We just had an article on tabbed browsing, and why its super-important. Not long before that, one on mouse gestures. And not long before that, one on how to improve the history/forward/next feature. The killer app for the web browser is browsing.
I mean these browser folks sure spend a lot of time jawing to justify their own existance. We get it already, yeah yeah yeah. Important new features and innovation.
Do they just like to hear their own voices? Do they fancy themselves media darlings?
It's not just this article. Everyone acts like we're just discovering weather since "El Nino". When it snows it's "El Nino", when it's sunny, its "El Nino". When it rains, it's "El Nino".
I mean, the earth had weather before someone decided to coin the phrase "El Nino". We've had "El Ninos" before there was "El Nino".
Personally I think "El Nino" is one of the stupidest and most bogus buzzword of the last century. It's really just code for "Greenhouse Effect", but hipper sounding (hipper = less hippiesh).
The code sharing in MS Windows is one of it's strongest features.
The API's may not be as 'clean' as you'd want them to be, there's plenty of deprecated kruft and screwy commands from old versions, but it's made it incredibly easy to access pretty much every feature of the OS programatically.
MFC, OLE, COM, ATL, ActiveX, DirectX, ADO, etc.
Consistency in the linux desktop's aesthetic and usage is just a start. Shared libraries need their interfaces 'carved in stone'. Having 6 versions of libWHATEVER to support 6 different apps is ridiculous. All the wasted space of statically compiled apps, none of the performance.
There was a "book", or rather a standard set up by the Open Group back when. We were supposed to have (IIRC my history) X as the window server, OpenLook as the desktop manager, and Motif as the widget library/api.
The rub was that everything was Free except Motif, which was commercial, and threw a wrench in the whole "standard" Unix desktop. I guess it was pretty much the superior piece of kit at the time.
The desktop projects need to work together towards the same goal if a Free desktop is to go anywhere. The code, the API, all the behind the scenes stuff needs to work in a common way. There needs to be a common clipboard and a standard for the way a window works.
There's then still a ton of room for 'tweaking'. Most people's 'tweaking' consists of changing some event sounds and putting on a wacky fractal wallpaper anyways.
Thing is, David Suzuki is considered a complete fraud and enviro zealot by many higher ups in academic circles (see my response to a post about 3 above the parent).
So, yeah he makes it entertaining. But is what he's talking about real science?
I had a guest lecturer in university who came in and talked for this 'academia' course I took.
I cant think of his name for the life of me. I know he was an academic big shot, and he had a handful of grad students falling him around like he was Jesus. But he basically came in and gave the best 90 minute lecture I've ever heard about what a crock and phony David Suzuki is.
He opened with a slide showing a quiet stream, with a great big "No Fishing" sign. And he said "2 months ago, David Suzuki was fishing 20 feet downstream from here"
He cut through the man like a hot knife through butter. He picked apart all of Suzuki's papers, his show (Nature of Things).
When I went in, I thought Suzuki was a brilliant scientist. When it was over, Suzuki was an obvious environmental zealot who spouts pseudoscience and conjecture as fact.
I figure this is on topic. Suzuki makes science 'entertaining', but most of what he says isnt correct, or proven through research.
It fits in perfect with this topic - because one of the things I remember the lecturer saying was "Real science doesnt get you a show on prime time - not even on the CBC"
Set up a WAP and stick a wireless card in your laptop.
My next door neighbour and I built a really kickass treehouse when we were like 10. It helped his father was a master carpenter, of course. It was pretty much framed and wired (electricity) to code, but the 2 outlets we had were wired to a extension-cord plug, and we buried an underground cable across the backyard and into the trees, where an outdoor outlet was. We'd plug in the treehouse as needed (not being legal to hardwire it)
We spliced a cable off of the roof antenna of his house (cable TV didnt reach us), and had our brand new 8 bit NES and a 13" color TV out there.
About 3 or 4 years later my friends and I decided my neighbour was a dickhead so we knocked the whole thing down.
Pretty much just another protocol like IPX/SPX, AppleTalk or more like TCP/UDP, since it was routable if I remember, which made it a good choice for big nets (like your university).
It didnt suck any more than any other protocol of the day. But it was proprietary, and fairly pricey.
