...the question that I have is will it work with existing VoIP providers like Vonage, VoicePulse & Packet 8? If not, then wouldn't I need to have some sort of SIP gateway sitting somewhere in order to use this thing? Sounds great if you're a corporation who could afford that kind of thing. But if you're a corporation, are you really going to expose your SIP gateway to the Internet?
I'm not a Shakespearian scholar, but I did very much enjoy Henry V. I don't remember any scenes where the Hostess interacted with the King of France. I can think of three possibilities for the descrepancy:
I am forgetting a scene
I am misreading the graph
This thing isn't very accurate
Anyone else got any input? How should I be reading this?
I recently had a motherboard die in my 2 year old computer - a 1GHZ P3. So, off I go to the computer store trying to buy a new mobo. Sorry, they don't make them anymore.
Ok, so I try to find out what it would take to buy a cheap replacement that they do have. This is great except for the replacement mobo requires a new CPU since the old one won't work in it. It also uses DDR ram instead of SDRAM. And, it consumes more power, so the old power supply won't work. Oh, and the new power supplies don't fit into the old case, so I need a new case, too.
Of course, I was able to reuse the old drives (hard, floppy, cd) and the old monitor, keyboard & mouse. So it's definately friendlier than buying a whole new PC w/monitor combo. It's cheaper too. Still, IMHO, upgrading is a lot more replacement than upgrade.
A suspected criminal is someone who law enforcement has reasonable cause to believe has broken the law.
And, no, I don't see the problem yet. MLK is a really bad example. He was trying to draw attention to bad laws by intentional, non-violant disobediance to the law. The *entire* point was to get thrown in jail for stupid things, in order to gain support for changing stupid laws.
But let's imagine someone who law enforcement was illegally tracking. We'll call him Bob. That law enforcement is tracking Bob is a failure of law enforcement. Our reaction to that should be to put stronger controls on law enforcement. It isn't to completely take away law enforcement's ability to track suspected criminals. What you're suggesting is that since law enforcement made a mistake with Bob, that they should be prohibited from tracking Ted Kaczynski.
Why should the failure of law enforcement in the Bob example prevent all law enforcement from tracking suspected criminals over the internet? Let's put controls on law enforcement that prevents them from abusing their ability to track people. Let's put those controls in place without regard to whether the tracking takes place in the real world or in the cyber world. In other words, lets keep the rules the same. If you break laws it shouldn't matter whether or not you did it in the real world or the cyber world.
I hear a lot of slahdotters saying that, in the name of "privacy", we should prevent all law enforcement from tracking all people at all times on the internet. That doesn't seem sensible to me. Law enforcement should have controls to prevent abuse, but legitimate law enforcement should be allowed to conduct tracking over the internet. I don't see how people on the internet should be subject to less scrutiny than people in the real world.
I don't mean to enrage the slashdotistas, but I find myself wondering why I should care about this. I don't personally view anonymity on the Internet as a right. It's nice and convenient sometimes, but not a right. So, it means that I have to be careful about the things that I do on the Internet. If I do something that makes me a target of a criminal investigation, isn't it a good thing to be able to track me?
Of course, there's a limit to this. Law enforcement should not be able to track anyone for any reason. They should only track those for whom they have sufficient cause. But that's true in the non-cyber world, too. In the non-cyber world, if you do something that provides justification for tracking, you have no right to anonymity. Ted Kaczynski did not have a right to anonymity after he started planting bombs. Just because Ted Kaczynski gets tracked doesn't mean that everyone should be tracked. But at the same time, just because there are limits on who to track doesn't mean that we shouldn't track Ted Kaczynski.
So my question is this: how is the internet different? Shouldn't law enforcement be able to track criminals on the internet? If controls can be put in place to prevent tracking anyone for any reason, shouldn't we encourage being able to track suspected criminals?
