Not the cpu in this case. A newer iBook will certainly have a Quartz Extreme compatible gpu, while the older G4 macs may not. Quartz Extreme support makes the difference in feel between the systems - it really is a big speed boost for drawing stuff on the screen. Check the model and amount of memory in the graphics cards before you assume the performance difference is due to the cpu.
Right, people should just live in the centers of cities, where they can easily walk anywhere they want to go. And while they are living this way, they should never prepare their own food, do their own laundry, or care for their own children. Other people can just do that for them! Why didn't I think of this! I must have been too busy 'using my car unneccessarily!'
Driving somewhat smaller cars is a reasonably good idea, but the way most of America is laid out, there is very little chance of anybody being able to 'walk more' for their essential transportation needs. Of course, high income people who live smack the middle of cities are unlikely to understand this. They usually miss the very obvious reason why other people cannot live the way they do as well.
SoBig.F would need to be identified as YOU by the system. As it can't get/guess admin authentication it does not get/guess YOUR authentication. It is a matter of Unix file access and privileges. You home directory is not different from the system files. The worm needs different file access than for the4 system but still need them.
Oh, I see what you are saying. So if I, the user, run a program, it won't execute with my permissions, and therefore will not be able to write anywhere I can write. In fact, it won't be able to write anywhere at all. Gee, that must be the reason I have been having so much trouble saving files from the applications I run!
Another point is: if the virus CANNOT write - per your own admission - interfere with system files how do you think it could spread?
Do you have any idea how SoBig.F spread?? Once the user who received the infected attachment in an email clicked on it (thereby running it themselves), it emailed itself to everyone in the user's address book, where more clueless users proceeded to click on it and cause it to propagate further. The 'magical Unix permissions' on OS X would not have prevented something like this from happening. The only way to reduce the likelihood of something like this is to prevent the mail program from running executable attachments, and Microsoft won't do that.
About all that can be said for the permissions model on OS X is that the damage would have been confined to the user's home directory in this case, which is what I said in my previous post. Unfortunately, you seem to believe that
Your home directory is not different from the system files.
Well, sorry, friend, but my home directory is owned by my user, and the group is staff, not admin, as per the traditional Unix permissions model, staff owning/home (even though in this case home dirs are not under/home, another Apple innovation). That means no 'magical administrator privileges' are needed to mess with it, any program I run as my user can do so. This is just common sense. System files, on the other hand, are mostly owned by the user root, group either admin or wheel. So those are safe from damage in this case, but big deal - they can be restored with a simple reinstall, whereas your personal files cannot.
I use Macs, but I am unwilling to become an uninformed psychotic advocate of the platform. You just need to accept that while good, they are not the greatest thing ever, and that being better than Microsoft is not the most important goal software can achieve.
I just started a book recently that postulates in the first chapter that both the former Soviet Union and the United States now practice a similar form of economic control of production that the author terms as 'state capitalism.' Interesting theory eh? In both countries, the government controls a large chunk of the industry. There is a large amount of crossover in the people who hold government industry jobs and the people who hold private industry jobs. The amount of influence private organizations have on government is also non-trivial, as long as they do not interfere with the government's primary goal of expanding it's power. This looks to be an interesting book. I forgot the author, but the title is After Capitalism.
Gowachin Law was a creation of the 'Dune' author, Frank Herbert, and appeared in several of his ConSentiency books. The losing lawyer is killed by the winning one. There are ill-defined rules where other participants - including judges who do not meet standards - can also be killed.
Parent poster thinks this should exist in reality...
How would this improve the legal system? It would heighten the risks of a lawsuit, but once one was rolling, both parties would be fighting for their lives. This would really provide incentive for them to break any possible rules if doing so would improve the chances of them winning. You think attorneys are corrupt and underhanded now, wait until you increase the stakes this way.
Or you could say the real goal is to decrease the amount of lawsuits. Well, that might work, but what about the legitimate lawsuits? Or the minor ones? Nobody would be willing to risk their life for some employment dispute you had with your employer, or a rent dispute when your landlord steals your cleaning deposit. Therefore the only recourse you would have in many cases where you had been wronged would be outside of the law, ie you determine for yourself whether and to what extent you have been wronged, and how to redistribute things so justice is best served. Call me crazy, but I would prefer a third party besides you and your hired hitman handle these matters.
Either of the side effects of this system do not seem to increase the amount of justice in the world.
You can do a lot as a user on OS X without needing any administrator privileges. If a virus like SoBig.F were written for the Mac, and you clicked on it (or did whatever was required to run it), it would be able to trash your home directory and run programs. The only thing it couldn't do is write outside of your home directory. Some comfort, if all your files were there. At least some of them probably would be, your home dir includes things like your desktop, for instance.
