For the image ones, couldn't you create 5 bots each with a different account and each one picks a different image and one picks None of these? One of them would be approved and you'd get paid, right?
Also if they are having humans approve your image selection before you get paid, isn't that as much effort as you making your original choice?
My complaint with Ajax is that it makes scripting the web much more
difficult. I write scripts that grab content from the web and do things
with it as well as scripts that post content to the web. I was trying to
write one of these the other day for a site that used Ajax for the login
form. If I still felt like it was worth writing, my script just became ten
times more complex.
How do you link to content that is behind or otherwise encrusted with Ajax?
How do crawlers find it? Without Ajax, you can look at the source of a
page and get a good idea of what it's doing. With Ajax, you basically have
to reverse engineer it (for an example, go look at the Gmail code).
The web should continue to stay one URL leads to one document which is
a self-contained chunk of plain text containing everything you need to view
its contents.
Ajax breaks the transparency and simplicity of the web for no good reason.
It offers only increased responsiveness, which unless you are on a modem or
something is minimal and mostly imagined by the user.
On the other hand, Everything2 seems to automatically link each "interesting" word to a seemingly random internal E2 page.
As far as I know all links on E2 are created by the people who write the nodes. There is no automatic linking. The links seem random because it is part of the E2 culture to link phrases to disparate nodes.
If Google search is finding things that are already stored on the hard drive, you can't blame Google search. Depending on evil people not finding things that are right there for them to see is security through obscurity.
Any web sites containing sensitive information should use SSL, which is not cached anywhere. SSL is free and widely supported. There is no excuse not to use it.
Are there really systems that human lives depend directly on that are running Windows?
If my life ever depends on some software, I want the operating systems and all the other software to be mathematically proven to be correct and I want multiple backups/failsafes present. I don't want it to be some VB app running on Windows because it's quicker and easier to develop.
What did Mitnick do exactly? He told the police what to ask for from the phone company?
I would think if the police went to the phone company and asked them "we need to find out where these calls are coming from", the phone company would know what needs to be done to find out.
I hope everything Mitnick knows is also known by someone at the phone company. It seems the cooperation of the phone company would preclude the necessity of involving an "expert" like Mitnick.
Usability and security are not mutually exlusive. On the contrary the more usable software is, the more secure it is. The more the user understands the software and the more at ease he feels with it, the more secure it is, because the weakest insecurities in any system are the human elements.
For example, say some software mandates changing your password every day and does not allow repeats. Not very usable. The user will avoid this obstacle by writing down his passwords, figuring out a way to stay logged in, using easier passwords, or something else which compromises security.
If your definition of "more usable" is "more graphical and has more features" (seems like Microsoft uses this one), then possibly as usability increases, security decreases. However, true usability and security are both results of the same thing - good design.
This is an example of using technology to solve a social problem and it's overkill. This is why phones and pagers have a silent/vibrate mode.
I want to receive calls in a movie theater or anywhere else I am. It's part of the convenience of having a portable phone. I put my phone on vibrate and I check who is calling and if I want to talk to them I step outside.
I'm surprised here of all the places that a lot of people are supporting a sweeping solution like this that inconveniences everyone because of a few rude assholes.
Re:Good... down with Real
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
Sadly I think Adobe is taking a page from Real's book. The latest version of Acrobat Reader (6.0) that I downloaded was bloated, slow and full of plugins and junk that I don't want.
All kinds of industries use these types of packaging plans to make consumers pay for things they don't want. When you buy a car, you can't just get leather seats. You have to buy the "luxury package" to get leather seats, which also includes expensive upgraded rims, etc.
The recording industry works this way too, "encouraging" the consumer to buy an entire album to get one song that they want.
It happens on the web too. Some sites put ads all through their content, and if you want to consume
the content, you are forced to accept the whole package they are offering and consume the ads too. At least on the web and with any digital product, techology can be used as a tool to break these packages apart, so that the consumer can be free to make his own choices.
I agree, the title is misleading. This didn't turn up anything of interest to me. Isn't there already a handy tool for finding businesses near you called the Yellow Pages? I have been accessing them lately by messaging AolYellowPages in AOL Instant Messager.
