Folks, go to cdfreaks.com and other Web sites devoted to burning and ripping.
Read the posts.
Put "DVD problems" in Google - you get 15,500,000 hits.
CD burners work fine. DVD burners suck and the media sucks unless you buy Japanese - and then only if the media happens to work with your burner.
I have a cheap Lite-On, so I'm not out that much money, but I'm not buying that brand again. I'm not saying everything they make is bad, plenty of people use Lite-On and swear by them. I'd have no particular qualms about buying a Lite-On CD burner, I suppose.
But after reading fifty million posts about problems with DVD burners, I KNOW there is a problem with either the technology or the manufacturers.
Actually you don't. DVD burners are hell. Mine won't recognize even top of the line blank media and won't even recognize a disk it's burned itself. It reads movie DVDs fine, though. Go figure. My other DVD drive recognizes the disks the burner burns okay.
The damn things are FAR too sensitive. The companies pushed the dye making technology too far. DVD burners are horrible consumer products - there are entire Web sites devoted to getting them working reliably. It's pathetic.
Resurrection of dead dogs has been done before, although I believe it was done differently.
IIRC cryonic experiments have shown brain damage is not significant for some time after clinical death although it is best minimized by supercooling the body as quickly as possible. Full cryonic suspension of a human body takes up to a week or more.
Brain damage is reduced by lowering body temperature, triggering Mammalian Dive Reflex which conserves body temperature to the heart and brain.
I believe there have been several cases of people drowning in extremely cold water circumstances who were retrieved within a half hour to an hour and were clinically dead for an hour or more before being resuscitated and not receiving significant brain damage.
This is a known effect that is now taken into account by rescue teams and hospitals. Drowning victims are not to be declared dead until they have been returned to full body temperature without resuscitation.
And Grandma, who isn't supposed to be able to even comprehend Linux or understand why running root is not desireable, is supposed to figure out Runas?
What's wrong with THIS picture?
Here's the bottom line: NO application which is not a SYSTEM application should need root privilege. Meaning an application that does not directly affect the kernel should not need root privilege.
I don't even like setuid and passwd - if the user needs to change his password on HIS machine, let him log in as root. If he needs to change his password on a multiuser machine or on a network, let the sys admin do it - corporate users shouldn't be using passwords anyway, they should be using PKI certificates and one-time password generators and tokens and be ASSIGNED security rather than letting the user handle his own security.
That may have been true in 1979, which, as you may be able to compute, was just a few years after UNIX was designed.
In case you aren't aware, the original UNIX HAD NO FILE SYSTEM AT ALL. It was intended to be a bunch of bytes on the system, being searching by grep and processed by tiny apps linked together with pipes!
The original UNIX was also where viruses were originally developed - because sys admins in those days didn't have to worry about them because they'd never heard of them.
None of that is true now after major redesigns - neither for security or the file system.
With Windows, it is STILL true that it was never designed for security and it STILL has little security after several major rewrites and so-called "security initiatives". And the next major rewrite will probably introduce such incredible complexity and consequently major security holes that it will be nearly unusable as anything but a standalone machine.
First they admit that end users don't comprehend NOT running as root.
THEN they introduce a dozen tools to "help" the end user not run as root, thereby introducing MORE COMPLEXITY into the concept.
What's wrong with this picture?
The bottom line is quite simple: DON'T CREATE USER ACCOUNTS AS ROOT BY DEFAULT! Every Linux distro can do that and Windows needs to do it, too. And the system needs to TELL users up front AS it's being installed WHY it's being done that way.
Introducing reduced-admin tools after the fact is just CYA horseshit.
That goddamn simple.
Stop treating the end users as dumb sheep to be spoon-fed pablum and fleeced of every dime they possess and security will improve.
And I'll add to that. This reminds me of the "Doom 2099" comic that Marvel put out along with their other "2099" series. Doctor Doom, the premier villain in Marvel Comics, became a critic of the "American Way" in that comic - and it got pulled because of it, the way I heard it.
The entire series got canned later, probably because of low sales, but "Doom 2099" was the best comic in the series and probably one of the best comics Marvel had put out around that time.
