No problem at all, provided you make sure to memorize your key fingerprint. A self-signed cert can be used to encrypt just fine--you'll just need to tell your browser to trust it for however long you feel necessary. The problem comes when someone manages to hijack your DNS and *also* has a self-signed certificate with your site's name on it. The fingerprint being different is about the only warning you're going to get (because it will be trivial for them to tunnel the HTTP requests through their fake server to your real server so all the content will appear correct).
Obviously CNR is a wonderful feature, as is clearly evidenced by all the dozen or so people still using Linspire.
I kinda get the feeling that I'm the only one who's noticed a problem with the man who stands to gain direct financial benefit from the inclusion of subscription fee-based technology in another distro being it's primary proponent. If instead, Linspire were to mount a covert campaign to infiltrate shills into the Ubuntu forums, people would onto them like white on rice.
I've given this some thought, and my best guess as to the reason for Smed's comments are that he has some stock options or something that haven't vested yet, and he's trying his best to respond in the "best interests of shareholders", i.e., simply putting the best face possible that he can on it so that he stands a chance of getting some retirement money before the whole thing crashes to the ground.
I had active accounts on both EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies up until last month (when I finally got around to cancelling them). In virtually no way was SOE actually doing what they were supposed to be doing from a gamer's point of view. They were interested in selling a product and getting people's money--which is an entirely different goal from making a game (good or not). It's possible for a company to do both, as both Blizzard and Cryptic Studios have proven. I was also a long-time subscriber to the original EverQuest. Even by the low standards EQI set, SOE was practically just marking time and cashing checks while running EQII.
The entire time I played EQII, it seemed like maybe one or two bugs got fixed a month. For a game which was supposed to have lots of developers and coders working for it, their output was approximately what I would expect from having maybe three or four people working for them. They were very good at regularly releasing "expansions" for people to buy, tho'. The problem with this is that from a traditional gamer's standpoint, these were just regularly scheduled times when the GM could be bribed to give you more loot. Every single expansion SOE releases seems to increase the amount of loot per hour players get, so you either buy the expansion, or your character suffers a serious disadvantage to the people who did. The expansions themselves were also full of serious bugs which never seemed to get fixed. The combat system in EQII was annoying at best, since it again boiled down to the most trivial form of tank in front, healers in the back, and everyone else gets to buff and cheer them on. The "upgrade" it recieved made it even more simplistic (and intolerable).
To Penny Arcade's credit, what they said about the EQII artwork is entirely correct. I'm sure they thought they were trying to create a photorealistic environment, but that's not quite reasonable to expect out of the engine, and the end result is that the world does look like a hackup of Bryce and Poser images.
Much the same thing went on with SWG. The released without actually having finished the game, and then had to turn around and do a major 'upgrade' to it. Their space combat expansion was basically just another bribery session. You could struggle to make money as a newbie in the desert, or spend half an hour flying around space and collect literally a week's worth of money all at once. The "combat upgrade" fixed one thing at the expense of losing nearly all of it's complexity. I suppose if the goal was to make existance on the planets of SWG as simplistic as their space combat, they did the right thing. However, neither I nor apparently many other people are willing to pay a monthly fee to pay something less challenging or complex than a shareware single-player shooter....and regardless of how carefully SOE tries to deny and hide that they've not lost players in droves, it's very obvious that the most recent major changes to both games basically killed them by causing players to jump ship en mass, although SWG to a much greater degree. Their cities are ghost towns and only moderately populated at "peak" times. I suspect the only reason they've not formally had server merges is simply because that would give away the fact that they've managed to basically chase away most of the players of both games now.
Basically, I think SOE got spoiled by having no real competition--then continued on that same path of being able to ignore the entire player base (95% of them are morons, but there's about 5% that must be listened to because they're right. SOE regularly ign
So basically, your argument is that the software must be flawed because you feel that someone was rude to you when you were asking for a feature that is technically not possible?
Perhaps you should take your head out of your butt.
It's pretty simple to spot the cause whenever anyone in Tennessee proposes new technological legislation... It's generally corruption, pure and simple. Someone who would clearly benefit from this happening has simply been passing out the bribe money. Louisiana might be have been polled as the most corrupt state government, but Tennessee works hard at catching up with them.
If software is taxed as property, then it's going to be able to have it's value depreciated as well. This is just going to mean a tax break on software for companies who use a lot of it, particularly when it comes to software that comes from a company who tends to obsolesce their old releases with new ones every three years. This will in turn allow the consultants who originally got these companies trapped in the never-ending renewal agreements with no way to test a migration to some other platform, to convince these companies to spend more money on their software, because with the tax break Uncle Sam is picking up part of the tab.
