Just look at any US game show. Anybody who wins any prize has to pay the taxes on that prize before they get it. Even if they don't live in the country, and they will never reap the benefits of the taxes. Happens to Canadians all the time who go on US game shows. Canadians don't pay taxes on prize winning. Oprah audience members also had to pay taxes on cars that she gave to all the audience members when there wasn't even a contest. Everyone in the audience got a car.
I think that's the major reason that Schwarzenegger got elected governor. I remember one speech he did. He said something about not worrying about corporations bribing him, because he was already rich. I think corporations should be outlawed from giving money to politicians. They are not voting entities. They should not be able to give money to politicians to get what they want. The corporations should be able to speak their minds, about what they want, but they shouldn't be giving money to them. That's the same as a bribe. Only personal donations should be allowed. And it should probably be capped, otherwise, private citizens are committing bribery too. Giving large chunks of money to a campaign that is obviously going to win, because thats the way it always goes in that jurisdiction, is pretty much nothing more than a bribe.
It probably has something to do with the actual giving out of prizes. There's many lotteries in Canada that are open to everyone except quebec residents. Not because we don't like quebec, but because there's lots of other rules to follow. I'm sure you could get someone in the US to submit your entry if you think it was good enough. They could claim the prize, and then ship it to you. They maybe could just have a contest for the people who can't enter, and just give them the recognition of winning, instead of a real prize. I'm sure just putting that on your resume would be a big enough prize.
If what you are saying is true, then it appears that what I said was correct, because nobody bought "new coke", because if they wanted pepsi, then they would get pepsi, if they wanted Coke, then they wouldn't buy new coke because it didn't taste like coke classic. It didn't end up driving people to pepsi, because they brought back the original coke, and people who liked coke bought that. But as a simbling posted, they never compared it to Pepsi, they just said it had a new taste, which as it happens wasn't even like coke or pepsi, and therefore, didn't sell well at all. They probably were buying pepsi at this point, unless, of course, they weren't buying any cola at all.
What would be really funny, is if they still don't run out. I know it's a little far fetched, as most people would buy into the marketing, but it would be interesting to see microsofts reaction. Besides, who has that much money to spend on a new system anyway. let's see $300 for the system that actually has everything, plus $60 for another controller, plus $20 (X2) for those battery packs so you don't run out of power in the middle of the game, plus $60 per game, maybe you should buy 2 or 3. Now you're up at $520 for a nice usable system. $300 isn't a bad price for a system, but once you add on all the extras you need to buy, it really does fall outside many people's budgets.
If you read the article, you would know that this beverage has no alcohol in it. So there's no problem there. As far as caffeine goes, well, just like everything else. Moderation is good. Fruit is good for you, but if you eat 25 servings of it every day, i'm pretty sure you're body won't like it too much.
Cloning the exact taste of Coke wouldn't be that hard if you threw a bunch of scientists at it. The reason it isn't done, is because as soon as you put out a product (CokeRipoff), and say it tastes just like Coke, you're admitting that Coke is the best. People will cease to buy your original product, Pepsi?, and buy Coke, because you are saying Coke is the good product. Some people will buy CokeRipoff, however, they know they aren't buying the real Coke, and will only buy CokeRipoff if, it is much cheaper, and others won't know about it.
This can be seen with the fragrance industry. The only reason they can sell a fragrance for $100 a bottle, is because people believe it's the real thing, and that they need the real thing. It could easily be produced and sold for much cheaper, which it sometimes is, but is often not bought by most, even at extreme savings, because they don't get the status of saying they are wearing a $100 fragrance.
The problem is, is that if you allow people to choose any password they want, many will choose a short, easy to guess password. I guess if they don't have to write it down, then it's more secure than a 20 character password which they do write down, but it is still very insecure. Making the system vulnerable to stuff that people can give away will always make it less secure. Until we move to something like retinal scans, the password will always be able to be given away by the user. And social engineering will therefore be trivially easy. Even with retinal scans, you could still fall prey to social engineering tricks, where new guy in the office asks to use your retinal scan, because his isn't working.
Well then maybe you should design an OpenDocument editor that's not so bloated. OpenOffice/Staroffice may be bloated, but that doesn't stop you from building a non-bloated editor which supports the opendocument format. That's the nice thing about the opendocument format. You can design your own application to handle the files if you aren't happy with the current offerings. There's also a few other wordprocessors out there that support these formats. You might want to give them a try.
