If someone is decideing between a Roku or an Apple TV based on a $80 price differential then they probably can't affort to buy shows anyhow. What matters is what's the easiest thing to use , gives you great results, and doesn't become an on-line attack vector in your home because you left it unpatched. For example, I bought my Amazon firestick because it delivered the content I wanted in the most simple way and it keeps it self updated and patched. It's not over complicated. I don't want something that can do everything like a chromeStick or an XBMC home sever. I want something that does just what I want extremely well.
What's the one thing I'd like for my Amazon fire stick that it doens't have is to be able to access the apple iTunes movie store. When you can plan in advance, downloading the movie rather that real time streaming is likely to achieve much better outcomes when my connection is overloaded. Paying a $1 extra for that is usually worth it to me.
I guess I should have returned to my starting point. As good as windows 10 seems, the upgrade process is a major botch. Do I really want to get involved with products from a company that can't get that right. They should make all the managers at microsoft try to update a 2 year old unpatched windows 8 computer. How could this get overlooked!!! My machine was not slow nor was my interenet connection. And other than 1 hour I lost when their upgrade tool got squurley it took 7 hours to just make my mainstream machine wind 10 ready. It kept haveing to reboot itself. It's just really really crappy design. The windows dressing is nice now. I fear what still lurks underneath. Neither windows 10 nor Norton utility stopped me from getting ruined by malware. And it's not like I just fell off the turnip truck. it's the APple and Linux give you more ways to inspect the unexploded suspect ordinance before you detonate it, and they are easier to find and trackdown every file that got changed. Not to mention easier unprivledged user installs and sandboxes.
But my kids think it's easier than learning linux so it's a winner! (they hated windows 8).
I'm a long term Mac and Linux (and VMS and CPM!) user. I have always detested window. I have had to use it over the years and have formed a very very vlow opinion of it.
That said this is a very positive review of Windows 10. But first let me start off with the truly awful back story. I bought a 2 year old HP quad i7 on which I planned to install a Linux, settling on Linux mint after trying out the latest distros for intuitive ease of use. But it came with Windows 8 on it, having had a factory-reset done. SO a virgin perfect copy of windows 8. Oh my god, is this a bad operating system. I had heard people complaining but I really had no idea it was so awful. Crazy tiles that feed bombard you with rubbish you didn't want. Or if you switch to desktop mode all sorts of non-intuitive pathways to reach various configuration files. And just nutty desgin decisions. I figured why not install windows 10. I had read several reviews saying that it's a great OS. it took me 7 hours of constant attention just to reach the point where I could request a copy of windows 10. You see they won't just give you a direct install like Linux or Mac, instead they make you update your machine up to the very latest pre-10 state before a little Icon appears to let you install 10. It took 167 updates to reach a state where I could then run the tool microsoft supplies to help you reach win 10 worthiness. I told me I had to install win 8.1. So I did that, then another 45 patches after that the little tool told me to do. Then the little tool suddenly got weird on my. it told me to install some file named KBXXXXXX.exe where XXX is sume number. but it didn't tell me how. I found it on the web and installed it. I re-ran the tool. Now the tool was being inscrutable. It told me the file had nor been run. SO I tried running the file again. But the executable said it had been run. went back to the tool. same story. No microsoft help or troubleshooting seemed to exist for this glithch. But what it turned out to be needed was to reboot and run update again. It turns out the executable somehow provides windows a list of further pathces it needs. But in 8.1 update only runs periodically auotmatically, not when needed. So I wasn't going to get anywhere. By forcing an update it worked. Then after that update I needed a few more patches. then Wham the windows 10 icon appears on my tool bar. I click it and fill out a request for windows 10. Nothing happens for a week. I begin to wonder. SO I click the button again and it says it will now install windows 10.
The installation was completely painless. It may have rebooted a few times but it did it mostly without persteing me with questions. Once it ran the first launch it asked my how far I wanted to pull my pants down for microsofts marketing division in a series of question. Each time I said no to something like "can we create a UUID advertising identifier to sell your ass to the world?" I gave up some service. For example, unless you share your contacts with Microsoft you don't get no Cortana.
Now to be fair, I didn't mind that too much. I though microsoft was being bold and forthright asking me these things, clearly explaining the consequences, and giving me the opt-out choices in a fairly fine grained way that was not confusing. I kudos to microsoft for not being google. (I hear the next ChromeOS has an anal probe.)
