You're right, this will help script-kiddies attack computers of the non-security conscious more easily, I suppose.
However, if you care at all about security, it's also going to make it really easy for you to fix any possible problems. Consider the situation as it is now: You protect yourself against all vulnerabilities you know about, and suffer the chances of a cracker finding out that you have a vulnerability in something that you weren't informed of.
Now consider having a central database with all known vulnerabilities, and a tool that uses that database to verify that you are secure against everything in the database. If the admin uses that tool, he's secure against every known vulnerability, and yes, those who don't have a higher chance of getting screwed. However, if you are serious about securing your systems, the only way you get in trouble is by an attack using an unknown vulnerability. The moment someone discovers that, that person will either a)include it in the database or b)use it, and then in the process make said vulnerability known.
And yeah, that was a really convulated way of explaining my thoughts...it's unfortunate that my thinking process is so damn warped.
The best you can do with access points today is to set up single key (like WEP) that is shared among multiple users.
WEP is a horrible thing. I use it msyelf, but that's mainly to keep my non-techie neighbors from turning on their laptops one day, have windows xp realize there's a wireless connection in their range, and start using my bandwidth. I have no delusions that my data is secure since anyone could, with a little patience, use airsnort to find out what my key is.
The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.
As another poster pointed out in this very article, it would be much better to have some sort of PGP encryption in the access point, where you send your public key to it, and it encrypts the data back. Problem with doing anything based on mac addresses themselves, is that you can change your mac address in both windows and linux
If the soft wall only acts by resisting attempts by the pilot to fly into it...what happens if a terrorist pilot flies higher up to a certain altitude, sets course to where he wants to hit, starts breaking everything in the cockpit to crash the plane in that general direction?
Basically what I'm saying is...if the pilot purposefully loses control of the plane towards the right direction, can the "soft wall" system regain control? I'd say probably not, and it sounds like this doesn't help any problem whatsoever, and it certainly creates some:
I can see a pilot maneuvering around a big city, getting in line to land...accidentally he starts to move towards the "soft wall"...the system forces him to return, right in the area where there are other airplanes. That sounds like a traffic control nightmare, one more thing for those poor guys to be aware of, one more thing to give them ulcers.
I think the concept depends on the reflecting of the photons.
The way I understand it (and I'm an electrical engineer, not a physicist so take this with a grain of salt), is that the reflection of the photons works on a similar concept to exhaust in rockets. By exerting force on the photons to push them in the other direction, you get an equal and opposite force in the direction you want to go.
It depends on the weight...if it's light, and 17", it's not that bad, as long as you have a case. 10 lb though...phew.
As long as they don't stop manufacturing 10" screen laptops and whatnot, I don't see what the big deal is. There's obviously a market for people who want bigger mobile screens. Personally, if I'm sitting in an airplane with no inmovie flight, and I got a 17" light noteboot...I'm happy. There's still, of course, the market for people who value the compactness more, and as long as those are still being manufactured, no need to complain that they're also catering to the other side.
I think it's pretty innovative to fit a 17" screen to a computer good enough to game in, and call it "mobile". As long as they can keep the weight 6 lb or less (yeah, apple is a bit on the heavy side too), with a carry case that isn't extremly bulky, I'm all for it. And I hate SUV's.
I suspect that a lot of gamers don't actually spend 35-40 hours a week in front of a computer like some workers do.
That's part of the problem, gamers don't all spend the same amount of time playing. While some play more, others play less, and it is unfair to include those that play less in that area. Another problem is the assumption that they don't have problems, I honestly don't know where they got that from. I am a gamer, and with new games I've been known to spend that much time playing, but I am suffering from problems. I had to switch the hand with which I press the space bar because it was painful. Then I switched to dvorak, and that helped also.
I know another gamer, definitely a lot more hardcore than I used to be, and he easily plays more than that. He has had problems too, and swears by the benefits of a wrist pad.
