a real website. Your vanity domain running off your DSL/Cable Modem doesn't count.
Sorry, but I find this fundamentally offensive. It's the use of "vanity domains" that spread the likes of Code Red - which led, of course, to major broadband leaders blocking incoming TCP port 80 requests across the board for a period of time.
<ANECDOTAL>
A friend of mine installed IIS on his ${CABLE_PROVIDER} account for the purposes of testing some ASP / Access code he was working on. He neglected, unfortunately, to apply any patches. Within eight (8) hours, his system was DoS'ing several machines across the Internet. ${CABLE_PROVIDER}, thankfully, shut him down as soon as it was observed and he had a few days off the Internet to think about his mistake.
</ANECDOTAL>
I remain of the firm opinion that any machine on a dedicated connection offering some form of service(s) to the outside world should take all neccesary precautions to help prevent the spread of malicious worms, else their providers should have the right (and the cajones) to remove them from their positions on the Internet.
Re:Some things I've come across before today:
on
When Users Attack
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· Score: 1
I've repaired two hard drives and one tape backup unit by replacing the controller board from a like-model, but I doubt I'd ever conceive of swapping the platters. I'll leave that up to data-recovery specialists, thankyouverymuch.
It seems that bitching and griping about the obvious and complaining about Slashdot's news postings is the new way to gain favour (and mod points) around here.
Oh, that and stooping to expletives to make a point (then chastizing my linguistic skills. Charming).
I apologize for believing so highly in the skillsets of the average Slashdot reader and for making the rash assumption that you'd see a freight train coming from a mile away.
This will be my last fucking post to this thread. I'm sorry to have wasted your (moreso my) time.
Some of us don't sit there trying to guess what a show is going to do next -- we like to be surprised. I deliberately DON'T think about what might happen next season.
Is that what this is about? You don't THINK about the television you're watching? You sit there, like a perfect Television Land Citizen, taking in the moving images being presented to you and thinking nothing of them?
Are you trying to tell me that you're a 'real fan' who's been done a disservice by having the obvious stated in an online news page?
I'm sorry, but in a world where television shows are increasingly brainless (half) hours of drivel, where new audiences can pick up the entire basis of a show's story through a single episode, and where genetalia humour is still worthy of a laugh, I enjoy a show that challenges me, that makes me wonder what's coming around the next corner. Not the simple things like a cast member coming back, but the intricate plots and complicated inter-personal relations.
If you're going to be this petty and, I hate to say it, immature about things as insignifigant as show casting decisions, I'm sorry, but you're just not my kind of people.
Relax and let life happen, and please, do me a favour and try to think about Buffy in the up-coming season. You might find that you enjoy the show a little more when you actually take it in.
I really hate to say this, and I realize I'll probably be modded down for it, but really people - you didn't see Faith coming back? I've just been counting the days (figuratively, I'm not that addicted to Buffy) until she came back.
The Angel episode (I have no idea which one) where he visited Faith in prison, and was talking to her as if she was a mis-guided soul; that as much as blasted a banner across the screen: "Faith is coming back!".
For those people who are real fans of the show and who've been paying attention to the subtelties they put into the scripts, you would have seen this coming from a kilometre away.
Yeah, it sucks when Slashdot posts spoilers, but it's no reason to haul out the posterius-humourous references.
Now, I'm not speaking scientifically here, merely empirically - but I firmly believe that people buy "Tylenol" (quoted to represent the pletheora of other brand-names out there) because it's a "name", and people trust brand names.
Even though a store-brand represents a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation, people tend to look at it as a "No Name" (which, incidentally, IS a brand name) product which, of course, is garbage.
We use store-brand acetaminophen at home because it costs half the price of the Big Brand Products out there, and it seems to work just as well.
Store brand antacids, store brand pain relievers, store brand NyQui.. er.. cough and congestion suppressant - they're all fine for me. I've got better things to save my money for.
Now that you mention it, a professor friend of mine has an "old" gyroscopic presenters mouse that looks remarkably similar. He's "been meaning to get around to trying it".;)
I'm not sure what company it's from, but it's a good few years old. I do know, however, that it doesn't double as an optical mouse.
I'd love to give this one a spin, but the cradle bugs me. What if I'm using the computer and it goes dead? I can't think of anything more inconvenient than to be rat-less (or have to crawl on the floor to plug in a new mouse) while I wait for it to charge.
