I usually have sleep mode enabled after 60 minutes of inactivity, but I occasionally need to keep the machine up because I'm downloading something.
Ideally I'd like to recompile the app with code inserted to disable sleep mode while it's running, or register some kind of user activity. Anyone know how this is accomplished on Vista? Another option would be to write another app that monitors network activity, and disables sleep mode when it sees activity over a certain threshold.
Or instead of getting ripped off by buying ink after you run out, or it dries up you could just buy a laser printer instead. Toner is inexpensive per page, doesn't dry out, and laser printers produce excellent quality.
People think they need color for some reason. Why I'm not exactly sure. I bought a used HP LaserJet 4 several years ago off ebay, and have used the same toner cartridge since I bought it. The old HP laserjets are tanks that can spit 20,000 pages without a hitch. The components are all replaceable, and really quite easy to change the pickup rollers, etc.
It's interesting that people start talking about Microsoft right away in reaction to this hole, as if the only thing that matters here is how this flaw relates to Microsoft.
What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model.
I know I'm spinning here, but I don't find it much of a stretch to interpret this as good PR for the Linux world -- they find problems, they fix them.
Great.. I guess I'd rather have the Linux World where there aren't any serious problems to begin with. The larger picture here is that computer security kinda sucks, not that Microsoft is better/worse at it than Linux is. I'm so sad and tired of trying to get laptops running linux reliably with wi-fi, I barely even bother messing with it anymore
Huh. I've had very good luck recently with Ubuntu. The built in wifi in my laptop worked out of the box with Ubuntu, and two other cards I own worked as well.
It hasn't always been like this of course. A couple years ago WiFi support was extremely lacking.
and when parts of the project were moved to Linux servers, the person literally did not understand why upper & lower case mixed reference tags were failing. And as scary as that sounds it very common.
Scary? Not really. One platform has different quirks than another. The linux world is by and large case sensitive, so people have learned to instinctively think about case. The Windows world isn't, so people are less inclined to think about case. It only takes about a minute to explain the case sensitive issue.
No, what's really scary is people who are just inherently bad programmers. Until you've come across someone like that, you have little appreciation for how bad it can get. Miss identifying a case sensitivity issue is really nothing compared to reading someones complete mess and constantly wondering "why did he do it like that?", or "wow, that's one of the biggest security holes I've ever seen." The difference is the guy who doesn't think about case sensitivity can be re-trained in minutes. Bad programmers are just inherently bad programmers and there's little hope for them.
If you think this article is stupid and an insult to your technical prowess, go to the firehose and vote it down.
Not everyone on Slashdot is at the same level as everyone else. While I've known all the stuff in the article for 10-12 years, I'm certain there's a significant number of people here that have no idea about process forking, or what the init process is.
All this to say, a college degree will at least indicate that the candidate is not a bum-off-the-street building a CV on fabrications, trickery and subterfuge.
I fail to see how a college degree precludes (or even lowers the chances of) someone being exactly this. I find it interesting that you found out the guy was a loser from the interview, and not from a piece of paper issued by an authority.
my question is, what's the difference between openwrt and dd-wrt?
OpenWRT is the only WRT distribution I've found that doesn't try to provide a single static firmware, but rather takes the approach of desktop/server linux distribution and provides package management. I'm not terribly familiar with DD-WRT, but I don't believe it takes the package management approach.
Personally I believe the package management approach is a better way to go. Don't like the version of -package- OpenWRT has provided? Go find a different one. Want some new feature they aren't providing? Go create one yourself. The UI may not be as polished, but I think the power you gain with package mangement is worth the added pain of having to configure the advanced stuff via command-line and editing files. (The less advanced stuff is all configurable via web interface).
You just answered your own question. Re-booting the system will cause the change to take effect, so W2K-Pro machines that were patched and shut down over the weekend should be OK come Monday. W2K Servers on the other hand which don't get rebooted all that often will need to be "prodded" in order for the update to take effect, if you haven't rebooted them since applying the update.
I think the issue here is that people are expecting the patch to change the timezone right away when they apply it, since we're after March 11th 2am. So if you apply the patch AFTER March 11th, you windows to reboot, or somehow cause it to reload your timezone information.