I imagine a lot more people can accept 500 deaths as the price to eliminate "terrorism" and threats of biological/chemical/nuclear arms against the US and allies, than could the nebuolous cause of better all mankind through discovery.
Well, yeah! And the reason is that 9/11 showed EVERYONE what the penalty is for lack of action against terrorism. Those 500 deaths to eliminate terrorism are an investment which pays returns in thousands of lives saved from terrorist acts. We don't send people to war *just* to defend the idea of our country. We send them to war to defend and protect us. You're asking to send people into space - to die - in order to explore, and gain new knowledge. You're asking them to suspend their belief that life is valuable to support your belief that knowledge is more valuable. In the case of war, people aren't being asked to disbelieve in the value of life in favor of something else. They're being asked to sacrifice some lives to protect other lives. You're asking to trade lives for ideas.
I'm not saying you shouldn't ask. I'm saying that you shouldn't expect a positive answer. Because the VAST majority of people don't agree with that sentiment.
"Neither the best efforts of Judge Patel - nor those of the Porsche-driving executives of the Recording Industry Association of America, nor the sleek legal defenders of existing copyright law - will alter this simple fact: No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for its invisible evasion."
I agree that the outcome is the same. An email that is not spam does not get delivered to me. But even though the outcome is the same, there is a difference. When SpamAssassin marks an email as a false positive, neither I nor the sender knows that the email didn't get delivered. With C/R if someone doesn't respond to the challenge, the sender knows that they've received a challenge and they're choosing not to respond. Someone who sends email to a C/R system has a lot more information than someone who sends email to SpamAssassin or a Baysian Filter or any sort of system that just guesses as to whether or not something is spam without trying to interract with the sender.
So for example, let's suppose my attorney sent me an email that was challenged. If my attorney decided not to respond to my challenge, he'd be, in effect, saying that getting the original email to me wasn't critical. That's an informed decision. But if my attorney sent me an email that SpamAssassin said was spam, he would have the expectation that I received it and acted on it. But in reality, neither of us would know that it wasn't delivered.
IMHO, this makes a C/R "false positive" less problematic than a false positive from SpamAssassin, et al.
Frankly, I'm confused by the existance of a flamewar between different antispam techniques. I like C/R because I think it's more effective. Of course, it creates some level of imposition on anyone who wants to send me email. But at this point I'm willing to impose on people who'd like to get into my mailbox. It is, afterall, my mailbox. If you want in, you gotta agree to my terms. But I can see how some folks would not want to make that imposition, and would rather use something like SpamAssassin. I'm ok with that. Those are the rules governing their mailbox. Why aren't they ok with the rules governing my mailbox?
Because when I receive a challenge, that tells me you had a problem with spam, and your fix was to make it everyone else's problem.
Spam already is everyone's problem. Spam is, IMHO, a social problem. Fixing it requires some level of social convention. I think C/R is a good first run at that social convention. But I'm open to other suggestions. Do you have a better solution?
Please don't list tools like SpamAssassin or Baysian filtering, etc. Those are not social conventions. They are tools that have the idea that they can work without a social convention. In it's place they stick complicated guessing. I've tried that route. It didn't work well enough.
I'm convinced we need a social convention. If you don't like C/R, do you have any other suggestions?
This is only a problem for someone who needs to send me an email and isn't already in my whitelist. A complete C/R system also needs to manage a whitelist. There's no point in challenging everyone everytime. If they've got a working email address, they should be able to get in w/out challenge going forward.
But if someone wants to send me an email, from an address that I don't know, they have to go through C/R. If they decline to respond to C/R, then I don't get their email. Basically it's an oppurtunity for them to say that they didn't really want to send me email anyway. Which is fine.
I agree with the condition that you're stating. But I don't think it's a problem.
Also, I've yet to hear of a C/R system that doesn't cause a nightmare for automated messages, like reciepts from online purchases. And if you were to add one address, what if I decided to switch mail servers and the address changes? (I've seen this many times with addresses I whitelist in SpamAssassin).