There's another sinister side of this as well. Leased equipment is not taxed the same way, so neither would leased software. Taxing _owned_ software would give a distinct advantage to companies dealing in mere site-licences, since it would be a simple wording clarification to make these entirely equivalent to the software leasing agreements that they already are.
Let's look at some of the other telling details... The board *proposing* this change admits they do not know how much money this would bring in. Normally these guys have a very clear idea of how much money a proposed tax is going to represent--so what's the source of their interest in trying to get the money in the first place? (Bribe money. Pure and simple)
Not to state the painfully obvious, but the way most retailers work, it's no great suprise their employees say unintelligent things like "it's the gold contact that let you know it's a USB 2.0 cable because electricity travels faster through gold." (That is a direct quote, by the way!)
The big chain stores charge customers $50 an hour (for in-house repair) to upwards of $100 an hour (for on-site work) and then turn around and give these hard-working individuals a whopping $10 to $12 per hour to survive on. The word "geeksploitation" comes to mind in a big way. It's this reason that most computer repairmen who tolerate this onerous situation (you can make $10 an hour doing data entry if you can just *type* fast) and hire on at these places are literally the bottom bidders in the system. That is just barely enough money to keep a geek in new hardware so they can learn the intimate details of troubleshooting it (which is cheaper than regular training classes, and includes employee discounts on the hardware). The majority of these poor, damned souls either stagnate, or tolerate the situation only long enough to get jobs at better places as either system administrators or network engineers, who are typically only marginally less underpaid.
Your best bet to finding really skilled geeks is still word-of-mouth to find an independent contractor or small group of geeks acting in concert.
Patrick did not drop Gnome support "just like that". This decision has been in the pipe for awhile, and anyone who has ever built Gnome can tell you that it alone is almost too much for one person. Slackware, for those who seem to have forgotten, is run by one guy, not a team of people. I think you'll find there's not too many people who have built Gnome by themselves before that would find fault in his offically handing it off to outside groups to deal with.
This has to be one of the more ignorant ideas I've heard of in some time. Technically any (and I mean any) word written on anything (including printed in books, and on this website) can be treated by Grafedia in this manner. Indeed, phrases that are printed everywhere (like "STOP", and "NO PARKING") and some that are infrequently scribbled (like "IDIOCY")
What they've "invented" is a online dictionary lookup that gives a small amount of your money to the cell phone companies (and possibly Grafedia as well!) every time you send a text message to retrieve the dictionary entry. How much money you lose depends on how long it takes you to realize you're just using a text message interface to a dictionary lookup.
It seems to me that this is all just Eskimos buying ice cubes in "Original Ice" flavor.
Thievery, murder, and child molestation have been around for time immemorial, but we still do everything we can to stop those activites, BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG.
A moral compass is not just another shiny bauble to hang from your watch chain.
In case you haven't noticed yet, hotplugging (and coldplugging) makes the loading of drivers for PCI and USB hardware a non-problem. Provided one has the proper module compiled, it's all taken care of by the kernel when the PCI and USB buses are initialized. See http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net for more information.
You don't have to be a fan of either Linux or open-source software to have contempt for SCO's legal actions. For all we know it could have just been someone looking to test out their new multi-platform exploit, using SCO as a convenient target, since they seem to be behaving as if they are immune to the repercussions of their actions.
I mean, this is the Internet we're talking about. Kooks and hotheads abound here. It was only a matter of time before someone up and decided to take hostile action against such a morally bankrupt company.
This should have never been moderated up in the first place. Removing spyware is not in violation of the warranty. Everything that's been posted about this (that has been rational and based on facts) has indicated that the removal of spyware may violate the licence agreements of other software that was installed with those programs. Read some of the EULAs every once in awhile and you will quickly find that partial removal of the software that's being installed (meaning: you keep the app but remove the spyware) is expressly forbidden.
Of course, if you as an individual want to risk being sued by these nasty companies (which isn't likely to happen since they can't possibly sue you for much) for violation of a EULA, go right ahead. Dell can't risk that kind of nonsense because there are evil lawyers out there who would sue Dell over it, given the chance.
Remember, this is the new economy, where if you can't come up with good idea and working business model, you can still make a profit by coming up with a half-assed idea and finding people to sue for damages.
It is not Dell's responsibility to educate users on safe computing practices. The average user is not a particularly bright individual, and if a company were to attempt to educate all their customers on what to do with their computer after recieving it, you could probably expect the cost of the equipment to double or triple as a result.
Let's not forget the more obvious problems associated with this issue that brought these users to call technical support with a spyware problem in the first place...
Downloading pirated software and/or music
Downloading untrusted software, or conversely software from vendors who aren't to be trusted
Use of Microsoft products
Failing to use a virus scanner or firewall and connecting to the Internet
Considering that this is a documented feature of Windows which is has already been published all over the Internet as a quick way of squelching the AutoPlay feature and an attempt at a lawsuit on these grounds would have a snowball in Hell commenting, "Wow! That was over with fast". Searching for this information is ridiculously easy...