The "silent issue" where Doom meditates on his failure in invading and conquering the United States and the potential of nanotechnology to change the world was one of the best comics I've ever read.
They even had him quoting Noam Chomsky and Bakunin in earlier issues!
Obviously somebody thought this was way too subversive.
Fox is not your average network. It's a political movement disguised as a network. Nothing else can explain Fox News. It's not just a company which was set up to play to a certain ignorant demographic.
Murdoch has an agenda and everything he does fits that agenda. So it would not surprise me at all to see him buy a series just to kill it and piss people off. After all, it's one 14-episode series - it's not going to bankrupt the network or him. If he thought it was subversive of his agenda in any way, yes, he'd kill it no matter how much his execs spent for it. And the rumor that the guy who bought it got canned supports that concept.
I've never seen the series. I've never seen Babylon 5, either, except maybe one episode while I was in the joint.
I've seen a FEW episodes of X-Files and maybe one episode (or might have been part of one, I can't remember) of Buffy.
Now I've seen the trailer for Serenity. It was completely incomprehensible to me, but looked interesting. I liked the scene where the apparent villain says, "I'm alone and unarmed", whereupon the hero says, "Good!" and draws his gun and shoots him. Reminds me of Indiana and the guy with the sword in "Raiders". Although I hope the whole movie isn't retreads of stuff I've seen like that.
If I have the money, I'll give this one a shot simply because it's space opera. I've seen the current Star Wars twice, and if I have the money I might see it again at some point - although I think it's going away pretty quickly.
I've seen the entire "Blake's Seven" series, and I think this one probably is on a par with that (with vastly superior special effects, of course!).
My favorite character in Blake was Avon, because he was a computer thief and both ruthlessly selfish and an idealist. My favorite line in Blake is in the episode about the dual between planets where Avon asks Tarrant if he has any compunction against cheating, and Tarrant says, "None whatsoever!", to which Avon replies, "Oh, good!"
If Serenity can match that, I'll give it a thumbs up.
"Let's just hope that they don't put any security holes in it"
Yo, dude, this is Microsoft, remember? Security holes are the FIRST thing that goes into the specifications for ANY Microsoft product, followed by the instability rules, then comes the massive confusing menu and dialog screens, followed by the toy GUI design, and then and ONLY then comes the functional specification - which consists of a long list of things they WON'T implement (or will implement in a non-standard way) followed by the (very) short list of actual capabilities.
Oh, yeah, I forgot - before the functional specs also comes the hype marketing plan - and maybe the copying of some other company's product.
Oh, yeah, and then they have to pay Rob Enderle and Laura DiDio to produce a report saying it's better than anything else on the market - especially anything that could be remotely considered open source.
It's FAR more insightful than any of the comments I've seen bitching about the "blame hackers" paragraph - which was preceded by "blame everybody else" sentences anyway.
You guys sound like the big media press whenever somebody gets caught faking or running false stories - "Oh, woe is us! Somebody is blaming us for being idiots! We're such a poor, put-upon industry!"
However, the point of Ranum's article is that we haven't learned. We've developed various technigues but so far, while the effective general concepts are understood by some people, most haven't implemented anything but point solutions - which have to be ineffective.
Maybe the problem is these point solutions are proprietary (and some of course are open source.) Maybe what's needed is some sort of "open source security project" where ALL the aspects of security are brought under one umbrella (sort of like Apache being an umbrella organization for all sorts of open source Web projects - more than just a Web server) and ALL the security pros can contribute software and technigues to set some sort of open source security standard. Just a thought.
I just read an interview with a CitiGroup guy who said when they got hacked, they brought in Shimomura, the guy that helped catch Mitnick. He came to their offices wearing velvet shorts, a T-shirt with math equations on it, a helmet and rollerblades. The receptionist was going to throw him out because she thought he was a bike messenger (on rollerblades instead of a bike)!
Ranum denounces crackers only in the last paragraph.
RTFA! The rest of the article should be modded "Very Insightful!"
I read his "Stupid on Software" article referenced here a while back and it, too, was very insightful. I need to look around and read what else he's written.