Yeah, the C/R system has to make certain additional allowances for things like this. TMDA does this. Every time I make an online payment or need a one-time email, I generate a dated address. That's an email address that will work for 7 days and then after that it expires. I choose a default of 7 days. The granularity is to the second, so if I needed an address that would only last for one second, I could generate one. Anyway, the vendor will be able to use that email address without going through C/R. And then, after the transaction is over, if that vendor tries to sell that email address, well it won't work for whomever purchased it.
I could also generate a keyword address. Which is what I do for certain vendors who have demonstrated that they're not going to give away or sell my email address. A keyword address lets anyone who knows the address into my mailbox. So in that situation, the vendor could use any email address and their email would get to me. My online banks get keyword addresses.
But if C/R doesn't work for you. Ok. If you ever send me email, you are free to discard all of my challenges. And I bet you could even setup a rule in SpamAssassin to automatically do it. For me, personally, this is a fine attitude to take. It's not a good attitude for most businesses who wants to attract and retain customers. Until it becomes socially acceptable, it's unlikely that most businesses will be able to use C/R. Which is too bad, because it's much more effective than any other system I've used (SpamAssassin, RBLs, & Baysian).
Use opt-in, and if you get a message from somebody that isn't on the list, it gets quarantined. Once a day (or however often) you get a digest that lists all the quarantined messages, their senders, the subjects. Next to each list item is a link that allows you to release/view the quarantined mail.
As someone how uses a Challenge/Response (C/R) system, I'm not sure I understand what the point would be of getting a list of quarantined email. How is scanning that list and manually looking at the good things substantially different than scanning your list of emails and only reading the ones that don't look like spam?
For a quarantine system to actually improve the spam problem, you need some way of allowing legitimate email to get through without you having to check the list. In the case of C/R only people with legitimate email addresses who respond to your challenge get out of quarantine. Since 99.9% of spam uses fake addresses, C/R is incredibly effective.
Personally, I think that we need two additional things in order to start having effective spam prevention and enforcement:
A socially accepted introduction mechanism which allows us to introduce ourselves to each other only if we have real, working email addresses. (C/R is one way to do this.)
A legal framework for enforcing spam restrictions on anyone who continues to spam even though they have a real, working email address.
I like C/R. I think it's a good idea. I wish that everyone would get accustomed to it. Then everyone (including businesses) would be able to use it. Right now businesses don't like telling their customers that their email hasn't gotten through yet. That's a good way to lose a customer. But if everyone knew that this was the way that we had to operate, then even businesses could implement it. If everyone did this, then the cost of spamming would dramatically increase because every spammer would have to have a working email address. And if they had a working email address, then they'd have to deal with the bandwidth to handle all of the challenges (and bounces).
But even then I think that spammers will continue to spam even from working email addresses. Which is where I think a legal framework comes in. If everyone uses C/R, and everyone has to have a real working email address in order to get through, then everyone who spams is trackable and enforcement can have some meaning.
Since everyone who uses a computer does so to control it's behavior (in some fashion) you could make the argument that everyone is a programmer - even Aunt Madge when she's browsing the web. She's instructing the computer to do something specific that she wants. And occasionaly it doesn't do what she expected. She has a bug in her program. The only difference is that here programming is done with a mouse and interpreted by a browser. Where as Linus' programs are done with an editor and interpreted first by a compiler and then by the CPU.
I think that if you consider that everyone who uses a computer is, to some extent, a programmer. The difference between the windows and unix culture isn't that one appeals to programmers and the other to users. It's that unix assumes that if there's a problem the user is going to figure it out and gives him/her tools to figure it out, but doesn't make assumptions about the users intelligence and lets the user figure it out on his/her own. Where as windows has to make the tacit assumption that users can't figure it out on their own and has to hand hold them through every step of the process.