In the same way, it's very hard to have a home PC that functions without bugs. Its impossible to know what kind of software the user will be running, as well as what stuff the user doesn't even know their running. I've run many windows systems that were very stable over the years. The trick is, keep the installed software base small, and only install that which is completely necessary. Most of the buggy, crashy windows installations I see are own by people who install everything they see, without even stopping to think what the program may do to their system, or whether they will really even use that software after 3 days. This is the reason no software vendors garauntee that their software will even do what it is supposed to do. Because they have no way of knowing the conditions under which is was run, and therefore can't control whether it will work or not. If you want to have a system that works perfectly all the time, be prepared to pay a lot for it, and be prepared for it to have very little functionality.
Re:Social Engineering Becoming More Serious
on
Security and Usability
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Social engineering will always be the broken part of security. You can have a system that requires users to have a 20 character randomly generated password, as well as a smart card, and they will still pass their password around along with their card, which will have the password written on the back. Until people start taking computer security seriously, there will be no end to the security breaches. One of the real problems is that we tend to put a lot of the blame on those breaking into the systems. The user is usually not only relieved from blame, but also get pitied for being the poor user that was attacked by the nasty con artist. While some of the blame lies with those doing the cracking, more blame should be put on the users, especially when they should know better. Phishing techniques when you get directed to some website, where you proceed to enter your username and password are in most cases completely avoidable. But people still sympathize with them, and blame it on the bad guys. Nobody would give people the same kind of sympathy if they handed their wallet over to the wallet inspector on a downtown street corner, or got their possessions stolen after leaving their door wide open. Why are we so quick to feel sorry for people, just because it happened on a computer?
The really crappy part is, is that this only hurts the legitimate users. People who wish to pirate the CD will just pop it in a Linux computer and rip it. Or they will just disable autorun on their CD drive. I'm not sure about this method specifically, but this seems to bypass every copy protection mechanism i've seen on music CDs. The rest of the users, are stuck out in the cold, using crappy players that come on the disc to play the CDs, as well as not being able to copy the CD onto their hard drive. Which kind of violates your fair use rights, depending on how you interpret them. Not to mention the fact that they have software on their computer that may be hard to uninstall, and may be doing things the user doesn't want it to do.
Opendocument isn't any more bloated than microsoft office documents. Most of my OpenOffice documents end up way smaller than what they would be had I used MS Office. Maybe there is a bit of extra information in there, but if the end result is a more compatible document format, that is kind of human readable, then, maybe it's good to have a little bit of bloat.
I seem to think that its the opposite. Although they may market the iPod as device for young, cool people, very few young people have them. This especially holds true for the more expensive units such as the video iPod. Not a lot of parents are willing to shell out $300 so their kids can listen to music. I know I never had anything that extravagant as a kid. Most people I see with iPods are 20+. More kids have TVs and DVD players in their rooms. That doesn't stop them from producing porn on DVD.
Maybe you shouldn't be comparing KDE, which is a pretty advanced desktop compared to what you get with Windows 98. You'd probably be better off comparing win98 to something with a similar feature set. I'm not sure of any linux desktops which have that little functionality/customizability. Even straight X-Windows seems to have more features than Win98. It may not look as pretty, but it still has more features. Win98 is probably comparable to sawfish, which looks about as good, but still blows windows 98 out of the water in features.
You can tell that information is being passed but it's very hard to tell what the information contains. The only reason that they could get information about the russian spys is because there was because they weren't using very good encryption algorithms. Same thing for the Germans in WW2. We now have at our disposal mathematically provable hard to break encryption. It's not the same as with the old methods. Now that we're using computers to do the encryption, its a lot harder to break the encryption. Back then, most of the encryption was still being done by hand.
You don't have to recompile your kernel to install any driver. The drivers are compile as modules and you load the modules. I have never in my life ever had a need to recompile the kernel.
I think I spent an entire day once looking for a driver for the OPTI931 on a windows machine. Windows isn't any better with the driver support than Linux in most instances.
Except that is isn't a toaster, it also does julienne fries. Computers are tools, except, like no other tool, they can do "Everything". It's like having an entire hardware store at your disposal to do whatever you want to. Most people wouldn't even know where to begin. Really all they do is take input, shuffle it around and give you output. But the sheer number of ways they can mix up that data is just extraordinary. If you just want to type letters, you'd probably be better off just getting an electric word processor, or even a type writer. A calculator would work well for doing math. They really should make a $50 tool that only does email, and maybe internet chat. Browsing the web is out. Because on the internet, there is "Everything" and people can't handle "Everything".