Now if it wanted to modify the system in some way requiring administrator privileges, ie write access somewhere else, a dialog would come up and you would be required to type your password. Which you would probably do, if you were silly enough to run the virus in the first place. The weak point that these types of viruses are exploiting is not so much flaws in the systems as it is flaws in the user.
Therefore, Macs are not immune. They just haven't been targeted with this kind of thing yet. That is really nothing to gloat over.
Re:Personally, I always preferred...
on
Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
The bonuses ruled. I never collected all the ankhs either, I guess that was an end of game bonus for the entire game. Once, on the first level of the shareware game, I got the bonus bonus. That means you got all the bonuses, including destroying all the ankhs, ending the level with 1 bar of health, drinking from all the fountains, getting all the powerups, killing everything, and many many others. Ah, the memories...
The best part of the game was the missile weapons. The firebomb, the heat seeker, the flamewall, the drunken missile (multiple little heatseekers). Pure magic. I really wish I could get the linux version to work. The source has been released, but the port seemed not to be finished yet. I couldn't figure it out anyway.
Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info from human readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.
Sure, this guy is a troll. But these are legitimate criticisms, with at least a grain of truth to them anyway. I especially hate the poorly documented NetInfo, and I'd like to add that it is impossible to cross-compile with OS X as a target, due mostly to their unconventional binary format. Very trollish tone, I'll admit, but we should all remember that OS X is set up as a closed system from many perspectives. I recall another fellow who was moderated as a troll for criticizing the iTunes music store as being evidence of Jobs desire to turn the computer into a digital shopping mall.
And I suppose the rebuttal is that hey, Apple is a company, and their goal is to make money, so all this is ok. Well, unfortunately I do not regard 'making money any way you can' as the highest and noblest pursuit of humanity. If Microsoft is any evidence, maybe the problem in the software industry is that being nice does not work to make money. Still, I am less than pleased with Apple taking exclusionary steps towards the freedom of their users. I like the way Aqua looks, and I have no problem with it, but NetInfo? What is the purpose of NetInfo? It certainly isn't an improvement, and actually has some fairly serious security problems, in that any user with shell access can view the entire database with nidump, including passwords of any other user.
As for the binary formats and cross-compilation issues, Apple's attitude is that if you want to develop for OS X, better have an OS X system! I think their business is being hurt a lot by being built around the need to sell their proprietary hardware.
Thanks for offering, but I already have an unbeatable roulette betting system. You know how you are allowed to bet on colors in addition to numbers? Bet on one, at the minimum bet. If you lose, double your bet to make up your loss. Every time you lose, just keep doubling your bet. Once you win back your loss, return to making the minimum bet.
Yeah, it's a joke. But a serious-faced business major explained this to me. He actually asked to write some stuff down; I thought this meant he had a really complicated system. So I give him the paper, and he starts writing:
5
10
20
40
etc.
Of course the obvious problem with the system is that the probability of winning by betting on a main color is slightly less than 50%, because there are two main colors and then one or two thingies (don't know the technical term) with a third one. Also, while if you win you gain money slowly, if you lose, you lose it very quickly. I wrote a little program to use this method. It would stop once the doubling of the bet would take away more money than it had if it lost (otherwise it would really lose spectacularly). After many runs of this system, the result I expected became apparent. It made money with the same probability as a single bet. The amounts were widely different - but with no change in the likelihood, betting everything you had on one throw was just as legitimate a strategy. This was faster, too.
I never bothered trying to correct the guy. I was so flabbergasted when he showed me initially that I really could say nothing, especially since it was obvious he wouldn't understand me. I suppose the problem was he was having trouble imagining the probability of losing eight or nine times in a row, which, while unlikely, is not that unlikely. It happened every simulated time, of course, usually within a hundred throws, frequently in far fewer, once in the initial eight!
If you are interested in making easy money, I think running a casino to cater to people like this would be much easier than 'informed gambling', whatever the hell that is. Let them think they are gaining some sort of advantage when all they are doing is moving risk around.
Thinking you're somehow going to train third graders useful or even applicable computer skills is an obscenely myopic idea. It would be at least ten years before a third grader ever really needed to use a computer in a professional capacity.
Great post! There is a reason that the justifications used for certain types of computers is the classroom are so nearsighted. There is a substantial section of the population that is nearly illiterate and dirt poor. They frequently work in the lowest occupational sectors doing menial labor. These people in most cases would desperately like their children to avoid their fate. But how?