...and for once, a lawsuit clearly filed for the purposes of harassment is highly likely to result in a successful counter-suit for damages, simply by the fact that this is a documented feature of Windows. Demonstrating that SunnComm's suit had absolutely no merit on the basis that the information in question was already common knowledge should be a walk in the park.
What makes this especially stupid is that they'll be suing someone who has very little (if any) money, although I imagine that may well change after the counter-suit. If the people at SunnComm weren't complete idiots, they'd go after someone who has money, like Jeffrey Richter, who writes books on using Windows as well as articles for the MSDN network and who already published this information in 1998.
"[...] has the paradigm of 'if you offer external services to the Internet then place those machines onto a perimeter network' been eroded?"
The simple answer to this question is "Definitely not." The use of a DMZ segment to keep production machines on their own physical network segment is likely to never become obsolete because the benefits of this simple step are so great.
"Are application level firewalls sophisticated enough to allow machines on your internal network to advertise services to the Internet?"
Whether they are or not is irrelevant. Only the barest minimum of your network should be exposed to another network (especially the Internet), and those hosts that _are_ should be unable to initiate connections to the rest of your network to reduce the impact of the loss of confidentiality in the case of an intrusion. While this may seem rather anal-retentive, to implement a proper application level firewall, the firewall can't just casually filter by generic service type. It _has_ to be able to distinguish a kosher query from a malicious one, and this requires a LOT of detailed work in the firewall rules to ensure that only the queries you want passed through can be passed. If you have a lot of custom CGIs with input parsing, this can turn into a nightmare of man-hours to maintain.
"When is it alright to 'poke a hole in the firewall' to allow this? Personally, I think the answer is 'Never!' but perhaps I'm out of touch with current network security models."
I mainly agree with you and feel that the answer is really "Almost never", with "never" requiring some support from the developers maintaining your site. If they're on-board with you on the concept of a DMZ, they'll help you by designing the production system so that connections could be made _to_ it from the intranet to extract information from the production hosts, instead of making the production hosts initiate connections to the intranet and increase the chance an intruder could do the same. If you can't control the access because it's some wacky proprietary protocol, institute a second DMZ (network cable is cheap and so are extra NICs). No other network should ever be allowed to reach inside your intranet.
Strap 8 Handspring Visors ($25 on Ebay for a Deluxe model just about every day of the week) to the side of a 1,000BTU air-conditioning unit ($50 at a pawn shop) and turn it on full blast. It may well give the same kilowatt-hours per clockcycle. It would certainly have more RAM.
(Yes, I am aware the Visors run on AAA-batteries.)
You have to think about clusters as small farms for converting electricity into information. There's no sense in even feeding these power if the output is going to be so low.
It's not like emulators for the C=64 don't exist, but I don't know what some of my raster-driven multitasking code would make of suddenly having >10,000 clockcycles per scan line as opposed to 83. (I _think_ that was the amount it was.)
You could probably write a new 6502 emulator in Perl and have it run at the right speed with the 2Ghz machines cheaply available now.
I had one of these machines when I was a kid. I outgrew BASIC fairly rapidly and started coding in assembly. My blue 6502 Assembly book was so dog eared that it made neighborhood beagles jealous. While I was taking calculus in college, I wrote a crude ray tracer that output 16 colored blocks and attempted to use screen refresh rates to eek more than 16 colors out of each text cell. I'm as big a fan of the machine as anyone, but it's time has passed.
Now, however, both the CELL PHONE AND PDA IN MY POCKET have more beef than a C=64.
I mean, if you're going to mod something from that era, at least use a C-128D. There's so much more room in the case.
...because it's the only reason I can see for coming to the conclusions that the report appears to. Let's look at those numbers again...
$707 million USD: Amount spent recovering from hacker attacks.
$28.2 BILLION USD: Amount spent recovering from hacker attacks plus worms/viruses.
After doing some simple math it appear that basically, over 95% of the economic damage being done is coming from worms and viruses, which are almost exclusively a Windows thing... and the article mentiones explicitly, "The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly to the record estimate."
Then the man goes on to imply that there's a higher proportion of Linux servers compromised, and then says "Microsoft deserves credit for having reduced the proportion of successful on-line hacker attacks perpetrated against Windows servers."
That is the part that really blows my mind. Did they just write off each and every dcom exploit incident as if it were a worm and not a "real" hack or something? What kind of credit do you give them for that? "Hey, good going Microsoft, there were a few Win2k servers still in boxes in the warehouse that didn't get compromised..."
Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due, so lets say it outright.... Their products were responsible for over 95% of the economic damage from unauthorized computer activity.
Try one of the Handsprings. If you don't mind paying a bit of shipping and handling, there's no reason you can't buy a Visor Deluxe on eBay, try it out, and then sell it to someone else on eBay if you decide you don't like it. To avoid them becoming the death of me through smoke inhalation if there's ever a fire where I live, I've eliminated probably 400-500 paperbacks from the stuff that has to go with me when I move by nabbing electronic replacements. I was picky enough about quality that I read most of them over again to be sure they were decent scans, so I can say with some certainty that I haven't had any problems reading for long periods of time on my Deluxe.
1) Main menu doesn't respond to alphabet keybindings ala IceWM, KDE and Windows 95!
I prefer to think of that one as "Thank god I don't have to use Windows95 anymore", but there's a reason the panel menu doesn't hotkey all it's items. For one, if you want to type instead of mouse a selection, the command line applet does tab completion. For another, a big goal in Gnome 2.x has been towards writing less terribly clever code, because terribly clever code is what makes terribly clever bugs that are hard to isolate and fix. You may find some consolation in the fact that Gnome 2.4 is ridiculously rock solid compared to Windows95.
2) Taskbar doesn't reflect order that programs were started in. It inserts new buttons at random positions.
Possibly you should have thought more deeply about this before posting. Hit ALT-TAB and stare at the list of applications shown for awhile longer. You may eventually notice they are listed in the order they are stacked on the desktop. It is not just making up the order.
GNOME rules, but these two things (among the Metacity wireframe and animation niggles) [...]
Those have been fixed for awhile now.
[...] are real problems. For all the UI work, it's a shame they can't get such elementary stuff right.
The real shame is the lack of accuracy in your post. Read the article. Gnome 2.4 was just released. Almost none of these problems you mention still exist..
Still, I'll be downloading it tonight:)
Perhaps next time you'll run the software for awhile before commenting on it.
Come on... Lots of people find the Palm handheld displays quite readable. As to cheap, check Ebay. You can buy Visor Deluxes all day long for under $30. Those have 16Mb of RAM which is enough to hold a dozen paperbacks. If you want to go as "high" as $80 you can get a Handspring Edge, which is 2x as fast, has a more durable case and better backlight, is lighter, and is rechargeable by leaving it in the cradle for an hour or three a week.
As to free software for reading, you've got your choice of Weasel Reader and Plucker. Both are quite easy to use, and come with tools to convert other formats into what they need to read them.
The only reason companies are finding eBooks unprofitable is they're discovering not too many people are interested in paying the same amount of money to buy an ebook (and not get the paperback) as they would to buy a paperback. Add to this that most of these nits are selling ebooks in proprietary protected formats that may or may not be readable in 5 years (paperbacks are certainly readable 5 years from now) and you have to wonder if these companies are beginning to make executive decisions based on the opinions of the interns from the "special" school.
I hate to post something entirely negative, but unless the thing is being ported to a digital watch or some kind magic decoder ring, the C=64 is *extremely* obsolete by now. Cheaply obtainable Palm devices have a ton more RAM and are considerably faster, even if they don't have color screens, and the Game Boy Advance, to put it bluntly, beats the stuffing out of the C=64 on almost all fronts (lacks a keyboard tho). Better sound, color, faster, more interesting ASM instruction set (without becoming insanely complex), exceedingly portable...
I can only hope that if they do actually do bring this back, they'll have the sense to target the only hardware market they're likely to stand a chance in, the one where people want something a little fancier than usual to open and close circuits and monitor things. There the C=64 might actually have a shot... It's probably more powerful than about three-quarters of the ATMs out there and just as capable of performing those same tasks.
"Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry."
Bullshit.
The problem is that the few people who actually still read books are not likely to be stupid people. On top of that, the people who are reading electronic formats of books are even less likely to be stupid people.
However, it would take rather dim consumers indeed to not see a problem with paying the exact same cost for an eBook as one would in a brick and mortar bookstore for a paperback... and strangely when I go to these eBook sellers online, I see exactly that. "Oh joy! Instead of paying $7.95 for that paperback over an Barnes & Noble, I can pay just $7.95 to download an electronic copy in a format that I probably won't be able to read again in 10 years because the format and it's reader will have been declared obsolete!"
The unwillingness of eBook publishers to see eBooks as something other than a way to increase sales profits by cutting out the middlemen of printing and shipping expenses is what is hampering eBook adoption.
Once you've looked at the daily (yes that view is just today) expand to the week and then month and tell me if quite possibly the SEC may be taking a look at whether or not the CEO of SCO is deliberately making these superfluous announcements in order for someone to be cashing in on the entirely temporary jumps in their pathetic value.