The solution I prefer is this one from A4-Tech. When your juice runs low, you simply plug in the charge cable and run as a wired mouse for a while (2.5 hours).
Ten days seems a little steep. The thing that rolls around in my mind, over and over again, is this;
If a noble, virtuous person can find the vulnerability and report it responsibly - who's to say that an evil, amoral person can't do same? Isn't this blatantly obvious? Shouldn't this be pointed out to companies, the government, and the media? What are the chances that a "Black Hat" is going to be responsible about disclosing the latest vulnerability; especially if it will allow him to gain access to, or wreak havoc on thousands of systems?
I think something to the tune of 30 days for a company to get something rolling before it's released is perfectly reasonable. After all, the hard work of finding the source of the problem is already done for them. If they're not actively trying to find and solve the problem, IMHO they're acting in bad faith and are putting all of their customers in jeopardy. After 30 days, tell the public that a vulnerability exists. Put the heat on them. If they don't budge (or worse -threaten with suit), let a few other white hats know about it so that they too may "discover" the vulnerability.
Now we have proof-of-concepts coming from half dozen different sources. This should be more than ample proof (to the company, media, and court of law) that the probability of somebody exploiting it for their own ends is very real, and more dangerous than somebody who remains quiet (and cooperative) for over a month.
If they haven't acted within a week of the 30-day mark, publish the code to every online forum you can find. SlashDot, ZDNet, ARSTechnica, Kuro5hin<sp?>, your own website, etc.
As to 'full disclosure' - that, IMHO, is not a proper solution. If somebody releases a fully disclosed [BIND/SendMail/Apache/ProFTPD/IMAPD/etc.] vulnerability while I'm asleep, I could be '0wn3d' before I even wake up to read my e-mail.
Most importantly, the public has to be made aware of the fact that software companies do, in fact, stonewall whitehat hackers. This leads to the customers' systems being in danger from blackhats, which is a Very Bad Thing. I thought this would be obvious, but then I've always been of the radical mindset of personal responsibility.
Even if it was a company that engaged in outright extortion, ie "we just found this hole, pay us $10,000 by Friday or we release it",
Even (especially) if the company did attempt such measures of extortion, HP (or any other company) could easily circumvent the extortionists by instead releasing a fix to the problem.
If they release a "spl01t" for something that's already officially announced and patched, what good would it do?
Maybe that's what we need; more extortionists to force companies to work signifigant overtime (ie: take responsibility for their code that runs thousands of mission-critical servers and protects ensitive data all over the globe), and more software divisions who have the desire (and authority!) to fix these problems as soon as they're discovered. Preferably a higher standard of code auditing could be implemented, but hey, in a perfect world...
That's actually a great idea. Since/. already runs Apache, they could support this natively even on their own (or an extension of.. ) hardware via mod_proxy.
Have a cache.slashdot.org that requests the URI the first time somdbody clicks 'through' it (with referrer protection, of course, to prevent every Joe from using/. as their own personal web proxy) and from then on people would hit the/. cache, saving us poor blokes with paltry DSL and cable connections.
I wonder if the/. folks have considered this idea. If you patent it quickly enough, maybe they'll have to pay you for it.;)
What is this world, and more importantly, our own community coming to? Linus makes an offhand remark and it's jumped all over like divine words from a deity?
Don't get me wrong, Linus is a great man who's done great things, but really; this much fuss over a sentence posted to Usenet?
It's pretty dissapointing when kernel developers have to practise self-censorship to avoid a media flurry.
Ok, so you're making a generalization about all of Ontario based on your experience being 'tight' with the admins of one single school. As was pointed out earlier, Ontario is a huge place with thousands of secondary schools. I administered one of them for a few years, and the picture there was nothing like the one you painted.
A better phrasing might have been "at my high school... ".
Sorry if I sound anal, but I don't really appreciate the insinuation that I, my partner, or my boss would be that callous, and I've never liked being spoken for.
>
Thanks. If I had known that during high school I would have walked with a screwdriver.
If you'd been caught dismantling school equipment at the school I worked at, you'd find yourself unable to access the computers and labs. I think that policy is pretty standard across most schools.
>
But seriously, I avoided those labs like the plague because it was rather impossible to do anything useful
That all depends on your definition of "useful". We had three gigabytes of application software (on average) installed in the computer labs, and another seven installed on the server.