All they have to go on where technology is concerned is a vague association of computers with sit-down jobs in offices (which seem like an unimaginable luxury to them). They want the computers in the schools to most resemble the ones they have seen being used by the people whose offices they clean, or who dispense their paychecks, give them orders, etc. The computers these people use, as with most of the rest of what they do, is a complete mystery to them. But they see the objects and grasp that they have some significance.
Now as you point out in the conclusion of your post, is training on how to use a specific system even really education? Not if it does not give the trainee general knowledge that could be applicable to other systems. But what most people who are completely ignorant care little about whether their children get either training or education. They want the appearance of wealth in the schools, and computers similar to those that people they think are wealthy are a big part of this. It sounds so silly, but they think, 'hey, my kid goes to school where they have computers like the general manager has! I bet he'll become something better than me!'
My mom's students always loved school at the end of the year and couldn't wait for first grade. Now they all hate school and much of my mom's job is keeping them on task when they're bored out of their skulls.
You are absolutely right. Why should school be a place of rigorous learning, when it could be an overpriced daycare center where stupid children are entertained and tricked into thinking they are smart and knowledgeable?
I'm kidding, sort of, since after all you were talking about kindergarten, where the kids are very young. All the same, I do not believe that education should focus exclusively on development of a personal feeling of self-worth, or how much the child enjoys the experience. Nothing wrong with story time and fingerpainting, but the kids need to learn to read too (and do some math, for that matter). Unfortunately, in many classrooms, this is not happening, for whatever reasons. Many people do not like this, but it seems in many cases the only way to identify schools that are performing poorly is to have an enforced set of standards the students are tested with. I think the big problem people have with the standardization is that while it makes a lot of schools better, it also makes outstanding schools worse. This of course means concerned parents can no longer work the system by putting their kids into certain schools.
I think there are many systemic problems with the public school system in America, and we won't see the end of them anytime soon.
This is a me too post. I feel your pain, and all I have done with OS X Server is an experimental setup with one client, and one server (both Macs), using the server as an authentication server and a file server for networked home directories.
And it sucks. Sometimes the logins are slow (very very slow), sometimes the preferences are not preserved across machines. Setting it up was tedious, and I ran into many unexpected problems. I spent a lot of time in the forums on Apple's site, looking for unofficial answers to my questions, because official ones usually did not exist. I cannot remember everything I went through to set it up, but I do know that it is hobbling along now well enough that I don't want to mess with it anymore. It certainly does not do everything I was lead to believe it would.
The documentation is terrible, horrible. It is actually more of a marketing document - explaining what can in theory be done with the machine, and how it is supposed to work. The explanations coincide with practice some of the time, sort of.
I've complained about it here before, but am willing to repeat now for the sake of warning anyone who might try to deploy OS X Server to serve Apple clients in an environment where it working might actually be important. Don't do it!! I hope Panther Server will be better, but it won't matter to mebecause I am not going to buy it anyway. I am never falling for this shit again.
Now, if all you were using it for was a simple file/web/print/dns server, or something along those lines, it would probably be ok. Then again, a Linux or *BSD box would be much cheaper for that, doncha think?
Clarification and development of witty idea. Summary of legal points:
1) This is all wrong 2) Geeks rule 3) I like tuna
Extended rant about moral issues surrounding situation. Oh the humanity, what is wrong with these people? Is there no justice in the world? I fear for the future of civilization.
Anger filled unreasonable solution - Let's all throw rocks! They can't stop all of us!
Mind showing me the source code where it shows there are intentional if (working) {break it;} code
I think you may not understand the nature of my point. I am certain that absolutely no such blantant, deliberate breakage exists. Do you really think there would have to be an if statement checking to see if a certain situation existed, then create a configuration that doesn't work? You don't have to implement things that are implicit, just leave them out. Thus, they could know about certain hardware configurations, problems, whatever, and simply not put that case into their configuration tools (causing them to create an improper configuration), but have a fix on file for those who paid for support. The sources would never need to show any hint of this kind of thing.
Why would I suspect something like this? Presentation. Their GUI config tools are presented to users as black boxes, and do not always work. Maybe they work for 99% of cases, making my point largely moot (possible), but they don't always work for me (I only have anecdotal evidence here). In those cases of failure, the tool becomes useless compared to more conventional means of configuration. In that case, the distro being from Redhat does not contribute any value - it actually wastes time as the tools they provide are not well documented compared with the software they operate on. And all the while you browse their site looking for answers, you are reminded they will be happy to sell you support.