I really don't understand why so many people are crazy about Heinlein.
I have read Heinlein and found his work embarrassingly corny and dated. Contrast with Philip K. Dick, whose ideas seem uncannily (and frighteningly) relevant to our own time.
I would love to receive the various monthly statements and other junk I receive in the mail in electronic form instead of in paper form. This way I could just dump it all in a directory without looking at it too closely. It's such a chore to go through all of the paper and determine if I need to save anything, and it has advertisements in every possible place they can stick one.
For my credit card, I pay the bills online, and I can view my balance and whole transaction history online. When I called them asking if they could stop sending the paper statement every month, they told me yes, but they would have to charge me money for it!
If you have a recent version of PHP, you don't even need mod_gzip. Just put the following lines in your.htaccess file:
php_flag zlib.output_compression on
Does everything on the fly. I once had a shell script that would wget a url with the accept encoding gzip header, and then wget it again without and show the percent savings. Was fairly interesting to see what sites were using compression, and what sites that weren't could have saved in bandwidth by using compression.
Sherman responded that most people don't shoplift because they fear they'll be arrested.
The RIAA views the average person (customer) as a morally bankrupt thief who will steal at every opportunity, unless they are constantly subjected to campaigns of fear and shame.
Offensive. Not that the RIAA hasn't already earned my lifetime contempt and made it my mission to make sure no one in their cartel ever sees another dime of my money. Then again what is a few dollars in lost music sales when you can shake down single moms and 12-year-olds for thousands.
Science fiction and fantasy are just different forms of entertainment, and I don't think the fact that the collective taste is swinging toward fantasy right now reflects anything significant about our culture.
If you want to see how our society stands in the realm of science, why not look at science fact instead of science fiction? If "young people no longer find science admirable", why has our society made more scientific progress in the past 50 years than the past 50,000? Is a nanotech scientist who enjoys Tolkien an indication of how ignorant we are becoming?
So no one reads or writes corny space opera any more. There are more interesting things to think about like nanotech, information processing, genetics, the human brain, and the biology of our own planet (maybe including how to put cod and haddock back in the Grand Banks!).
Is this really the best way to make this point? Anyone who uses or even knows of the existence of things like Wine and Knoppix probably already has a pretty good idea that software patents are bad.
I can't see the politicians and bureaucrats being moved to action because 0.0000001% of their constituents can't reach the Knoppix website.
It also decreases lightbulb sales. It's just like many other things (consumer electronics, computer parts, shoes, clothes, etc.) that are basically designed to break after a certain amount of time.
Before this mentality took over in the 1950's, things were made to last forever and had a really sturdy, well-crafted feel to them. A lot of stuff from this period still works perfectly today.
Piss off. Give a the right to say "yay" or "nay" or I'll just have to setup a firewall to block any ports you seek to use. My system is MINE to use or misuse as I see fit. Period.
I completely agree with the right to say "yay" or "nay". I was suggesting making it the default, but of course leaving an option to turn it completely off. I had not thought of dialup users, but a consideration could be made for them.
The blaster worm really hit home for me and made me rethink some of my ideas. It was the first worm that affected a number of people I know at their homes and made their machines unusable (the previous ones seemed to target Windows editions and services more commonly found in a business setting). The worm also required no user action for infection (wasn't caused by opening an email attachment or something). It could have been much more malignant than it was. As a programmer I actually felt bad for these people, who hadn't a clue why their machines stopped working.
And if you don't trust Microsoft not to secretly replace your perfectly fine software with DRM software, I guess you don't trust any of their patches or service packs, whether they are installed by you or automatically behind the scenes.
I don't think it's a horrible idea to make automatic silent updates the default. After cleaning up some of my relatives' machines after the Blaster worm, I set them all to automatic updates. Yes, there is a chance that an update might break something, but this chance is far less than the chance of another exploit or worm trashing the system.
They just don't understand it at all and as the person who gets called when there is a problem, I'll take any proactive measures that I can to make sure things continue running smoothly.
Slashdot Mirror
For the image ones, couldn't you create 5 bots each with a different account and each one picks a different image and one picks None of these? One of them would be approved and you'd get paid, right?