Consoles are actually easier to use than windows based machines. People just relate to it better. I never saw anybody who had a c64 stuggle with Load *,8,1 and all that jazz. People have trouble with computers now because they do so much more than they used to, and do it all at the same time. It's giving someone a tool that does everything and telling them to use it. They don't even know where to start. Guess that's why MS invented the start button, so people would know where to go first when they turned on the computer.
Linux is no less ready for the desktop than windows is. People who have no idea how to operate their windows computer will have no idea how to operate a linux computer. At this point, comparing windows and linux is like comparing a Ford to a GM car, and saying that a GM car is harder to drive.
1. Windows tries to manage programs that you install, but does a really terrible job at it, expecting the program to know how to uninstall itself, instead of keeping track of what the program installed so it can actually get rid of it when you want to, and tell you about anything else that depends on this program to work.
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and doesn't use plain english that everyone can understand?
7. Package management tools are the best way to install applications that require dependancies on other applications. If you want to code your own application, and include all the libraries that the application needs with the application, then you can go ahead and do that. Firefox, OpenOffice and Netbeans all use this method for installing, and they work pretty well. But it shouldn't be the only option available to all application developers, nor should it be pushed on them.
8. Pretty much all tools 99% of people need have been created. When it looks exactly like the windows counterpart we get bashed for not being innovative enough. When we do something like GIMP, we get bashed because it is too different. GIMP is a great interface. If you start out using it, all the other graphics packages seem weird and confusing to you.
8. I'm not sure what comes after 8 either. Anyway, reading and writing office documents is still a big problem, even with Openoffice. They are usually legible, but tables usually stick outside the margins, and many other formatting problems exist as well. Everyone I know has office at home, simply because that's what people expect you to use. Most of them don't pay for it, and frankly, I don't think Microsoft cares.
Yeah, I had the same problem. That was a long time ago. It's 2005. Try Mandriva (formerly Mandrake). Its one of the easier ones to install and get working, and targets desktops pretty well. Linux has matured a lot in the past 6 years.
Another thing, I was reading an article, saying that OpenOffice had take 5 years to get where it is today, like it was a long time. Microsoft Office has been around since 1989. At that rate, OpenOffice will bet 10 times as good as MS Office in 3 years.
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Just look at any US game show. Anybody who wins any prize has to pay the taxes on that prize before they get it. Even if they don't live in the country, and they will never reap the benefits of the taxes. Happens to Canadians all the time who go on US game shows. Canadians don't pay taxes on prize winning. Oprah audience members also had to pay taxes on cars that she gave to all the audience members when there wasn't even a contest. Everyone in the audience got a car.
I think that's the major reason that Schwarzenegger got elected governor. I remember one speech he did. He said something about not worrying about corporations bribing him, because he was already rich. I think corporations should be outlawed from giving money to politicians. They are not voting entities. They should not be able to give money to politicians to get what they want. The corporations should be able to speak their minds, about what they want, but they shouldn't be giving money to them. That's the same as a bribe. Only personal donations should be allowed. And it should probably be capped, otherwise, private citizens are committing bribery too. Giving large chunks of money to a campaign that is obviously going to win, because thats the way it always goes in that jurisdiction, is pretty much nothing more than a bribe.
It probably has something to do with the actual giving out of prizes. There's many lotteries in Canada that are open to everyone except quebec residents. Not because we don't like quebec, but because there's lots of other rules to follow. I'm sure you could get someone in the US to submit your entry if you think it was good enough. They could claim the prize, and then ship it to you. They maybe could just have a contest for the people who can't enter, and just give them the recognition of winning, instead of a real prize. I'm sure just putting that on your resume would be a big enough prize.
If what you are saying is true, then it appears that what I said was correct, because nobody bought "new coke", because if they wanted pepsi, then they would get pepsi, if they wanted Coke, then they wouldn't buy new coke because it didn't taste like coke classic. It didn't end up driving people to pepsi, because they brought back the original coke, and people who liked coke bought that. But as a simbling posted, they never compared it to Pepsi, they just said it had a new taste, which as it happens wasn't even like coke or pepsi, and therefore, didn't sell well at all. They probably were buying pepsi at this point, unless, of course, they weren't buying any cola at all.
What would be really funny, is if they still don't run out. I know it's a little far fetched, as most people would buy into the marketing, but it would be interesting to see microsofts reaction. Besides, who has that much money to spend on a new system anyway. let's see $300 for the system that actually has everything, plus $60 for another controller, plus $20 (X2) for those battery packs so you don't run out of power in the middle of the game, plus $60 per game, maybe you should buy 2 or 3. Now you're up at $520 for a nice usable system. $300 isn't a bad price for a system, but once you add on all the extras you need to buy, it really does fall outside many people's budgets.