If you were working with the software to the point of auditing all the sources to make sure they worked yourself, you might as well just roll your own distribution because you would be doing all the work of a distro maker. Incidentally, could you show me the source code to Redhat Advanced Server? I was looking for it recently, but had a little trouble finding it. I guess you have to buy it or something, that's free software all right.
How much money has debian or gentoo or mandrake or suse or IBM put up to defend linux? well RH put in 1 million to defend the kernel we ALL use. how much have you put in?
You are right, this is completely benevolent charity. Redhat does not have a large monetary stake in the outcome of lawsuits against the Linux kernel. Get real, this is money they figured they would have to spend anyway, to protect a business interest, not because they care about the technology. And because of this reason, I have put up no money to support them. Free software can exist without huge business interests, but in the case of Redhat the reverse is not true. They just exist in order to make a profit from something they didn't create.
They stink and I don't like them. They are the Microsoft of Linux, except Microsoft develops all of their software themselves. I won't play their free goofy software, pay for knowledge to get it working game.
Well, the problem I have with Redhat is that their core business is selling support for their distro. Unfortunately, this is really obvious from the way things are set up. Particularly, their GUI configuration tools do not always work, and when they fail, I have had trouble finding good documentation on how to make things work. I think this is intentional, they want people to purchase some support from them, so they create situations in which it is needed. I don't know what kind of hardware you are using that Redhat works 95% of the time, out-of-the-box, but in my experience either hardware or software config will need tweaking in order to make it perform the task I want. Regardless of distro, this is true, and the easier a distro makes this tweaking process, the better I like it.
The distro I use now is Debian, and while the configuration is not always as slick (flat text files in/etc, usually), the process is usually well-documented, either by the distro folks or the people who make the software. This allows me to figure things out myself more easily, without being dependent on a company to fix things for me.
Disclaimer, my Red Hat usage ended at 8.0, at which point I switched to Debian.
I really think that the GNU people are right to some degree that being stingy with knowledge impoverishes us all, while we could just as easily all be wealthy by sharing it. I think Redhat is in the position where it is advantageous for them to be stingy with knowledge, and this is not good for the community. Also, I could care less about who the 'market leader' of Linux is. That term is nearly meaningless, because Linux is not a product, it is a community process.
Redhat is not a bad distro, but there are reasons to use a different one.
Oh yeah, I should mention I am running wu-ftpd too... Some posts seem to suggest I should not be doing that. Huh. Is there another ftpd that provides guest access as well as wu-ftpd?
Hey, I'm running debian stable 3.0 on a box at home (totally behind a firewall, not to worry). How do I fix this? I just did 'apt-get update' and it said it downloaded some stuff from security.debian.org. Is that all there is to it?
If I decide to sell my old NetApp, does this mean I can sell the hardware to someone, and the software to someone else?
Looks like, under the license agreement of the software, you cannot resell it to anyone at all. The only exception is from the article, in the case of mergers/acquisitions, etc, when all the assets of one company go to another.
How dare you call me a sheep, you pathetic little anonymous coward! I have my own thoughts, and I am not afraid to stand behind them with a username and risk my own karma. Just because you disagree with me does not make me a fool, or a sheep, or whatever.
No, I am considerably older than five. Let me reiterate, people who wield power do so because other people obey them. There is no other reason. They may have means of compelling people to obey - but these depend on the lack of moral development of the people subjugated. Ie, if I resist this person, I will be killed, but my children and their children will have a chance of living free from oppression. Or, if I obey, I will live another day, regardless of how terrible a society I will live in. Most people go for 'living another day.'
Or to put it another way, most people cannot endure temporary consequences in pursuit of long term goals. Frequently the consequences are much better than death, but they avoid them anyway, even if avoiding them means society is taken in unpleasant directions.
The major reason that broadband over powerlines is a good idea is because the power companies have comprehensive right-of-way for their cables, right to your door. They also do not have much incentive not to sell it to you, like the local phone and cable monopolies, the first of which does not really see how broadband relates to their business, and the second who thinks broadband is a good way to sell you more digital media content. If power companies could leverage their access, they could make some money that otherwise will just go somewhere else.
I would almost be inclined to say to heck with the ham radio operators in this case. After all, what would hurt them would benefit lots of other people. But on the other hand, this is ridiculous! Is the only way to get broadband to more American homes over frickin' powerlines?! Too bad if this comes to pass, it will be the fault of the telcos and the cable companies if it does.