I'm quite stunned that this guy wrote an _entire paper_ about something that's essentially an optimal golomb ruler computation, and a small one at that.
I suspect another thorn in this plan is that the people handing back change will have serious difficulty in accurately counting out change in those denominations unless the register shows them a little picture of two 18-cent coins, a twenty-seven cent coin, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem at all, provided you make sure to memorize your key fingerprint. A self-signed cert can be used to encrypt just fine--you'll just need to tell your browser to trust it for however long you feel necessary. The problem comes when someone manages to hijack your DNS and *also* has a self-signed certificate with your site's name on it. The fingerprint being different is about the only warning you're going to get (because it will be trivial for them to tunnel the HTTP requests through their fake server to your real server so all the content will appear correct).
Obviously CNR is a wonderful feature, as is clearly evidenced by all the dozen or so people still using Linspire.
I kinda get the feeling that I'm the only one who's noticed a problem with the man who stands to gain direct financial benefit from the inclusion of subscription fee-based technology in another distro being it's primary proponent. If instead, Linspire were to mount a covert campaign to infiltrate shills into the Ubuntu forums, people would onto them like white on rice.
I've given this some thought, and my best guess as to the reason for Smed's comments are that he has some stock options or something that haven't vested yet, and he's trying his best to respond in the "best interests of shareholders", i.e., simply putting the best face possible that he can on it so that he stands a chance of getting some retirement money before the whole thing crashes to the ground.
...and regardless of how carefully SOE tries to deny and hide that they've not lost players in droves, it's very obvious that the most recent major changes to both games basically killed them by causing players to jump ship en mass, although SWG to a much greater degree. Their cities are ghost towns and only moderately populated at "peak" times. I suspect the only reason they've not formally had server merges is simply because that would give away the fact that they've managed to basically chase away most of the players of both games now.
I had active accounts on both EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies up until last month (when I finally got around to cancelling them). In virtually no way was SOE actually doing what they were supposed to be doing from a gamer's point of view. They were interested in selling a product and getting people's money--which is an entirely different goal from making a game (good or not). It's possible for a company to do both, as both Blizzard and Cryptic Studios have proven. I was also a long-time subscriber to the original EverQuest. Even by the low standards EQI set, SOE was practically just marking time and cashing checks while running EQII.
The entire time I played EQII, it seemed like maybe one or two bugs got fixed a month. For a game which was supposed to have lots of developers and coders working for it, their output was approximately what I would expect from having maybe three or four people working for them. They were very good at regularly releasing "expansions" for people to buy, tho'. The problem with this is that from a traditional gamer's standpoint, these were just regularly scheduled times when the GM could be bribed to give you more loot. Every single expansion SOE releases seems to increase the amount of loot per hour players get, so you either buy the expansion, or your character suffers a serious disadvantage to the people who did.
The expansions themselves were also full of serious bugs which never seemed to get fixed. The combat system in EQII was annoying at best, since it again boiled down to the most trivial form of tank in front, healers in the back, and everyone else gets to buff and cheer them on. The "upgrade" it recieved made it even more simplistic (and intolerable).
To Penny Arcade's credit, what they said about the EQII artwork is entirely correct. I'm sure they thought they were trying to create a photorealistic environment, but that's not quite reasonable to expect out of the engine, and the end result is that the world does look like a hackup of Bryce and Poser images.
Much the same thing went on with SWG. The released without actually having finished the game, and then had to turn around and do a major 'upgrade' to it. Their space combat expansion was basically just another bribery session. You could struggle to make money as a newbie in the desert, or spend half an hour flying around space and collect literally a week's worth of money all at once. The "combat upgrade" fixed one thing at the expense of losing nearly all of it's complexity. I suppose if the goal was to make existance on the planets of SWG as simplistic as their space combat, they did the right thing. However, neither I nor apparently many other people are willing to pay a monthly fee to pay something less challenging or complex than a shareware single-player shooter.
Basically, I think SOE got spoiled by having no real competition--then continued on that same path of being able to ignore the entire player base (95% of them are morons, but there's about 5% that must be listened to because they're right. SOE regularly ign
So basically, your argument is that the software must be flawed because you feel that someone was rude to you when you were asking for a feature that is technically not possible?
Perhaps you should take your head out of your butt.
It's pretty simple to spot the cause whenever anyone in Tennessee proposes new technological legislation... It's generally corruption, pure and simple. Someone who would clearly benefit from this happening has simply been passing out the bribe money. Louisiana might be have been polled as the most corrupt state government, but Tennessee works hard at catching up with them.
If software is taxed as property, then it's going to be able to have it's value depreciated as well. This is just going to mean a tax break on software for companies who use a lot of it, particularly when it comes to software that comes from a company who tends to obsolesce their old releases with new ones every three years. This will in turn allow the consultants who originally got these companies trapped in the never-ending renewal agreements with no way to test a migration to some other platform, to convince these companies to spend more money on their software, because with the tax break Uncle Sam is picking up part of the tab.