Now what about the actual user experience. Well I have to say it's lovely. they got rid of the dancing squirrel tiles and put back the start button. The tiles now are shrunk and toned down to they pop up alongside the start menu. The remaining tiles are mostly just the useful ones like things you last did. there's still some you didn't ask for of course but really it's well done to the point of being useful.
And that's the crux of the new 10. It basically just gets out of your way. By not being windows 8, it's huge step forward. It is very mac like in the attention to
the model espoused by Kahn academy and others is to flip the classroom. You still go to school. But you watch the lesson at home before class. The teacher summarizes the key points in class then they rest of the time is spent working problems from the lesson .
So it's no a no school mooc but just the opposite. You have to watch the lesson by a deadline then you get intensive application experience to find the bugs in your understanding guided by a teacher in a more one on one way.
These mooc videos will be very useful once schools try using them that way. You can imagine having multiple less masterful instructors in the classroom and the master teacher on video saved for all time and in competition with competing master presenters.
Long time windows hater here , use Macs and Linux, but I accidentally ended up with a windows PC a month ago. My first impression of it, with windows 8 installed, was oh my god, I heard that windows 8 was ten steps back, but I had no idea everyone was right. It was far less intuitive and usable than XP for example. But I decided to upgrade to windows 10 because I had read some good reviews but diehard mac users. From an out of the box factory recovery of windows 8 to an installed windows 10 was an 8 hour ordeal with a few cryptic steps one had to google along the way. It's truly mind boggling that that Microsoft can't figure out how it install a new OS in less than 8 hours. I was going as fast as one could go, the problem was not the dowload speed, that was instant comparitaively on my fast connection. It was that it had to do about 250 incremental and 2 major system updates before it would let you even request windows 10.
Anyhow once I got windows 10 installed. I was expecting to hate it. I'm sort of upset that it's so good. It basically is very close to a well configured linux mint in look and feel. The start menus is back and those crazy pants tiles with tonnes of crap you never asked for are wrangled into a small corner of the start menu and trimmed down to just the things you use a lot. The best description of the OS is that it no longer gets in your way so it's more like every other OS now.
It's still baffling in the directory layout and the mysteries of the registry. And since I have no idea how to use power shell I feel completely helpless; unistalls are inscrutable. And there's still the problem of crapware that burdens this. After you install Norton Utilities tries to trick you into installing it before revealing that it is payware. Within 2 weeks I got the entrire system trojaned with mal ware. I wasn't trying to do anything bad at all. I was trying to install an editor for minecraft mods and it came wrapped in something called openDownloader which just hosed my system. I told the windows 10 to revert it self, so I lost all my installs but at least got my computer back from the grave. What's meaningful about that ordeal is that it was the first time in my entire life that I got hit with malware. Iv'e certainly managed to download accidental malware on linux and mac, but it's always been possible for me to either inspect it enough to figure it out beofre the install or to install it under conditions (like not root or with a sandbox) that it was neutered or at the very least find every file that got touched. So malware has never been a problem for me before ever before I used a modern windows machine.
So between the 8 hour ordrdeal and the instant rooting I'm not a fan on Microsoft design. But if you are a savy windows user, have an already updated computer (not a factor reinstall) then installation will be a snap, and you will love this operating system. It's so mac and linux mint like.
I see a lot of comments here about the term "winning" being jingoist or otherwise Soviet bashing. In this day and age of infinite nuance one can see why avoiding terms that imply superiority or seem revisionist depending on your subjective interpretation is politically correct. However, At the time of the great space race, the politically correct way of looking at things was in terms of "winning". The moon was a race. Part of the race was about building booster rockets that would be useful for ICBMs. But another was the race for mindshare in world where both russia/soviet and the US thought in terms of spreading communism. As time wore on, the space race also became a way for the US and Russia to releave the tensions of the proxy wars and find a new playing field in which cooperation was possible. Skylab and the soviet counterpart were plans for which guests from each country might be welcomed on board. But each country wanted to "win" in terms of being the host not the guest. This later paved the way for more cooperation with the international space station. bit by bit, then sportsmanship in space became a route to ties, cooperations and maybe trust, which helped with the START ballistic missile limitation treaties. So there's really nothing wrong with calling this "winning" as that was the terms of this sporting conquest of space was in fact waged under. It was a race and doing it better than the other guy was the goal. THe early russian firsts with sputnik and laika and the crash landings on venus and the moon and mars showed it was a race. The US response was to do everything better rather than be the also ran in same category of accomplishment. Thus it's not unfair to chest thump that the US did achieve more successful and elaborate missions even if the Soviets got somewhere first. It was about winning. But the off earth sporting contest created some cooperative sportsmanship too. THese days people think that contests create contention and the opposite, altruistic cooperation, is the morally superior route to reliving contention but the space race showed that cooperation can emerge out of contests too.
