this local exploit has been sitting there for ~5 years before The Good Guys spotted it.
Well, I think this proves that the "security through obscurity" model is, at best, ineffective. If it has been so long there for anyone to see and the "good" guys didn't see it, what makes you believe that the "bad" guys would spot it?
Well jeez, this actually sounds like an argument *for* security through obscurity. If it took so long to find the bug even with open source access, imagine how long it would have taken to find the exploit in a closed-source product.
Don't forget... security through obscurity (S.T.O) is not in itself a bad thing. If you don't know what you're looking for, you're unlikely to find it. The real problem with S.T.O.
is that if you are relying solely on it, it is a 'brittle' defence: once an attacker is aware of the 'hidden secret' it's game over.
So... do you use a password on your accounts? After all, that's security through obscurity, right?
This isn't meant to be a troll post, but hasn't every generation said this about the newest generation? I remember my parents being concerned at the violence in the video games I was playign in the early 80's.
This generational decay has been going on for over two thousand years. Socrates himself said:
Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food and tyrannise their teachers.
I wonder...
Was there one Really, Really Great generation from which we all devolved? (This was before the invention of the party.) Or maybe it's a cyclical thing. Real research on the topic of well-behavedness of kids across generations would be wonderful, but, being Real Research, has no place on slashdot.
I think the most modern use is "Lexii". Defend this to the death. If anyone calls you on it, say "everyone knows what I mean when I say it". To be extra clever, refer to Toyotae and other caren.
Alternate Strategy: If you want to be the Old-School Curmudgeon with a Classical Education, fume about how there's no such thing as a "Lexius".
The whirring sound you hear is the sound of your grammar-school teachers collectively rotating, at lathe speed, in their graves.
swf. black head scarf. inexperienced at dating. enjoys long walks in the desert. i do not sing. please no public stoning.
You see some pretty funny stuff in the Russian dating service sites. "Single White-Russian Female, Christian, hobbies include sewing and quiet submission to husband. No Chechens." I think there's some... exaggeration going on.
About the arab history and culture not being taught... well, I would agree half way. We focus more on the actual benifits of things like the Renaissance, not where they came from. Also, in areas that are more muslim, be sure that they do teach more muslim history.
Somehow all of us have heard of the Arab (& Persian & Indian) contributions to science... I don't see a huge conspiracy of silence.
Let us also not forget that a large impetus to the Rennaissance was the exodus of Byzantine Greek scholars from the wreckage of the Eastern Roman Empire, busily being dismantled by the Turks. The Arab and later Turkish conquests cut off the Western world from much of the wisdom of our Greek heritage. It was only later that trade and warfare re-acquainted the West with what they had lost, plus benefits -- the Muslims had been adding to that corpus during the meantime.
Let's summarize:
Any mathematical or scientific term beginning with al- is likely from the Islamic world. Algebra, Algorithm (*), Alchemy, etc. Thanks guys. Now knock it off with this Dar al-Harb stuff, okay?
(*) Neat story... the guy who invented the term was (mumble) al-Kwarismi, so named after the kingdom of Kwarism along the oxus and jaxartes deep in what we now call the 'stans.
most of the PCs used in Iran are assembled from smuggled parts
and run pirated versions of all the latest software (due to foreign embargo?). It sounds like a great opportunity for open source software.
I have had a devil of a time finding pirated versions of open source software. Everywhere I go I find legit download sites. Not a bootleg cracked version of gcc in sight. I personally spent agonizing hours trying to disable the copy protection in Debian so I could install it, but I couldn't even locate the copy protection. Eventually I gave up in failure an' downloaded Win2K from pirated-shtuff.ir.an.
each time I'm with friends and they surf, and they get popups, I show them fire(bird-fox), and tabbed browsing.
I have to whine about Mozilla browser. It really is dog slow to load, and more importantly, to restore from being minimized. Especially if you have a lot of tabs. It crashes. It steals my lunch money. If only it had a neck to throttle.
And yet...
I simply cannot live without tabbed browsing. So I use it anyway.
For learning, we don't have to learn assembly first anymore, you can start with any language. I think it is good to take a two pronged approach. Learn C first, and at the same time, start learning digital logic. [...] When one is comfortable with both, I think learning assembly is much easier.
You are missing the One True Purpose of assembly language, and the One True Reason everyone should learn assembly first:
Nothing else in the Universe can make students grateful -- grateful! -- to be allowed to use C
... The internet essentially carries with it a stupid-user tax. Worms, virii [sic, heh], spam, et al are the by-products of stupidity, but as with most taxes, it is just something that you have to deal with.
