Pretty much all Unix systems are hackable with local access.
I'm guessing either the entire file system is encrypted, or the problem is getting into an application that's running under the OS. Most times the OS isn't the final gakekeeper in high security; the application itself may run everything encrypted, and may very well have no easy way to restore access if a password is lost.
Of all the idiotic, impossible to believe things I saw in that movie, the worst, the absolute worst, the most impossible to believe, was that the big uber hacker had a sexy kung fu hacker chick girlfriend.
Compared to that, fitting all the nations financial data on three hard drives, ramming a (flying) helicopter with a car, and hacking the entire country from a semi-trailer are almost plausible.
I've been in a position to do this (I was still rooted from home in three systems, and though they changed the passwords, they didn't kick active sessions) and all I did was change the MOTD to "When firing a user with root access, make sure to abort existing sessions."
Professionalism is key if you expect to be trusted with access to big sexy systems.
Seems to me like windows ME came out after Windows 2k. Regardless, anyone but a diehard fanboy would have to admit that there are serious issues with Vista, especially with bloat and resource hogging, and while a linux user can be expected to be able to understand and optimize the crap running on his system, that is not acceptable for Windows; it needs to work out of the box.
And I disagree about gaming resources; we're not talking about a 5,000 dollar gaming PC, but about a quality midrange computer, the sort that could run the game in XP, but can't in Vista. That is the issue. Having Windows increase its bloat to match new hardware becomes unacceptable after a while.
And as for the home site license, I don't think it's a bad idea, but the people who make you reactivate your system every time you swap a graphics card are probably going to disagree.
I've heard that too. On the one hand, yea, it ought to work without emulation; emulation is the great surrender: "We can't figure out what the fuck we did to break it, so here, we'll just emulate the working system."
I've seen whole applications running on an emulated version of the only picky OS setup they ever ran on, and it's only funny/sad, not funny/haha. Windows NT4 service pack 2 running in a VM? Yeesh.
But a sloppy, inefficient solution is still a working solution, and it's a working solution that should be trivial to implement.
Features? It doesn't need new features, most people don't use the features it already has. What it needs is not to suck!
The first thing Microsoft needs to do is look at everything from the user perspective. What can be faster, lighter, more convenient? What can be more stable? The absolute last thing they need to do is to--even for a second--imagine that bolting some shiny crap onto Vista is going to somehow make people happy with it.
Christ. Some of the stuff he thinks 7 needs is stuff that would make any knowledgable geek recoil in horror. WinFS?!? Are you kidding me?
"Game Mode" so I can turn off the resource hogging of my OS and run a game? NO! Pay attention! I want the OS to not hog resources.
A standards compliant web browser? It's called Firefox. Next.
Site licensing for the home user? *pause for sardonic laughter* Yea, right, that's going to happen about the time Ballmer gay marries Steve Jobs.
The only things I think he had right (aside from the impossible things like a modular os, etc) were XP virtual machine/emulation, and a better UAC interface. An XP vm would be a quick and dirty fix for compatibility issues; Mac pulled this with OS9 emulation, and it definitely smoothed their adpotion of OSX. As far as the UAC, Microsoft has always been the king of suck as far as security interfaces go; I almost always end up having to disable security to get the machine to do the crap I want it to do, and while I've got faith in my upstream security, I'm the kind of person who can't ever have enough security, and it pisses me off when some of it is useless. If you have to disable security to make your machine work, it's WORTHLESS (I'm looking at you too Symantec).
I liked Pan's Labyrinth, and so did a lot of other people, though I can see it's not for everyone.
My main problem with the english dub is the american studios who won't license a foreign film without overdubbing the quality acting with some dumbed down jackass dialogue, and they often don't give you the option for the original audio. Have you heard the dub for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Jesus, it sounds like they hired a bunch of hobo's to do the dub.
It's just a button of mine; I don't care if they make an english dub, but I don't want that to be the first option if it wasn't originally recorded in english.
Yea, I hate movies that require me to be literate, and I tried to learn "spannish" but whenever I google it google asks me if I want to learn "Spanish" whatever the fuck that is.