>
the ~400 computers in the school shared a single 128kbit internet connection and the main admin had a habit of spying on users by using Netbus in combination with some sort of network watchdog program
These two are interrelated. Yes, most school boards in Ontario used low-end Internet connections, but that was the fault of beaurocracy not moving at the speed of technology. Much of it has recently been updated to 1.544MBit/sec speeds through an initiative to completely replace the existing provider (DCN) with a Bell Nexxia VPN solution.
With either connection, of course, there is the imminent potential to swamp it in a matter of minutes. But you have to keep in mind that anything not directly academics-related was strictly off-limits. Visiting someone's home page, participating in online chat sessions, MUDs, online games, downloading video or audio content, downloading any type of software, or any of the thousands of other Internet activities people do at home are simply not allowed. If the only use of the 128KBit line was for academic purposes, it performs perfectly well. It's only when people abuse the connection that others suffer.
>
These admins at the school I went to were hell bent on making sure you couldn't do anything fun on the machines.
School computers are not your property.
You have no right to use school computers.
School computers must be available, and the behaviour predictable for hundreds of users; each with different needs.
You might want to re-think your statement based on the above parameters. {smile}
However - were such an activity as LAN games to be done on the computers, the admins could create a separate gaming image with all the requisite software/drivers installed (including the various games), but with no access to network resources. They could create a grouping of machines in their LAN management software and simply start the image process at the end of the school day on days when LAN games were scheduled, and set them to be re-imaged before class the next morning. If done properly (which wouldn't be too terribly difficult), nobody who didn't participate would know anything had happened at all, and the network would remain completely unaffected.
> At the public schools in my area (Ontario, Canada) this is highly uncommon. During normal hours you get in trouble if you are caught playing games
Of course! That's inappropriate use of resources, and goes without saying.
> and the admins would probably laugh at you if you proposed the idea for doing it at night because people would be messing around installing DirectX and loads of other stuff on their carefully configured boxes.
You might be assuming a bit about the admins. Many networked machines already have DirectX installed on them, and if not it's a trivial operation to do so. Besides that; this would be a school-sanctioned activity and the games would be planned out beforehand, so the admins would have the machines prepared for them - including DirectX.
On the other hand, this would be considered an "extra-curricular activity", and with the political strife going on in this region it's highly unlikely that any admin or teacher would be willing to stay late to supervise.
> Besides, people kept stealing the mouse balls so the admins super-glued the mice shut. The balls stay in there but you can't clean them, thus the mice get clogged with crap and are no use for gaming.
Flip your mouse over and look for a hole or two with a screw in [it/them]. Probably Phillips #1. Remove screw, pry open mouse. Viola - access to rollers for cleannig. Generally easier to clean the rollers than in the confined space the cover allows anyways.
> How many schools actually have computers that are good enough to play Unreal Tourney or Age of Empires?
More than you may realize, actually. The school board I worked for has recently upgraded board-wide to IBM PII 400s, and are slowly upgrading labs towards and beyond the 1GHz marker. The older machines have, typically, generic S3 video chipsets onboard but the newer models are shifting through S3 Savage, Trident, and eventually to nVidia chipsets.
The Cisco programs for high schools are dandies; the government loves the media hype, local companies (small to corporate) like the initiative, so funding often comes in large amounts from strange sources (while the rest of the school resources are mis-managed and lacking, of course... ), so Cisco labs would probably be at an advantage.
I have to agree with the positive reviews of Toshiba laptops. I use my Satellite 1800 (PS181C) exclusively at home, work, school, and on job sites everywhere. Whenever it's powered by AC, dnetc is crunching away eating 100% of the CPU. Heat is barely a factor, nor is noise from the constantly running fan.
When I was preparing to purchase a laptop, I found that Toshiba's were the best bang for the buck. This machine is a fantastic balance of performance and economy. So it doesn't have a 15" display or a DVDROM - it stays powered longer than any others i work with.
My only real issue is the fact that the battery will not charge, or if it does, it does so at a rate of 1% every 48 hours when the CPU is pegged. However, with my power saving options I wind up with anywhere from 4-6 hours of run-time on battery, so I guess Toshiba's power handling is just fine with me. {smile}
As for Dells; I wouldn't give you a thank-you for one. I'd never reccomend one to a friend, family member, colleague, or client.