There's another sinister side of this as well. Leased equipment is not taxed the same way, so neither would leased software. Taxing _owned_ software would give a distinct advantage to companies dealing in mere site-licences, since it would be a simple wording clarification to make these entirely equivalent to the software leasing agreements that they already are.
Let's look at some of the other telling details... The board *proposing* this change admits they do not know how much money this would bring in. Normally these guys have a very clear idea of how much money a proposed tax is going to represent--so what's the source of their interest in trying to get the money in the first place? (Bribe money. Pure and simple)
Not to state the painfully obvious, but the way most retailers work, it's no great suprise their employees say unintelligent things like "it's the gold contact that let you know it's a USB 2.0 cable because electricity travels faster through gold." (That is a direct quote, by the way!)
The big chain stores charge customers $50 an hour (for in-house repair) to upwards of $100 an hour (for on-site work) and then turn around and give these hard-working individuals a whopping $10 to $12 per hour to survive on. The word "geeksploitation" comes to mind in a big way. It's this reason that most computer repairmen who tolerate this onerous situation (you can make $10 an hour doing data entry if you can just *type* fast) and hire on at these places are literally the bottom bidders in the system. That is just barely enough money to keep a geek in new hardware so they can learn the intimate details of troubleshooting it (which is cheaper than regular training classes, and includes employee discounts on the hardware). The majority of these poor, damned souls either stagnate, or tolerate the situation only long enough to get jobs at better places as either system administrators or network engineers, who are typically only marginally less underpaid.
Your best bet to finding really skilled geeks is still word-of-mouth to find an independent contractor or small group of geeks acting in concert.
Stop the geeksploitation!
Patrick did not drop Gnome support "just like that". This decision has been in the pipe for awhile, and anyone who has ever built Gnome can tell you that it alone is almost too much for one person. Slackware, for those who seem to have forgotten, is run by one guy, not a team of people. I think you'll find there's not too many people who have built Gnome by themselves before that would find fault in his offically handing it off to outside groups to deal with.
This has to be one of the more ignorant ideas I've heard of in some time. Technically any (and I mean any) word written on anything (including printed in books, and on this website) can be treated by Grafedia in this manner. Indeed, phrases that are printed everywhere (like "STOP", and "NO PARKING") and some that are infrequently scribbled (like "IDIOCY")
What they've "invented" is a online dictionary lookup that gives a small amount of your money to the cell phone companies (and possibly Grafedia as well!) every time you send a text message to retrieve the dictionary entry. How much money you lose depends on how long it takes you to realize you're just using a text message interface to a dictionary lookup.
It seems to me that this is all just Eskimos buying ice cubes in "Original Ice" flavor.
Thievery, murder, and child molestation have been around for time immemorial, but we still do everything we can to stop those activites, BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG.
A moral compass is not just another shiny bauble to hang from your watch chain.
In case you haven't noticed yet, hotplugging (and coldplugging) makes the loading of drivers for PCI and USB hardware a non-problem. Provided one has the proper module compiled, it's all taken care of by the kernel when the PCI and USB buses are initialized. See http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net for more information.
You don't have to be a fan of either Linux or open-source software to have contempt for SCO's legal actions. For all we know it could have just been someone looking to test out their new multi-platform exploit, using SCO as a convenient target, since they seem to be behaving as if they are immune to the repercussions of their actions.
I mean, this is the Internet we're talking about. Kooks and hotheads abound here. It was only a matter of time before someone up and decided to take hostile action against such a morally bankrupt company.
This should have never been moderated up in the first place. Removing spyware is not in violation of the warranty. Everything that's been posted about this (that has been rational and based on facts) has indicated that the removal of spyware may violate the licence agreements of other software that was installed with those programs. Read some of the EULAs every once in awhile and you will quickly find that partial removal of the software that's being installed (meaning: you keep the app but remove the spyware) is expressly forbidden.
Of course, if you as an individual want to risk being sued by these nasty companies (which isn't likely to happen since they can't possibly sue you for much) for violation of a EULA, go right ahead. Dell can't risk that kind of nonsense because there are evil lawyers out there who would sue Dell over it, given the chance.
Remember, this is the new economy, where if you can't come up with good idea and working business model, you can still make a profit by coming up with a half-assed idea and finding people to sue for damages.
It is not Dell's responsibility to educate users on safe computing practices. The average user is not a particularly bright individual, and if a company were to attempt to educate all their customers on what to do with their computer after recieving it, you could probably expect the cost of the equipment to double or triple as a result.