"They involve activism, raising awareness, getting others involved in politics, and other things that don't look real cool in graphic novels."
No - they involve pocket nukes - and those you don't want to hang around seeing if they look cool or not. Once nanotech is adequately developed, that will be the better way to go. You don't like the way someone runs a country? Kill them. That's what THEY do.
About head movement, I believe I read somewhere that this was the first Batman costume that did in fact allow head movement. But I didn't notice it being done much in the movie, so maybe not. There are also probably several variations of the costume (ones for closeup head shots, ones for full body camera shots, etc.) so they vary in their capabilities.
$30,000 for Shaolin Temple martial arts training? Get serious.
There are plenty of legit Togakure-ryu ninjutsu teachers in the US and they don't charge you that kind of money. And it's legit ninjutsu, not Chinese martial arts (not to say anything against those forms, of course - but Chinese martial arts is not what Batman learned.)
Then he says get a kevlar jacket? Right, uh huh. You'd at LEAST need a full SWAT outfit and preferably something more extensive than that to match Batman's costume. $300,000 - that's a little pricey - you could probably do very well for a third or less than that. (Of course, if you'd rather be Iron Man than Batman, add on some more zeros.)
Slashdot Mirror
Folks, go to cdfreaks.com and other Web sites devoted to burning and ripping.
Read the posts.
Put "DVD problems" in Google - you get 15,500,000 hits.
CD burners work fine. DVD burners suck and the media sucks unless you buy Japanese - and then only if the media happens to work with your burner.
I have a cheap Lite-On, so I'm not out that much money, but I'm not buying that brand again. I'm not saying everything they make is bad, plenty of people use Lite-On and swear by them. I'd have no particular qualms about buying a Lite-On CD burner, I suppose.
But after reading fifty million posts about problems with DVD burners, I KNOW there is a problem with either the technology or the manufacturers.
Actually you don't. DVD burners are hell. Mine won't recognize even top of the line blank media and won't even recognize a disk it's burned itself. It reads movie DVDs fine, though. Go figure. My other DVD drive recognizes the disks the burner burns okay.
The damn things are FAR too sensitive. The companies pushed the dye making technology too far. DVD burners are horrible consumer products - there are entire Web sites devoted to getting them working reliably. It's pathetic.
You're incredibly ignorant of the possibilities, not to mention the basic concepts of the entire issue.
So I have to say I hope I don't live in a world where YOU won't die.
There aren't too many people in the world - just too many morons.
We Transhumans will fix that in due time.
Have a nice day.
Resurrection of dead dogs has been done before, although I believe it was done differently.
IIRC cryonic experiments have shown brain damage is not significant for some time after clinical death although it is best minimized by supercooling the body as quickly as possible. Full cryonic suspension of a human body takes up to a week or more.
Brain damage is reduced by lowering body temperature, triggering Mammalian Dive Reflex which conserves body temperature to the heart and brain.
I believe there have been several cases of people drowning in extremely cold water circumstances who were retrieved within a half hour to an hour and were clinically dead for an hour or more before being resuscitated and not receiving significant brain damage.
This is a known effect that is now taken into account by rescue teams and hospitals. Drowning victims are not to be declared dead until they have been returned to full body temperature without resuscitation.
Oh, really?
And Grandma, who isn't supposed to be able to even comprehend Linux or understand why running root is not desireable, is supposed to figure out Runas?
What's wrong with THIS picture?
Here's the bottom line: NO application which is not a SYSTEM application should need root privilege. Meaning an application that does not directly affect the kernel should not need root privilege.
I don't even like setuid and passwd - if the user needs to change his password on HIS machine, let him log in as root. If he needs to change his password on a multiuser machine or on a network, let the sys admin do it - corporate users shouldn't be using passwords anyway, they should be using PKI certificates and one-time password generators and tokens and be ASSIGNED security rather than letting the user handle his own security.
That may have been true in 1979, which, as you may be able to compute, was just a few years after UNIX was designed.
In case you aren't aware, the original UNIX HAD NO FILE SYSTEM AT ALL. It was intended to be a bunch of bytes on the system, being searching by grep and processed by tiny apps linked together with pipes!