Also if they are having humans approve your image selection before you get paid, isn't that as much effort as you making your original choice?
My complaint with Ajax is that it makes scripting the web much more difficult. I write scripts that grab content from the web and do things with it as well as scripts that post content to the web. I was trying to write one of these the other day for a site that used Ajax for the login form. If I still felt like it was worth writing, my script just became ten times more complex.
How do you link to content that is behind or otherwise encrusted with Ajax? How do crawlers find it? Without Ajax, you can look at the source of a page and get a good idea of what it's doing. With Ajax, you basically have to reverse engineer it (for an example, go look at the Gmail code).
The web should continue to stay one URL leads to one document which is a self-contained chunk of plain text containing everything you need to view its contents.
Ajax breaks the transparency and simplicity of the web for no good reason. It offers only increased responsiveness, which unless you are on a modem or something is minimal and mostly imagined by the user.
As far as I know all links on E2 are created by the people who write the nodes. There is no automatic linking. The links seem random because it is part of the E2 culture to link phrases to disparate nodes.
If Google search is finding things that are already stored on the hard drive, you can't blame Google search. Depending on evil people not finding things that are right there for them to see is security through obscurity.
Any web sites containing sensitive information should use SSL, which is not cached anywhere. SSL is free and widely supported. There is no excuse not to use it.
Bruce Schneier should have this job. As a matter of fact he should be Secretary of Homeland Security.
Are there really systems that human lives depend directly on that are running Windows?
If my life ever depends on some software, I want the operating systems and all the other software to be mathematically proven to be correct and I want multiple backups/failsafes present. I don't want it to be some VB app running on Windows because it's quicker and easier to develop.
With screen and ssh.
My TODO list is ~/TODO. I edit it with vim. Sometimes I grep it. When I get things done I dd that line.
I can access it anywhere with ssh.
In the classic "invisible hand" economic model, profit is an inefficiency, which is squeezed out of the market entirely. It is not maximized.
Companies' profits come from failures in the free market, due to external forces like government intervention, lack of competition, etc.
What did Mitnick do exactly? He told the police what to ask for from the phone company?
I would think if the police went to the phone company and asked them "we need to find out where these calls are coming from", the phone company would know what needs to be done to find out.
I hope everything Mitnick knows is also known by someone at the phone company. It seems the cooperation of the phone company would preclude the necessity of involving an "expert" like Mitnick.
Usability and security are not mutually exlusive. On the contrary the more usable software is, the more secure it is. The more the user understands the software and the more at ease he feels with it, the more secure it is, because the weakest insecurities in any system are the human elements.
For example, say some software mandates changing your password every day and does not allow repeats. Not very usable. The user will avoid this obstacle by writing down his passwords, figuring out a way to stay logged in, using easier passwords, or something else which compromises security.
If your definition of "more usable" is "more graphical and has more features" (seems like Microsoft uses this one), then possibly as usability increases, security decreases. However, true usability and security are both results of the same thing - good design.
This is an example of using technology to solve a social problem and it's overkill. This is why phones and pagers have a silent/vibrate mode.
I want to receive calls in a movie theater or anywhere else I am. It's part of the convenience of having a portable phone. I put my phone on vibrate and I check who is calling and if I want to talk to them I step outside.
I'm surprised here of all the places that a lot of people are supporting a sweeping solution like this that inconveniences everyone because of a few rude assholes.
Sadly I think Adobe is taking a page from Real's book. The latest version of Acrobat Reader (6.0) that I downloaded was bloated, slow and full of plugins and junk that I don't want.
All kinds of industries use these types of packaging plans to make consumers pay for things they don't want. When you buy a car, you can't just get leather seats. You have to buy the "luxury package" to get leather seats, which also includes expensive upgraded rims, etc.
The recording industry works this way too, "encouraging" the consumer to buy an entire album to get one song that they want.
It happens on the web too. Some sites put ads all through their content, and if you want to consume the content, you are forced to accept the whole package they are offering and consume the ads too. At least on the web and with any digital product, techology can be used as a tool to break these packages apart, so that the consumer can be free to make his own choices.