The viking mission was only funded for about 60 days of data collection. Yet the data kept flowing for years. Somehow they managed to keep the monitoring stations open to capture and archive the data. But it just was spooled onto magnetic tapes and stored on shelves. Years later I came along as a summer student and manually loaded the tapes one by one and read them onto a disk, and was the first person ever to know and analyze the multi-year weather data sets. Virtually every other nasa mission has the same budget profile of expecting early failure so not budgeting in the costs of maintaining the mission. No doubt it's a good strategy if they feel to be able to come back and ask for more, but as my experience shows sometimes that doesn't work and you don't get the extra funding. Also in hindsight, given the unknown local boulder field where one of them landed, there was a low probability of a successful landing, so maybe someone figured 60days was the average lifespan given the high infant mortality of landers.
When the Landers eventually died no one was sure why. It was thought maybe a bad instruction put them into a state that drained batteries or something. At that time James Tillman (U.W.) asked for a small 5K budget to put together a manual that would detail the RS232-like external connectors on the lander and explain how to repower and and communicate with the device from the outside--- should anyone ever happen to go there in the future and be physically present it would be easy to turn it back on. But that was never funded.
The landers themselves were built to specs that no subsequent mission has used. In particular they were worried about sterilizing the lander of all earth living material so it was baked at such a high temperature most conventional electronic materials (at the time) would have failed. For example, The data collected was cached on tape while it was out of sight of the satellite data link to earth. But conventional ferric oxide tapes would have melted in the sterilization process, so they took a page from Hitler's scientists who pioneered magnetic recording on magnetic stainless steel tapes. Radiation damage to integrated electronics in satellites was a big problem at the time, and I'm not sure why that's different now, but in any case they decided to use core memory rather than chip memory. (hence the term "core dump" for all you youngsters). Only this wasn't your grandmother's knitting style core memory but rather the cores were applied by evaporating the magnetic material onto the wires allowing a tight radiation impervious memory mesh to be synthesized. The wind and temperature sensor had no moving parts. Instead it consisted of three temperature sensors mounted on short poles at right angles to each other, and a hot wire mounted on a pole diagonal to all three. When the wind blew the thin martian atmosphere it would blow the heated air over the temperature pickups differently and from there one can solve the inverse problem of pressure (density), temperature, and wind speed and direction.
Someone who holds patents without producing anything for the purpose of extracting royalties is not a patent troll.
Patent trolls are bad. These are people who exaggerate their patent's originality and breadth to practice extortion-- extortion usually comes in the form or asking for money at a sufficiently small sum compared to what the company might risk losing if it pressed the case.
but holding companies that don't act like patent trolls are hugely valuable. For example, consider the company PDLI. it holds biomedical patents and it's most profitable patent is "Queen et al", which is a general method for humanizing antibodies (that is what lets you take antibodies developed outside of humans and turn them into drugs suited for humans). The people who developed the patent were lab researchers who have no ability or interest in making commerical scale drugs. That's why we have drug companies. They sell the patent to PDLI for assured income, and PDLI takes on the risk of marketing the patent. Drug companies use the patented process to make and sell comerical drugs. The researcher's are not waiting around for the drug companies to have success to get paid. Thus everyone in the food chain here is doing exactly what they are good at doing. The patents would not be in such widespread use without PDLI stepping up to arbitrage the risk and make the market for the patent work.
Arbitragers are good.
Patents are valuable to society becuase comapnies will often not invest the time and effort into refining a method of production if they can't be protected from upstarts. Thus technology and science enter the commercial arena more quickly when patent protection lets a company take the investment risk. THat is, by liscencing a patent either exclusively or one with a high price their is a strong barrier to competition from upstarts. At the right level of exclusivity or price this actually enhances the use of the technology not diminishes it by exclusion. An logically, the patent holder sets the terms where they get the most money which comes from the most valued use of the invention. SO society benefits.
Thus there's a huge difference between extortionists with bad patents wield as war clubs against companies not able to defend themselves and non-producing patent holders which are hugely beneficial to society.
using the phrase non-producing patent holder as the definition of a patent troll is wildly inaccurate and misleading
just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
when thousands of unconscious drunk people, faces covered in felt marker writing wake up and stumble out of their cabs and collectively ask where the hell am I. And the cab says "Anchorage Alaska, that'll be $1500.00 for the ride." At least there will be enough cabs to take them home right there.