The original UNIX was also where viruses were originally developed - because sys admins in those days didn't have to worry about them because they'd never heard of them.
None of that is true now after major redesigns - neither for security or the file system.
With Windows, it is STILL true that it was never designed for security and it STILL has little security after several major rewrites and so-called "security initiatives". And the next major rewrite will probably introduce such incredible complexity and consequently major security holes that it will be nearly unusable as anything but a standalone machine.
First they admit that end users don't comprehend NOT running as root.
THEN they introduce a dozen tools to "help" the end user not run as root, thereby introducing MORE COMPLEXITY into the concept.
What's wrong with this picture?
The bottom line is quite simple: DON'T CREATE USER ACCOUNTS AS ROOT BY DEFAULT! Every Linux distro can do that and Windows needs to do it, too. And the system needs to TELL users up front AS it's being installed WHY it's being done that way.
Introducing reduced-admin tools after the fact is just CYA horseshit.
That goddamn simple.
Stop treating the end users as dumb sheep to be spoon-fed pablum and fleeced of every dime they possess and security will improve.
And I'll add to that. This reminds me of the "Doom 2099" comic that Marvel put out along with their other "2099" series. Doctor Doom, the premier villain in Marvel Comics, became a critic of the "American Way" in that comic - and it got pulled because of it, the way I heard it.
The entire series got canned later, probably because of low sales, but "Doom 2099" was the best comic in the series and probably one of the best comics Marvel had put out around that time.
The "silent issue" where Doom meditates on his failure in invading and conquering the United States and the potential of nanotechnology to change the world was one of the best comics I've ever read.
They even had him quoting Noam Chomsky and Bakunin in earlier issues!
Obviously somebody thought this was way too subversive.
I'm not so sure Fox doesn't do that.
Fox is not your average network. It's a political movement disguised as a network. Nothing else can explain Fox News. It's not just a company which was set up to play to a certain ignorant demographic.
Murdoch has an agenda and everything he does fits that agenda. So it would not surprise me at all to see him buy a series just to kill it and piss people off. After all, it's one 14-episode series - it's not going to bankrupt the network or him. If he thought it was subversive of his agenda in any way, yes, he'd kill it no matter how much his execs spent for it. And the rumor that the guy who bought it got canned supports that concept.
I've never seen the series. I've never seen Babylon 5, either, except maybe one episode while I was in the joint.
I've seen a FEW episodes of X-Files and maybe one episode (or might have been part of one, I can't remember) of Buffy.
Now I've seen the trailer for Serenity. It was completely incomprehensible to me, but looked interesting. I liked the scene where the apparent villain says, "I'm alone and unarmed", whereupon the hero says, "Good!" and draws his gun and shoots him. Reminds me of Indiana and the guy with the sword in "Raiders". Although I hope the whole movie isn't retreads of stuff I've seen like that.
If I have the money, I'll give this one a shot simply because it's space opera. I've seen the current Star Wars twice, and if I have the money I might see it again at some point - although I think it's going away pretty quickly.
I've seen the entire "Blake's Seven" series, and I think this one probably is on a par with that (with vastly superior special effects, of course!).
My favorite character in Blake was Avon, because he was a computer thief and both ruthlessly selfish and an idealist. My favorite line in Blake is in the episode about the dual between planets where Avon asks Tarrant if he has any compunction against cheating, and Tarrant says, "None whatsoever!", to which Avon replies, "Oh, good!"
If Serenity can match that, I'll give it a thumbs up.
"I like Windows, but I don't go into Linux threads to complain, I just don't read them."
/. fanboy. You're not even a paid MS shill. So what are you doing here?
You're obviously not a regular
Reminds me of the line Robert Guillaume used to his boss in the Rutger Hauer bounty hunter movie:
"Next time you want to fuck me - kiss me first!"
"Let's just hope that they don't put any security holes in it"
Yo, dude, this is Microsoft, remember? Security holes are the FIRST thing that goes into the specifications for ANY Microsoft product, followed by the instability rules, then comes the massive confusing menu and dialog screens, followed by the toy GUI design, and then and ONLY then comes the functional specification - which consists of a long list of things they WON'T implement (or will implement in a non-standard way) followed by the (very) short list of actual capabilities.