They run loud and hot, their display hinges are far too loose, they continue to have battery issues, the screens wind up with a keyboard imprint stamped on them (lid closes too tightly, perhaps), the power saving functionality is awful (far too simplistic for one thing), and they're overall quite tempermental.
Their phone techs, I might add, can be quite... shall we say demeaning and most un-helpful. A colleague of mine has an Inspiron (top of the line book as of about six months ago) whose battery has gone south. Battery thinks it's at 100% charge, but run-time is approx. 30 minutes. He phoned Dell, who told him to enable his power saving features which, of course, had been active the whole time. The battery continued to deteriorate to the point where it would only maintain a 74% charge, then a 67%, etc..
All this, mind you, with the extended on-site warranty package!
If ever I have a problem with my Satellite, I'll follow-up with an indication of Toshiba's technical support.
Oh, and for the record, I much prefer Toshiba's keyboard layout (ref: Home/End/PgUp/PgDown) to the style used by Dell and IBM books. I can use them without having to lift my hands from their position, whereas on a Dell/IBM machine I have to pick up my right hand and look at the keyboard to hit the derned things, way in tarnation up in front of the hinge. Most inconvenient, IMHO, and my productivity always suffers when I have to use one of those machines.
One of our esteemed {eh-hem} political leaders here in the Great Almost White But Always Very Wet North decided to re-name his party; a combination of the Canadian Alliance and the Reform Party to, you guessed it - the Canadian Reform Alliance Party (or something of that nature). Well-intentioned, I'm sure, but it only took about 2 hours before the headlines containing "CRAP" were in print.
I presume that your ISP is using the G.Lite implementation of ADSL which dictates 1.5 Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream
Not quite. Sympatico has just recently up'ped their business class ADSL service to 3.0Mbps downstream. Their salesmen, of course, could use a little tact in their diets. One friend (and small business owner) got a telephoned, faxed, and e-mailed apology from one particular salesman and his supervisor for harassing him.
"But sir! You DO need 3 megabits! Who WOULDN'T want those higher speeds? It's ONLY an extra $50 per month!"
Anyways, higher speed DSL service is available in Canada, unfortunately Sympatico appears unable to upgrade their network to meet customer demands, so we all wind up with poor speeds and unreliable connections. Half the time, I wind up being authenticated through their ATM cloud to Montreal or Kingston.
Since Sympatico is piggy-backing on Bell Nexxia's national network, they have the potential to offer 8Mbit service to all customers, if only they'd get their act together.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, I'd prefer that plin-text not be HTML-ized. Those sorts of features are the ones that tend to lead to strange scripting vulnerabilities being executed on hapless viewers.
What kind of layout would you prefer, based on the varying nature ofI've used IE on dialup to visit large(r) pages using table layouts, and haven't noticed a problem. If it does still exist, however, isn't that more of a browser deficiency than a website problem?
Most of the reasons given lend to poor website design, not the use of tables. I've always opposed static pixel width/height designes in almost all circumstances, regardless of the use of tables. All sites I design use percentages, or wildcards (SIZE="120,*") if, for example, I have 120px navigation buttons.If you design a website properly, it'll look good at 640x480 through to 1600x1200 (with the only problem at the higher resolutions being lack of content making paragraphs/sections look really thin, IME), regardless of window size, browser accessories, colour depth, etc..
It just goes to prove the old addage; it's easier to do it right the first time, etc..
I've always seen it used to provide more pop-ups (which, of course, I have disabled anyways) and do other nasties with cookies, re-directs, etc..
In the CSS world, I have to wait for a corporation to perform the tests I could be doing myself, in-house. Besides that - how are they going to know what areas of my servers I need heavily tested, and what areas are less important?
You're not running your web servers on 386s, are you? {smile}
Seriously, though, I'm sure it's more than possible (and I'll be putting this to a practical test very shortly) to install Gentoo where the compilers et al. reside on an NFS-mounted compile machine and can be mounted when required, then promptly unmounted and access forbidden.
Of course, there are also the precautions of having one's compilers and libraries accessible only from a select group of trusted users which, of course, do not include one's daemon users / groups.
Sorry, but I find this fundamentally offensive. It's the use of "vanity domains" that spread the likes of Code Red - which led, of course, to major broadband leaders blocking incoming TCP port 80 requests across the board for a period of time.