I use slashdotFS which is a markovian random comment generator which effectively embeds data in a stegenographic comment. The FS handles the details of creating and saving these so it's all transparent and mounts on your desktop like a regular drive. It's slow but it's capacity seems unlimited and frequently gets modded insightful
Perhaps that explains why my company bUber (pronounced Boob Urge) has bee so tied up in the courts. The concept is simple our company iPimp arranges meetings of escorts in hotel rooms. The contractors are all independent contractors, making a little money, but really they are their to give their single serving friends, we call them rides, a hand. This is completely different from normal prostitution, it's a different bussiness model even though it fills the same niche. In places where whore houses are well regulated, inspected and liscenced one can see that we don't need to meet such requirements since our service producers are independent contractors. Our rates are lower since were just making connections between people who might not be full time whores. They just notify us when they are available and we make use of what would otherwise would have been wasted time. We have surge pricing for conventions and with that can get more providers on the street when they are needed.
Recently Uber approached us because it fits well with there model. Our providers need delivery to addresses, and their drivers can act as sales agents for us as well. But they are reluctant to merge with us until we can shake these ridiculous legal problems. We certainly are not a traditional whore house.
setuid is for executables./etc/sudoers is root owned/readable but it's not executable, so there's no set UID on this file. I think the exploit you are describing is acutally another clever way to achieve a root priv escalation. using sudoers is more direct but also perhaps easier to detect.
That command is a riddle and, forgive me, but I think your explanation is wrong. the final sudo -s is not there to create an error. it's a perfectly fine command and is that to just make you root on the spot.
I think a partial explanation of what goes on is this:
the first bin just creates the text you want to shove into the sudoers file. that's clear enough.
the pass to >&3 is saying send this text to file descriptor 3. This doesn't exist..yet...but it will shortly.
So how does the file open happen? Well if you put an environment variable definition in front of a command, what happens is the command runs with that environment variable temporarily set for the duration of the command. thus
DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE=/etc/sudoers newgrp
says create the env DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE temporarily and set it to/etc/sudoers and after setting that, then execute newgrp.
newgrp doesn't actually do anything at all here other than launch a new shell which promptly quits. However it does run with setuid root privilege.
guessing here: And while it's running but not doing anything the system goes, oh, I better open a stream to the DYLD_ file because there might be some output to log there. So it opens that file pre-emptively and duly assigns it to file descriptor 3 for input.
unfortunately DYLD has inherited the permission of newgrp to do that, so its doing a file open as root too.
So we can now write to 3 and DYLD_ redirects that into the file.
at this point I'm not sure what happens exactly. One possibility is the obvious which is that what we write to file descitor 3 goes into the file represent file descriptor 3. that's simple if that's what bash would do. However the explanation of the exploit notes that DYLD_ also fails to close it's file descriptors. In which case what happens is that the newgrp command just exits but because the pipe made it a child, it's parent inherits the dangling filedesciptor. and then that's why we can write to that. I really don't know my bash well enough to say which of those might be the right mechanism here. if either.
anyone alse want to explain?
Another point I'm fuzzy on here is whether the writer needs to have the same setuid as the reader.
Reading the explanation here: https://www.sektioneins.de/en/... I don't fully understand how it works, but it seems to be more complex than what you just said. I suspect it depends on a parent process inheriting a child procesess setuid for accessing a file.
the bash script however is a riddle to me. I don't understand how the pipe to channel 3 ends up in the/etc/sudoers file. Where does channel 3 go. I suspect the newgrp statement is there to just be any process which does a setuid as root. Not sure. Again I don't understand how it's being called here.
What does the environment variable look like as this executes? which parts of it execute when? and how does the echo get to the file.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix is $8 a month, so they can afford the shows but still feel that Apple TV is overpriced.
If all you are watching is Netflix then yes you don't need apple.
If someone is decideing between a Roku or an Apple TV based on a $80 price differential then they probably can't affort to buy shows anyhow. What matters is what's the easiest thing to use , gives you great results, and doesn't become an on-line attack vector in your home because you left it unpatched. For example, I bought my Amazon firestick because it delivered the content I wanted in the most simple way and it keeps it self updated and patched. It's not over complicated. I don't want something that can do everything like a chromeStick or an XBMC home sever. I want something that does just what I want extremely well.