I got this link from the article, where it's mentioned that ergonomic keyboards aren't all they're cracked out to be...and it's a hilarious piece of work.
What I find funny, besides the comment that what causes limb disorders is the stress of deadlines and not the keyboard (citing gamers who supposedly don't have any problems, hah!), is the author's choice of pictures. I guess I can understand lara croft, but what's with the cat? And look at the caption on that picture...I don't know, I have a weird sense of humor, maybe it's just funny to me.
If federal officials decide that Linux merits the same export controls as Unix, experts fear that could end development of Linux by the open-source community.
What's that all about? Why wouldn't development of the export controlled sections of linux not continue to be developed in a whole bunch of non-US countries?
heh...if you read the post, you'd understand the point was showing that the person had flexibility.
I laugh at the fact that they actually have courses to teach people how to use word processors and the such, and then I wake up from geek world and take a good look at my parents. I've never had anyone "teach" me how to use word, excel, or anything else, but when I had to use it, I learned it on the go, and wasn't inneficient at it either. To any computer literate person, the skill to figure out a tremendouly easy gui is just intuitive. "hmm...I want a table of contents...hey, look...insert TOC...hmm...it filters through heading types...I guess all I need to do is set up my headings as I type, then click the right radio buttons for the ones that I want to show up in the toc"
If you hire an employee that has experience in a system that makes you be able to think (ie, linux, where you need to figure out how to get things to work--and thus learn how to figure things out), you'll not only get an employee who will be able to figure out word xp in no time flat, you'll get an employee who won't be complaining that he can't do his job because he doesn't know how to use the new, upgraded "word l337" or whatever mycrosoft thinks their new cool name should be.
incoming anything was meant to include actual phone calls, not just SMS. When you receive a call on your home phone, you don't pay for it, but if you receive one at your cell you do.
Let's stop pretending that a 50-year old govrnment agency like NASA can revive the energy and drive of the Apollo era. Let's have a space policy that ends NASA's constricting monopoly and allows American enterprise to go where it will in space.
I don't see what NASA's age has in terms of relevance...there are many other government agencies that are even older, and that doesn't keep them from doing their job right...regardless, as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, there's nothing that prevents "American enterprise" to go to space. The problem is nobody with that kind of money feels that they should invest in something with no visible returns. Of course there are always a few millionairs with $20 million in their pockets that want a little tour, but not enough to start self-sustaining business on it (ie, businesses that provide their own shuttle, not a ride on a russian one that is already going on a mission to the space station anyway).
People need to stop with all these talks about how needlessly we're risking the lives of all those astronauts.
They knew the risks. We know the risks now that two crews have died...still, heck, I'd give anything to take that risk, and so would countless others. It's human nature to accept risks in order to experience new things.
Do we need to try and minimize those risks? Sure...let's send some people out into space and try out new things that could potentially minimize that risk. I can give at least one example...how about some space walks in attempts to create and test procedures to fix the shuttle's exterior in an emergency? Risky? Yeah...but definitely better than not taking those risks. It was once risky to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane, but that didn't stop Charles Lindbergh.
Because our individual selves is really so unique , I think we all have trouble thinking in terms of perfect copies of our consciousness. In the matrix reloaded, one of the things that I couldn't get out of my mind was, "is there any significance to being the original smith? Is he the one that's going to matter in revolutions, or are all of them going to have to be dealt with."
So try pulling that number with your question, and approach it like this: if it's a copy of "you", that feels like "you", thinks like "you", and in fact thinks it's "you", does the original really have any advantage over the copy? When you write a small program, copy it over to a disk, format your drive, then copy it back to your computer, do you ever feel like you're missing something for not having the "original" one you made? By this train of thought, you *are* both "you"
By another type of thinking though, what makes the original "you" special, is the fact that there's only one of you. If you have copies of that program you made in every computer you own, on the web, and in hundreds of disks...would you ever feel bad about deleting one copy? When it's your only copy you have to go through the whole thinking process, "I might need this someday", but when you know you have a copy handy somewhere, you don't care. When you know that you have so many copies of it, it actually gets annoying and you want to get rid of some of them ("why am I keeping all these copies of this thing?"). So maybe, the moment you make a perfect copy of yourself, neither is really "you" in the sense that it's worth as much as you are right now...you've decreased your value, because if something happens to a copy, no big loss.