In other words, unix assumes it's users are intelligent, and windows assumes it's users are dumb.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is bad. I'm just saying that's the way it is. And if you're intelligent, it's incredibly frustrating to use windows because you don't want a computer operating system that can't think for itself to assume you're dumb. And vice versa, if you're a user who doesn't care that much to learn about how computers work best, you want your hand held.
The problem of course is this: windows servers. A server should not be managed by someone who's dumb or who doesn't care that much about how computers work. A server should be rock solid and should be configured correctly and should work. Server admins should be hired because they know what they're doing, and they should get it to work. Microsoft tries to sell the idea that any monkey can manage their server. And what do they end up with? Monkeys managing servers who don't care about installing patches. Deployed servers with huge numbers of vulnerabilities because the admin didn't patch them.
If the culture of windows is supporrts non-computer saavy users and the culture of unix supports computer saavy users, then lets all agree that windows should NOT be in the data center. If you put windows in the data center, then you're already admitting defeat.
Of course, there are certain advantages to random access storage with a directory structure. Like, say, knowing what's on the disk and where it is.:-)
Of course, that's true. But in that case, most people chose convenience (floppies) over cheap (casettes). It's not the same with TiVo vs homebrew DVR. TiVo is both easier and cheaper than a homebrew DVR. So I don't really see Tivo going the way of the data cassette.
I'm sure there are other advantages, those are just off the top of my head.
One of the big ones that most people don't mention is that with a TiVo you can watch your show from the beginning 15 minutes after it starts. With a VCR, even if you've managed to get it programmed the way you want it, and you've always got a tape it, if you get home 5 mins after your favorite program starts, you have wait until it's over until you can see the beginning. With a TiVo you just start watching.
Also TiVo records by show title and guide information instead of by timeslot. So NBC decides to rearrange Wednesday night (for whatever reason) you'll still get West Wing recorded.
Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is like comparing a automobile to a tricycle. Yes they're both methods of transportation but one is dramatically more convenient.
I can see getting a lot of geek satisfaction out of building one of these things, but to use it as a day-in/day-out DVR, I don't think it makes a lot of financial sense. First thing is that it's expensive. A TiVo with a lifetime subscription costs about $500. The WinTV-PVR 350 card alone is most of the cost of the TiVo hardware. I have yet to see an example of building one of these things for that low of a price.
Second, if you've got DirecTV, then there's no DVR that you can build that's going to do as good of a job of capturing the signal as the DirecTV DVR w/TiVo (DTiVo). The DTiVo simply copies the already MPEG encoded stream that DirecTV sends. Thus the DTiVo doesn't need an expensive (and relatively low quality) hardware MPEG encoder. Which means that the DTiVo can be found for serious cheap, sometimes even for free. Assuming that a homebrew DVR costs about $800 to build, you could get a free DTiVo and put the $800 towards 13 yrs 4 mos worth of monthly fees.
Still it sounds like a fun project. But it seems like you'd be paying for the entertainment of putting it together. Not for the low cost of the DVR.
First things first. The original poster didn't attribute the quote to Bill Gates. So a denial from Bill Gates doesn't mean that someone didn't actually say it. Second, someone had to have come to that conclusion, whether they said it or not, because that was in fact the limit. Third, if I were Bill Gates, and I *had* said that incredibly stupid thing, the chances are pretty high that (a) I'd lie about it later on, or (b) I'd forget that I said it.
My point is that Bill Gates is denying it. Bill Gates also says that Microsoft is not a monopoly. Bill Gates saying something does not necessarily make it true.
So you think that they only possible way to allow access to those computers in the library is to use the guest account, and then let anyone log into them? I sure don't.
But, I'll grant that there may be some unbelievably obscure purpose for which use of an account like "Guest" would be beneficial. But that misses the point. The point is that in the vast majority of cases an enabled Guest account is nothing more than a security hole. If that's true, then why not default to having no Guest account at all (not enabled, not created), and create it only in those obscure cases where it's needed?