Maybe I'm the minority, but adding an english dub to a kickass foreign film is like taking a supermodel and tatooing a casino ad on her forehead...If you don't speak the language, and can't be bothered to read the text, then the film is probably not for you in the first place.
(Yoda Voice): "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your desssstiny."
The Ruby crowd is really vocal, but the opportunities aren't really out there for Ruby programmers at this point, and considering the current scaling problems with Rails...Well, I'm not sure they're going to be until they get them ironed out.
If you've got time to invest, Java is always a good skill to have...It's not new and sexy anymore, but it's everywhere. If you don't have the time, Php is at least popular, easy, and widely used.
If you're really into the idea of a deployment framework like Rails, you might want to check out Python and Django.
Well that's encouraging to me, since I program half a dozen different languages, half of which start with the letter "P", and only one of which ends in ".Net".
Still, from looking, I doubt your one-track geeks are having much trouble getting started..Net and Java are everywhere, and, unfortunately for me, while I'm capable of programming in those languages, the vast majority of the jobs are web app gigs I don't have much interest in.
I saw one the other day that was a basic webmonkey job; they wanted VB.Net and Access and some basic ms-centric crap like that...And seven years of college.
I had more coke in my sinuses than Paris Hilton; a masters for that? Talk about your degree inflation. 3 years of highschool and a fricking MCAD would have been overkill for that gig.
Heat's not a waste product in the way that you mean it. A combustion engine that produces no heat is not a combustion engine. The heat is required.
The heat in a car engine comes from two places: the actual combustion reaction, and the inevitable friction/inefficency. Of those two sources (given proper maintenance and lubrication) the combustion reaction creates the vast majority of the heat.
Basically, a combustion engine requires countless controlled explosions to function, and to fuel those explosions you need a high energy fuel that is capable of rapid continuous oxidation...There were early experiments with a gunpowder-based engine, and theoretically you can use anything that will go "boom".
That reaction is absolutely critical to the function of the engine and it absolutely depends on high grade fuel. Now, while theoretically anything can be a fuel, the best fuels will produce the most vigorous reaction, and the most heat. The less heat produced by the fuel, the lower the quality of the reaction. When the temperature drops, the quality of your combustion drops, and that leads to more pollutants, poorer fuel economy, and an engine that sounds like crap and produces less power.
Eh. The problem is the drop in demand that accompanies a high cost for fuel. The oil market is extremely volatile right now, and the reason for that is that the big investors know that if demand drops significantly, they're going to lose their asses. They're banking on disasters, frankly, and if one doesn't arrive before september they're going to the poor house.
I agree completely, especially with regards to animal waste->fuel conversion. The animal waste is costly enough to dispose of already to make it profitable.
Still, its never going to eliminate oil as a fuel source. It'll take something epic like algae for that. In my mind, biofuels are something to sort of tide us over while cleaner renewables hit their stride. Having a car burning biofuel is not nearly as nice as one that just runs on pure electricity.
The problem is, that the process doesn't scale well. A lot of biodiesel needs several days of cooking, so there is a limit to how much stock you can be working with at any one time.
Even with the thermal depol process, you have a multistage process that takes a significant amount of time, and takes up a significant amount of space. And there as well you have availablity issues with feedstock.
Stability == Stagnation. All economic activity is cyclical, and the goal should be to bring the peaks closer together, not flatten them out.
I'm frankly fine with speculators speculating because, frankly, it always ends up with them losing their asses. Commodities will even back out as the markets settle down.
The problem is that production is slow and low. 500 barrels a day is great and all, but that's not even close to what is needed.
I've got plenty of biofuel plants around me as well, and the things that are keeping them from taking over the world are low supplys of feed stocks, long cook times, and low peak output.
Lot of biofuel startups out there, and they're doing middlin due to all the interest in biofuels. But they're not exactly setting the world on fire right now.
That hope, that beautiful little flower of perfect happy hope, is how they take your money away from you.
