I'm not sure why everyone is so up in arms about it being released. There are lots of ridiculous plugins out there. I've got one running that makes all my tabs different colors...Now that's pointless bloat! But if I decide that the browser is getting sluggish, I can go through and take out the plugins I don't really use, and we're back to normal.
Just because a plugin exists, doesn't make it an automatic security hole for a browser.
Nah. A killer app is one whose extraordinary usefulness drives a particular market. The webbrowser itself was a response to the big killer app, the internet. The network had been there for years, but when they started making it pretty with pictures and blinking things, people went nuts. It drove browser development, broadband deployment, and started the biggest boom/bust economic cycle in recent history.
That is a killer app. Firefox is nice, but it's just another browser until it comes up with the one thing that everyone absolutely lusts after in their secret hearts. More reliable, less spyware...That's just not sexy. But some wonder-widget that captures the public's imagination and exponentiates Firefox's market share? That's a killer app.
More choice is never a bad thing. Some people will still pick their add ons off the "Top Ten" list, but the others are available for those who are willing to dig a little to find a useful tool.
Yea, some other monkey in my company set up the backups on that machine; I have a morbid fear of tape, which is why I had the two machine setup in the first place. I was pretty much relying on the fact that I could sync up the two machines, and since they both had raids, I wasn't too worried about losing them both. Worst case scenario, I had solid backups of the database and all the software, so I could have rebuilt the machine in a few hours.
I was pretty keyed up for the rest of that day though...I didn't want to bog down the whole building by running my rebuild scripts, so I sat around thinking about what a bad time it would be for the other box to crash. Long day.
Actually saw that happen once. "rm -rf / temp/files/backup/junk" I just went to lunch. Poor bastard was in tears when I got back...Backup had failed to restore, the usual litany of disaster. I'd given him root so he could do patches on the system, without me having to come down and do it...kinda a trial basis sort of thing.
Eventually I told him that I'd load balanced that server, so there was an identical machine sitting not three feet away, with all the same data, etc...The users never even noticed anything was wrong. I don't know why he thought no one had called...Those machines hosted a big critical app that was used ALL THE TIME. That was definitely the end of root for him.
Doesn't fly, because you postulated that you've already got a complete list of prime numbers. If you've already got the list, saying that something isn't ON the list is trivial. So either Q+1 ought to be on the list, for being prime, or Q+1 is not prime, despite the mathematical definition.
The point of proving a negative is usually used with intention or prediction. For example, it's impossible to prove that some scientist won't come up with the good old Theory of Everything this year, or that any random person won't die in the coming year. Who the hell knows?
Internet Explorer is still necessary for viewing some websites. I can't put in my damn expense reports without IE because the wankers who wrote the site wrote it using Microsofts Java, which only runs with microsofts crappy browser. All the management here uses Outlook, and corporate is migrating everyone to Exchange. They'd go nuts if we tried to take away their shiny HTML mail.
We get tons of ads (ads that we get paid to publish) in email, generally pictures, quark, or pagemaker files, so we can't filter any sort of image or zip format completely.
It's one thing if you're in a position to dictate those terms to your business, but if you're not in a high security field, upper management is going to tell you to shove it.
If you catch it in time, and if the thing you downloaded isn't capable of logging and trasmitting a password. But what if you don't, or it is?
Right now worms and viruses are easy to spot, because the first thing they do is spam themselves out all over the place. Gives you tons of warning. But what happens when you get one that spreads slowly, under the radar? Then you've got a long term vunerability on the network.
Everything aside from the possibility of hitting a living thing is easily solvable. We already have cars with computerized traction control, so they could calculate the amount of time it would take to stop given conditions if there was an accident ahead, and you'd always try to stop because that's what the drivers ed textbook says.
Car swerves into your lane, you'd always slow down and try to evade, and you'd never speed up. Even if speeding up might zip you out of the accident, the first time it failed, the auto company would get sued into a smoking hole because the computer hit the gas and increased the energy of the situation.
The solution to the problem is always going to be the same with a computer in control. Slow down, and evade. There will never be a situation where the computer decides to floor it and weave through the obstacles, that will never be allowed in the programming.
The problem with living things is the computers ability to categorize them in advance. Person or dog? You'd need some sophisticated sensors to tell the difference, and some sophisticated software to make the call. But again, it's going to come down to the programming. If a person walks out into the road, and the computer is driving, the computer will ALWAYS try to slow down and evade. It may have a more vigorous response programmed for certain situations (unlikely), but that's what it's going to do.