It weighs about the same as a single atom of helium and exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second
Ok, that's a really tiny number. That's a decimal point followed by 20 zeros, and then a 1:
0.000000000000000000001
or
1x10e-21
To understand this in a slightly different way, if we changed the scale of time and stretched the life of this mystery meson 1 second, a normal second would get stretched to 31.7 trillion years! Or put another way: the life of this particle is to 1 second, as 1 second is to 31.7 trillion years.
Just out of curioustiy, how in the world do we measure anything that exists for that short of a time?
That is the worst excuse for insecurity that I've ever heard. Call me the IT gestapo if you like but there are a TON of ways to securely share documents with an unknown anonymous community. Don't believe me? What do you think you're doing right now! A web page is nothing more than a series of files. Files that are securely shared and, most of the time, done incredibly easily.
Using the guest account is probably the worst way that I can think of to share files... oh wait, I just thought of a worse one - using the Administrator account. The problem with both of these is that, while they accomplish the intended goal, they fail a security check because they also permit additional access that isn't necessary for the stated goal. Why do you think you need to use a guest account to share files? Sure it works. But it also lets someone LOG IN! Categorically, it is not different from using the Administrator account to accomplish the same thing. In both cases, the solution provides WAY too much access for the task that is to be accomplished.
Slashdot Mirror
...the question that I have is will it work with existing VoIP providers like Vonage, VoicePulse & Packet 8? If not, then wouldn't I need to have some sort of SIP gateway sitting somewhere in order to use this thing? Sounds great if you're a corporation who could afford that kind of thing. But if you're a corporation, are you really going to expose your SIP gateway to the Internet?
Or am I just being dumb?
- I am forgetting a scene
- I am misreading the graph
- This thing isn't very accurate
Anyone else got any input? How should I be reading this?I recently had a motherboard die in my 2 year old computer - a 1GHZ P3. So, off I go to the computer store trying to buy a new mobo. Sorry, they don't make them anymore.
Ok, so I try to find out what it would take to buy a cheap replacement that they do have. This is great except for the replacement mobo requires a new CPU since the old one won't work in it. It also uses DDR ram instead of SDRAM. And, it consumes more power, so the old power supply won't work. Oh, and the new power supplies don't fit into the old case, so I need a new case, too.
Of course, I was able to reuse the old drives (hard, floppy, cd) and the old monitor, keyboard & mouse. So it's definately friendlier than buying a whole new PC w/monitor combo. It's cheaper too. Still, IMHO, upgrading is a lot more replacement than upgrade.
$.02
Ok, well it isn't $500, but you can do exactly what you're talking about today, with this or one of these.
A suspected criminal is someone who law enforcement has reasonable cause to believe has broken the law.
And, no, I don't see the problem yet. MLK is a really bad example. He was trying to draw attention to bad laws by intentional, non-violant disobediance to the law. The *entire* point was to get thrown in jail for stupid things, in order to gain support for changing stupid laws.
But let's imagine someone who law enforcement was illegally tracking. We'll call him Bob. That law enforcement is tracking Bob is a failure of law enforcement. Our reaction to that should be to put stronger controls on law enforcement. It isn't to completely take away law enforcement's ability to track suspected criminals. What you're suggesting is that since law enforcement made a mistake with Bob, that they should be prohibited from tracking Ted Kaczynski.
Why should the failure of law enforcement in the Bob example prevent all law enforcement from tracking suspected criminals over the internet? Let's put controls on law enforcement that prevents them from abusing their ability to track people. Let's put those controls in place without regard to whether the tracking takes place in the real world or in the cyber world. In other words, lets keep the rules the same. If you break laws it shouldn't matter whether or not you did it in the real world or the cyber world.
I hear a lot of slahdotters saying that, in the name of "privacy", we should prevent all law enforcement from tracking all people at all times on the internet. That doesn't seem sensible to me. Law enforcement should have controls to prevent abuse, but legitimate law enforcement should be allowed to conduct tracking over the internet. I don't see how people on the internet should be subject to less scrutiny than people in the real world.