Truly, much effective tracking could be done at close range. It would not be pervasive, but still could be very comprehensive, covering not every place you would go, but most places you would. The problem here is, what good is such a system, except for tracking uninteresting information? Serious criminals would figure out how to get around it, and perhaps even concerned citizens would as well. Maybe you could solve more bank and convenience store robberies by having records of exactly who went into these establishments. Perhaps fugitives could be more easily tracked if you knew who went into gas stations and highway rest stops.
But you could still get mugged, raped, or even murdered in some dark alley somewhere, where there was no scanning device nearby. And the costly system would therefore be useless in the minds of most people, or at least not useful enough to justify the expense of putting tracking hotspots in most places. Particularly given the amount of worthless data it would collect that many people would just as soon not have collected.
I think this wouldn't be popular unless it cut the unsolved murder rate to 2% or made some other similar drastic improvement.
Still, you'll get no argument from me that short-range tracking could be doable, provided you had a comprehensive database of who bought what, which is reasonably likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the cpu in this case. A newer iBook will certainly have a Quartz Extreme compatible gpu, while the older G4 macs may not. Quartz Extreme support makes the difference in feel between the systems - it really is a big speed boost for drawing stuff on the screen. Check the model and amount of memory in the graphics cards before you assume the performance difference is due to the cpu.
Right, people should just live in the centers of cities, where they can easily walk anywhere they want to go. And while they are living this way, they should never prepare their own food, do their own laundry, or care for their own children. Other people can just do that for them! Why didn't I think of this! I must have been too busy 'using my car unneccessarily!'
Driving somewhat smaller cars is a reasonably good idea, but the way most of America is laid out, there is very little chance of anybody being able to 'walk more' for their essential transportation needs. Of course, high income people who live smack the middle of cities are unlikely to understand this. They usually miss the very obvious reason why other people cannot live the way they do as well.
Oh, I see what you are saying. So if I, the user, run a program, it won't execute with my permissions, and therefore will not be able to write anywhere I can write. In fact, it won't be able to write anywhere at all. Gee, that must be the reason I have been having so much trouble saving files from the applications I run!
Do you have any idea how SoBig.F spread?? Once the user who received the infected attachment in an email clicked on it (thereby running it themselves), it emailed itself to everyone in the user's address book, where more clueless users proceeded to click on it and cause it to propagate further. The 'magical Unix permissions' on OS X would not have prevented something like this from happening. The only way to reduce the likelihood of something like this is to prevent the mail program from running executable attachments, and Microsoft won't do that.
About all that can be said for the permissions model on OS X is that the damage would have been confined to the user's home directory in this case, which is what I said in my previous post. Unfortunately, you seem to believe that
Well, sorry, friend, but my home directory is owned by my user, and the group is staff, not admin, as per the traditional Unix permissions model, staff owningI use Macs, but I am unwilling to become an uninformed psychotic advocate of the platform. You just need to accept that while good, they are not the greatest thing ever, and that being better than Microsoft is not the most important goal software can achieve.
I just started a book recently that postulates in the first chapter that both the former Soviet Union and the United States now practice a similar form of economic control of production that the author terms as 'state capitalism.' Interesting theory eh? In both countries, the government controls a large chunk of the industry. There is a large amount of crossover in the people who hold government industry jobs and the people who hold private industry jobs. The amount of influence private organizations have on government is also non-trivial, as long as they do not interfere with the government's primary goal of expanding it's power. This looks to be an interesting book. I forgot the author, but the title is After Capitalism.
How would this improve the legal system? It would heighten the risks of a lawsuit, but once one was rolling, both parties would be fighting for their lives. This would really provide incentive for them to break any possible rules if doing so would improve the chances of them winning. You think attorneys are corrupt and underhanded now, wait until you increase the stakes this way.
Or you could say the real goal is to decrease the amount of lawsuits. Well, that might work, but what about the legitimate lawsuits? Or the minor ones? Nobody would be willing to risk their life for some employment dispute you had with your employer, or a rent dispute when your landlord steals your cleaning deposit. Therefore the only recourse you would have in many cases where you had been wronged would be outside of the law, ie you determine for yourself whether and to what extent you have been wronged, and how to redistribute things so justice is best served. Call me crazy, but I would prefer a third party besides you and your hired hitman handle these matters.
Either of the side effects of this system do not seem to increase the amount of justice in the world.
You can do a lot as a user on OS X without needing any administrator privileges. If a virus like SoBig.F were written for the Mac, and you clicked on it (or did whatever was required to run it), it would be able to trash your home directory and run programs. The only thing it couldn't do is write outside of your home directory. Some comfort, if all your files were there. At least some of them probably would be, your home dir includes things like your desktop, for instance.