Well, I gotta stop right here so as to not bore many people to death...but I love these discussions. Guess I'm gonna read that book.
I mean, reading his comments it seems clear that his purpose was not to defend Linux, but to try to draw a distinction (surprise) between the Linux kernel, the GNU system and the OS that is GNU/Linux.
I don't think he cares about the lawsuit at all...he's just using a visible issue to see if people will pay attention to the same old stuff he's always blabbing about, but no one cares anymore. He barely mentions the SCO issue...
I think the article description says it all: commentary by Richard Stallman about the SCO case against IBM, kind of.
I'm happy it didn't come off as trollish, as I feared. I guess it does help to have a common experience...I always deeply want to look at Tom's reviews, but I always leave his site pissed off because of the experience.
I'm gonna be modded as a troll on this one, but I gotta do it, because it will happen to me:)
::bangs head on keyboard for giving moderator ideas::
::Slashdot story: Tom's Hardware benchmarks the G5, and compares it to dual Xeons, dual Opterons, and (I guess), the P4::
Me: "Woohoo...I'll finally found out which is better"::clicks link::
"Page 1: We have tested all these systems, and you will soon see our results."::scroll down through ads, click next::
"Page 2: These tables show the systems we have tested on"::scroll down, next::
"Page 3: Tables, cont.."::yells out profanities, looks on table of contents, chooses "benchmark results"::
"Page 45: And now, let us take a look how the G5 stands against the current x86 and AMD64 processors"::AAAAAAAAHHHHHH...can't stand it anymore, clicks on conclusion::
"Page 666: And thus, we conclude that the G5 is better in some ways and worse in others"::NOOOOOOO...Now I'll never know!!!::
Slashdot Mirror
SCO...copyright issues...
Can't think of a way to explain it more clearly, so they'll either get it, or mod me down with you. At least you should know that *I* laughed.
However, if you care at all about security, it's also going to make it really easy for you to fix any possible problems. Consider the situation as it is now: You protect yourself against all vulnerabilities you know about, and suffer the chances of a cracker finding out that you have a vulnerability in something that you weren't informed of.
Now consider having a central database with all known vulnerabilities, and a tool that uses that database to verify that you are secure against everything in the database. If the admin uses that tool, he's secure against every known vulnerability, and yes, those who don't have a higher chance of getting screwed. However, if you are serious about securing your systems, the only way you get in trouble is by an attack using an unknown vulnerability. The moment someone discovers that, that person will either a)include it in the database or b)use it, and then in the process make said vulnerability known.
And yeah, that was a really convulated way of explaining my thoughts...it's unfortunate that my thinking process is so damn warped.
he never mentioned he'd factor the prime numbers into prime numbers. 3 and 6 are factors of 18, even though they're not prime factors of 18.
I was gonna post that first...then I saw his 5-digit /. id
WEP is a horrible thing. I use it msyelf, but that's mainly to keep my non-techie neighbors from turning on their laptops one day, have windows xp realize there's a wireless connection in their range, and start using my bandwidth. I have no delusions that my data is secure since anyone could, with a little patience, use airsnort to find out what my key is.
The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.