<ANECDOTAL>
A friend of mine installed IIS on his ${CABLE_PROVIDER} account for the purposes of testing some ASP / Access code he was working on. He neglected, unfortunately, to apply any patches. Within eight (8) hours, his system was DoS'ing several machines across the Internet. ${CABLE_PROVIDER}, thankfully, shut him down as soon as it was observed and he had a few days off the Internet to think about his mistake.
</ANECDOTAL>
I remain of the firm opinion that any machine on a dedicated connection offering some form of service(s) to the outside world should take all neccesary precautions to help prevent the spread of malicious worms, else their providers should have the right (and the cajones) to remove them from their positions on the Internet.
I've repaired two hard drives and one tape backup unit by replacing the controller board from a like-model, but I doubt I'd ever conceive of swapping the platters. I'll leave that up to data-recovery specialists, thankyouverymuch.
One has to wonder why you'd back up mission-critical data with a low-level back-up application without fully understanding it in the first place.
Oh, that and stooping to expletives to make a point (then chastizing my linguistic skills. Charming).
I apologize for believing so highly in the skillsets of the average Slashdot reader and for making the rash assumption that you'd see a freight train coming from a mile away.
This will be my last fucking post to this thread. I'm sorry to have wasted your (moreso my) time.
Are you trying to tell me that you're a 'real fan' who's been done a disservice by having the obvious stated in an online news page?
I'm sorry, but in a world where television shows are increasingly brainless (half) hours of drivel, where new audiences can pick up the entire basis of a show's story through a single episode, and where genetalia humour is still worthy of a laugh, I enjoy a show that challenges me, that makes me wonder what's coming around the next corner. Not the simple things like a cast member coming back, but the intricate plots and complicated inter-personal relations.
If you're going to be this petty and, I hate to say it, immature about things as insignifigant as show casting decisions, I'm sorry, but you're just not my kind of people.
Relax and let life happen, and please, do me a favour and try to think about Buffy in the up-coming season. You might find that you enjoy the show a little more when you actually take it in.
The Angel episode (I have no idea which one) where he visited Faith in prison, and was talking to her as if she was a mis-guided soul; that as much as blasted a banner across the screen: "Faith is coming back!".
For those people who are real fans of the show and who've been paying attention to the subtelties they put into the scripts, you would have seen this coming from a kilometre away.
Yeah, it sucks when Slashdot posts spoilers, but it's no reason to haul out the posterius-humourous references.
Now, I'm not speaking scientifically here, merely empirically - but I firmly believe that people buy "Tylenol" (quoted to represent the pletheora of other brand-names out there) because it's a "name", and people trust brand names. Even though a store-brand represents a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation, people tend to look at it as a "No Name" (which, incidentally, IS a brand name) product which, of course, is garbage. We use store-brand acetaminophen at home because it costs half the price of the Big Brand Products out there, and it seems to work just as well. Store brand antacids, store brand pain relievers, store brand NyQui.. er.. cough and congestion suppressant - they're all fine for me. I've got better things to save my money for.
I'm not sure what company it's from, but it's a good few years old. I do know, however, that it doesn't double as an optical mouse.
I'd love to give this one a spin, but the cradle bugs me. What if I'm using the computer and it goes dead? I can't think of anything more inconvenient than to be rat-less (or have to crawl on the floor to plug in a new mouse) while I wait for it to charge.
The solution I prefer is this one from A4-Tech. When your juice runs low, you simply plug in the charge cable and run as a wired mouse for a while (2.5 hours).
If a noble, virtuous person can find the vulnerability and report it responsibly - who's to say that an evil, amoral person can't do same? Isn't this blatantly obvious? Shouldn't this be pointed out to companies, the government, and the media? What are the chances that a "Black Hat" is going to be responsible about disclosing the latest vulnerability; especially if it will allow him to gain access to, or wreak havoc on thousands of systems?
I think something to the tune of 30 days for a company to get something rolling before it's released is perfectly reasonable. After all, the hard work of finding the source of the problem is already done for them. If they're not actively trying to find and solve the problem, IMHO they're acting in bad faith and are putting all of their customers in jeopardy. After 30 days, tell the public that a vulnerability exists. Put the heat on them. If they don't budge (or worse -threaten with suit), let a few other white hats know about it so that they too may "discover" the vulnerability.
Now we have proof-of-concepts coming from half dozen different sources. This should be more than ample proof (to the company, media, and court of law) that the probability of somebody exploiting it for their own ends is very real, and more dangerous than somebody who remains quiet (and cooperative) for over a month.