I don't mean to enrage the slashdotistas, but I find myself wondering why I should care about this. I don't personally view anonymity on the Internet as a right. It's nice and convenient sometimes, but not a right. So, it means that I have to be careful about the things that I do on the Internet. If I do something that makes me a target of a criminal investigation, isn't it a good thing to be able to track me?
Of course, there's a limit to this. Law enforcement should not be able to track anyone for any reason. They should only track those for whom they have sufficient cause. But that's true in the non-cyber world, too. In the non-cyber world, if you do something that provides justification for tracking, you have no right to anonymity. Ted Kaczynski did not have a right to anonymity after he started planting bombs. Just because Ted Kaczynski gets tracked doesn't mean that everyone should be tracked. But at the same time, just because there are limits on who to track doesn't mean that we shouldn't track Ted Kaczynski.
So my question is this: how is the internet different? Shouldn't law enforcement be able to track criminals on the internet? If controls can be put in place to prevent tracking anyone for any reason, shouldn't we encourage being able to track suspected criminals?
Buddy, if only I had the mod points to mod you up.
I'm not saying you shouldn't ask. I'm saying that you shouldn't expect a positive answer. Because the VAST majority of people don't agree with that sentiment.
I like the way that John Parry Barlow expresses this idea:
You're just impatient. It's still coming. :)
I agree that the outcome is the same. An email that is not spam does not get delivered to me. But even though the outcome is the same, there is a difference. When SpamAssassin marks an email as a false positive, neither I nor the sender knows that the email didn't get delivered. With C/R if someone doesn't respond to the challenge, the sender knows that they've received a challenge and they're choosing not to respond. Someone who sends email to a C/R system has a lot more information than someone who sends email to SpamAssassin or a Baysian Filter or any sort of system that just guesses as to whether or not something is spam without trying to interract with the sender.
So for example, let's suppose my attorney sent me an email that was challenged. If my attorney decided not to respond to my challenge, he'd be, in effect, saying that getting the original email to me wasn't critical. That's an informed decision. But if my attorney sent me an email that SpamAssassin said was spam, he would have the expectation that I received it and acted on it. But in reality, neither of us would know that it wasn't delivered.
IMHO, this makes a C/R "false positive" less problematic than a false positive from SpamAssassin, et al.
Frankly, I'm confused by the existance of a flamewar between different antispam techniques. I like C/R because I think it's more effective. Of course, it creates some level of imposition on anyone who wants to send me email. But at this point I'm willing to impose on people who'd like to get into my mailbox. It is, afterall, my mailbox. If you want in, you gotta agree to my terms. But I can see how some folks would not want to make that imposition, and would rather use something like SpamAssassin. I'm ok with that. Those are the rules governing their mailbox. Why aren't they ok with the rules governing my mailbox?
Please don't list tools like SpamAssassin or Baysian filtering, etc. Those are not social conventions. They are tools that have the idea that they can work without a social convention. In it's place they stick complicated guessing. I've tried that route. It didn't work well enough.
I'm convinced we need a social convention. If you don't like C/R, do you have any other suggestions?
This is only a problem for someone who needs to send me an email and isn't already in my whitelist. A complete C/R system also needs to manage a whitelist. There's no point in challenging everyone everytime. If they've got a working email address, they should be able to get in w/out challenge going forward.
But if someone wants to send me an email, from an address that I don't know, they have to go through C/R. If they decline to respond to C/R, then I don't get their email. Basically it's an oppurtunity for them to say that they didn't really want to send me email anyway. Which is fine.
I agree with the condition that you're stating. But I don't think it's a problem.