You act like the goal is to have a computer that can drive a racecar, and make the sort ethical descisions that people are notoriously bad at. It's not going to happen. If they get a functional computer driver, it's going to take the most conservative response in every situation. It is not going to take a huge swerve in a pedestrian area to avoid a fender bender.
Bah, screw that. Just block the ports on the firewall. If certain users need those services, then do a NAT directly to their workstation, and put that workstation on a subnet that can be isolated from the rest of your systems. Firewall based security isn't a total solution, but if you have a tight firewall then your security problems are so much more managable.
I had a client who objected to this one the grounds that their employees used it "only" to talk to each other, so it was more "efficient" to keep the service. So I set them up a jabber server in the building, and blocked all outgoing traffic. The boss was fine with it, and while the employees were pissed as hell, they couldn't say anything about it because they'd all sworn that they weren't using it to chat with people outside the building.
I don't see how it is possible to secure an open protocol that allows file transfers. There is always going to be some idiot who'll click on the bad link, and download the trojan that can compromise the security of the entire network.
Even if you put in multiple cutouts when dealing with untrusted users, inevitably you'll have a trusted user who will unthinkingly violate protocol and open the whole setup to exploitation.
Right now I think that it may have some issues regarding lane changing, and collision avoidance, but I think that, in the long run, those problems are a lot more solvable than, "Woops there's a giant ditch in the way, what do I do?".
Collision avoidance is pretty simple...Just stay X distance away from everybody around you, and computers have a huge advantage in that sort of test because, a) they don't get bored and stop paying attention, and b) they have very quick reaction time. It's probably easier to teach it to avoid someone merging into its lane than it is to teach it how to tell what a turn signal means.
You're talking about creating an artifical scarcity to boost prices. That's what got them in this mess to begin with. Do you really think p2p would have blown up the way it did if the RIAA hadn't been gouging with the CD prices? Remember 20 dollar CDs? Pretty unjustifable. As soon as they get truly effective DRM, prices will zip right back up.
Ah, no way will they be that intelligent. They'll spend ten times what they've lost in piracy, alienate zillions of customers, get embroiled in countless lawsuits, all in an attempt to make sure that no one NO ONE gets for free what they have the rights to sell.
It's like the war on drugs...You can't fight supply and demand. The invisible hand will bitch slap you up one side of the street and down the other. But people persist in fighting it.
It's not too bad. The acting is tolerable, the science is not completely inaccurate. Of course it absolutely HAS to be a crime show, because that's all we've got these days is crime shows.
My biggest problem with it is the whole friday night thing. I don't have a huge social life or anything, but I've almost always got something better to do on Friday night. Gotta get off my ass and finish my MythTV box.
Yes, I for one welcome the indecisiveness of our would-be DRM overlords.
It amusing that the greed of the big media corporations which kickstarted this whole mess to begin with, is the same exact thing that is keeping them from developing effective DRM. All the shifting alliances as all the tech companies try and lock the content providers into their DRM scheme, and all of them fight to make sure their DRM doesn't really work with anyone elses. It'll be a moot point before they get their crap together.
Ahhh, the sweet spectacle of infighting among ones enemies.
Numb3rs? As far as sci-fi, I'm with ya, but the pickin's are slim in general. I'm trying to think of other new shows and I'm failing. Bunch of reality tv crap, and interminable crime scene investigations where the CSI guys aren't dorky pale geeks who never leave the lab, but instead tanned field agents who run down suspects and shoot people and crap.
I agree with you, but you're comparing apples to oranges. The pointy hairs all want shared calendars and the other flashy sparkly crap that Exchange provides.
Open source still does not have a good answer to Exchange...You can say Phpgroupware and such, but try to convince people who've used Exchange to use those products? It's seriously uphill, because even though they're cheaper, they just don't work as well on the user end, no matter how well they perform on the server end.
The place where I work right now has a ton of legacy crap. It's about to be a real problem because my boss just gave her two weeks notice, and she's the last person here who really understands the Cobol and RPG legacy code.
They haven't updated it in forever, so IE mac is really so old as to be useless. If you use a Mac, you're probably using Firefox, Opera, or Safari, and much happier anyway.
I was kinda referring to that period of LPs before 8 tracks came out where you could buy the LP or you could buy the 45, or you could listen to it on the radio, but, without a reel to reel player, you couldn't record anything. I think the RIAA still thinks of that as their golden age.
Slashdot Mirror
So don't install it.
I'm not sure why everyone is so up in arms about it being released. There are lots of ridiculous plugins out there. I've got one running that makes all my tabs different colors...Now that's pointless bloat! But if I decide that the browser is getting sluggish, I can go through and take out the plugins I don't really use, and we're back to normal.