I have a hard time believing that the patch didn't work as advertised. I think I remember testing it by setting my clock ahead and watching if the time went from 1:59 am to 3:00am.
The Microsoft KB articles said that was exactally what you would have to do with 2000 and NT4. Everyone seemed to think that we were changing the *time* early this morning. Well, we weren't, we changed *timezones*. On 2K and NT4 updating the timezone information only ocurrs when the timzone is changed.
Didn't anybody know what they were doing?
I think you misunderstand what the patch is supposed to do. It's supposed to update when windows changes from *ST to *DT where * is Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, etc. The GP is complaining that this didn't happen.
I'm not sure why the GP had problems though. I just booted my Win2K laptop which had the patch applied, and it worked just fine (Even made sure I didn't login to the domain and have it reset my time)
Presuming she doesn't go to jail or a mental institution, you couldn't have found somewhere for her to work at NASA, given how big NASA is?
Why? I wasn't aware there were really any facts in dispute here. She's clearly totally bonkers, and being an Astronaut is not a job where being bonkers is welcome. If she were a hollywood actress on the other hand, it'd be an asset. Especially since it's your training program that caused the breakdown in the first place, most likely?
Err.. what? I know it's fun to just make up theories without a shred of evidence to support them. But it's not something that often leads to the truth. I think we can safetly ignore your supposition.
You and I would probably agree that the crusade to require passive restraints in cars (basically, seatbelts that buckle you in involuntarily) is Nannie State Fascism.
The thing you've completely missed is that a "passive restraint" device can also be an airbag.
Car makers were required to include a "passive restraint" device in cars many years ago. They could either do the idiotic seatbelt thing, or airbags. Many chose the dumb seatbelt thing because it was cheaper. Later on the law was changed and airbags were required. So it's not a "nannie state" anything, the dumb seatbelt thing was because the automakers lobbied congress for a cheaper alternative to airbags, and got it for several years. But we probably disagree as to the speed limit (I think people who think they can drive safely at 90 MPH are fooling themselves, but that's not a popular opinion).
90 MPH is probbably higher than the freeways were designed to be safe at, but the 55 MPH limit is simply stupid. The 55 MPH limit was introduced to save gasoline during the energy crisis, it didn't have anything to do with safety.
I do think it's pretty interesting that both the examples you picked had little to do with safety, and everything to do with politics.
Any operating system (including previous versions of Windows) caches data in unused areas of RAM until those areas are needed for currently running applications.
That's true. But not all operating systems (including previous versions of Windows) are smart about what they cache. Vista will look at your usage and start pre-loading pages into memory that you frequently use. If you login and start up firefox, Vista will starts caching those pages in memory as soon as you boot.
You might get an MTBF of say, two years, when the reality is that the distribution has a big spike at one month, and the rest of the failures forming a wide bell curve centered at say, five years.
Well, the article actually says that drives don't have a spike of failures at the beginning. It also says failure rates increase with time. So you're right that MTBF shouldn't be taken for a single drive, since the failure rate at 5 years is going to be much higher than at one.
The other thing that the article claims is that the stated MTBF is simply just wrong. It mentioned a stated MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, and an observed MTBF of 300,000 hours. That's pretty bad. It's also quite interesting that the "enterprise" level drives aren't any better than the consumer level drives.
How lazy do you have to be to need the pre-assembled mentos & coke? honestly?
Well, I'm sure the kit has a nozzle that reduces the size of the opening so the fountain can reach greater heights. It also has a release mechanism with a string atatched so you don't have to risk diet coke spraying all over you.
It's not laziness, it's just a better product than most people could put together themselves.
I do IT consulting for small businesses, and I can tell you that bad AV software has cost the companies I work for thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and in troubleshooting costs.
One particular product that got installed by another consultant was BitDefender. It caused at least 3 distinct un-related problems at two different sights that I fixed by choosing a different AV product. I don't blame the other consultant, since it's difficult to know which AV software is going to break something. I DO blame the AV vendors for producing buggy software that winds up costing companies a lot of money.
One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."
That's not exactly ideal academic objectivity.
