Now, I'm no Linux zealot (in fact, I develop and sell Windows software) but I have had several years experience admin'ing a student-run computer lab and I have learned a few things about spyware.
We had Windows 2000 machines installed, and for the longest time keeping them up to date and users locked down to regular user privileges prevented the spread of nasties. Individual accounts got spyware and viruses, but it didn't spread across the machine.
Then over the past year and a bit I noticed that even though I kept the machine up to date, spyware did seem to "leak" from one user's account to elsewhere on the system. I do keep the systems patched, but sometimes I am as late as a week applying a fix. Let's face it, I have better things to do and I'm not paid to look after the lab.
But here's what I recently did. We set up our beefy Linux server (which already acted as the primary domain controller for the NT domain, with samba) as an XDMCP capable server. This means that any UNIX (or windows) station can login into the server as a dumb terminal, using XDMCP. This is done easily with Xfree/X.org with the command "X -query hostname"
So now we still have Windows 2000 and Windows XP stations, which are clean at the moment... but I suspect that the Linux workstations are going to fare better over time. After all, they're dumb terminals to the Linux server. People can still run Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice which takes care of 99% of our users' activities. People are happy, I am happy, and we're re-using old equipment (graphical terminals) that would otherwise be occupying landfill space.
Is this guy joking?? The field of programming or software engineering is far from obsoleted/superceded/replaced.
Go and ask computer users (both novices and professionals) about what they think of the software they use day to day. Most will complain about the software they use (unreliable, unstable, missing essential capabilities...). That alone tells us there is still much more work to be done.
I don't think it matters whether you use UML diagrams, Java, C#. What matters is that everyone in business today is a computer user, and a large percent of these computer users are not happy with the software they are using.
There is plenty of work for those that can solve these problems. IMHO.
Oh yea, you can have gunshots, swearing, explosions, people dying in sprays of blood... but simulated sex between two marionettes is bad
Several scholars have put the more general case. Seeing murders (gunshots through the body, spraying blood, vehicular manslaughter) is now so commonplace in TV and movies that it's quite ludicrous to simultaneously outlaw depiction of sex. Man, if a cock or pussy was shown on prime time TV could you imagine what would happen?
What does it say about our society when we readily celebrate instruments of death and destruction, but can't even bring ourselves to look at parts of our own bodies that bring life itself?
Shouldn't you mention that you were paid for this review
Let's not make this misleading. Pretty much all movie reviewers (for newspapers and magazines anyway) routinely receive promo packages for their movies - including free tickets, sometimes even gift basket style stuff. To fill in the picture a bit more, doctors, pharmacists, and even university professors in medical/technical fields routinely receive these kind of promotions. Doctors get free samples of random drugs, for godsake.
So this slashdot review is not out of the ordinary, and it's nothing to criticize IMHO. However the general prevalant practice in marketing, of influencing key people in groups, or decision makers, is quite reprehensible. I don't care much about the effects in entertainment because People Know What They Like but I'm much more concerned when it comes to medicine and the drug industry. (An aside: carefully read those posters in your doctors' office next time, what products are they advertising?)
This is the unfortunate thing about the so-called neoconservative mindset. Modern conservatism is nothing more than the rationalization of greed, avarice, and self-interest . . . Global warming has not affected them adversely yet
It's probably not even on their radar of "cares", since the damage is really being done in the long-term and the awful effects are to be seen long after the money is made, and the corpse is rotting.
In my mind, these business people who try to get their way even at the detriment of the planet are among the worst humans ever. A cruel dictator or invader might result in thousands of peoples' deaths. In contrast, the individuals allowing large portions of the forests to be cut down; rare freshwater pollution; and overconsumption of resources to the brink are endangerous the lives of millions, even billions of people in the future.
I don't want to be part of the generation that is looked back on in history and blamed as the group of people Who Finally Fucked It All Up during a period of unprecedented development.
That's just great, a cure that US Law will say we can't experiment with
The American president already told you the "cure". The only safe path is abstinence. Abstaining from sexual intercourse is the best way to avoid getting HIV and other STIs.
I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but really not sure whether I'm trolling or being funny or what.