Just because a plugin exists, doesn't make it an automatic security hole for a browser.
Nah. A killer app is one whose extraordinary usefulness drives a particular market. The webbrowser itself was a response to the big killer app, the internet. The network had been there for years, but when they started making it pretty with pictures and blinking things, people went nuts. It drove browser development, broadband deployment, and started the biggest boom/bust economic cycle in recent history.
That is a killer app. Firefox is nice, but it's just another browser until it comes up with the one thing that everyone absolutely lusts after in their secret hearts. More reliable, less spyware...That's just not sexy. But some wonder-widget that captures the public's imagination and exponentiates Firefox's market share? That's a killer app.
More choice is never a bad thing. Some people will still pick their add ons off the "Top Ten" list, but the others are available for those who are willing to dig a little to find a useful tool.
Yea, some other monkey in my company set up the backups on that machine; I have a morbid fear of tape, which is why I had the two machine setup in the first place. I was pretty much relying on the fact that I could sync up the two machines, and since they both had raids, I wasn't too worried about losing them both. Worst case scenario, I had solid backups of the database and all the software, so I could have rebuilt the machine in a few hours.
I was pretty keyed up for the rest of that day though...I didn't want to bog down the whole building by running my rebuild scripts, so I sat around thinking about what a bad time it would be for the other box to crash. Long day.
Actually saw that happen once. "rm -rf / temp/files/backup/junk" I just went to lunch. Poor bastard was in tears when I got back...Backup had failed to restore, the usual litany of disaster. I'd given him root so he could do patches on the system, without me having to come down and do it...kinda a trial basis sort of thing.
Eventually I told him that I'd load balanced that server, so there was an identical machine sitting not three feet away, with all the same data, etc...The users never even noticed anything was wrong. I don't know why he thought no one had called...Those machines hosted a big critical app that was used ALL THE TIME. That was definitely the end of root for him.
This stuff is useless in and of itself, but it's another step toward powered body armor, which is the eventual goal.
Doesn't fly, because you postulated that you've already got a complete list of prime numbers. If you've already got the list, saying that something isn't ON the list is trivial. So either Q+1 ought to be on the list, for being prime, or Q+1 is not prime, despite the mathematical definition.
The point of proving a negative is usually used with intention or prediction. For example, it's impossible to prove that some scientist won't come up with the good old Theory of Everything this year, or that any random person won't die in the coming year. Who the hell knows?
Eh, ThinkGeek seems to agree with me. I'd never heard yours before, but the points the same.
Sure, if you can get away with all those things.
Internet Explorer is still necessary for viewing some websites. I can't put in my damn expense reports without IE because the wankers who wrote the site wrote it using Microsofts Java, which only runs with microsofts crappy browser. All the management here uses Outlook, and corporate is migrating everyone to Exchange. They'd go nuts if we tried to take away their shiny HTML mail.
We get tons of ads (ads that we get paid to publish) in email, generally pictures, quark, or pagemaker files, so we can't filter any sort of image or zip format completely.
It's one thing if you're in a position to dictate those terms to your business, but if you're not in a high security field, upper management is going to tell you to shove it.
If you catch it in time, and if the thing you downloaded isn't capable of logging and trasmitting a password. But what if you don't, or it is?
Right now worms and viruses are easy to spot, because the first thing they do is spam themselves out all over the place. Gives you tons of warning. But what happens when you get one that spreads slowly, under the radar? Then you've got a long term vunerability on the network.
Everything aside from the possibility of hitting a living thing is easily solvable. We already have cars with computerized traction control, so they could calculate the amount of time it would take to stop given conditions if there was an accident ahead, and you'd always try to stop because that's what the drivers ed textbook says.
Car swerves into your lane, you'd always slow down and try to evade, and you'd never speed up. Even if speeding up might zip you out of the accident, the first time it failed, the auto company would get sued into a smoking hole because the computer hit the gas and increased the energy of the situation.
The solution to the problem is always going to be the same with a computer in control. Slow down, and evade. There will never be a situation where the computer decides to floor it and weave through the obstacles, that will never be allowed in the programming.
The problem with living things is the computers ability to categorize them in advance. Person or dog? You'd need some sophisticated sensors to tell the difference, and some sophisticated software to make the call. But again, it's going to come down to the programming. If a person walks out into the road, and the computer is driving, the computer will ALWAYS try to slow down and evade. It may have a more vigorous response programmed for certain situations (unlikely), but that's what it's going to do.