TCP/IP made it irrelevant (as it did IPX/SPX, Netbeui, appletalk, etc). It's still around, though.
A: The vision of the Liberty Alliance Project is to enable a networked world in which individuals and businesses can more easily conduct transactions while protecting the privacy and security of vital identity information. To accomplish its vision, the Liberty Alliance will establish an open standard for federated network identity through open technical specifications that will:
Support a broad range of identity-based products and services
Enable commercial and non-commercial organizations to realize new revenue and cost saving opportunities that economically leverage their relationships with customers, business partners, and employees
Provide consumers with choice of identity provider(s), the ability to link accounts through account federation, and the convenience of single sign-on, when using any network of connected services and devices
Increase ease-of-use for consumers to help stimulate e-commerce
Yeah, yeah. The gub'ment gonna undermine all those goals and blah blah conspiracy blah blah.
This is going to happen, and it's best it emerge as an open standard. Sane citizens of the 21st century want a secure and verifiable identity for e-commerce (which extends past the net, swiping your card for a bag of Doritos at the 7-11 really crosses into e-commerce)
>> the cracker's IP would have to remain static and thus quite traceable
Naw, not at all.. You could:
1) have the malicious app read a webpage (on geocities or other free, anon host) and embed commands into it
2) get a free redirect/ip name from no-ip.com or whatever, and redirect it to a proxy or bnc or whathaveyou
3) have it join an IRC/ICQ/AIM chatroom, and command it from there (this is a popular one with the script kiddies)
If you're doing your hax0ring without masking your IP somehow, then you deserve what's coming to ya.
Re:No need to run Windows as an Administrator
on
Windows Rootkits
·
· Score: 2
You can also right click an icon, select properties, and check the "run as another user" box. Kind of like the suid bit in linux, but it'll prompt for a password every time.
Which is kind of a pain if you're trying to include runas in a script.
>> Bare privileges are useful only for folks that only use Office and such. Any user needing a little more than the bare min. privileges will not be happy.
He'd be just as unhappy if it were a linux based system.
Norton Antivirus boots from CD and can scan NTFS and FAT filesystems.
And there are a ton of utilities that let you boot "NT" off of a floppy. It copies the kernel and NTFS drivers onto a floppy that you can boot to a DOS prompt (with NTFS r/w) and do the do from there.
When will uninformed Windows critics start being modded as the trolls they are?
Re:Let's pretend I'm on linux...
on
Windows Rootkits
·
· Score: 1
>> the average Linux user is a lot more likely to already have 'locked down' their system than the average Windows user, not to mention is more likely to hve the skills to remove it.
I doubt that.
The average linux user is a 13 year old who downloaded Red Hat because he wants to be l337.
Go to #linux on efnet, grab IPs at random from the kids in the pack (heck try the mods too), and see how many you can log into with root/root or root/(blank).
Linux rootkits are more popular, IMO, because there's more you can do (network wise) with a few small shell scripts in linux, than you could in windows.
Re:rootkit redundant.
on
Windows Rootkits
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There's no need to run as Administrator. Pretty much any user account can mess up a Windows system pretty bad, even the Guest account.
But what you say is also true. I too run an account that's a member of Administrators because it's too much trouble to become all-powerful when needed.
It's kinda funny now that I'm thinking of it. You have to be an admin to install a printer, but any old account can delete the printer driver files. Nice.
Not if you've spent some time locking down the box, and designing and implementing security properly. Users cant delete anything they dont have write access too.
Now, out of the box, WinXP and its predecessors install by default in a very insecure state. That I take issue with, but there's nothing stopping you from fixing that.
If you have your/bin directories set up as uog+rwx then I can screw around with your printers too. This doesnt mean that linux is "insecure".
And if you run as administrator all the time, that's just like always logging in as root.
Too many people like to dump on Windows security, but very few have ever even bothered to try and set it up properly.
After the filesystem permissions are properly set, the local and domain policies in place and checked, the services audited for necessity and security, then what's left is a legitimate fault with Windows.