What's the one thing I'd like for my Amazon fire stick that it doens't have is to be able to access the apple iTunes movie store. When you can plan in advance, downloading the movie rather that real time streaming is likely to achieve much better outcomes when my connection is overloaded. Paying a $1 extra for that is usually worth it to me.
don't be evil, be greedy.
It's the Elbonian outsourcing model.
in case you were looking for the logo here it is.
https://m.imgur.com/XaIWseY
I guess I should have returned to my starting point. As good as windows 10 seems, the upgrade process is a major botch. Do I really want to get involved with products from a company that can't get that right. They should make all the managers at microsoft try to update a 2 year old unpatched windows 8 computer. How could this get overlooked!!! My machine was not slow nor was my interenet connection. And other than 1 hour I lost when their upgrade tool got squurley it took 7 hours to just make my mainstream machine wind 10 ready. It kept haveing to reboot itself. It's just really really crappy design. The windows dressing is nice now. I fear what still lurks underneath. Neither windows 10 nor Norton utility stopped me from getting ruined by malware. And it's not like I just fell off the turnip truck. it's the APple and Linux give you more ways to inspect the unexploded suspect ordinance before you detonate it, and they are easier to find and trackdown every file that got changed. Not to mention easier unprivledged user installs and sandboxes.
But my kids think it's easier than learning linux so it's a winner! (they hated windows 8).
Here's my review of windows 10.
I'm a long term Mac and Linux (and VMS and CPM!) user. I have always detested window. I have had to use it over the years and have formed a very very vlow opinion of it.
That said this is a very positive review of Windows 10.
But first let me start off with the truly awful back story. I bought a 2 year old HP quad i7 on which I planned to install a Linux, settling on Linux mint after trying out the latest distros for intuitive ease of use. But it came with Windows 8 on it, having had a factory-reset done. SO a virgin perfect copy of windows 8. Oh my god, is this a bad operating system. I had heard people complaining but I really had no idea it was so awful. Crazy tiles that feed bombard you with rubbish you didn't want. Or if you switch to desktop mode all sorts of non-intuitive pathways to reach various configuration files. And just nutty desgin decisions. I figured why not install windows 10. I had read several reviews saying that it's a great OS.
it took me 7 hours of constant attention just to reach the point where I could request a copy of windows 10. You see they won't just give you a direct install like Linux or Mac, instead they make you update your machine up to the very latest pre-10 state before a little Icon appears to let you install 10. It took 167 updates to reach a state where I could then run the tool microsoft supplies to help you reach win 10 worthiness. I told me I had to install win 8.1. So I did that, then another 45 patches after that the little tool told me to do. Then the little tool suddenly got weird on my. it told me to install some file named KBXXXXXX.exe where XXX is sume number. but it didn't tell me how. I found it on the web and installed it. I re-ran the tool. Now the tool was being inscrutable. It told me the file had nor been run. SO I tried running the file again. But the executable said it had been run. went back to the tool. same story. No microsoft help or troubleshooting seemed to exist for this glithch. But what it turned out to be needed was to reboot and run update again. It turns out the executable somehow provides windows a list of further pathces it needs. But in 8.1 update only runs periodically auotmatically, not when needed. So I wasn't going to get anywhere. By forcing an update it worked. Then after that update I needed a few more patches. then Wham the windows 10 icon appears on my tool bar. I click it and fill out a request for windows 10. Nothing happens for a week. I begin to wonder. SO I click the button again and it says it will now install windows 10.
The installation was completely painless. It may have rebooted a few times but it did it mostly without persteing me with questions. Once it ran the first launch it asked my how far I wanted to pull my pants down for microsofts marketing division in a series of question. Each time I said no to something like "can we create a UUID advertising identifier to sell your ass to the world?" I gave up some service. For example, unless you share your contacts with Microsoft you don't get no Cortana.
Now to be fair, I didn't mind that too much. I though microsoft was being bold and forthright asking me these things, clearly explaining the consequences, and giving me the opt-out choices in a fairly fine grained way that was not confusing. I kudos to microsoft for not being google. (I hear the next ChromeOS has an anal probe.)
Now what about the actual user experience. Well I have to say it's lovely. they got rid of the dancing squirrel tiles and put back the start button. The tiles now are shrunk and toned down to they pop up alongside the start menu. The remaining tiles are mostly just the useful ones like things you last did. there's still some you didn't ask for of course but really it's well done to the point of being useful.