Let me tell you how the fuel of the future will come about. Some guy in a lab will come up with something that is woefully inefficient, and they will haggle with it for a decade with little funding and little respect, and it will become more efficient, and then more people will say, "Wow, maybe there is something to (insert inefficient process here)" and they'll start working on it. And a decade or so later it will be roughly equivalent to our current fuel in cost.
People have been working on the idea of biofuels forever, and we've got some semi-decent methods out there, but every one of them is the fruit of a LOT of crappy thankless work done when oil was cheaper than bottled water.
Likewise fusion; we know it can be done. One day we will do it, barring an intellectual dark age. But right now its an expensive boondoggle.
Technically it's the energy generated by the fuel going bang but generally you're going to get heat with your bang unless you're using compressed air or astroglide. (da-dum-tschh. The show changes completely after I've had my coffee.)
Yea, that's a massive screaming bullshit call in my book. If you're going to call it "bio-crude" which is weird in and of itself, you're going to have to accept that it is actually a fuel.
The heat produced out of combustion is sort of required; heat warms up the engine. If there is no heat, there is not much energy in the reaction. If there is no energy, it's not much of a fuel.
Even if, even if the manufacturing claims were accurate, the stuff doesn't behave like a hydrocarbon fuel.
Sounds like a pump and dump to me. Their stock is at approximately nothing, this claim has no actual details of process. It also violates common sense (complete combustion from a hydrocarbon? They're not zero impurity fuels), and promises an astounding return from the use of a waste product. They make claims that they can put it into production very quickly, which is extremely unlikely given the issues with biofuel scaling.
From their website:
Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the Company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting the Company and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors available from the Company.
Randomly throwing down on people legitimately asking for some technical help is a big problem in the OSS community. Whether or not/. is the appropriate place to ask this question is debatable, but since it made the front page and there is no helpful SRS faq on this site, might as well direct them somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much all Unix systems are hackable with local access.
I'm guessing either the entire file system is encrypted, or the problem is getting into an application that's running under the OS. Most times the OS isn't the final gakekeeper in high security; the application itself may run everything encrypted, and may very well have no easy way to restore access if a password is lost.
Of all the idiotic, impossible to believe things I saw in that movie, the worst, the absolute worst, the most impossible to believe, was that the big uber hacker had a sexy kung fu hacker chick girlfriend.
Compared to that, fitting all the nations financial data on three hard drives, ramming a (flying) helicopter with a car, and hacking the entire country from a semi-trailer are almost plausible.
I've been in a position to do this (I was still rooted from home in three systems, and though they changed the passwords, they didn't kick active sessions) and all I did was change the MOTD to "When firing a user with root access, make sure to abort existing sessions."
Professionalism is key if you expect to be trusted with access to big sexy systems.
I was just trying not to imply that Ballmer is a girl.
Seems to me like windows ME came out after Windows 2k. Regardless, anyone but a diehard fanboy would have to admit that there are serious issues with Vista, especially with bloat and resource hogging, and while a linux user can be expected to be able to understand and optimize the crap running on his system, that is not acceptable for Windows; it needs to work out of the box.
And I disagree about gaming resources; we're not talking about a 5,000 dollar gaming PC, but about a quality midrange computer, the sort that could run the game in XP, but can't in Vista. That is the issue. Having Windows increase its bloat to match new hardware becomes unacceptable after a while.
And as for the home site license, I don't think it's a bad idea, but the people who make you reactivate your system every time you swap a graphics card are probably going to disagree.
I've heard that too. On the one hand, yea, it ought to work without emulation; emulation is the great surrender: "We can't figure out what the fuck we did to break it, so here, we'll just emulate the working system."
I've seen whole applications running on an emulated version of the only picky OS setup they ever ran on, and it's only funny/sad, not funny/haha. Windows NT4 service pack 2 running in a VM? Yeesh.
But a sloppy, inefficient solution is still a working solution, and it's a working solution that should be trivial to implement.
Features? It doesn't need new features, most people don't use the features it already has. What it needs is not to suck!