>> My NES and SNES, some carts with battery-backed save still work
If the battery dies (it wont last more than 10 years max, my original Zelda gave it up not more than a year ago), it's a CR-2032 you can get for a buck at Radio Shack. The old ones welded into place, but it's easy to clip out. Replace it with an appropriate holder (another buck from RS) so it'll be easier to replace the next time. Hold the battery in tight with a bit of black tape, so it wont shake loose when you move the cart.
There's no reason an NES cart shouldnt last for 50 years if it's cared for. I'd say NES gets my vote too. I still play it more often than any other console.
If the game was free for download (and why not, anyone interested in playing it has a broadband net connection anyways), then maybe a monthly service charge makes sense.
But $X a month on top of $Y purchase price just comes off as stickyfingered.
They probably make a ton of cash off of people who buy the game, play it for 3 days, dont like it, and dont subscribe for any longer.
I dont blame EQ or whatever for such behavior. If he wasnt going to drop out of class to play EQ, it'd be for some other reason.
Losers lose, thats what they do.
More personal responsibility, please. Say "I flunked out of college because I was lazy or couldnt hack it", not "I flunked out of college because video games are too fun".
I agree, Metroid Prime was a great game, and they did a great job turning it into an FPS.
I was worried they'd ruin it, but it still felt like metroid, with all the exploring and powerups. The graphics and sound were incredible with lots of variety, and the gameplay was smooth and easy to master.
It definately knocked Halo out of the 'best console FPS ever' position in my book.
So far I've liked my GCN better than PS2 or Xbox, so far as quality of the games at least.
Of course to say such is to start a goofy flamefest that noone wants to be involved in.
Slashdot Mirror
We just had an article on tabbed browsing, and why its super-important. Not long before that, one on mouse gestures. And not long before that, one on how to improve the history/forward/next feature. The killer app for the web browser is browsing.
I mean these browser folks sure spend a lot of time jawing to justify their own existance. We get it already, yeah yeah yeah. Important new features and innovation.
Do they just like to hear their own voices? Do they fancy themselves media darlings?
It's not just this article. Everyone acts like we're just discovering weather since "El Nino". When it snows it's "El Nino", when it's sunny, its "El Nino". When it rains, it's "El Nino".
I mean, the earth had weather before someone decided to coin the phrase "El Nino". We've had "El Ninos" before there was "El Nino".
Personally I think "El Nino" is one of the stupidest and most bogus buzzword of the last century. It's really just code for "Greenhouse Effect", but hipper sounding (hipper = less hippiesh).
The code sharing in MS Windows is one of it's strongest features.
The API's may not be as 'clean' as you'd want them to be, there's plenty of deprecated kruft and screwy commands from old versions, but it's made it incredibly easy to access pretty much every feature of the OS programatically.
MFC, OLE, COM, ATL, ActiveX, DirectX, ADO, etc.
Consistency in the linux desktop's aesthetic and usage is just a start. Shared libraries need their interfaces 'carved in stone'. Having 6 versions of libWHATEVER to support 6 different apps is ridiculous. All the wasted space of statically compiled apps, none of the performance.
"A fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts once he has forgotten his aim."
-G. Santayana
There was a "book", or rather a standard set up by the Open Group back when. We were supposed to have (IIRC my history) X as the window server, OpenLook as the desktop manager, and Motif as the widget library/api.
The rub was that everything was Free except Motif, which was commercial, and threw a wrench in the whole "standard" Unix desktop. I guess it was pretty much the superior piece of kit at the time.
The desktop projects need to work together towards the same goal if a Free desktop is to go anywhere. The code, the API, all the behind the scenes stuff needs to work in a common way. There needs to be a common clipboard and a standard for the way a window works.
There's then still a ton of room for 'tweaking'. Most people's 'tweaking' consists of changing some event sounds and putting on a wacky fractal wallpaper anyways.
Thing is, David Suzuki is considered a complete fraud and enviro zealot by many higher ups in academic circles (see my response to a post about 3 above the parent).
So, yeah he makes it entertaining. But is what he's talking about real science?
I had a guest lecturer in university who came in and talked for this 'academia' course I took.
I cant think of his name for the life of me. I know he was an academic big shot, and he had a handful of grad students falling him around like he was Jesus. But he basically came in and gave the best 90 minute lecture I've ever heard about what a crock and phony David Suzuki is.