With respect to spam, let's take a step back. Obviously somebody out there is gleefully munching handfuls of Viagra and (ahem) "enhancement" pills to psych himself up to (ahem) r0x0r his wife until her weight-loss pills kick in.
It is silly to assume that all these people are just morons. After all, Viagra is proven to work, it is a legitimate product of sorts. The internet is there for hefty short limp (ahem ahem) non-digerati as well as for propeller heads, God bless 'em.
It seems to me that spam is the runaway bastard-child of something which actually is good and useful -- that is, targeted marketing to the willing. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There is a huge legitimate market out there, just begging to be flee^wmarketed.
The anti-spam people are fighting against the Invisible Hand. Good luck.
Just the fact that GUIs exist doesn't make text mode programs completely obsolete.
Certainly true, but there can be mishaps if you mix the two. When using vi, hitting the ESC key is a good thing. Nothing bad will ever happen to you. You pop back into navigate mode and can take stock of the situation.hhhhhoh crap.
Heaven help you, though, if you have the wrong window in focus. Many Windows programs do Bad Things (like closing windows or dialogs) when receiving ESC.
You always know who are the Unix guys in the office, because they're the ones sitting at the Windows machines, who every once in a while will reflexively hit ESC 5 or 6 times just to feel better. They can't help it.
What does this have to do with money? Humans are naturally curious. We're explorers. That's what we do.
You are right. Even if it is a one-way mission, I guarantee that there will be volunteers confident that they can McGuyver-like, whomp up an indefinitely-survivable habitat from the lander's wreckage, twine, and the odd Martian artifact found lying about.
They'll probably be right.
For the record, I am on that first Mars colony ship, even if they have to duct-tape me onto the outer hull. I'll hold my breath, Goddammit.
Demon comes from the greek word diamon, or, more accurately delta-iota-alpha-mu-omicron-nu, depending on how it's declined. That's singular nominative (i think). [...]
In helenistic greek, i.e. around the time of the peloponnesian wars, [...]
When the word was moved into other languages (i think it came to english via romance languages, stemming from latin), it changed to demon, [...]
[... all words come from Greek, obviously...]
[... Windows XP as secret Christian reference...]
Just suffice it to say, when you see demon, you don't have to think servant of satan, from the pits of hell, sent to torment the true believing christians. It's just a spirit, who may have the attitude of a prankster.
Thanks for the historical overview; it was very neat. I do think you're overlooking one thing: that long series of derivations and meaning-shifts you mentioned did happen, and that's why modern Christians may be discomfited by the BSD daemon. If we were still Hellenistic Greeks there'd be no problem.
(Well, okay, maybe a little problem... imagine you're at Komdeks, ready to start the demo, when you realize Paulos forgot to bring the damned-to-hades sacrificial bull! Oh, the embarrassment.)
Personally, I'm a Christian and I don't get too creeped out by the BSD daemon, but I'll be just as happy when it's gone.
There are in fact fewer jobs available, and the salaries are the same (ie, not lower).
Hmm... do not overlook that there is a lag time effect involved. That is, as the supply of labor (eg unemployed computer people) goes up, and the demand (non-outsourced job slots) goes down, the price of the commodity (your salary) goes down.
There is no escaping this; it is Adam Smith's invisible hand bitch-slapping you.
However, it will take a while -- years, maybe -- for it all to shake out. Salaries are "sticky", in that they fall more slowly than, say, the price of soybeans. This is because (a) some people quit tech entirely, slowing the rise in labor supply, (b) it takes a while to find that new job, even at a lower salary, and most importantly (c) your employer typically can't walk in and lower salaries of existing workers "to meet the market, heh heh".
There will be a painful and slow process, and it is not yet clear how many US software jobs will remain at the equilibrium point. Fasten your seatbelts, gentlemen, it's going to be a bumpy decade.
Ironically, the GNU/HURD may well be more friendly to proprietary software and drivers than Linux ever will be! Being a microkernel OS, drivers would have a far cleaner separation from the GPLed HURD kernel
That's a good point, but I do wonder if the GNU/HURD people will explicitly put the kibosh on the idea out of principle. Remember, the hard-core GNU guys are pretty inflexible about non-GPL software.
Yes, actually I have. Only in America and Europe is it considered "normal" for a woman to be overweight. If you travel to other countries, it's actually quite difficult to find fat people
Let's not forget that in the 3rd world there just isn't such a superabundance of cheap food. In America the poor people are fat, and the rich people (with access to gym & overpriced Jenny-Craig chow) are thin.