If they haven't acted within a week of the 30-day mark, publish the code to every online forum you can find. SlashDot, ZDNet, ARSTechnica, Kuro5hin<sp?>, your own website, etc.
As to 'full disclosure' - that, IMHO, is not a proper solution. If somebody releases a fully disclosed [BIND/SendMail/Apache/ProFTPD/IMAPD/etc.] vulnerability while I'm asleep, I could be '0wn3d' before I even wake up to read my e-mail.
Most importantly, the public has to be made aware of the fact that software companies do, in fact, stonewall whitehat hackers. This leads to the customers' systems being in danger from blackhats, which is a Very Bad Thing. I thought this would be obvious, but then I've always been of the radical mindset of personal responsibility.
Is that even politically correct?!?
Even (especially) if the company did attempt such measures of extortion, HP (or any other company) could easily circumvent the extortionists by instead releasing a fix to the problem.
If they release a "spl01t" for something that's already officially announced and patched, what good would it do?
Maybe that's what we need; more extortionists to force companies to work signifigant overtime (ie: take responsibility for their code that runs thousands of mission-critical servers and protects ensitive data all over the globe), and more software divisions who have the desire (and authority!) to fix these problems as soon as they're discovered. Preferably a higher standard of code auditing could be implemented, but hey, in a perfect world ...
Have a cache.slashdot.org that requests the URI the first time somdbody clicks 'through' it (with referrer protection, of course, to prevent every Joe from using /. as their own personal web proxy) and from then on people would hit the /. cache, saving us poor blokes with paltry DSL and cable connections.
I wonder if the /. folks have considered this idea. If you patent it quickly enough, maybe they'll have to pay you for it. ;)
{sigh} Maybe the rumours of elitism in the Slashdot crowd are true after all.
My apologies in arears for not going off half-cocked because Linus opened his news reader and spake.
What is this world, and more importantly, our own community coming to? Linus makes an offhand remark and it's jumped all over like divine words from a deity? Don't get me wrong, Linus is a great man who's done great things, but really; this much fuss over a sentence posted to Usenet? It's pretty dissapointing when kernel developers have to practise self-censorship to avoid a media flurry.
Ok, so you're making a generalization about all of Ontario based on your experience being 'tight' with the admins of one single school. As was pointed out earlier, Ontario is a huge place with thousands of secondary schools. I administered one of them for a few years, and the picture there was nothing like the one you painted.
A better phrasing might have been "at my high school ... ".
Sorry if I sound anal, but I don't really appreciate the insinuation that I, my partner, or my boss would be that callous, and I've never liked being spoken for.
If you'd been caught dismantling school equipment at the school I worked at, you'd find yourself unable to access the computers and labs. I think that policy is pretty standard across most schools. That all depends on your definition of "useful". We had three gigabytes of application software (on average) installed in the computer labs, and another seven installed on the server.These two are interrelated. Yes, most school boards in Ontario used low-end Internet connections, but that was the fault of beaurocracy not moving at the speed of technology. Much of it has recently been updated to 1.544MBit/sec speeds through an initiative to completely replace the existing provider (DCN) with a Bell Nexxia VPN solution.
With either connection, of course, there is the imminent potential to swamp it in a matter of minutes. But you have to keep in mind that anything not directly academics-related was strictly off-limits. Visiting someone's home page, participating in online chat sessions, MUDs, online games, downloading video or audio content, downloading any type of software, or any of the thousands of other Internet activities people do at home are simply not allowed. If the only use of the 128KBit line was for academic purposes, it performs perfectly well. It's only when people abuse the connection that others suffer.You might want to re-think your statement based on the above parameters. {smile}
However - were such an activity as LAN games to be done on the computers, the admins could create a separate gaming image with all the requisite software/drivers installed (including the various games), but with no access to network resources. They could create a grouping of machines in their LAN management software and simply start the image process at the end of the school day on days when LAN games were scheduled, and set them to be re-imaged before class the next morning. If done properly (which wouldn't be too terribly difficult), nobody who didn't participate would know anything had happened at all, and the network would remain completely unaffected.
You might be assuming a bit about the admins. Many networked machines already have DirectX installed on them, and if not it's a trivial operation to do so. Besides that; this would be a school-sanctioned activity and the games would be planned out beforehand, so the admins would have the machines prepared for them - including DirectX.