He opened with a slide showing a quiet stream, with a great big "No Fishing" sign. And he said "2 months ago, David Suzuki was fishing 20 feet downstream from here"
He cut through the man like a hot knife through butter. He picked apart all of Suzuki's papers, his show (Nature of Things).
When I went in, I thought Suzuki was a brilliant scientist. When it was over, Suzuki was an obvious environmental zealot who spouts pseudoscience and conjecture as fact.
I figure this is on topic. Suzuki makes science 'entertaining', but most of what he says isnt correct, or proven through research.
It fits in perfect with this topic - because one of the things I remember the lecturer saying was "Real science doesnt get you a show on prime time - not even on the CBC"
Set up a WAP and stick a wireless card in your laptop.
My next door neighbour and I built a really kickass treehouse when we were like 10. It helped his father was a master carpenter, of course. It was pretty much framed and wired (electricity) to code, but the 2 outlets we had were wired to a extension-cord plug, and we buried an underground cable across the backyard and into the trees, where an outdoor outlet was. We'd plug in the treehouse as needed (not being legal to hardwire it)
We spliced a cable off of the roof antenna of his house (cable TV didnt reach us), and had our brand new 8 bit NES and a 13" color TV out there.
About 3 or 4 years later my friends and I decided my neighbour was a dickhead so we knocked the whole thing down.
It was pretty cool while it lasted, though.
Pretty much just another protocol like IPX/SPX, AppleTalk or more like TCP/UDP, since it was routable if I remember, which made it a good choice for big nets (like your university).
It didnt suck any more than any other protocol of the day. But it was proprietary, and fairly pricey.
TCP/IP made it irrelevant (as it did IPX/SPX, Netbeui, appletalk, etc). It's still around, though.
Is not having knee-jerk FUD-filled conspiracy reaction, and seems to actually understand the story.
Not only that, he probably uses windows.
Q: What is the Liberty Alliance Project?
A: The vision of the Liberty Alliance Project is to enable a networked world in which individuals and businesses can more easily conduct transactions while protecting the privacy and security of vital identity information. To accomplish its vision, the Liberty Alliance will establish an open standard for federated network identity through open technical specifications that will:
Support a broad range of identity-based products and services
Enable commercial and non-commercial organizations to realize new revenue and cost saving opportunities that economically leverage their relationships with customers, business partners, and employees
Provide consumers with choice of identity provider(s), the ability to link accounts through account federation, and the convenience of single sign-on, when using any network of connected services and devices
Increase ease-of-use for consumers to help stimulate e-commerce
Yeah, yeah. The gub'ment gonna undermine all those goals and blah blah conspiracy blah blah.
This is going to happen, and it's best it emerge as an open standard. Sane citizens of the 21st century want a secure and verifiable identity for e-commerce (which extends past the net, swiping your card for a bag of Doritos at the 7-11 really crosses into e-commerce)
more like 1 bit capacity, I'd think.
If the DVD-R still exists, its a 0. If its a smoking clump of carbon and you're nausious from fumes, it's a 1.
I really can't see the use of a laser mounted in a 747. IMHO, it's way too slow compared to the missiles, and will not be able to scramble fast enough
That's why you keep a few of the birds in the air on alert at all time.
Seriously, you dont think the engineers who know what they're doing thought of that?
>> the cracker's IP would have to remain static and thus quite traceable
Naw, not at all.. You could:
1) have the malicious app read a webpage (on geocities or other free, anon host) and embed commands into it
2) get a free redirect/ip name from no-ip.com or whatever, and redirect it to a proxy or bnc or whathaveyou
3) have it join an IRC/ICQ/AIM chatroom, and command it from there (this is a popular one with the script kiddies)
If you're doing your hax0ring without masking your IP somehow, then you deserve what's coming to ya.
You can also right click an icon, select properties, and check the "run as another user" box. Kind of like the suid bit in linux, but it'll prompt for a password every time.
Which is kind of a pain if you're trying to include runas in a script.
>> Bare privileges are useful only for folks that only use Office and such. Any user needing a little more than the bare min. privileges will not be happy.
He'd be just as unhappy if it were a linux based system.