I recall an article by a Peace Corps fellow returned from West Africa, where being fat is a sign of prosperity. A local man told him, "When you came here you were white and fat. Now you're skinny and red," and wondered if the PC fellow thought it was worth it.
In short... in many parts of the world, "fat" also means "phat".
[...] He felt the need to point out at least twice per e-mail that he had invented Ethernet. That's not including the line he had in his.sig, where he made sure everyone knew that he was the "father" of Ethernet.
Creator of Ethernet or not, I just came away with the impression that he was an egotistical person who never did anything else and intended to just rest on his laurels, as if that would get him by for the rest of his life.
Well, if I'd invented Ethernet, I'd sure as hell mention it as often as I could.;)
I mean, those are some pretty serious laurels to rest on.
All I can say (so far, so far!) is that I've written some fairly mean business software and, um, maintained server uptime within the limits specified in the SLA. That's hardly.sig-worthy.
The fact that Anti-Spam sites are now being targetted makes it that much better because those sites have actually caused me a lot of personal headache by labeling me as a spammer even though I've never touched the stuff in my life!!
I've sent countless emails explaining to them that they have no proof or reason to even remotely believe
Er... I think you may have touched on the actual problem here.
Just stop sending emails like this:
"Dear Sir or Madam, I am not a spammer, you've got to believe me. For the [100234]th time, please take me off your blacklist. Do you have any idea who I am? I am, in fact, the nephew of deposed Nigerian minister Nbuko Mdebele, and..."
...OpenOffice.org has not been stellar. While I use it on occasion, it's always struck me as so horribly slow. It seems to me that we *dont* want to be imitating all the feature bloat and general crap that seems to hang on to MS Office like cheap wallpaper. Honestly, who really needs all the features in Word anyway?
Joel Spolsky has a neat-o article about this. The basic point:
Each of those 'bloat' features has someone who insists on having it. Start trimming them away and you start losing customers to apps which do have the feature.
... Israel has got some of the best politicians money can buy
Too bad US law doesn't allow us to shop overseas; we're spending a mighty lot of money to buy third rate ones...
It's so hard to please some people. First we hear complaints of how we're outsourcing our government corruption to low-cost Israeli politicos, then we get complaints that our local product just isn't cutting it.
Of course, if we were really serious about getting some sleazy politics from low-cost areas, we'd start getting complaints that we're oppressing those poor pols by letting them steal only a million a day.
I just find it amazing that this is really news and that people are asking others to step up to breaking the law.
The problem is that the law is wrong. No, not on general principles -- the appropriate parties should be able to go after pirates -- but it's wrong that the penalties per violation are so mind-bogglingly high, and have no relationship to the actual loss suffered by the copyright owners.
It does seem excessive, but I think the idea is to have a strong deterrent effect.
However, ridiculous fines as deterrent work better on corporations than on teenagers, who can't or won't believe that it could possibly apply to them. In a sense they're right, as no court is going to make a little girl pay 800 large; hence this $3500 settlement.
That said, right now there is an army of teenagers out there holding their thumbs and index fingers up to form a giant "W"
A better deterrent, sez I, is to make teenage offenders listen to each and every bootleg track, sequentially. With the state of music these days, this oughta be punishment enough.
Another thought: After paying out a sane-but-painful 3500, Miss Whassername's pop might provide the "deterrent factor".
Some people like it hot, but not that hot. Most restaurants serve it around 135 degrees, which most people consider quite hot. Smart waitresses will sometimes keep their "freshener" pot at 150 or so,...
The thing that makes this whole McD business funny to me is that for decades I've made my coffee by putting a coffeepot on the stove. When the water (ahem) boils, the coffeepot whistles, and I decant the water into a cup.
It's *hot*. Like 212 degrees hot.
I think the main line of reasoning of the anti-McD-judgement people is simply this:
Accidents happen. Especially if you do something silly like hold a flimsy sytrofoam cup between your legs and mess around with it. Why is it taken for granted that, whenever you suffer an injury, the nearest deep pocket has to pay and pay large?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget
So
Was there one Really, Really Great generation from which we all devolved? (This was before the invention of the party.) Or maybe it's a cyclical thing. Real research on the topic of well-behavedness of kids across generations would be wonderful, but, being Real Research, has no place on slashdot.