Now if it wanted to modify the system in some way requiring administrator privileges, ie write access somewhere else, a dialog would come up and you would be required to type your password. Which you would probably do, if you were silly enough to run the virus in the first place. The weak point that these types of viruses are exploiting is not so much flaws in the systems as it is flaws in the user.
Therefore, Macs are not immune. They just haven't been targeted with this kind of thing yet. That is really nothing to gloat over.
The bonuses ruled. I never collected all the ankhs either, I guess that was an end of game bonus for the entire game. Once, on the first level of the shareware game, I got the bonus bonus. That means you got all the bonuses, including destroying all the ankhs, ending the level with 1 bar of health, drinking from all the fountains, getting all the powerups, killing everything, and many many others. Ah, the memories...
The best part of the game was the missile weapons. The firebomb, the heat seeker, the flamewall, the drunken missile (multiple little heatseekers). Pure magic. I really wish I could get the linux version to work. The source has been released, but the port seemed not to be finished yet. I couldn't figure it out anyway.
Sure, this guy is a troll. But these are legitimate criticisms, with at least a grain of truth to them anyway. I especially hate the poorly documented NetInfo, and I'd like to add that it is impossible to cross-compile with OS X as a target, due mostly to their unconventional binary format. Very trollish tone, I'll admit, but we should all remember that OS X is set up as a closed system from many perspectives. I recall another fellow who was moderated as a troll for criticizing the iTunes music store as being evidence of Jobs desire to turn the computer into a digital shopping mall.
And I suppose the rebuttal is that hey, Apple is a company, and their goal is to make money, so all this is ok. Well, unfortunately I do not regard 'making money any way you can' as the highest and noblest pursuit of humanity. If Microsoft is any evidence, maybe the problem in the software industry is that being nice does not work to make money. Still, I am less than pleased with Apple taking exclusionary steps towards the freedom of their users. I like the way Aqua looks, and I have no problem with it, but NetInfo? What is the purpose of NetInfo? It certainly isn't an improvement, and actually has some fairly serious security problems, in that any user with shell access can view the entire database with nidump, including passwords of any other user.
As for the binary formats and cross-compilation issues, Apple's attitude is that if you want to develop for OS X, better have an OS X system! I think their business is being hurt a lot by being built around the need to sell their proprietary hardware.
Thanks for offering, but I already have an unbeatable roulette betting system. You know how you are allowed to bet on colors in addition to numbers? Bet on one, at the minimum bet. If you lose, double your bet to make up your loss. Every time you lose, just keep doubling your bet. Once you win back your loss, return to making the minimum bet.
Yeah, it's a joke. But a serious-faced business major explained this to me. He actually asked to write some stuff down; I thought this meant he had a really complicated system. So I give him the paper, and he starts writing:
5
10
20
40
etc.
Of course the obvious problem with the system is that the probability of winning by betting on a main color is slightly less than 50%, because there are two main colors and then one or two thingies (don't know the technical term) with a third one. Also, while if you win you gain money slowly, if you lose, you lose it very quickly. I wrote a little program to use this method. It would stop once the doubling of the bet would take away more money than it had if it lost (otherwise it would really lose spectacularly). After many runs of this system, the result I expected became apparent. It made money with the same probability as a single bet. The amounts were widely different - but with no change in the likelihood, betting everything you had on one throw was just as legitimate a strategy. This was faster, too.
I never bothered trying to correct the guy. I was so flabbergasted when he showed me initially that I really could say nothing, especially since it was obvious he wouldn't understand me. I suppose the problem was he was having trouble imagining the probability of losing eight or nine times in a row, which, while unlikely, is not that unlikely. It happened every simulated time, of course, usually within a hundred throws, frequently in far fewer, once in the initial eight!
If you are interested in making easy money, I think running a casino to cater to people like this would be much easier than 'informed gambling', whatever the hell that is. Let them think they are gaining some sort of advantage when all they are doing is moving risk around.
Great post! There is a reason that the justifications used for certain types of computers is the classroom are so nearsighted. There is a substantial section of the population that is nearly illiterate and dirt poor. They frequently work in the lowest occupational sectors doing menial labor. These people in most cases would desperately like their children to avoid their fate. But how?
All they have to go on where technology is concerned is a vague association of computers with sit-down jobs in offices (which seem like an unimaginable luxury to them). They want the computers in the schools to most resemble the ones they have seen being used by the people whose offices they clean, or who dispense their paychecks, give them orders, etc. The computers these people use, as with most of the rest of what they do, is a complete mystery to them. But they see the objects and grasp that they have some significance.