This is a fluff piece about the lab closing, not an objective analysis of the lab in the eyes of the scientific community. You can't exactly take one quote from one editor and come to the conclusion that no one seriously looks at the work they do.
I'm pretty sure I went to a talk by someone from this lab maybe 10-12 years ago at the University of MN. It was attended by many scientists, and they didn't just simply dismiss them because they had kooky ideas (quantum mechanics is pretty kooky, but we know it's real), they dismissed them from the results the lab produced. It was quite a while ago, but one of the better criticisms I remember that as they got better equipment, the results they were looking for got smaller and smaller. That's an indication of experimental error, not of a real phenomenon.
So I don't find it surprising that some people are willing to make dismissive statements about the work of the lab. They haven't paid attention to the quite valid scientific criticism they've received over the years, so it's probbably frustating that anyone still takes them seriously. The Princeton ESP lab is fueled by our cultures love for "the underdog", a distrust of authority, and an inability of some people to understand how science works.
It's all nice to talk about the legit uses of Tor, but that doesn't mean you get to just gloss over the problems it creates.
The question is really, how much is legit use, and how much is something most people would have a problem with? (i.e. child porn, harassment, etc). I hear a lot of people talking about fighting oppressive governments, but very little of what the majority of Tor is used for. Talking about your hate for child porn is nice and all, but it doesn't really address the problem or how big it is. I really have little idea what the majority of Tor use is, but your post doesn't have any indication you do either.
I would say, though, that those problems already exist anyway. There are so many compromised machines out there, that Bad Guys can do their Bad Things indirectly anyway, without ever being held accountable.
That's assuming that the Bad Guys all have an equal amount of resources and skills. There's a lot of Bad Guys that couldn't compromise a host if they tried, but can still cause problems for others when given access to an anonymous network. The problems on EFNet IRC that another poster mentioned and I alluded to are a prime example of this.
I'm curious about the problems that Tor creates. I was talking with someone who runs a Tor node, and he was dismayed that he was banned from most EFNet IRC servers. My guess was that people had abused Tor and used it to escape bans on IRC. It seemed perfectly reasonable to ban all Tor nodes if it created those problems.
So my question is, what problems does Tor create for us all? I'm all for people being able to escape governments that want to control what they do.. but I can't imagine that this doesn't create other problems, so of which might not be immediately apparent.
I'd be more interested to see the power consumption differences between an off she shelf Best Buy computer of 5-10 years ago compared to one of today.
It's no secret that power consumption of PCs has gone up steadily. I'll bet you hard money that a Best Buy special made today is going to consume more power than a Best Buy special of 5 years ago. You might save a couple watts by having on-board LAN, but it's going to be more than taken up by higher electrical usage of the processor. As a real world comparison, I happened to plug in my old Circa 1996 PPro 200 to a power meter about a week ago. It ate up about 60-70 watts at idle. My Circa 2002 AMD XP2000+ machine with onboard sound, and LAN eats up about 110-120 watts at idle.
Just because the victims are scientologists doesn't mean this guy didn't do some ugly crap that we don't know about.
That's true. But that's also why we have open courts of law where the facts are a matter of evidence. So far I haven't heard anything about this guy doing anything worthy of being illegal. Since it's all a matter of public record, I have to think I'm getting the whole story. He sounds a little nutty, but then you'd have to be a little nutty to bother with the tiny influence Scientology has on the world.
On the other hand we have a group of people well known for using the law and the courts to harass people. As far as "the government" not being a fan of Scientology, well I don't know anything about that. I do know that government prosecutors have a long history of convicting people that haven't done anything wrong in order to advance their careers, or because simply have a missguided sense of justice. There's really no need to resort to making up unseen behaviour by this guy to explain his conviction. I guess I prefer to go by what's known to arrive at conclusions instead of making stuff up.
I take it that means there's no separate transport for the AGP, so the PCI bus gets held up when you're doing anything graphically intense?
I'm not really sure exactly, but I do remember having problems with audio skipping on an old non-AGP computer, and having other people explain this was a problem with the bus being saturated.
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I usually have sleep mode enabled after 60 minutes of inactivity, but I occasionally need to keep the machine up because I'm downloading something.