I agree, the title is misleading. This didn't turn up anything of interest to me. Isn't there already a handy tool for finding businesses near you called the Yellow Pages? I have been accessing them lately by messaging AolYellowPages in AOL Instant Messager.
Try GeoURL to find actual people near you.
I really don't understand why so many people are crazy about Heinlein.
I have read Heinlein and found his work embarrassingly corny and dated. Contrast with Philip K. Dick, whose ideas seem uncannily (and frighteningly) relevant to our own time.
They and their fellow parasites make my grandma's computing experience a lot less pleasant.
I would love to receive the various monthly statements and other junk I receive in the mail in electronic form instead of in paper form. This way I could just dump it all in a directory without looking at it too closely. It's such a chore to go through all of the paper and determine if I need to save anything, and it has advertisements in every possible place they can stick one.
For my credit card, I pay the bills online, and I can view my balance and whole transaction history online. When I called them asking if they could stop sending the paper statement every month, they told me yes, but they would have to charge me money for it!
If you have a recent version of PHP, you don't even need mod_gzip. Just put the following lines in your .htaccess file:
php_flag zlib.output_compression onDoes everything on the fly. I once had a shell script that would wget a url with the accept encoding gzip header, and then wget it again without and show the percent savings. Was fairly interesting to see what sites were using compression, and what sites that weren't could have saved in bandwidth by using compression.
The RIAA views the average person (customer) as a morally bankrupt thief who will steal at every opportunity, unless they are constantly subjected to campaigns of fear and shame.
Offensive. Not that the RIAA hasn't already earned my lifetime contempt and made it my mission to make sure no one in their cartel ever sees another dime of my money. Then again what is a few dollars in lost music sales when you can shake down single moms and 12-year-olds for thousands.
Science fiction and fantasy are just different forms of entertainment, and I don't think the fact that the collective taste is swinging toward fantasy right now reflects anything significant about our culture.
If you want to see how our society stands in the realm of science, why not look at science fact instead of science fiction? If "young people no longer find science admirable", why has our society made more scientific progress in the past 50 years than the past 50,000? Is a nanotech scientist who enjoys Tolkien an indication of how ignorant we are becoming?
So no one reads or writes corny space opera any more. There are more interesting things to think about like nanotech, information processing, genetics, the human brain, and the biology of our own planet (maybe including how to put cod and haddock back in the Grand Banks!).
Is this really the best way to make this point? Anyone who uses or even knows of the existence of things like Wine and Knoppix probably already has a pretty good idea that software patents are bad.
I can't see the politicians and bureaucrats being moved to action because 0.0000001% of their constituents can't reach the Knoppix website.
It also decreases lightbulb sales. It's just like many other things (consumer electronics, computer parts, shoes, clothes, etc.) that are basically designed to break after a certain amount of time.
Before this mentality took over in the 1950's, things were made to last forever and had a really sturdy, well-crafted feel to them. A lot of stuff from this period still works perfectly today.
Piss off. Give a the right to say "yay" or "nay" or I'll just have to setup a firewall to block any ports you seek to use. My system is MINE to use or misuse as I see fit. Period.
I completely agree with the right to say "yay" or "nay". I was suggesting making it the default, but of course leaving an option to turn it completely off. I had not thought of dialup users, but a consideration could be made for them.
The blaster worm really hit home for me and made me rethink some of my ideas. It was the first worm that affected a number of people I know at their homes and made their machines unusable (the previous ones seemed to target Windows editions and services more commonly found in a business setting). The worm also required no user action for infection (wasn't caused by opening an email attachment or something). It could have been much more malignant than it was. As a programmer I actually felt bad for these people, who hadn't a clue why their machines stopped working.
And if you don't trust Microsoft not to secretly replace your perfectly fine software with DRM software, I guess you don't trust any of their patches or service packs, whether they are installed by you or automatically behind the scenes.
I don't think it's a horrible idea to make automatic silent updates the default. After cleaning up some of my relatives' machines after the Blaster worm, I set them all to automatic updates. Yes, there is a chance that an update might break something, but this chance is far less than the chance of another exploit or worm trashing the system.
They just don't understand it at all and as the person who gets called when there is a problem, I'll take any proactive measures that I can to make sure things continue running smoothly.