Yeah, but if you want a truly secure box, you ain't going to run at default.
Windows is 'insecure' because of where it's used. It's in the cubicles and secretaries desks, it's on grandmas sewing table cum computer desk.
People spend time securing linux because it's more often than not running in a backroom as a server, and someone has taken the time to secure it.
If linux becomes the mainstream OS everyone wants it to be, then we'll see just how secure grandma's email is.
I mean you either shoot for easy to use and potentially insecure, or hard to use but very secure.
Norton Antivirus boots from CD and can scan NTFS and FAT filesystems.
And there are a ton of utilities that let you boot "NT" off of a floppy. It copies the kernel and NTFS drivers onto a floppy that you can boot to a DOS prompt (with NTFS r/w) and do the do from there.
When will uninformed Windows critics start being modded as the trolls they are?
>> the average Linux user is a lot more likely to already have 'locked down' their system than the average Windows user, not to mention is more likely to hve the skills to remove it.
I doubt that.
The average linux user is a 13 year old who downloaded Red Hat because he wants to be l337.
Go to #linux on efnet, grab IPs at random from the kids in the pack (heck try the mods too), and see how many you can log into with root/root or root/(blank).
Linux rootkits are more popular, IMO, because there's more you can do (network wise) with a few small shell scripts in linux, than you could in windows.
There's no need to run as Administrator. Pretty much any user account can mess up a Windows system pretty bad, even the Guest account.
/bin directories set up as uog+rwx then I can screw around with your printers too. This doesnt mean that linux is "insecure".
But what you say is also true. I too run an account that's a member of Administrators because it's too much trouble to become all-powerful when needed.
It's kinda funny now that I'm thinking of it. You have to be an admin to install a printer, but any old account can delete the printer driver files. Nice.
Not if you've spent some time locking down the box, and designing and implementing security properly. Users cant delete anything they dont have write access too.
Now, out of the box, WinXP and its predecessors install by default in a very insecure state. That I take issue with, but there's nothing stopping you from fixing that.
If you have your
And if you run as administrator all the time, that's just like always logging in as root.
Too many people like to dump on Windows security, but very few have ever even bothered to try and set it up properly.
After the filesystem permissions are properly set, the local and domain policies in place and checked, the services audited for necessity and security, then what's left is a legitimate fault with Windows.
x86 design isn't all that shitty. It's in the eye of the beholder.
There's no reason to stick with x86, it would be just as easy to emulate a la Virtual PC for backwards compatibility.
It's lasted, and dominated, because in many ways it's a good design.
>> My NES and SNES, some carts with battery-backed save still work
If the battery dies (it wont last more than 10 years max, my original Zelda gave it up not more than a year ago), it's a CR-2032 you can get for a buck at Radio Shack. The old ones welded into place, but it's easy to clip out. Replace it with an appropriate holder (another buck from RS) so it'll be easier to replace the next time. Hold the battery in tight with a bit of black tape, so it wont shake loose when you move the cart.
There's no reason an NES cart shouldnt last for 50 years if it's cared for. I'd say NES gets my vote too. I still play it more often than any other console.
If the game was free for download (and why not, anyone interested in playing it has a broadband net connection anyways), then maybe a monthly service charge makes sense.
But $X a month on top of $Y purchase price just comes off as stickyfingered.
They probably make a ton of cash off of people who buy the game, play it for 3 days, dont like it, and dont subscribe for any longer.
I dont blame EQ or whatever for such behavior. If he wasnt going to drop out of class to play EQ, it'd be for some other reason.
Losers lose, thats what they do.
More personal responsibility, please. Say "I flunked out of college because I was lazy or couldnt hack it", not "I flunked out of college because video games are too fun".
I agree, Metroid Prime was a great game, and they did a great job turning it into an FPS.
I was worried they'd ruin it, but it still felt like metroid, with all the exploring and powerups. The graphics and sound were incredible with lots of variety, and the gameplay was smooth and easy to master.
It definately knocked Halo out of the 'best console FPS ever' position in my book.
So far I've liked my GCN better than PS2 or Xbox, so far as quality of the games at least.
Of course to say such is to start a goofy flamefest that noone wants to be involved in.