Gosh darnit, I am so sick and tired of the liberal media twisting and spinning all the news into some sort of Conservative conspiracy story. I wasn't too thrilled watching that PBS commie Jim Lehrer moderate the presidential debate, either. Jesus, if you're not going to place your faith in God and the * elected * president's office, and trust that the men in the closed meetings know a bit more than you or I know, that what are you going to place your faith? Bush and Cheney are smarter, and probably more honest than 75% of the bleeding heart liberal whiners that keep wrecking my day. I hope you all go back to your gay bars and stay the hell away from my ballot boxes.
This sounds too much like what happens in Canada, where an extra fee is included in the price of most blank media. This fee is SUPPOSED to be re-distributed to the artists, but it rarely is.
These levy collection is nothing more than public-sponsored charity for a shitty, failing industry. The CRIA has been stealing from me for years, since every time I buy CDs for backup media I am forced to pay them a small amount of money. How can they get away with this?
it's a good thing I am Canadian, we don't have to deal with the various **AAs
Sorry to say, you're being naive. As we speak, the recording industry CRIA is working hand in hand with the government in order to push ratification of the WIPO Treaty in Canada. WIPO ratification in the US created the DMCA, and in Europe created their messy equivalent.
As a Canadian who currently enjoys digital freedom, but is on the brink of losing them, I beg you to become more actively involved - as a starting point, go to digital-copyright forums and join. Read up on the issue, sign the petition, contact your MP and let them know you're watching how they vote on copyright reform bills. Remember, both the Liberal government and NDP support copyright reform that would do away with our fair use rights. Politicians don't understand or particularly care about these issues, and they're being pressured by the industry to do something that isn't in the interest of Canadians. That's my take on it, anyway.
That email is looking more and more like an attractive P2P interface for file sharing. I think this would be a convenient way to share files. Encrypt and send them to mailboxes, pick them up at your convenience.
While the base64 encoding isn't terribly efficient for space, an interesting characteristic of email is that multiple recipients at the same domain - say gmail.com, benefit from a single data transmission to gmail's server delivering the mail to several destination accounts. So for the first time we could have a P2P app with 'multicast'-like content delivery.
In my day, an article like this would have been a downright joke. Seriously, this is such a milestone that I'm filing the article in my permanent news archives.
In retrospect I don't know why we thought such a thing was impossible for so long? After all, buffer overflows or other coding problems can result in malicious code executing. I guess what we didn't expect "back then" was that computers primarily engaged in networking activities would be running vital parsers - HTML, ActiveX, images etc - within the operating system itself, with administrator level privileges.
Wouldn't it make sense to limit the scope of any kind of modular parser/crypto using privilege isolation, so that even if malicious code starts running it is utterly incapable of affecting anything else?
i.e. shouldn't all such modules - crypto, image, parser run within some kind of privilege jails and communicate with the involved application using something like a socket? Hell, couldn't Windows do just that and wrap it up so API users don't notice? What am I missing here? I'm not picking on Windows here, same thing could be done on *NIX.
bleep was just about perfect. Because it's direct to the record label, about 50% of the sale goes to the artists (which is fantastic in my books). You simply pay for the sale, maybe an entire album, and get a ZIP file containing the high quality MP3s that have been lame encoded with VBR. Very proper. Looks proper, sounds proper. So yeah, that's about as perfect as I have seen!
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office.
I use OO for everything because I think it is better than MS Office. Most importantly, it runs on several platforms - whether I'm on a Windows desktop, Linux desktop, or Sun UNIX station I can edit and print the same documents. Second (touching on the article's issue) I know that the data stored in OpenOffice's files will have superior longevity to any proprietary solution.
I don't worry too much about proprietary software and closed source, but where data longevity is concerned I do care. Have you ever taken a look at those SXW word processor files? They're just ZIP archives containing several XML files, one for style, one for content, etc. Extracting the data from OO's data files is easy to do.
I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 171v two years ago, and brought it home fearfully waiting for the ghosting I had heard about with LCD monitors. No such experience. In my day-to-day work I don't notice any GUI delays that can be blamed on the monitor. And even when playing games (like Enemy Territory) the monitor performs beautifully.
But I have seen other people with LCD monitors that don't seem to work as well with fast moving objects. The SyncMaster wasn't a particularly expensive model or anything, but it definitely performs well.