Let's not forget the more obvious problems associated with this issue that brought these users to call technical support with a spyware problem in the first place...
We tah ded.
Considering that this is a documented feature of Windows which is has already been published all over the Internet as a quick way of squelching the AutoPlay feature and an attempt at a lawsuit on these grounds would have a snowball in Hell commenting, "Wow! That was over with fast". Searching for this information is ridiculously easy...
Sample Google Search #1
Sample Google Search #2
...and for once, a lawsuit clearly filed for the purposes of harassment is highly likely to result in a successful counter-suit for damages, simply by the fact that this is a documented feature of Windows. Demonstrating that SunnComm's suit had absolutely no merit on the basis that the information in question was already common knowledge should be a walk in the park.
DMCA "Violation" #1
DMCA "Violation" #2
What makes this especially stupid is that they'll be suing someone who has very little (if any) money, although I imagine that may well change after the counter-suit. If the people at SunnComm weren't complete idiots, they'd go after someone who has money, like Jeffrey Richter, who writes books on using Windows as well as articles for the MSDN network and who already published this information in 1998.
Yet Another DMCA "Violation"
I know what you're thinking right now, but even really stupid companies don't try to sue Microsoft over things this trivial.
The simple answer to this question is "Definitely not." The use of a DMZ segment to keep production machines on their own physical network segment is likely to never become obsolete because the benefits of this simple step are so great.
Whether they are or not is irrelevant. Only the barest minimum of your network should be exposed to another network (especially the Internet), and those hosts that _are_ should be unable to initiate connections to the rest of your network to reduce the impact of the loss of confidentiality in the case of an intrusion. While this may seem rather anal-retentive, to implement a proper application level firewall, the firewall can't just casually filter by generic service type. It _has_ to be able to distinguish a kosher query from a malicious one, and this requires a LOT of detailed work in the firewall rules to ensure that only the queries you want passed through can be passed. If you have a lot of custom CGIs with input parsing, this can turn into a nightmare of man-hours to maintain.
I mainly agree with you and feel that the answer is really "Almost never", with "never" requiring some support from the developers maintaining your site. If they're on-board with you on the concept of a DMZ, they'll help you by designing the production system so that connections could be made _to_ it from the intranet to extract information from the production hosts, instead of making the production hosts initiate connections to the intranet and increase the chance an intruder could do the same. If you can't control the access because it's some wacky proprietary protocol, institute a second DMZ (network cable is cheap and so are extra NICs). No other network should ever be allowed to reach inside your intranet.
Strap 8 Handspring Visors ($25 on Ebay for a Deluxe model just about every day of the week) to the side of a 1,000BTU air-conditioning unit ($50 at a pawn shop) and turn it on full blast. It may well give the same kilowatt-hours per clockcycle. It would certainly have more RAM.
(Yes, I am aware the Visors run on AAA-batteries.)
You have to think about clusters as small farms for converting electricity into information. There's no sense in even feeding these power if the output is going to be so low.
It's not like emulators for the C=64 don't exist, but I don't know what some of my raster-driven multitasking code would make of suddenly having >10,000 clockcycles per scan line as opposed to 83. (I _think_ that was the amount it was.)
You could probably write a new 6502 emulator in Perl and have it run at the right speed with the 2Ghz machines cheaply available now.
Just let it go, people. _Let it go_ already.
I had one of these machines when I was a kid. I outgrew BASIC fairly rapidly and started coding in assembly. My blue 6502 Assembly book was so dog eared that it made neighborhood beagles jealous. While I was taking calculus in college, I wrote a crude ray tracer that output 16 colored blocks and attempted to use screen refresh rates to eek more than 16 colors out of each text cell. I'm as big a fan of the machine as anyone, but it's time has passed.
Now, however, both the CELL PHONE AND PDA IN MY POCKET have more beef than a C=64.
I mean, if you're going to mod something from that era, at least use a C-128D. There's so much more room in the case.
...because it's the only reason I can see for coming to the conclusions that the report appears to. Let's look at those numbers again...
$707 million USD: Amount spent recovering from hacker attacks.
$28.2 BILLION USD: Amount spent recovering from hacker attacks plus worms/viruses.
After doing some simple math it appear that basically, over 95% of the economic damage being done is coming from worms and viruses, which are almost exclusively a Windows thing... and the article mentiones explicitly, "The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly to the record estimate."
Then the man goes on to imply that there's a higher proportion of Linux servers compromised, and then says "Microsoft deserves credit for having reduced the proportion of successful on-line hacker attacks perpetrated against Windows servers."
That is the part that really blows my mind. Did they just write off each and every dcom exploit incident as if it were a worm and not a "real" hack or something? What kind of credit do you give them for that? "Hey, good going Microsoft, there were a few Win2k servers still in boxes in the warehouse that didn't get compromised..."
Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due, so lets say it outright.... Their products were responsible for over 95% of the economic damage from unauthorized computer activity.
Try one of the Handsprings. If you don't mind paying a bit of shipping and handling, there's no reason you can't buy a Visor Deluxe on eBay, try it out, and then sell it to someone else on eBay if you decide you don't like it. To avoid them becoming the death of me through smoke inhalation if there's ever a fire where I live, I've eliminated probably 400-500 paperbacks from the stuff that has to go with me when I move by nabbing electronic replacements. I was picky enough about quality that I read most of them over again to be sure they were decent scans, so I can say with some certainty that I haven't had any problems reading for long periods of time on my Deluxe.
I prefer to think of that one as "Thank god I don't have to use Windows95 anymore", but there's a reason the panel menu doesn't hotkey all it's items. For one, if you want to type instead of mouse a selection, the command line applet does tab completion. For another, a big goal in Gnome 2.x has been towards writing less terribly clever code, because terribly clever code is what makes terribly clever bugs that are hard to isolate and fix. You may find some consolation in the fact that Gnome 2.4 is ridiculously rock solid compared to Windows95.
Possibly you should have thought more deeply about this before posting. Hit ALT-TAB and stare at the list of applications shown for awhile longer. You may eventually notice they are listed in the order they are stacked on the desktop. It is not just making up the order.
Those have been fixed for awhile now.
The real shame is the lack of accuracy in your post. Read the article. Gnome 2.4 was just released. Almost none of these problems you mention still exist..
Perhaps next time you'll run the software for awhile before commenting on it.
Come on... Lots of people find the Palm handheld displays quite readable. As to cheap, check Ebay. You can buy Visor Deluxes all day long for under $30. Those have 16Mb of RAM which is enough to hold a dozen paperbacks. If you want to go as "high" as $80 you can get a Handspring Edge, which is 2x as fast, has a more durable case and better backlight, is lighter, and is rechargeable by leaving it in the cradle for an hour or three a week.
As to free software for reading, you've got your choice of Weasel Reader and Plucker. Both are quite easy to use, and come with tools to convert other formats into what they need to read them.
The only reason companies are finding eBooks unprofitable is they're discovering not too many people are interested in paying the same amount of money to buy an ebook (and not get the paperback) as they would to buy a paperback. Add to this that most of these nits are selling ebooks in proprietary protected formats that may or may not be readable in 5 years (paperbacks are certainly readable 5 years from now) and you have to wonder if these companies are beginning to make executive decisions based on the opinions of the interns from the "special" school.
I hate to post something entirely negative, but unless the thing is being ported to a digital watch or some kind magic decoder ring, the C=64 is *extremely* obsolete by now. Cheaply obtainable Palm devices have a ton more RAM and are considerably faster, even if they don't have color screens, and the Game Boy Advance, to put it bluntly, beats the stuffing out of the C=64 on almost all fronts (lacks a keyboard tho). Better sound, color, faster, more interesting ASM instruction set (without becoming insanely complex), exceedingly portable...
I can only hope that if they do actually do bring this back, they'll have the sense to target the only hardware market they're likely to stand a chance in, the one where people want something a little fancier than usual to open and close circuits and monitor things. There the C=64 might actually have a shot... It's probably more powerful than about three-quarters of the ATMs out there and just as capable of performing those same tasks.
"Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry."
Bullshit.
The problem is that the few people who actually still read books are not likely to be stupid people. On top of that, the people who are reading electronic formats of books are even less likely to be stupid people.
However, it would take rather dim consumers indeed to not see a problem with paying the exact same cost for an eBook as one would in a brick and mortar bookstore for a paperback... and strangely when I go to these eBook sellers online, I see exactly that. "Oh joy! Instead of paying $7.95 for that paperback over an Barnes & Noble, I can pay just $7.95 to download an electronic copy in a format that I probably won't be able to read again in 10 years because the format and it's reader will have been declared obsolete!"
The unwillingness of eBook publishers to see eBooks as something other than a way to increase sales profits by cutting out the middlemen of printing and shipping expenses is what is hampering eBook adoption.SCOX ticker through MarketWatch
Once you've looked at the daily (yes that view is just today) expand to the week and then month and tell me if quite possibly the SEC may be taking a look at whether or not the CEO of SCO is deliberately making these superfluous announcements in order for someone to be cashing in on the entirely temporary jumps in their pathetic value.
I'm quite stunned that this guy wrote an _entire paper_ about something that's essentially an optimal golomb ruler computation, and a small one at that.
I suspect another thorn in this plan is that the people handing back change will have serious difficulty in accurately counting out change in those denominations unless the register shows them a little picture of two 18-cent coins, a twenty-seven cent coin, and so on.