As another poster pointed out in this very article, it would be much better to have some sort of PGP encryption in the access point, where you send your public key to it, and it encrypts the data back. Problem with doing anything based on mac addresses themselves, is that you can change your mac address in both windows and linux
Basically what I'm saying is...if the pilot purposefully loses control of the plane towards the right direction, can the "soft wall" system regain control? I'd say probably not, and it sounds like this doesn't help any problem whatsoever, and it certainly creates some:
I can see a pilot maneuvering around a big city, getting in line to land...accidentally he starts to move towards the "soft wall"...the system forces him to return, right in the area where there are other airplanes. That sounds like a traffic control nightmare, one more thing for those poor guys to be aware of, one more thing to give them ulcers.
The way I understand it (and I'm an electrical engineer, not a physicist so take this with a grain of salt), is that the reflection of the photons works on a similar concept to exhaust in rockets. By exerting force on the photons to push them in the other direction, you get an equal and opposite force in the direction you want to go.
I'll be online tonight...and why the heck aren't we posting AC? Not like we wouldn't be able to figure out the identity of the other...oh well :)
As long as they don't stop manufacturing 10" screen laptops and whatnot, I don't see what the big deal is. There's obviously a market for people who want bigger mobile screens. Personally, if I'm sitting in an airplane with no inmovie flight, and I got a 17" light noteboot...I'm happy. There's still, of course, the market for people who value the compactness more, and as long as those are still being manufactured, no need to complain that they're also catering to the other side.
I think it's pretty innovative to fit a 17" screen to a computer good enough to game in, and call it "mobile". As long as they can keep the weight 6 lb or less (yeah, apple is a bit on the heavy side too), with a carry case that isn't extremly bulky, I'm all for it. And I hate SUV's.
That's part of the problem, gamers don't all spend the same amount of time playing. While some play more, others play less, and it is unfair to include those that play less in that area. Another problem is the assumption that they don't have problems, I honestly don't know where they got that from. I am a gamer, and with new games I've been known to spend that much time playing, but I am suffering from problems. I had to switch the hand with which I press the space bar because it was painful. Then I switched to dvorak, and that helped also.
I know another gamer, definitely a lot more hardcore than I used to be, and he easily plays more than that. He has had problems too, and swears by the benefits of a wrist pad.
To the lazy people, lemme reproduce the link:
What I find funny, besides the comment that what causes limb disorders is the stress of deadlines and not the keyboard (citing gamers who supposedly don't have any problems, hah!), is the author's choice of pictures. I guess I can understand lara croft, but what's with the cat? And look at the caption on that picture...I don't know, I have a weird sense of humor, maybe it's just funny to me.
If federal officials decide that Linux merits the same export controls as Unix, experts fear that could end development of Linux by the open-source community.
What's that all about? Why wouldn't development of the export controlled sections of linux not continue to be developed in a whole bunch of non-US countries?
Comments like that one piss me off...
I call browsing /. research :)
I laugh at the fact that they actually have courses to teach people how to use word processors and the such, and then I wake up from geek world and take a good look at my parents. I've never had anyone "teach" me how to use word, excel, or anything else, but when I had to use it, I learned it on the go, and wasn't inneficient at it either. To any computer literate person, the skill to figure out a tremendouly easy gui is just intuitive. "hmm...I want a table of contents...hey, look...insert TOC...hmm...it filters through heading types...I guess all I need to do is set up my headings as I type, then click the right radio buttons for the ones that I want to show up in the toc"
If you hire an employee that has experience in a system that makes you be able to think (ie, linux, where you need to figure out how to get things to work--and thus learn how to figure things out), you'll not only get an employee who will be able to figure out word xp in no time flat, you'll get an employee who won't be complaining that he can't do his job because he doesn't know how to use the new, upgraded "word l337" or whatever mycrosoft thinks their new cool name should be.
incoming anything was meant to include actual phone calls, not just SMS. When you receive a call on your home phone, you don't pay for it, but if you receive one at your cell you do.
I have a bigger question: Why do we have to pay for incoming anything? I know that in other countries (such as Brazil), that doesn't happen.