If you read the article, you would know that this beverage has no alcohol in it. So there's no problem there. As far as caffeine goes, well, just like everything else. Moderation is good. Fruit is good for you, but if you eat 25 servings of it every day, i'm pretty sure you're body won't like it too much.
Cloning the exact taste of Coke wouldn't be that hard if you threw a bunch of scientists at it. The reason it isn't done, is because as soon as you put out a product (CokeRipoff), and say it tastes just like Coke, you're admitting that Coke is the best. People will cease to buy your original product, Pepsi?, and buy Coke, because you are saying Coke is the good product. Some people will buy CokeRipoff, however, they know they aren't buying the real Coke, and will only buy CokeRipoff if, it is much cheaper, and others won't know about it.
This can be seen with the fragrance industry. The only reason they can sell a fragrance for $100 a bottle, is because people believe it's the real thing, and that they need the real thing. It could easily be produced and sold for much cheaper, which it sometimes is, but is often not bought by most, even at extreme savings, because they don't get the status of saying they are wearing a $100 fragrance.
The problem is, is that if you allow people to choose any password they want, many will choose a short, easy to guess password. I guess if they don't have to write it down, then it's more secure than a 20 character password which they do write down, but it is still very insecure. Making the system vulnerable to stuff that people can give away will always make it less secure. Until we move to something like retinal scans, the password will always be able to be given away by the user. And social engineering will therefore be trivially easy. Even with retinal scans, you could still fall prey to social engineering tricks, where new guy in the office asks to use your retinal scan, because his isn't working.
Well then maybe you should design an OpenDocument editor that's not so bloated. OpenOffice/Staroffice may be bloated, but that doesn't stop you from building a non-bloated editor which supports the opendocument format. That's the nice thing about the opendocument format. You can design your own application to handle the files if you aren't happy with the current offerings. There's also a few other wordprocessors out there that support these formats. You might want to give them a try.
In the same way, it's very hard to have a home PC that functions without bugs. Its impossible to know what kind of software the user will be running, as well as what stuff the user doesn't even know their running. I've run many windows systems that were very stable over the years. The trick is, keep the installed software base small, and only install that which is completely necessary. Most of the buggy, crashy windows installations I see are own by people who install everything they see, without even stopping to think what the program may do to their system, or whether they will really even use that software after 3 days. This is the reason no software vendors garauntee that their software will even do what it is supposed to do. Because they have no way of knowing the conditions under which is was run, and therefore can't control whether it will work or not. If you want to have a system that works perfectly all the time, be prepared to pay a lot for it, and be prepared for it to have very little functionality.
Social engineering will always be the broken part of security. You can have a system that requires users to have a 20 character randomly generated password, as well as a smart card, and they will still pass their password around along with their card, which will have the password written on the back. Until people start taking computer security seriously, there will be no end to the security breaches. One of the real problems is that we tend to put a lot of the blame on those breaking into the systems. The user is usually not only relieved from blame, but also get pitied for being the poor user that was attacked by the nasty con artist. While some of the blame lies with those doing the cracking, more blame should be put on the users, especially when they should know better. Phishing techniques when you get directed to some website, where you proceed to enter your username and password are in most cases completely avoidable. But people still sympathize with them, and blame it on the bad guys. Nobody would give people the same kind of sympathy if they handed their wallet over to the wallet inspector on a downtown street corner, or got their possessions stolen after leaving their door wide open. Why are we so quick to feel sorry for people, just because it happened on a computer?
The really crappy part is, is that this only hurts the legitimate users. People who wish to pirate the CD will just pop it in a Linux computer and rip it. Or they will just disable autorun on their CD drive. I'm not sure about this method specifically, but this seems to bypass every copy protection mechanism i've seen on music CDs. The rest of the users, are stuck out in the cold, using crappy players that come on the disc to play the CDs, as well as not being able to copy the CD onto their hard drive. Which kind of violates your fair use rights, depending on how you interpret them. Not to mention the fact that they have software on their computer that may be hard to uninstall, and may be doing things the user doesn't want it to do.
Opendocument isn't any more bloated than microsoft office documents. Most of my OpenOffice documents end up way smaller than what they would be had I used MS Office. Maybe there is a bit of extra information in there, but if the end result is a more compatible document format, that is kind of human readable, then, maybe it's good to have a little bit of bloat.