Ideally I'd like to recompile the app with code inserted to disable sleep mode while it's running, or register some kind of user activity. Anyone know how this is accomplished on Vista? Another option would be to write another app that monitors network activity, and disables sleep mode when it sees activity over a certain threshold.
Or instead of getting ripped off by buying ink after you run out, or it dries up you could just buy a laser printer instead. Toner is inexpensive per page, doesn't dry out, and laser printers produce excellent quality.
People think they need color for some reason. Why I'm not exactly sure. I bought a used HP LaserJet 4 several years ago off ebay, and have used the same toner cartridge since I bought it. The old HP laserjets are tanks that can spit 20,000 pages without a hitch. The components are all replaceable, and really quite easy to change the pickup rollers, etc.
It's interesting that people start talking about Microsoft right away in reaction to this hole, as if the only thing that matters here is how this flaw relates to Microsoft.
What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model.
I know I'm spinning here, but I don't find it much of a stretch to interpret this as good PR for the Linux world -- they find problems, they fix them.
Great.. I guess I'd rather have the Linux World where there aren't any serious problems to begin with. The larger picture here is that computer security kinda sucks, not that Microsoft is better/worse at it than Linux is.
I'm so sad and tired of trying to get laptops running linux reliably with wi-fi, I barely even bother messing with it anymore
Huh. I've had very good luck recently with Ubuntu. The built in wifi in my laptop worked out of the box with Ubuntu, and two other cards I own worked as well.
It hasn't always been like this of course. A couple years ago WiFi support was extremely lacking.
and when parts of the project were moved to Linux servers, the person literally did not understand why upper & lower case mixed reference tags were failing. And as scary as that sounds it very common.
Scary? Not really. One platform has different quirks than another. The linux world is by and large case sensitive, so people have learned to instinctively think about case. The Windows world isn't, so people are less inclined to think about case. It only takes about a minute to explain the case sensitive issue.
No, what's really scary is people who are just inherently bad programmers. Until you've come across someone like that, you have little appreciation for how bad it can get. Miss identifying a case sensitivity issue is really nothing compared to reading someones complete mess and constantly wondering "why did he do it like that?", or "wow, that's one of the biggest security holes I've ever seen." The difference is the guy who doesn't think about case sensitivity can be re-trained in minutes. Bad programmers are just inherently bad programmers and there's little hope for them.
If you think this article is stupid and an insult to your technical prowess, go to the firehose and vote it down.
Not everyone on Slashdot is at the same level as everyone else. While I've known all the stuff in the article for 10-12 years, I'm certain there's a significant number of people here that have no idea about process forking, or what the init process is.
All this to say, a college degree will at least indicate that the candidate is not a bum-off-the-street building a CV on fabrications, trickery and subterfuge.
I fail to see how a college degree precludes (or even lowers the chances of) someone being exactly this. I find it interesting that you found out the guy was a loser from the interview, and not from a piece of paper issued by an authority.
my question is, what's the difference between openwrt and dd-wrt?
OpenWRT is the only WRT distribution I've found that doesn't try to provide a single static firmware, but rather takes the approach of desktop/server linux distribution and provides package management. I'm not terribly familiar with DD-WRT, but I don't believe it takes the package management approach.
Personally I believe the package management approach is a better way to go. Don't like the version of -package- OpenWRT has provided? Go find a different one. Want some new feature they aren't providing? Go create one yourself. The UI may not be as polished, but I think the power you gain with package mangement is worth the added pain of having to configure the advanced stuff via command-line and editing files. (The less advanced stuff is all configurable via web interface).
You just answered your own question. Re-booting the system will cause the change to take effect, so W2K-Pro machines that were patched and shut down over the weekend should be OK come Monday. W2K Servers on the other hand which don't get rebooted all that often will need to be "prodded" in order for the update to take effect, if you haven't rebooted them since applying the update.
I think the issue here is that people are expecting the patch to change the timezone right away when they apply it, since we're after March 11th 2am. So if you apply the patch AFTER March 11th, you windows to reboot, or somehow cause it to reload your timezone information.
I have a hard time believing that the patch didn't work as advertised. I think I remember testing it by setting my clock ahead and watching if the time went from 1:59 am to 3:00am.