Now as you point out in the conclusion of your post, is training on how to use a specific system even really education? Not if it does not give the trainee general knowledge that could be applicable to other systems. But what most people who are completely ignorant care little about whether their children get either training or education. They want the appearance of wealth in the schools, and computers similar to those that people they think are wealthy are a big part of this. It sounds so silly, but they think, 'hey, my kid goes to school where they have computers like the general manager has! I bet he'll become something better than me!'
You are absolutely right. Why should school be a place of rigorous learning, when it could be an overpriced daycare center where stupid children are entertained and tricked into thinking they are smart and knowledgeable?
I'm kidding, sort of, since after all you were talking about kindergarten, where the kids are very young. All the same, I do not believe that education should focus exclusively on development of a personal feeling of self-worth, or how much the child enjoys the experience. Nothing wrong with story time and fingerpainting, but the kids need to learn to read too (and do some math, for that matter). Unfortunately, in many classrooms, this is not happening, for whatever reasons. Many people do not like this, but it seems in many cases the only way to identify schools that are performing poorly is to have an enforced set of standards the students are tested with. I think the big problem people have with the standardization is that while it makes a lot of schools better, it also makes outstanding schools worse. This of course means concerned parents can no longer work the system by putting their kids into certain schools.
I think there are many systemic problems with the public school system in America, and we won't see the end of them anytime soon.
Throw me a mod point, I know how to use google! Or maybe not...
This is a me too post. I feel your pain, and all I have done with OS X Server is an experimental setup with one client, and one server (both Macs), using the server as an authentication server and a file server for networked home directories.
And it sucks. Sometimes the logins are slow (very very slow), sometimes the preferences are not preserved across machines. Setting it up was tedious, and I ran into many unexpected problems. I spent a lot of time in the forums on Apple's site, looking for unofficial answers to my questions, because official ones usually did not exist. I cannot remember everything I went through to set it up, but I do know that it is hobbling along now well enough that I don't want to mess with it anymore. It certainly does not do everything I was lead to believe it would.
The documentation is terrible, horrible. It is actually more of a marketing document - explaining what can in theory be done with the machine, and how it is supposed to work. The explanations coincide with practice some of the time, sort of.
I've complained about it here before, but am willing to repeat now for the sake of warning anyone who might try to deploy OS X Server to serve Apple clients in an environment where it working might actually be important. Don't do it!! I hope Panther Server will be better, but it won't matter to mebecause I am not going to buy it anyway. I am never falling for this shit again.
Now, if all you were using it for was a simple file/web/print/dns server, or something along those lines, it would probably be ok. Then again, a Linux or *BSD box would be much cheaper for that, doncha think?
Clarification and development of witty idea. Summary of legal points:
1) This is all wrong
2) Geeks rule
3) I like tuna
Extended rant about moral issues surrounding situation. Oh the humanity, what is wrong with these people? Is there no justice in the world? I fear for the future of civilization.
Anger filled unreasonable solution - Let's all throw rocks! They can't stop all of us!
I think you may not understand the nature of my point. I am certain that absolutely no such blantant, deliberate breakage exists. Do you really think there would have to be an if statement checking to see if a certain situation existed, then create a configuration that doesn't work? You don't have to implement things that are implicit, just leave them out. Thus, they could know about certain hardware configurations, problems, whatever, and simply not put that case into their configuration tools (causing them to create an improper configuration), but have a fix on file for those who paid for support. The sources would never need to show any hint of this kind of thing.
Why would I suspect something like this? Presentation. Their GUI config tools are presented to users as black boxes, and do not always work. Maybe they work for 99% of cases, making my point largely moot (possible), but they don't always work for me (I only have anecdotal evidence here). In those cases of failure, the tool becomes useless compared to more conventional means of configuration. In that case, the distro being from Redhat does not contribute any value - it actually wastes time as the tools they provide are not well documented compared with the software they operate on. And all the while you browse their site looking for answers, you are reminded they will be happy to sell you support.
If you were working with the software to the point of auditing all the sources to make sure they worked yourself, you might as well just roll your own distribution because you would be doing all the work of a distro maker. Incidentally, could you show me the source code to Redhat Advanced Server? I was looking for it recently, but had a little trouble finding it. I guess you have to buy it or something, that's free software all right.
You are right, this is completely benevolent charity. Redhat does not have a large monetary stake in the outcome of lawsuits against the Linux kernel. Get real, this is money they figured they would have to spend anyway, to protect a business interest, not because they care about the technology. And because of this reason, I have put up no money to support them. Free software can exist without huge business interests, but in the case of Redhat the reverse is not true. They just exist in order to make a profit from something they didn't create.