You act like the goal is to have a computer that can drive a racecar, and make the sort ethical descisions that people are notoriously bad at. It's not going to happen. If they get a functional computer driver, it's going to take the most conservative response in every situation. It is not going to take a huge swerve in a pedestrian area to avoid a fender bender.
Bah, screw that. Just block the ports on the firewall. If certain users need those services, then do a NAT directly to their workstation, and put that workstation on a subnet that can be isolated from the rest of your systems. Firewall based security isn't a total solution, but if you have a tight firewall then your security problems are so much more managable.
I had a client who objected to this one the grounds that their employees used it "only" to talk to each other, so it was more "efficient" to keep the service. So I set them up a jabber server in the building, and blocked all outgoing traffic. The boss was fine with it, and while the employees were pissed as hell, they couldn't say anything about it because they'd all sworn that they weren't using it to chat with people outside the building.
I don't see how it is possible to secure an open protocol that allows file transfers. There is always going to be some idiot who'll click on the bad link, and download the trojan that can compromise the security of the entire network.
Even if you put in multiple cutouts when dealing with untrusted users, inevitably you'll have a trusted user who will unthinkingly violate protocol and open the whole setup to exploitation.
Right now I think that it may have some issues regarding lane changing, and collision avoidance, but I think that, in the long run, those problems are a lot more solvable than, "Woops there's a giant ditch in the way, what do I do?".
Collision avoidance is pretty simple...Just stay X distance away from everybody around you, and computers have a huge advantage in that sort of test because, a) they don't get bored and stop paying attention, and b) they have very quick reaction time. It's probably easier to teach it to avoid someone merging into its lane than it is to teach it how to tell what a turn signal means.
Still a long way to go, but this is a big step.
Pssh. I expect what I'm going to see...Tons of amatuer iPod porn.
You're talking about creating an artifical scarcity to boost prices. That's what got them in this mess to begin with. Do you really think p2p would have blown up the way it did if the RIAA hadn't been gouging with the CD prices? Remember 20 dollar CDs? Pretty unjustifable. As soon as they get truly effective DRM, prices will zip right back up.
Ah, no way will they be that intelligent. They'll spend ten times what they've lost in piracy, alienate zillions of customers, get embroiled in countless lawsuits, all in an attempt to make sure that no one NO ONE gets for free what they have the rights to sell.
It's like the war on drugs...You can't fight supply and demand. The invisible hand will bitch slap you up one side of the street and down the other. But people persist in fighting it.
It's not too bad. The acting is tolerable, the science is not completely inaccurate. Of course it absolutely HAS to be a crime show, because that's all we've got these days is crime shows.
My biggest problem with it is the whole friday night thing. I don't have a huge social life or anything, but I've almost always got something better to do on Friday night. Gotta get off my ass and finish my MythTV box.
Yes, I for one welcome the indecisiveness of our would-be DRM overlords.
It amusing that the greed of the big media corporations which kickstarted this whole mess to begin with, is the same exact thing that is keeping them from developing effective DRM. All the shifting alliances as all the tech companies try and lock the content providers into their DRM scheme, and all of them fight to make sure their DRM doesn't really work with anyone elses. It'll be a moot point before they get their crap together.
Ahhh, the sweet spectacle of infighting among ones enemies.
Numb3rs? As far as sci-fi, I'm with ya, but the pickin's are slim in general. I'm trying to think of other new shows and I'm failing. Bunch of reality tv crap, and interminable crime scene investigations where the CSI guys aren't dorky pale geeks who never leave the lab, but instead tanned field agents who run down suspects and shoot people and crap.
I agree with you, but you're comparing apples to oranges. The pointy hairs all want shared calendars and the other flashy sparkly crap that Exchange provides.
Open source still does not have a good answer to Exchange...You can say Phpgroupware and such, but try to convince people who've used Exchange to use those products? It's seriously uphill, because even though they're cheaper, they just don't work as well on the user end, no matter how well they perform on the server end.
I mean, one of their goals is "Take Vista into the Boardroom"...A reasonable company would say, "Make sure Vista gets released this year."
I programmed in RPG this morning. :/
The place where I work right now has a ton of legacy crap. It's about to be a real problem because my boss just gave her two weeks notice, and she's the last person here who really understands the Cobol and RPG legacy code.
They haven't updated it in forever, so IE mac is really so old as to be useless. If you use a Mac, you're probably using Firefox, Opera, or Safari, and much happier anyway.
I was kinda referring to that period of LPs before 8 tracks came out where you could buy the LP or you could buy the 45, or you could listen to it on the radio, but, without a reel to reel player, you couldn't record anything. I think the RIAA still thinks of that as their golden age.