The Microsoft KB articles said that was exactally what you would have to do with 2000 and NT4. Everyone seemed to think that we were changing the *time* early this morning. Well, we weren't, we changed *timezones*. On 2K and NT4 updating the timezone information only ocurrs when the timzone is changed.
Didn't anybody know what they were doing?
I think you misunderstand what the patch is supposed to do. It's supposed to update when windows changes from *ST to *DT where * is Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, etc. The GP is complaining that this didn't happen.
I'm not sure why the GP had problems though. I just booted my Win2K laptop which had the patch applied, and it worked just fine (Even made sure I didn't login to the domain and have it reset my time)
Presuming she doesn't go to jail or a mental institution, you couldn't have found somewhere for her to work at NASA, given how big NASA is?
Why? I wasn't aware there were really any facts in dispute here. She's clearly totally bonkers, and being an Astronaut is not a job where being bonkers is welcome. If she were a hollywood actress on the other hand, it'd be an asset.
Especially since it's your training program that caused the breakdown in the first place, most likely?
Err.. what? I know it's fun to just make up theories without a shred of evidence to support them. But it's not something that often leads to the truth. I think we can safetly ignore your supposition.
You and I would probably agree that the crusade to require passive restraints in cars (basically, seatbelts that buckle you in involuntarily) is Nannie State Fascism.
The thing you've completely missed is that a "passive restraint" device can also be an airbag.
Car makers were required to include a "passive restraint" device in cars many years ago. They could either do the idiotic seatbelt thing, or airbags. Many chose the dumb seatbelt thing because it was cheaper. Later on the law was changed and airbags were required. So it's not a "nannie state" anything, the dumb seatbelt thing was because the automakers lobbied congress for a cheaper alternative to airbags, and got it for several years.
But we probably disagree as to the speed limit (I think people who think they can drive safely at 90 MPH are fooling themselves, but that's not a popular opinion).
90 MPH is probbably higher than the freeways were designed to be safe at, but the 55 MPH limit is simply stupid. The 55 MPH limit was introduced to save gasoline during the energy crisis, it didn't have anything to do with safety.
I do think it's pretty interesting that both the examples you picked had little to do with safety, and everything to do with politics.
Thank you for you input. I will consider it carefully.
Love Vellmont.
Any operating system (including previous versions of Windows) caches data in unused areas of RAM until those areas are needed for currently running applications.
That's true. But not all operating systems (including previous versions of Windows) are smart about what they cache. Vista will look at your usage and start pre-loading pages into memory that you frequently use. If you login and start up firefox, Vista will starts caching those pages in memory as soon as you boot.
You might get an MTBF of say, two years, when the reality is that the distribution has a big spike at one month, and the rest of the failures forming a wide bell curve centered at say, five years.
Well, the article actually says that drives don't have a spike of failures at the beginning. It also says failure rates increase with time. So you're right that MTBF shouldn't be taken for a single drive, since the failure rate at 5 years is going to be much higher than at one.
The other thing that the article claims is that the stated MTBF is simply just wrong. It mentioned a stated MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, and an observed MTBF of 300,000 hours. That's pretty bad. It's also quite interesting that the "enterprise" level drives aren't any better than the consumer level drives.
How lazy do you have to be to need the pre-assembled mentos & coke? honestly?
Well, I'm sure the kit has a nozzle that reduces the size of the opening so the fountain can reach greater heights. It also has a release mechanism with a string atatched so you don't have to risk diet coke spraying all over you.
It's not laziness, it's just a better product than most people could put together themselves.
Why do you need one? Are you planning on making a dup detector or a dup submitter?
How about a real kill file rather than modding stuff down? I can't be the only one that doesn't even want to see AC replies under a certain level.
I do IT consulting for small businesses, and I can tell you that bad AV software has cost the companies I work for thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and in troubleshooting costs.
One particular product that got installed by another consultant was BitDefender. It caused at least 3 distinct un-related problems at two different sights that I fixed by choosing a different AV product. I don't blame the other consultant, since it's difficult to know which AV software is going to break something. I DO blame the AV vendors for producing buggy software that winds up costing companies a lot of money.
One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."
That's not exactly ideal academic objectivity.