I seem to think that its the opposite. Although they may market the iPod as device for young, cool people, very few young people have them. This especially holds true for the more expensive units such as the video iPod. Not a lot of parents are willing to shell out $300 so their kids can listen to music. I know I never had anything that extravagant as a kid. Most people I see with iPods are 20+. More kids have TVs and DVD players in their rooms. That doesn't stop them from producing porn on DVD.
Maybe you shouldn't be comparing KDE, which is a pretty advanced desktop compared to what you get with Windows 98. You'd probably be better off comparing win98 to something with a similar feature set. I'm not sure of any linux desktops which have that little functionality/customizability. Even straight X-Windows seems to have more features than Win98. It may not look as pretty, but it still has more features. Win98 is probably comparable to sawfish, which looks about as good, but still blows windows 98 out of the water in features.
You can tell that information is being passed but it's very hard to tell what the information contains. The only reason that they could get information about the russian spys is because there was because they weren't using very good encryption algorithms. Same thing for the Germans in WW2. We now have at our disposal mathematically provable hard to break encryption. It's not the same as with the old methods. Now that we're using computers to do the encryption, its a lot harder to break the encryption. Back then, most of the encryption was still being done by hand.
You don't have to recompile your kernel to install any driver. The drivers are compile as modules and you load the modules. I have never in my life ever had a need to recompile the kernel.
I always thought it was "Read The Friendly Article" :)
I think I spent an entire day once looking for a driver for the OPTI931 on a windows machine. Windows isn't any better with the driver support than Linux in most instances.
Except that is isn't a toaster, it also does julienne fries. Computers are tools, except, like no other tool, they can do "Everything". It's like having an entire hardware store at your disposal to do whatever you want to. Most people wouldn't even know where to begin. Really all they do is take input, shuffle it around and give you output. But the sheer number of ways they can mix up that data is just extraordinary. If you just want to type letters, you'd probably be better off just getting an electric word processor, or even a type writer. A calculator would work well for doing math. They really should make a $50 tool that only does email, and maybe internet chat. Browsing the web is out. Because on the internet, there is "Everything" and people can't handle "Everything".
Consoles are actually easier to use than windows based machines. People just relate to it better. I never saw anybody who had a c64 stuggle with Load *,8,1 and all that jazz. People have trouble with computers now because they do so much more than they used to, and do it all at the same time. It's giving someone a tool that does everything and telling them to use it. They don't even know where to start. Guess that's why MS invented the start button, so people would know where to go first when they turned on the computer.
Linux is no less ready for the desktop than windows is. People who have no idea how to operate their windows computer will have no idea how to operate a linux computer. At this point, comparing windows and linux is like comparing a Ford to a GM car, and saying that a GM car is harder to drive.
1. Windows tries to manage programs that you install, but does a really terrible job at it, expecting the program to know how to uninstall itself, instead of keeping track of what the program installed so it can actually get rid of it when you want to, and tell you about anything else that depends on this program to work.
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and doesn't use plain english that everyone can understand?
7. Package management tools are the best way to install applications that require dependancies on other applications. If you want to code your own application, and include all the libraries that the application needs with the application, then you can go ahead and do that. Firefox, OpenOffice and Netbeans all use this method for installing, and they work pretty well. But it shouldn't be the only option available to all application developers, nor should it be pushed on them.
8. Pretty much all tools 99% of people need have been created. When it looks exactly like the windows counterpart we get bashed for not being innovative enough. When we do something like GIMP, we get bashed because it is too different. GIMP is a great interface. If you start out using it, all the other graphics packages seem weird and confusing to you.
8. I'm not sure what comes after 8 either. Anyway, reading and writing office documents is still a big problem, even with Openoffice. They are usually legible, but tables usually stick outside the margins, and many other formatting problems exist as well. Everyone I know has office at home, simply because that's what people expect you to use. Most of them don't pay for it, and frankly, I don't think Microsoft cares.
Yeah, I had the same problem. That was a long time ago. It's 2005. Try Mandriva (formerly Mandrake). Its one of the easier ones to install and get working, and targets desktops pretty well. Linux has matured a lot in the past 6 years.
Another thing, I was reading an article, saying that OpenOffice had take 5 years to get where it is today, like it was a long time. Microsoft Office has been around since 1989. At that rate, OpenOffice will bet 10 times as good as MS Office in 3 years.
Are there any games that aren't FPSs? As far as i'm concerned, those are pretty much a bunch of different titles for the same game.