The first thing Microsoft needs to do is look at everything from the user perspective. What can be faster, lighter, more convenient? What can be more stable? The absolute last thing they need to do is to--even for a second--imagine that bolting some shiny crap onto Vista is going to somehow make people happy with it.
Christ. Some of the stuff he thinks 7 needs is stuff that would make any knowledgable geek recoil in horror. WinFS?!? Are you kidding me?
"Game Mode" so I can turn off the resource hogging of my OS and run a game? NO! Pay attention! I want the OS to not hog resources.
A standards compliant web browser? It's called Firefox. Next.
Site licensing for the home user? *pause for sardonic laughter* Yea, right, that's going to happen about the time Ballmer gay marries Steve Jobs.
The only things I think he had right (aside from the impossible things like a modular os, etc) were XP virtual machine/emulation, and a better UAC interface. An XP vm would be a quick and dirty fix for compatibility issues; Mac pulled this with OS9 emulation, and it definitely smoothed their adpotion of OSX. As far as the UAC, Microsoft has always been the king of suck as far as security interfaces go; I almost always end up having to disable security to get the machine to do the crap I want it to do, and while I've got faith in my upstream security, I'm the kind of person who can't ever have enough security, and it pisses me off when some of it is useless. If you have to disable security to make your machine work, it's WORTHLESS (I'm looking at you too Symantec).
blah blah. End rant.
I liked Pan's Labyrinth, and so did a lot of other people, though I can see it's not for everyone.
My main problem with the english dub is the american studios who won't license a foreign film without overdubbing the quality acting with some dumbed down jackass dialogue, and they often don't give you the option for the original audio. Have you heard the dub for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Jesus, it sounds like they hired a bunch of hobo's to do the dub.
It's just a button of mine; I don't care if they make an english dub, but I don't want that to be the first option if it wasn't originally recorded in english.
Yea, I hate movies that require me to be literate, and I tried to learn "spannish" but whenever I google it google asks me if I want to learn "Spanish" whatever the fuck that is.
Maybe I'm the minority, but adding an english dub to a kickass foreign film is like taking a supermodel and tatooing a casino ad on her forehead...If you don't speak the language, and can't be bothered to read the text, then the film is probably not for you in the first place.
Php is close to the metal the way a penny laying on the train tracks is close to the metal.
The nice thing about Php is that it's easy. The not nice thing about Php is that when you need to do something that's not easy, it's hard.
(Yoda Voice): "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your desssstiny."
The Ruby crowd is really vocal, but the opportunities aren't really out there for Ruby programmers at this point, and considering the current scaling problems with Rails...Well, I'm not sure they're going to be until they get them ironed out.
If you've got time to invest, Java is always a good skill to have...It's not new and sexy anymore, but it's everywhere. If you don't have the time, Php is at least popular, easy, and widely used.
If you're really into the idea of a deployment framework like Rails, you might want to check out Python and Django.
Well that's encouraging to me, since I program half a dozen different languages, half of which start with the letter "P", and only one of which ends in ".Net".
Still, from looking, I doubt your one-track geeks are having much trouble getting started. .Net and Java are everywhere, and, unfortunately for me, while I'm capable of programming in those languages, the vast majority of the jobs are web app gigs I don't have much interest in.
I saw one the other day that was a basic webmonkey job; they wanted VB.Net and Access and some basic ms-centric crap like that...And seven years of college.
I had more coke in my sinuses than Paris Hilton; a masters for that? Talk about your degree inflation. 3 years of highschool and a fricking MCAD would have been overkill for that gig.
Heat's not a waste product in the way that you mean it. A combustion engine that produces no heat is not a combustion engine. The heat is required.
The heat in a car engine comes from two places: the actual combustion reaction, and the inevitable friction/inefficency. Of those two sources (given proper maintenance and lubrication) the combustion reaction creates the vast majority of the heat.
Basically, a combustion engine requires countless controlled explosions to function, and to fuel those explosions you need a high energy fuel that is capable of rapid continuous oxidation...There were early experiments with a gunpowder-based engine, and theoretically you can use anything that will go "boom".