And that's the crux of the new 10. It basically just gets out of your way. By not being windows 8, it's huge step forward. It is very mac like in the attention to
No you should power it off a treadmill and work off the 64Oz coke you drank. Then take a shower.
owes a lot to Windows 95
Which owes a lot to Windows 3. Which owes a lot to the Mac SE and its kin. Which owes a lot to Xerox PARC. Which owes a lot to Doug Engelbart and SRI.
By the time Microsoft got to a UI, it was like the shopping cart that got passed around the hobo camp.
And by the time linux got to the cart one of the wheels had a shimmy
the model espoused by Kahn academy and others is to flip the classroom. You still go to school. But you watch the lesson at home before class. The teacher summarizes the key points in class then they rest of the time is spent working problems from the lesson .
So it's no a no school mooc but just the opposite. You have to watch the lesson by a deadline then you get intensive application experience to find the bugs in your understanding guided by a teacher in a more one on one way.
These mooc videos will be very useful once schools try using them that way. You can imagine having multiple less masterful instructors in the classroom and the master teacher on video saved for all time and in competition with competing master presenters.
Long time windows hater here , use Macs and Linux, but I accidentally ended up with a windows PC a month ago. My first impression of it, with windows 8 installed, was oh my god, I heard that windows 8 was ten steps back, but I had no idea everyone was right. It was far less intuitive and usable than XP for example. But I decided to upgrade to windows 10 because I had read some good reviews but diehard mac users. From an out of the box factory recovery of windows 8 to an installed windows 10 was an 8 hour ordeal with a few cryptic steps one had to google along the way. It's truly mind boggling that that Microsoft can't figure out how it install a new OS in less than 8 hours. I was going as fast as one could go, the problem was not the dowload speed, that was instant comparitaively on my fast connection. It was that it had to do about 250 incremental and 2 major system updates before it would let you even request windows 10.
Anyhow once I got windows 10 installed. I was expecting to hate it. I'm sort of upset that it's so good. It basically is very close to a well configured linux mint in look and feel. The start menus is back and those crazy pants tiles with tonnes of crap you never asked for are wrangled into a small corner of the start menu and trimmed down to just the things you use a lot. The best description of the OS is that it no longer gets in your way so it's more like every other OS now.
It's still baffling in the directory layout and the mysteries of the registry. And since I have no idea how to use power shell I feel completely helpless; unistalls are inscrutable. And there's still the problem of crapware that burdens this. After you install Norton Utilities tries to trick you into installing it before revealing that it is payware. Within 2 weeks I got the entrire system trojaned with mal ware. I wasn't trying to do anything bad at all. I was trying to install an editor for minecraft mods and it came wrapped in something called openDownloader which just hosed my system. I told the windows 10 to revert it self, so I lost all my installs but at least got my computer back from the grave. What's meaningful about that ordeal is that it was the first time in my entire life that I got hit with malware. Iv'e certainly managed to download accidental malware on linux and mac, but it's always been possible for me to either inspect it enough to figure it out beofre the install or to install it under conditions (like not root or with a sandbox) that it was neutered or at the very least find every file that got touched. So malware has never been a problem for me before ever before I used a modern windows machine.
So between the 8 hour ordrdeal and the instant rooting I'm not a fan on Microsoft design. But if you are a savy windows user, have an already updated computer (not a factor reinstall) then installation will be a snap, and you will love this operating system. It's so mac and linux mint like.
I see a lot of comments here about the term "winning" being jingoist or otherwise Soviet bashing. In this day and age of infinite nuance one can see why avoiding terms that imply superiority or seem revisionist depending on your subjective interpretation is politically correct. However, At the time of the great space race, the politically correct way of looking at things was in terms of "winning". The moon was a race. Part of the race was about building booster rockets that would be useful for ICBMs. But another was the race for mindshare in world where both russia/soviet and the US thought in terms of spreading communism. As time wore on, the space race also became a way for the US and Russia to releave the tensions of the proxy wars and find a new playing field in which cooperation was possible. Skylab and the soviet counterpart were plans for which guests from each country might be welcomed on board. But each country wanted to "win" in terms of being the host not the guest. This later paved the way for more cooperation with the international space station. bit by bit, then sportsmanship in space became a route to ties, cooperations and maybe trust, which helped with the START ballistic missile limitation treaties. So there's really nothing wrong with calling this "winning" as that was the terms of this sporting conquest of space was in fact waged under. It was a race and doing it better than the other guy was the goal. THe early russian firsts with sputnik and laika and the crash landings on venus and the moon and mars showed it was a race. The US response was to do everything better rather than be the also ran in same category of accomplishment. Thus it's not unfair to chest thump that the US did achieve more successful and elaborate missions even if the Soviets got somewhere first. It was about winning. But the off earth sporting contest created some cooperative sportsmanship too. THese days people think that contests create contention and the opposite, altruistic cooperation, is the morally superior route to reliving contention but the space race showed that cooperation can emerge out of contests too.