On the other hand, this would be considered an "extra-curricular activity", and with the political strife going on in this region it's highly unlikely that any admin or teacher would be willing to stay late to supervise.
Flip your mouse over and look for a hole or two with a screw in [it/them]. Probably Phillips #1. Remove screw, pry open mouse. Viola - access to rollers for cleannig. Generally easier to clean the rollers than in the confined space the cover allows anyways.More than you may realize, actually. The school board I worked for has recently upgraded board-wide to IBM PII 400s, and are slowly upgrading labs towards and beyond the 1GHz marker. The older machines have, typically, generic S3 video chipsets onboard but the newer models are shifting through S3 Savage, Trident, and eventually to nVidia chipsets.
The Cisco programs for high schools are dandies; the government loves the media hype, local companies (small to corporate) like the initiative, so funding often comes in large amounts from strange sources (while the rest of the school resources are mis-managed and lacking, of course ... ), so Cisco labs would probably be at an advantage.
I have to agree with the positive reviews of Toshiba laptops. I use my Satellite 1800 (PS181C) exclusively at home, work, school, and on job sites everywhere. Whenever it's powered by AC, dnetc is crunching away eating 100% of the CPU. Heat is barely a factor, nor is noise from the constantly running fan.
When I was preparing to purchase a laptop, I found that Toshiba's were the best bang for the buck. This machine is a fantastic balance of performance and economy. So it doesn't have a 15" display or a DVDROM - it stays powered longer than any others i work with.
My only real issue is the fact that the battery will not charge, or if it does, it does so at a rate of 1% every 48 hours when the CPU is pegged. However, with my power saving options I wind up with anywhere from 4-6 hours of run-time on battery, so I guess Toshiba's power handling is just fine with me. {smile}
As for Dells; I wouldn't give you a thank-you for one. I'd never reccomend one to a friend, family member, colleague, or client.
They run loud and hot, their display hinges are far too loose, they continue to have battery issues, the screens wind up with a keyboard imprint stamped on them (lid closes too tightly, perhaps), the power saving functionality is awful (far too simplistic for one thing), and they're overall quite tempermental.
Their phone techs, I might add, can be quite... shall we say demeaning and most un-helpful. A colleague of mine has an Inspiron (top of the line book as of about six months ago) whose battery has gone south. Battery thinks it's at 100% charge, but run-time is approx. 30 minutes. He phoned Dell, who told him to enable his power saving features which, of course, had been active the whole time. The battery continued to deteriorate to the point where it would only maintain a 74% charge, then a 67%, etc..
All this, mind you, with the extended on-site warranty package!
If ever I have a problem with my Satellite, I'll follow-up with an indication of Toshiba's technical support.
Oh, and for the record, I much prefer Toshiba's keyboard layout (ref: Home/End/PgUp/PgDown) to the style used by Dell and IBM books. I can use them without having to lift my hands from their position, whereas on a Dell/IBM machine I have to pick up my right hand and look at the keyboard to hit the derned things, way in tarnation up in front of the hinge. Most inconvenient, IMHO, and my productivity always suffers when I have to use one of those machines.
One of our esteemed {eh-hem} political leaders here in the Great Almost White But Always Very Wet North decided to re-name his party; a combination of the Canadian Alliance and the Reform Party to, you guessed it - the Canadian Reform Alliance Party (or something of that nature). Well-intentioned, I'm sure, but it only took about 2 hours before the headlines containing "CRAP" were in print.
I presume that your ISP is using the G.Lite implementation of ADSL which dictates 1.5 Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream
Not quite. Sympatico has just recently up'ped their business class ADSL service to 3.0Mbps downstream. Their salesmen, of course, could use a little tact in their diets. One friend (and small business owner) got a telephoned, faxed, and e-mailed apology from one particular salesman and his supervisor for harassing him.
"But sir! You DO need 3 megabits! Who WOULDN'T want those higher speeds? It's ONLY an extra $50 per month!"
Anyways, higher speed DSL service is available in Canada, unfortunately Sympatico appears unable to upgrade their network to meet customer demands, so we all wind up with poor speeds and unreliable connections. Half the time, I wind up being authenticated through their ATM cloud to Montreal or Kingston.
Since Sympatico is piggy-backing on Bell Nexxia's national network, they have the potential to offer 8Mbit service to all customers, if only they'd get their act together.
{harumph!}