They stink and I don't like them. They are the Microsoft of Linux, except Microsoft develops all of their software themselves. I won't play their free goofy software, pay for knowledge to get it working game.
Well, the problem I have with Redhat is that their core business is selling support for their distro. Unfortunately, this is really obvious from the way things are set up. Particularly, their GUI configuration tools do not always work, and when they fail, I have had trouble finding good documentation on how to make things work. I think this is intentional, they want people to purchase some support from them, so they create situations in which it is needed. I don't know what kind of hardware you are using that Redhat works 95% of the time, out-of-the-box, but in my experience either hardware or software config will need tweaking in order to make it perform the task I want. Regardless of distro, this is true, and the easier a distro makes this tweaking process, the better I like it.
/etc, usually), the process is usually well-documented, either by the distro folks or the people who make the software. This allows me to figure things out myself more easily, without being dependent on a company to fix things for me.
The distro I use now is Debian, and while the configuration is not always as slick (flat text files in
Disclaimer, my Red Hat usage ended at 8.0, at which point I switched to Debian.
I really think that the GNU people are right to some degree that being stingy with knowledge impoverishes us all, while we could just as easily all be wealthy by sharing it. I think Redhat is in the position where it is advantageous for them to be stingy with knowledge, and this is not good for the community. Also, I could care less about who the 'market leader' of Linux is. That term is nearly meaningless, because Linux is not a product, it is a community process.
Redhat is not a bad distro, but there are reasons to use a different one.
Oh yeah, I should mention I am running wu-ftpd too... Some posts seem to suggest I should not be doing that. Huh. Is there another ftpd that provides guest access as well as wu-ftpd?
Hey, I'm running debian stable 3.0 on a box at home (totally behind a firewall, not to worry). How do I fix this? I just did 'apt-get update' and it said it downloaded some stuff from security.debian.org. Is that all there is to it?
Where are you located? I'm guessing not in the U.S....
"Have you ever heard of user error?" - Bill Gates
Ozzy is user error, folks.
Looks like, under the license agreement of the software, you cannot resell it to anyone at all. The only exception is from the article, in the case of mergers/acquisitions, etc, when all the assets of one company go to another.
How dare you call me a sheep, you pathetic little anonymous coward! I have my own thoughts, and I am not afraid to stand behind them with a username and risk my own karma. Just because you disagree with me does not make me a fool, or a sheep, or whatever.
No, I am considerably older than five. Let me reiterate, people who wield power do so because other people obey them. There is no other reason. They may have means of compelling people to obey - but these depend on the lack of moral development of the people subjugated. Ie, if I resist this person, I will be killed, but my children and their children will have a chance of living free from oppression. Or, if I obey, I will live another day, regardless of how terrible a society I will live in. Most people go for 'living another day.'
Or to put it another way, most people cannot endure temporary consequences in pursuit of long term goals. Frequently the consequences are much better than death, but they avoid them anyway, even if avoiding them means society is taken in unpleasant directions.
The major reason that broadband over powerlines is a good idea is because the power companies have comprehensive right-of-way for their cables, right to your door. They also do not have much incentive not to sell it to you, like the local phone and cable monopolies, the first of which does not really see how broadband relates to their business, and the second who thinks broadband is a good way to sell you more digital media content. If power companies could leverage their access, they could make some money that otherwise will just go somewhere else.
I would almost be inclined to say to heck with the ham radio operators in this case. After all, what would hurt them would benefit lots of other people. But on the other hand, this is ridiculous! Is the only way to get broadband to more American homes over frickin' powerlines?! Too bad if this comes to pass, it will be the fault of the telcos and the cable companies if it does.
Truly, much effective tracking could be done at close range. It would not be pervasive, but still could be very comprehensive, covering not every place you would go, but most places you would. The problem here is, what good is such a system, except for tracking uninteresting information? Serious criminals would figure out how to get around it, and perhaps even concerned citizens would as well. Maybe you could solve more bank and convenience store robberies by having records of exactly who went into these establishments. Perhaps fugitives could be more easily tracked if you knew who went into gas stations and highway rest stops.
But you could still get mugged, raped, or even murdered in some dark alley somewhere, where there was no scanning device nearby. And the costly system would therefore be useless in the minds of most people, or at least not useful enough to justify the expense of putting tracking hotspots in most places. Particularly given the amount of worthless data it would collect that many people would just as soon not have collected.
I think this wouldn't be popular unless it cut the unsolved murder rate to 2% or made some other similar drastic improvement.
Still, you'll get no argument from me that short-range tracking could be doable, provided you had a comprehensive database of who bought what, which is reasonably likely.