The viking mission was only funded for about 60 days of data collection. Yet the data kept flowing for years. Somehow they managed to keep the monitoring stations open to capture and archive the data. But it just was spooled onto magnetic tapes and stored on shelves. Years later I came along as a summer student and manually loaded the tapes one by one and read them onto a disk, and was the first person ever to know and analyze the multi-year weather data sets. Virtually every other nasa mission has the same budget profile of expecting early failure so not budgeting in the costs of maintaining the mission. No doubt it's a good strategy if they feel to be able to come back and ask for more, but as my experience shows sometimes that doesn't work and you don't get the extra funding. Also in hindsight, given the unknown local boulder field where one of them landed, there was a low probability of a successful landing, so maybe someone figured 60days was the average lifespan given the high infant mortality of landers.
When the Landers eventually died no one was sure why. It was thought maybe a bad instruction put them into a state that drained batteries or something. At that time James Tillman (U.W.) asked for a small 5K budget to put together a manual that would detail the RS232-like external connectors on the lander and explain how to repower and and communicate with the device from the outside--- should anyone ever happen to go there in the future and be physically present it would be easy to turn it back on. But that was never funded.
The landers themselves were built to specs that no subsequent mission has used. In particular they were worried about sterilizing the lander of all earth living material so it was baked at such a high temperature most conventional electronic materials (at the time) would have failed. For example, The data collected was cached on tape while it was out of sight of the satellite data link to earth. But conventional ferric oxide tapes would have melted in the sterilization process, so they took a page from Hitler's scientists who pioneered magnetic recording on magnetic stainless steel tapes. Radiation damage to integrated electronics in satellites was a big problem at the time, and I'm not sure why that's different now, but in any case they decided to use core memory rather than chip memory. (hence the term "core dump" for all you youngsters). Only this wasn't your grandmother's knitting style core memory but rather the cores were applied by evaporating the magnetic material onto the wires allowing a tight radiation impervious memory mesh to be synthesized. The wind and temperature sensor had no moving parts. Instead it consisted of three temperature sensors mounted on short poles at right angles to each other, and a hot wire mounted on a pole diagonal to all three. When the wind blew the thin martian atmosphere it would blow the heated air over the temperature pickups differently and from there one can solve the inverse problem of pressure (density), temperature, and wind speed and direction.
Someone who holds patents without producing anything for the purpose of extracting royalties is not a patent troll.
Patent trolls are bad. These are people who exaggerate their patent's originality and breadth to practice extortion-- extortion usually comes in the form or asking for money at a sufficiently small sum compared to what the company might risk losing if it pressed the case.
but holding companies that don't act like patent trolls are hugely valuable. For example, consider the company PDLI. it holds biomedical patents and it's most profitable patent is "Queen et al", which is a general method for humanizing antibodies (that is what lets you take antibodies developed outside of humans and turn them into drugs suited for humans). The people who developed the patent were lab researchers who have no ability or interest in making commerical scale drugs. That's why we have drug companies. They sell the patent to PDLI for assured income, and PDLI takes on the risk of marketing the patent. Drug companies use the patented process to make and sell comerical drugs. The researcher's are not waiting around for the drug companies to have success to get paid. Thus everyone in the food chain here is doing exactly what they are good at doing. The patents would not be in such widespread use without PDLI stepping up to arbitrage the risk and make the market for the patent work.
Arbitragers are good.
Patents are valuable to society becuase comapnies will often not invest the time and effort into refining a method of production if they can't be protected from upstarts. Thus technology and science enter the commercial arena more quickly when patent protection lets a company take the investment risk. THat is, by liscencing a patent either exclusively or one with a high price their is a strong barrier to competition from upstarts. At the right level of exclusivity or price this actually enhances the use of the technology not diminishes it by exclusion. An logically, the patent holder sets the terms where they get the most money which comes from the most valued use of the invention. SO society benefits.