This is a fluff piece about the lab closing, not an objective analysis of the lab in the eyes of the scientific community. You can't exactly take one quote from one editor and come to the conclusion that no one seriously looks at the work they do.
I'm pretty sure I went to a talk by someone from this lab maybe 10-12 years ago at the University of MN. It was attended by many scientists, and they didn't just simply dismiss them because they had kooky ideas (quantum mechanics is pretty kooky, but we know it's real), they dismissed them from the results the lab produced. It was quite a while ago, but one of the better criticisms I remember that as they got better equipment, the results they were looking for got smaller and smaller. That's an indication of experimental error, not of a real phenomenon.
So I don't find it surprising that some people are willing to make dismissive statements about the work of the lab. They haven't paid attention to the quite valid scientific criticism they've received over the years, so it's probbably frustating that anyone still takes them seriously. The Princeton ESP lab is fueled by our cultures love for "the underdog", a distrust of authority, and an inability of some people to understand how science works.
It's all nice to talk about the legit uses of Tor, but that doesn't mean you get to just gloss over the problems it creates.
The question is really, how much is legit use, and how much is something most people would have a problem with? (i.e. child porn, harassment, etc). I hear a lot of people talking about fighting oppressive governments, but very little of what the majority of Tor is used for. Talking about your hate for child porn is nice and all, but it doesn't really address the problem or how big it is. I really have little idea what the majority of Tor use is, but your post doesn't have any indication you do either.
I would say, though, that those problems already exist anyway. There are so many compromised machines out there, that Bad Guys can do their Bad Things indirectly anyway, without ever being held accountable.
That's assuming that the Bad Guys all have an equal amount of resources and skills. There's a lot of Bad Guys that couldn't compromise a host if they tried, but can still cause problems for others when given access to an anonymous network. The problems on EFNet IRC that another poster mentioned and I alluded to are a prime example of this.
I'm curious about the problems that Tor creates. I was talking with someone who runs a Tor node, and he was dismayed that he was banned from most EFNet IRC servers. My guess was that people had abused Tor and used it to escape bans on IRC. It seemed perfectly reasonable to ban all Tor nodes if it created those problems.
So my question is, what problems does Tor create for us all? I'm all for people being able to escape governments that want to control what they do.. but I can't imagine that this doesn't create other problems, so of which might not be immediately apparent.
I'd be more interested to see the power consumption differences between an off she shelf Best Buy computer of 5-10 years ago compared to one of today.
It's no secret that power consumption of PCs has gone up steadily. I'll bet you hard money that a Best Buy special made today is going to consume more power than a Best Buy special of 5 years ago. You might save a couple watts by having on-board LAN, but it's going to be more than taken up by higher electrical usage of the processor. As a real world comparison, I happened to plug in my old Circa 1996 PPro 200 to a power meter about a week ago. It ate up about 60-70 watts at idle. My Circa 2002 AMD XP2000+ machine with onboard sound, and LAN eats up about 110-120 watts at idle.
Just because the victims are scientologists doesn't mean this guy didn't do some ugly crap that we don't know about.
That's true. But that's also why we have open courts of law where the facts are a matter of evidence. So far I haven't heard anything about this guy doing anything worthy of being illegal. Since it's all a matter of public record, I have to think I'm getting the whole story. He sounds a little nutty, but then you'd have to be a little nutty to bother with the tiny influence Scientology has on the world.
On the other hand we have a group of people well known for using the law and the courts to harass people. As far as "the government" not being a fan of Scientology, well I don't know anything about that. I do know that government prosecutors have a long history of convicting people that haven't done anything wrong in order to advance their careers, or because simply have a missguided sense of justice. There's really no need to resort to making up unseen behaviour by this guy to explain his conviction. I guess I prefer to go by what's known to arrive at conclusions instead of making stuff up.
including a clarification from Allchin on that 'I'd buy a Mac' quote.
Where I live we don't call that clarification, we call that spin.
I take it that means there's no separate transport for the AGP, so the PCI bus gets held up when you're doing anything graphically intense?
I'm not really sure exactly, but I do remember having problems with audio skipping on an old non-AGP computer, and having other people explain this was a problem with the bus being saturated.