We actually lock down our Windows XP machines pretty hard, yet for some reason a virus is capable of installing DLLs into the system folder on a non-priveleged account... We've had a number of keylogger viruses and such pop up on local machines, even from machines with restricted permissions (i.e. can't even write to C:). I don't know what's wrong with XP, but this looks to be a pretty big flaw.
I'll second this. This is what I have experienced as well (in our student lab), except even on Windows 2000 machines. Malware entering through a low privilege account found its way to areas of the disk guarded by NTFS. I don't know how this happened. On our UNIX systems I might expect something like this if there is a privilege escalation flaw in the kernel or an exploitable service or setuid root binary, but the difference is...
I keep our UNIX systems fully patched and see no problems, but when I try to keep the Windows systems fully patched it seems that privilege escalation still happens, and the logs suggest that it's not happening through a service.
Re:Without reading the article...
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If it's your dream to fly forget about flying cars and get your pilot's license.
And if you're a teen in Canada, join the Air Cadets program and get free pilot training/licensing. Now in my 20s I really really wish I had done this, it would be so cool.
The industry had better find a way to make those cars fly, or dance, or perform sexual favors or something... because now that everyone has a car, the industry is starting to cool down, and auto manufacturing/sales is a major part of the US economy. Don't be surprised is Ford has major problems within the next decade.
In a biological system (an ecosystem) you want a large diversity of species participating in the system, so that environmental fluctuations and pathogens don't wipe out large parts of the ecosystem all at once.
If you extend this to interoperating computer systems, then ideally you want a variety of platforms (indeed, operating systems but also processor architectures and device types).
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I'm no Linux zealot (in fact, I develop and sell Windows software) but I have had several years experience admin'ing a student-run computer lab and I have learned a few things about spyware.
We had Windows 2000 machines installed, and for the longest time keeping them up to date and users locked down to regular user privileges prevented the spread of nasties. Individual accounts got spyware and viruses, but it didn't spread across the machine.
Then over the past year and a bit I noticed that even though I kept the machine up to date, spyware did seem to "leak" from one user's account to elsewhere on the system. I do keep the systems patched, but sometimes I am as late as a week applying a fix. Let's face it, I have better things to do and I'm not paid to look after the lab.
But here's what I recently did. We set up our beefy Linux server (which already acted as the primary domain controller for the NT domain, with samba) as an XDMCP capable server. This means that any UNIX (or windows) station can login into the server as a dumb terminal, using XDMCP. This is done easily with Xfree/X.org with the command "X -query hostname"
So now we still have Windows 2000 and Windows XP stations, which are clean at the moment... but I suspect that the Linux workstations are going to fare better over time. After all, they're dumb terminals to the Linux server. People can still run Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice which takes care of 99% of our users' activities. People are happy, I am happy, and we're re-using old equipment (graphical terminals) that would otherwise be occupying landfill space.
Is this guy joking?? The field of programming or software engineering is far from obsoleted/superceded/replaced.
Go and ask computer users (both novices and professionals) about what they think of the software they use day to day. Most will complain about the software they use (unreliable, unstable, missing essential capabilities...). That alone tells us there is still much more work to be done.
I don't think it matters whether you use UML diagrams, Java, C#. What matters is that everyone in business today is a computer user, and a large percent of these computer users are not happy with the software they are using.
There is plenty of work for those that can solve these problems. IMHO.
What does it say about our society when we readily celebrate instruments of death and destruction, but can't even bring ourselves to look at parts of our own bodies that bring life itself?
So this slashdot review is not out of the ordinary, and it's nothing to criticize IMHO. However the general prevalant practice in marketing, of influencing key people in groups, or decision makers, is quite reprehensible. I don't care much about the effects in entertainment because People Know What They Like but I'm much more concerned when it comes to medicine and the drug industry. (An aside: carefully read those posters in your doctors' office next time, what products are they advertising?)
Stop <<sob>> it's already dead!!
In my mind, these business people who try to get their way even at the detriment of the planet are among the worst humans ever. A cruel dictator or invader might result in thousands of peoples' deaths. In contrast, the individuals allowing large portions of the forests to be cut down; rare freshwater pollution; and overconsumption of resources to the brink are endangerous the lives of millions, even billions of people in the future.