Thus there's a huge difference between extortionists with bad patents wield as war clubs against companies not able to defend themselves and non-producing patent holders which are hugely beneficial to society.
using the phrase non-producing patent holder as the definition of a patent troll is wildly inaccurate and misleading
just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
when thousands of unconscious drunk people, faces covered in felt marker writing wake up and stumble out of their cabs and collectively ask where the hell am I. And the cab says "Anchorage Alaska, that'll be $1500.00 for the ride."
At least there will be enough cabs to take them home right there.
Start with land mines.
Good god no! that's the plot device for the movie screamers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
takes on a whole new meaning.
Autonomous intelligent self propelled evolving landmines turn on humans. 'nuff said.
another way is to convert it to jpeg and store it in facebook.
I use slashdotFS which is a markovian random comment generator which effectively embeds data in a stegenographic comment. The FS handles the details of creating and saving these so it's all transparent and mounts on your desktop like a regular drive. It's slow but it's capacity seems unlimited and frequently gets modded insightful
Perhaps that explains why my company bUber (pronounced Boob Urge) has bee so tied up in the courts. The concept is simple our company iPimp arranges meetings of escorts in hotel rooms. The contractors are all independent contractors, making a little money, but really they are their to give their single serving friends, we call them rides, a hand. This is completely different from normal prostitution, it's a different bussiness model even though it fills the same niche. In places where whore houses are well regulated, inspected and liscenced one can see that we don't need to meet such requirements since our service producers are independent contractors. Our rates are lower since were just making connections between people who might not be full time whores. They just notify us when they are available and we make use of what would otherwise would have been wasted time. We have surge pricing for conventions and with that can get more providers on the street when they are needed.
Recently Uber approached us because it fits well with there model. Our providers need delivery to addresses, and their drivers can act as sales agents for us as well. But they are reluctant to merge with us until we can shake these ridiculous legal problems. We certainly are not a traditional whore house.
setuid is for executables. /etc/sudoers is root owned/readable but it's not executable, so there's no set UID on this file. I think the exploit you are describing is acutally another clever way to achieve a root priv escalation. using sudoers is more direct but also perhaps easier to detect.
That command is a riddle and, forgive me, but I think your explanation is wrong.
the final sudo -s is not there to create an error. it's a perfectly fine command and is that to just make you root on the spot.
I think a partial explanation of what goes on is this:
the first bin just creates the text you want to shove into the sudoers file. that's clear enough.
the pass to >&3 is saying send this text to file descriptor 3. This doesn't exist..yet...but it will shortly.
So how does the file open happen? Well if you put an environment variable definition in front of a command, what happens is the command runs with that environment variable temporarily set for the duration of the command. thus
DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE=/etc/sudoers newgrp
says create the env DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE temporarily and set it to /etc/sudoers and after setting that, then execute newgrp.
newgrp doesn't actually do anything at all here other than launch a new shell which promptly quits. However it does run with setuid root privilege.
guessing here: And while it's running but not doing anything the system goes, oh, I better open a stream to the DYLD_ file because there might be some output to log there. So it opens that file pre-emptively and duly assigns it to file descriptor 3 for input.
unfortunately DYLD has inherited the permission of newgrp to do that, so its doing a file open as root too.
So we can now write to 3 and DYLD_ redirects that into the file.
at this point I'm not sure what happens exactly. One possibility is the obvious which is that what we write to file descitor 3 goes into the file represent file descriptor 3. that's simple if that's what bash would do. However the explanation of the exploit notes that DYLD_ also fails to close it's file descriptors. In which case what happens is that the newgrp command just exits but because the pipe made it a child, it's parent inherits the dangling filedesciptor. and then that's why we can write to that. I really don't know my bash well enough to say which of those might be the right mechanism here. if either.
anyone alse want to explain?
Another point I'm fuzzy on here is whether the writer needs to have the same setuid as the reader.
Reading the explanation here: https://www.sektioneins.de/en/...
I don't fully understand how it works, but it seems to be more complex than what you just said. I suspect it depends on a parent process inheriting a child procesess setuid for accessing a file.
the bash script however is a riddle to me. I don't understand how the pipe to channel 3 ends up in the /etc/sudoers file. Where does channel 3 go. I suspect the newgrp statement is there to just be any process which does a setuid as root. Not sure. Again I don't understand how it's being called here.
What does the environment variable look like as this executes? which parts of it execute when? and how does the echo get to the file.
the final sudo -s I understand.
can someone break this down for me?