Yeah, the C/R system has to make certain additional allowances for things like this. TMDA does this. Every time I make an online payment or need a one-time email, I generate a dated address. That's an email address that will work for 7 days and then after that it expires. I choose a default of 7 days. The granularity is to the second, so if I needed an address that would only last for one second, I could generate one. Anyway, the vendor will be able to use that email address without going through C/R. And then, after the transaction is over, if that vendor tries to sell that email address, well it won't work for whomever purchased it.
I could also generate a keyword address. Which is what I do for certain vendors who have demonstrated that they're not going to give away or sell my email address. A keyword address lets anyone who knows the address into my mailbox. So in that situation, the vendor could use any email address and their email would get to me. My online banks get keyword addresses.
But if C/R doesn't work for you. Ok. If you ever send me email, you are free to discard all of my challenges. And I bet you could even setup a rule in SpamAssassin to automatically do it. For me, personally, this is a fine attitude to take. It's not a good attitude for most businesses who wants to attract and retain customers. Until it becomes socially acceptable, it's unlikely that most businesses will be able to use C/R. Which is too bad, because it's much more effective than any other system I've used (SpamAssassin, RBLs, & Baysian).
But to each his own.
For a quarantine system to actually improve the spam problem, you need some way of allowing legitimate email to get through without you having to check the list. In the case of C/R only people with legitimate email addresses who respond to your challenge get out of quarantine. Since 99.9% of spam uses fake addresses, C/R is incredibly effective.
Personally, I think that we need two additional things in order to start having effective spam prevention and enforcement:
- A socially accepted introduction mechanism which allows us to introduce ourselves to each other only if we have real, working email addresses. (C/R is one way to do this.)
- A legal framework for enforcing spam restrictions on anyone who continues to spam even though they have a real, working email address.
I like C/R. I think it's a good idea. I wish that everyone would get accustomed to it. Then everyone (including businesses) would be able to use it. Right now businesses don't like telling their customers that their email hasn't gotten through yet. That's a good way to lose a customer. But if everyone knew that this was the way that we had to operate, then even businesses could implement it. If everyone did this, then the cost of spamming would dramatically increase because every spammer would have to have a working email address. And if they had a working email address, then they'd have to deal with the bandwidth to handle all of the challenges (and bounces).But even then I think that spammers will continue to spam even from working email addresses. Which is where I think a legal framework comes in. If everyone uses C/R, and everyone has to have a real working email address in order to get through, then everyone who spams is trackable and enforcement can have some meaning.
$.02
Since everyone who uses a computer does so to control it's behavior (in some fashion) you could make the argument that everyone is a programmer - even Aunt Madge when she's browsing the web. She's instructing the computer to do something specific that she wants. And occasionaly it doesn't do what she expected. She has a bug in her program. The only difference is that here programming is done with a mouse and interpreted by a browser. Where as Linus' programs are done with an editor and interpreted first by a compiler and then by the CPU.
I think that if you consider that everyone who uses a computer is, to some extent, a programmer. The difference between the windows and unix culture isn't that one appeals to programmers and the other to users. It's that unix assumes that if there's a problem the user is going to figure it out and gives him/her tools to figure it out, but doesn't make assumptions about the users intelligence and lets the user figure it out on his/her own. Where as windows has to make the tacit assumption that users can't figure it out on their own and has to hand hold them through every step of the process.
In other words, unix assumes it's users are intelligent, and windows assumes it's users are dumb.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is bad. I'm just saying that's the way it is. And if you're intelligent, it's incredibly frustrating to use windows because you don't want a computer operating system that can't think for itself to assume you're dumb. And vice versa, if you're a user who doesn't care that much to learn about how computers work best, you want your hand held.
The problem of course is this: windows servers. A server should not be managed by someone who's dumb or who doesn't care that much about how computers work. A server should be rock solid and should be configured correctly and should work. Server admins should be hired because they know what they're doing, and they should get it to work. Microsoft tries to sell the idea that any monkey can manage their server. And what do they end up with? Monkeys managing servers who don't care about installing patches. Deployed servers with huge numbers of vulnerabilities because the admin didn't patch them.