I don't want to be part of the generation that is looked back on in history and blamed as the group of people Who Finally Fucked It All Up during a period of unprecedented development.
they're squishy when their in heat!
Gosh darnit, I am so sick and tired of the liberal media twisting and spinning all the news into some sort of Conservative conspiracy story. I wasn't too thrilled watching that PBS commie Jim Lehrer moderate the presidential debate, either. Jesus, if you're not going to place your faith in God and the * elected * president's office, and trust that the men in the closed meetings know a bit more than you or I know, that what are you going to place your faith? Bush and Cheney are smarter, and probably more honest than 75% of the bleeding heart liberal whiners that keep wrecking my day. I hope you all go back to your gay bars and stay the hell away from my ballot boxes.
As a Canadian who currently enjoys digital freedom, but is on the brink of losing them, I beg you to become more actively involved - as a starting point, go to digital-copyright forums and join. Read up on the issue, sign the petition, contact your MP and let them know you're watching how they vote on copyright reform bills. Remember, both the Liberal government and NDP support copyright reform that would do away with our fair use rights. Politicians don't understand or particularly care about these issues, and they're being pressured by the industry to do something that isn't in the interest of Canadians. That's my take on it, anyway.
That email is looking more and more like an attractive P2P interface for file sharing. I think this would be a convenient way to share files. Encrypt and send them to mailboxes, pick them up at your convenience.
While the base64 encoding isn't terribly efficient for space, an interesting characteristic of email is that multiple recipients at the same domain - say gmail.com, benefit from a single data transmission to gmail's server delivering the mail to several destination accounts. So for the first time we could have a P2P app with 'multicast'-like content delivery.
In my day, an article like this would have been a downright joke. Seriously, this is such a milestone that I'm filing the article in my permanent news archives.
In retrospect I don't know why we thought such a thing was impossible for so long? After all, buffer overflows or other coding problems can result in malicious code executing. I guess what we didn't expect "back then" was that computers primarily engaged in networking activities would be running vital parsers - HTML, ActiveX, images etc - within the operating system itself, with administrator level privileges.
Wouldn't it make sense to limit the scope of any kind of modular parser/crypto using privilege isolation, so that even if malicious code starts running it is utterly incapable of affecting anything else?
i.e. shouldn't all such modules - crypto, image, parser run within some kind of privilege jails and communicate with the involved application using something like a socket? Hell, couldn't Windows do just that and wrap it up so API users don't notice? What am I missing here? I'm not picking on Windows here, same thing could be done on *NIX.
bleep was just about perfect. Because it's direct to the record label, about 50% of the sale goes to the artists (which is fantastic in my books). You simply pay for the sale, maybe an entire album, and get a ZIP file containing the high quality MP3s that have been lame encoded with VBR. Very proper. Looks proper, sounds proper. So yeah, that's about as perfect as I have seen!
I don't worry too much about proprietary software and closed source, but where data longevity is concerned I do care. Have you ever taken a look at those SXW word processor files? They're just ZIP archives containing several XML files, one for style, one for content, etc. Extracting the data from OO's data files is easy to do.
I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 171v two years ago, and brought it home fearfully waiting for the ghosting I had heard about with LCD monitors. No such experience. In my day-to-day work I don't notice any GUI delays that can be blamed on the monitor. And even when playing games (like Enemy Territory) the monitor performs beautifully.
But I have seen other people with LCD monitors that don't seem to work as well with fast moving objects. The SyncMaster wasn't a particularly expensive model or anything, but it definitely performs well.
I keep our UNIX systems fully patched and see no problems, but when I try to keep the Windows systems fully patched it seems that privilege escalation still happens, and the logs suggest that it's not happening through a service.
The industry had better find a way to make those cars fly, or dance, or perform sexual favors or something... because now that everyone has a car, the industry is starting to cool down, and auto manufacturing/sales is a major part of the US economy. Don't be surprised is Ford has major problems within the next decade.
In related news, rescue rodents to join the effort. Unfortunately there's a risk of infecting found victims with rabies.
In a biological system (an ecosystem) you want a large diversity of species participating in the system, so that environmental fluctuations and pathogens don't wipe out large parts of the ecosystem all at once.
If you extend this to interoperating computer systems, then ideally you want a variety of platforms (indeed, operating systems but also processor architectures and device types).