I don't see what NASA's age has in terms of relevance...there are many other government agencies that are even older, and that doesn't keep them from doing their job right...regardless, as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, there's nothing that prevents "American enterprise" to go to space. The problem is nobody with that kind of money feels that they should invest in something with no visible returns. Of course there are always a few millionairs with $20 million in their pockets that want a little tour, but not enough to start self-sustaining business on it (ie, businesses that provide their own shuttle, not a ride on a russian one that is already going on a mission to the space station anyway).
They knew the risks. We know the risks now that two crews have died...still, heck, I'd give anything to take that risk, and so would countless others. It's human nature to accept risks in order to experience new things.
Do we need to try and minimize those risks? Sure...let's send some people out into space and try out new things that could potentially minimize that risk. I can give at least one example...how about some space walks in attempts to create and test procedures to fix the shuttle's exterior in an emergency? Risky? Yeah...but definitely better than not taking those risks. It was once risky to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane, but that didn't stop Charles Lindbergh.
Because our individual selves is really so unique , I think we all have trouble thinking in terms of perfect copies of our consciousness. In the matrix reloaded, one of the things that I couldn't get out of my mind was, "is there any significance to being the original smith? Is he the one that's going to matter in revolutions, or are all of them going to have to be dealt with."
So try pulling that number with your question, and approach it like this: if it's a copy of "you", that feels like "you", thinks like "you", and in fact thinks it's "you", does the original really have any advantage over the copy? When you write a small program, copy it over to a disk, format your drive, then copy it back to your computer, do you ever feel like you're missing something for not having the "original" one you made? By this train of thought, you *are* both "you"
By another type of thinking though, what makes the original "you" special, is the fact that there's only one of you. If you have copies of that program you made in every computer you own, on the web, and in hundreds of disks...would you ever feel bad about deleting one copy? When it's your only copy you have to go through the whole thinking process, "I might need this someday", but when you know you have a copy handy somewhere, you don't care. When you know that you have so many copies of it, it actually gets annoying and you want to get rid of some of them ("why am I keeping all these copies of this thing?"). So maybe, the moment you make a perfect copy of yourself, neither is really "you" in the sense that it's worth as much as you are right now...you've decreased your value, because if something happens to a copy, no big loss.
Well, I gotta stop right here so as to not bore many people to death...but I love these discussions. Guess I'm gonna read that book.
But...but...it's not that difficult. Here's how you do it:
Count the number of x's per group: 4
Count the number of groups: 6
Now...everytime you need to reproduce that pattern, write 6 groups of 4 x's separated by periods. :)
I don't think he cares about the lawsuit at all...he's just using a visible issue to see if people will pay attention to the same old stuff he's always blabbing about, but no one cares anymore. He barely mentions the SCO issue...
I think the article description says it all: commentary by Richard Stallman about the SCO case against IBM, kind of.
I'm happy it didn't come off as trollish, as I feared. I guess it does help to have a common experience...I always deeply want to look at Tom's reviews, but I always leave his site pissed off because of the experience.
::bangs head on keyboard for giving moderator ideas::
::Slashdot story: Tom's Hardware benchmarks the G5, and compares it to dual Xeons, dual Opterons, and (I guess), the P4::
Me: "Woohoo...I'll finally found out which is better" ::clicks link::
"Page 1: We have tested all these systems, and you will soon see our results." ::scroll down through ads, click next::
"Page 2: These tables show the systems we have tested on" ::scroll down, next::
"Page 3: Tables, cont.." ::yells out profanities, looks on table of contents, chooses "benchmark results"::
"Page 45: And now, let us take a look how the G5 stands against the current x86 and AMD64 processors" ::AAAAAAAAHHHHHH...can't stand it anymore, clicks on conclusion::
"Page 666: And thus, we conclude that the G5 is better in some ways and worse in others" ::NOOOOOOO...Now I'll never know!!!::
The dual proc G5 beats the 3 GHz Pentium 4 and the Dual 3.06GHz Xeon
You're a member of the Flat Earth Society aren't you?