If the culture of windows is supporrts non-computer saavy users and the culture of unix supports computer saavy users, then lets all agree that windows should NOT be in the data center. If you put windows in the data center, then you're already admitting defeat.
Oops! My bad. I got my threads confused and thought you were saying something about homebrew DVRs. So sorry!
$.02
Also TiVo records by show title and guide information instead of by timeslot. So NBC decides to rearrange Wednesday night (for whatever reason) you'll still get West Wing recorded.
Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is like comparing a automobile to a tricycle. Yes they're both methods of transportation but one is dramatically more convenient.
I can see getting a lot of geek satisfaction out of building one of these things, but to use it as a day-in/day-out DVR, I don't think it makes a lot of financial sense. First thing is that it's expensive. A TiVo with a lifetime subscription costs about $500. The WinTV-PVR 350 card alone is most of the cost of the TiVo hardware. I have yet to see an example of building one of these things for that low of a price.
Second, if you've got DirecTV, then there's no DVR that you can build that's going to do as good of a job of capturing the signal as the DirecTV DVR w/TiVo (DTiVo). The DTiVo simply copies the already MPEG encoded stream that DirecTV sends. Thus the DTiVo doesn't need an expensive (and relatively low quality) hardware MPEG encoder. Which means that the DTiVo can be found for serious cheap, sometimes even for free. Assuming that a homebrew DVR costs about $800 to build, you could get a free DTiVo and put the $800 towards 13 yrs 4 mos worth of monthly fees.
Still it sounds like a fun project. But it seems like you'd be paying for the entertainment of putting it together. Not for the low cost of the DVR.
First things first. The original poster didn't attribute the quote to Bill Gates. So a denial from Bill Gates doesn't mean that someone didn't actually say it. Second, someone had to have come to that conclusion, whether they said it or not, because that was in fact the limit. Third, if I were Bill Gates, and I *had* said that incredibly stupid thing, the chances are pretty high that (a) I'd lie about it later on, or (b) I'd forget that I said it.
My point is that Bill Gates is denying it. Bill Gates also says that Microsoft is not a monopoly. Bill Gates saying something does not necessarily make it true.
$.02
- Hate Bush
- Love space travel
What to do? What to do?So you think that they only possible way to allow access to those computers in the library is to use the guest account, and then let anyone log into them? I sure don't.
But, I'll grant that there may be some unbelievably obscure purpose for which use of an account like "Guest" would be beneficial. But that misses the point. The point is that in the vast majority of cases an enabled Guest account is nothing more than a security hole. If that's true, then why not default to having no Guest account at all (not enabled, not created), and create it only in those obscure cases where it's needed?
Ok, that's a really tiny number. That's a decimal point followed by 20 zeros, and then a 1:
0.000000000000000000001
1x10e-21
To understand this in a slightly different way, if we changed the scale of time and stretched the life of this mystery meson 1 second, a normal second would get stretched to 31.7 trillion years! Or put another way: the life of this particle is to 1 second, as 1 second is to 31.7 trillion years.
Just out of curioustiy, how in the world do we measure anything that exists for that short of a time?
That is the worst excuse for insecurity that I've ever heard. Call me the IT gestapo if you like but there are a TON of ways to securely share documents with an unknown anonymous community. Don't believe me? What do you think you're doing right now! A web page is nothing more than a series of files. Files that are securely shared and, most of the time, done incredibly easily.
Using the guest account is probably the worst way that I can think of to share files... oh wait, I just thought of a worse one - using the Administrator account. The problem with both of these is that, while they accomplish the intended goal, they fail a security check because they also permit additional access that isn't necessary for the stated goal. Why do you think you need to use a guest account to share files? Sure it works. But it also lets someone LOG IN! Categorically, it is not different from using the Administrator account to accomplish the same thing. In both cases, the solution provides WAY too much access for the task that is to be accomplished.