Alternate Strategy: If you want to be the Old-School Curmudgeon with a Classical Education, fume about how there's no such thing as a "Lexius".
The whirring sound you hear is the sound of your grammar-school teachers collectively rotating, at lathe speed, in their graves.
Let us also not forget that a large impetus to the Rennaissance was the exodus of Byzantine Greek scholars from the wreckage of the Eastern Roman Empire, busily being dismantled by the Turks. The Arab and later Turkish conquests cut off the Western world from much of the wisdom of our Greek heritage. It was only later that trade and warfare re-acquainted the West with what they had lost, plus benefits -- the Muslims had been adding to that corpus during the meantime.
Let's summarize:
Any mathematical or scientific term beginning with al- is likely from the Islamic world. Algebra, Algorithm (*), Alchemy, etc. Thanks guys. Now knock it off with this Dar al-Harb stuff, okay?
(*) Neat story
This is an OSS disaster.
iRaq anyone?
And yet
I simply cannot live without tabbed browsing. So I use it anyway.
Nothing else in the Universe can make students grateful -- grateful! -- to be allowed to use C
It is silly to assume that all these people are just morons. After all, Viagra is proven to work, it is a legitimate product of sorts. The internet is there for hefty short limp (ahem ahem) non-digerati as well as for propeller heads, God bless 'em.
It seems to me that spam is the runaway bastard-child of something which actually is good and useful -- that is, targeted marketing to the willing. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There is a huge legitimate market out there, just begging to be flee^wmarketed.
The anti-spam people are fighting against the Invisible Hand. Good luck.
Heaven help you, though, if you have the wrong window in focus. Many Windows programs do Bad Things (like closing windows or dialogs) when receiving ESC.
You always know who are the Unix guys in the office, because they're the ones sitting at the Windows machines, who every once in a while will reflexively hit ESC 5 or 6 times just to feel better. They can't help it.
They'll probably be right.
For the record, I am on that first Mars colony ship, even if they have to duct-tape me onto the outer hull. I'll hold my breath, Goddammit.
(Well, okay, maybe a little problem
Personally, I'm a Christian and I don't get too creeped out by the BSD daemon, but I'll be just as happy when it's gone.
However, it will take a while -- years, maybe -- for it all to shake out. Salaries are "sticky", in that they fall more slowly than, say, the price of soybeans. This is because (a) some people quit tech entirely, slowing the rise in labor supply, (b) it takes a while to find that new job, even at a lower salary, and most importantly (c) your employer typically can't walk in and lower salaries of existing workers "to meet the market, heh heh".
There will be a painful and slow process, and it is not yet clear how many US software jobs will remain at the equilibrium point. Fasten your seatbelts, gentlemen, it's going to be a bumpy decade.
I recall an article by a Peace Corps fellow returned from West Africa, where being fat is a sign of prosperity. A local man told him, "When you came here you were white and fat. Now you're skinny and red," and wondered if the PC fellow thought it was worth it.
In short
Well, if I'd invented Ethernet, I'd sure as hell mention it as often as I could.
I mean, those are some pretty serious laurels to rest on.
All I can say (so far, so far!) is that I've written some fairly mean business software and, um, maintained server uptime within the limits specified in the SLA. That's hardly
Just stop sending emails like this:
"Dear Sir or Madam, I am not a spammer, you've got to believe me. For the [100234]th time, please take me off your blacklist. Do you have any idea who I am? I am, in fact, the nephew of deposed Nigerian minister Nbuko Mdebele, and
Each of those 'bloat' features has someone who insists on having it. Start trimming them away and you start losing customers to apps which do have the feature.
Of course, if we were really serious about getting some sleazy politics from low-cost areas, we'd start getting complaints that we're oppressing those poor pols by letting them steal only a million a day.
That said, right now there is an army of teenagers out there holding their thumbs and index fingers up to form a giant "W"
A better deterrent, sez I, is to make teenage offenders listen to each and every bootleg track, sequentially. With the state of music these days, this oughta be punishment enough.
Another thought: After paying out a sane-but-painful 3500, Miss Whassername's pop might provide the "deterrent factor".
Hey ...
How about Chapeau-S/2 ?
It's *hot*. Like 212 degrees hot.
I think the main line of reasoning of the anti-McD-judgement people is simply this:
Accidents happen. Especially if you do something silly like hold a flimsy sytrofoam cup between your legs and mess around with it. Why is it taken for granted that, whenever you suffer an injury, the nearest deep pocket has to pay and pay large?
At least that's me.