That reaction is absolutely critical to the function of the engine and it absolutely depends on high grade fuel. Now, while theoretically anything can be a fuel, the best fuels will produce the most vigorous reaction, and the most heat. The less heat produced by the fuel, the lower the quality of the reaction. When the temperature drops, the quality of your combustion drops, and that leads to more pollutants, poorer fuel economy, and an engine that sounds like crap and produces less power.
Eh. The problem is the drop in demand that accompanies a high cost for fuel. The oil market is extremely volatile right now, and the reason for that is that the big investors know that if demand drops significantly, they're going to lose their asses. They're banking on disasters, frankly, and if one doesn't arrive before september they're going to the poor house.
I agree completely, especially with regards to animal waste->fuel conversion. The animal waste is costly enough to dispose of already to make it profitable.
Still, its never going to eliminate oil as a fuel source. It'll take something epic like algae for that. In my mind, biofuels are something to sort of tide us over while cleaner renewables hit their stride. Having a car burning biofuel is not nearly as nice as one that just runs on pure electricity.
The problem is, that the process doesn't scale well. A lot of biodiesel needs several days of cooking, so there is a limit to how much stock you can be working with at any one time.
Even with the thermal depol process, you have a multistage process that takes a significant amount of time, and takes up a significant amount of space. And there as well you have availablity issues with feedstock.
Stability == Stagnation. All economic activity is cyclical, and the goal should be to bring the peaks closer together, not flatten them out.
I'm frankly fine with speculators speculating because, frankly, it always ends up with them losing their asses. Commodities will even back out as the markets settle down.
The problem is that production is slow and low. 500 barrels a day is great and all, but that's not even close to what is needed.
I've got plenty of biofuel plants around me as well, and the things that are keeping them from taking over the world are low supplys of feed stocks, long cook times, and low peak output.
And it's a steal at a penny a share!
Lot of biofuel startups out there, and they're doing middlin due to all the interest in biofuels. But they're not exactly setting the world on fire right now.
That hope, that beautiful little flower of perfect happy hope, is how they take your money away from you.
Let me tell you how the fuel of the future will come about. Some guy in a lab will come up with something that is woefully inefficient, and they will haggle with it for a decade with little funding and little respect, and it will become more efficient, and then more people will say, "Wow, maybe there is something to (insert inefficient process here)" and they'll start working on it. And a decade or so later it will be roughly equivalent to our current fuel in cost.
People have been working on the idea of biofuels forever, and we've got some semi-decent methods out there, but every one of them is the fruit of a LOT of crappy thankless work done when oil was cheaper than bottled water.
Likewise fusion; we know it can be done. One day we will do it, barring an intellectual dark age. But right now its an expensive boondoggle.
Technically it's the energy generated by the fuel going bang but generally you're going to get heat with your bang unless you're using compressed air or astroglide. (da-dum-tschh. The show changes completely after I've had my coffee.)
Yea, that's a massive screaming bullshit call in my book. If you're going to call it "bio-crude" which is weird in and of itself, you're going to have to accept that it is actually a fuel.
The heat produced out of combustion is sort of required; heat warms up the engine. If there is no heat, there is not much energy in the reaction. If there is no energy, it's not much of a fuel.
Even if, even if the manufacturing claims were accurate, the stuff doesn't behave like a hydrocarbon fuel.
Sounds like a pump and dump to me. Their stock is at approximately nothing, this claim has no actual details of process. It also violates common sense (complete combustion from a hydrocarbon? They're not zero impurity fuels), and promises an astounding return from the use of a waste product. They make claims that they can put it into production very quickly, which is extremely unlikely given the issues with biofuel scaling.
From their website:
Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the Company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting the Company and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors available from the Company.
I think that sums it up nicely.
That's outstandingly unhelpful. How about attaching a link to a decent SRS implementation? Or sending them to OpenSPF?
Randomly throwing down on people legitimately asking for some technical help is a big problem in the OSS community. Whether or not /. is the appropriate place to ask this question is debatable, but since it made the front page and there is no helpful SRS faq on this site, might as well direct them somewhere.