Oh, yeah, I forgot - before the functional specs also comes the hype marketing plan - and maybe the copying of some other company's product.
Oh, yeah, and then they have to pay Rob Enderle and Laura DiDio to produce a report saying it's better than anything else on the market - especially anything that could be remotely considered open source.
The last time I was on, you had to go down and personally collect that check every couple weeks or whatever.
Sounds like a dangerous way to commit a crime - showing up once a week (ON TIME!) in a government office to collect the theft.
I could see it if they mailed it to your phoney box address - or better yet, Direct Deposit. Does unemployment do that stuff now?
"a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive"
Or at least it feels that way when I see a nice picture of Angelina Jolie!
"Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard."
Duh!
Everybody knows your market share is not even one percent.
It doesn't matter if Firefox is three percent or six percent, it's WAY PAST your market share.
I switched from Opera to Firefox and now my browser doesn't crash when I visit The Register site...
In fact, in general, I have far fewer crashes from Firefox than Opera - hardly any, in fact. Not bad for a browser with a lot of bug reports!
Somebody did.
It's called Linux.
Well, I suppose you COULD say it hasn't actually ENDED yet - let's just say it's "ENDING"!
Get over the last paragraph, morons, and RTFA!
It's FAR more insightful than any of the comments I've seen bitching about the "blame hackers" paragraph - which was preceded by "blame everybody else" sentences anyway.
You guys sound like the big media press whenever somebody gets caught faking or running false stories - "Oh, woe is us! Somebody is blaming us for being idiots! We're such a poor, put-upon industry!"
Deal with it!
You're correct about how it started.
However, the point of Ranum's article is that we haven't learned. We've developed various technigues but so far, while the effective general concepts are understood by some people, most haven't implemented anything but point solutions - which have to be ineffective.
Maybe the problem is these point solutions are proprietary (and some of course are open source.) Maybe what's needed is some sort of "open source security project" where ALL the aspects of security are brought under one umbrella (sort of like Apache being an umbrella organization for all sorts of open source Web projects - more than just a Web server) and ALL the security pros can contribute software and technigues to set some sort of open source security standard. Just a thought.
I just read an interview with a CitiGroup guy who said when they got hacked, they brought in Shimomura, the guy that helped catch Mitnick. He came to their offices wearing velvet shorts, a T-shirt with math equations on it, a helmet and rollerblades. The receptionist was going to throw him out because she thought he was a bike messenger (on rollerblades instead of a bike)!
Or at least, has the wrong emphasis.
Ranum denounces crackers only in the last paragraph.
RTFA! The rest of the article should be modded "Very Insightful!"
I read his "Stupid on Software" article referenced here a while back and it, too, was very insightful. I need to look around and read what else he's written.
"They involve activism, raising awareness, getting others involved in politics, and other things that don't look real cool in graphic novels."
No - they involve pocket nukes - and those you don't want to hang around seeing if they look cool or not. Once nanotech is adequately developed, that will be the better way to go. You don't like the way someone runs a country? Kill them. That's what THEY do.
The rest of that list is a total waste of time.
About head movement, I believe I read somewhere that this was the first Batman costume that did in fact allow head movement. But I didn't notice it being done much in the movie, so maybe not. There are also probably several variations of the costume (ones for closeup head shots, ones for full body camera shots, etc.) so they vary in their capabilities.
$30,000 for Shaolin Temple martial arts training? Get serious.
There are plenty of legit Togakure-ryu ninjutsu teachers in the US and they don't charge you that kind of money. And it's legit ninjutsu, not Chinese martial arts (not to say anything against those forms, of course - but Chinese martial arts is not what Batman learned.)
Then he says get a kevlar jacket? Right, uh huh. You'd at LEAST need a full SWAT outfit and preferably something more extensive than that to match Batman's costume. $300,000 - that's a little pricey - you could probably do very well for a third or less than that. (Of course, if you'd rather be Iron Man than Batman, add on some more zeros.)
I stopped reading this crap after that page.