What does the FCC care? It's still compliant, even if it's hacked.
I daresay the wireless carrier will be a bit ticked though, but they should have seen it coming. If the data connection this thing uses isn't firewalled to only talk to the B&N servers it's their own fault.
Small price to pay for MS to get a user back on an unmodded 360 that won't be able to play torrented games, resulting in more game sales, plus more recurring Live credit purchases.
Look people, it's not that tough - if you're going to mod your box, then don't put it online where anybody that wants to can inspect it. You can't have it both ways.
is less the distro and more the messaging. My work machine runs Ubuntu with a Windows VM, but it's running Hardy and it will stay that way until Lucid comes out and has been confirmed stable by checking Ubuntu Forums for posts on the specific model. Works like a charm.
Now, on my personal laptop (Dell XPS M1330), it got reloaded this weekend with no issues whatsoever and everything worked perfectly, with one small exception - Gnome MPlayer causes flickering in fullscreen mode when the seek bar animates away. A single Google search resulting in a single gconf setting fixed that. I don't think that's too much to ask for a "bleeding edge" release. Disregarding the fact that I opted to move 500G of encrypted data off and back on so I could move to EXT4, it would have taken about 2 hours to get a total reload back to the same state as previous.
What needs to happen is messaging that Karmic is new and shiny, but is not an LTS release, so people who can't handle some problems should stay away. If Lucid comes out and has problems like this, I'll change my tune.
This isn't a general problem - do you really think people would be running Linux on laptops at all if their battery life went from 3 hours on Windows to 40 minutes on Linux?
I happily get much longer battery life on my Linux laptops, because they're much more configurable. A couple of years ago I watched three movies in a row on my 17-inch Dell laptop on an international flight - this machine gets three hours with a tailwind running Windows and doing much of anything. How did I do it? I loaded the movies into a RAM disk and set the hard drive to power down, shut off syslog, and removed the DVD drive completely. Try that on a Windows box!
Notwithstanding trickery, I also get better life in normal use as well.
Please choose a title like "Why does my laptop get bad battery life on Linux"? And post it on a Linux support board, not on Slashdot.
I did RTFPDF, and I read that this is an 80's-era system running on a Z80 processor. Nowadays, we have chips with memory management, lockable pages, execute-only pages, and other nice things. If you require that the contents of any card inserted be signed by the election commission before you'll even touch them, it would be a bit difficult to get an interface to the system in the first place, now wouldn't it?
We have this great thing called Public Key Crypto and the PKI to go along with it.
If you presume a custom processor that will only execute code signed by an election commission, that would be a first step - the system won't run anything that hasn't been specifically approved for installation on the machine. There would be no more "last minute fixes" as we've seen in the past, where code was installed without being vetted by an election authority.
For that matter, require the software developers to store their code on a state or federal election repository, and only sign code that's been compiled on those systems, from that repository. Require that anyone who makes changes sign them with their private key and state the reason for the change.
For the results, take each ballot, strip off the identifying information, and encrypt it to the election commission, and sign it with a pre-deployed per-machine private key that's known. It would of course also be important to have a reliable time source for the device, to include that in the result file.
I would even envision that this would be a good purpose for a federal election agency - hosting the code for all certified voting systems, and being the "root of trust" that signs certificates for the state election commissions, which can then sign local and county commissions, which can then issue keys to individual election machines.
Some patches to an open-source OS, say Linux, a PKI infrastructure (along with some HSM modules to store keys) and a processor with an integrated crypto engine and TPM module would take care of all of this.
Banks do this kind of stuff all the time - what's so hard about it?
That's not sandboxing, that's privilege separation and has been implemented in Windows NT i think in the beginning of 90s and for consumer OSes like 2000/2K. I don't see why you point it out as if it was exclusive to UNIX and not present in Windows? We're not in MS-DOS/95/98 era anymore.
Um, because it's practically unusable? Have you ever tried to configure unprivileged users on a Windows box and allow them to run ALL of the apps they need? Good luck with that.
After watching my oldest son's handwriting get completely ruined by his moronic elementary school with their even more moronic D'Nealian handwriting program, which is intended to "better prepare students to move on to cursive writing", I'm more than a little soured on the whole cursive writing thing.
Those days are long over, people - the only thing the average person needs cursive for is to develop a signature, and a short session with each student can handle that. What's more important is working to ensure that a given student's PRINT writing is legible, not cursive that they'll never use.
All I know is, this D'Neal dude needs to go away, he's ruining a significant portion of the current student populace's writing.
I don't hate Microsoft, in fact I've done quite a few implementations of Exchange and SharePoint and AD for companies in the past.
But I do understand that they're a typical scumbag corporate giant acting the way scumbag corporate giants do - trying to make it so that you HAVE to buy their product because you have no other choice.
So now I make sure that I don't become dependent on that product by actively avoiding it wherever possible - which means my home family machine, my personal laptops, and my work machine all run Ubuntu quite happily. And when people ask me how I do it, I happily show them so they know they have that option too. Does it involve sacrifice? Yes, a little bit, and less every day. But it also involves great advantages, namely that I don't have to worry much at all about my wife and kids visiting the wrong Web site (and that's all it takes!) and getting our family machine rooted nine ways to Sunday, leading to my bank accounts being emptied out. That's really the stakes here.
Could I spend all my time positively hating Microsoft and all that they do? Yes, I could, but I'd rather spend my time making sure they don't matter to me. Recently I read an article about Microsoft's change in the upgrade rules, meaning you have to jump through more hoops to do a bare install from an upgrade CD. In the past, I would have been ticked off and hated Microsoft more. Now, I just thought "man, sucks to be you if you're still a Windows user" and moved on to trying out the latest Ubuntu alpha release and looking for bugs. Much more productive use of my time, and more hurtful to MS as well, because it means Ubuntu will be a better OS if the bugs I find are fixed.
to take this 68-point checklist with you of all the things that have a good chance of being wrong with your new Camaro, and check them all before you take possession from the dealer.
I mean seriously, isn't the Camaro supposed to be the showcase of GM? If things are bad enough that a group of Camaro fans create this list, what does that say about GM's statements that they've improved quality in the past few years?
Depends on your definition of "reasonably powered", but this has a dual-core 1.6 gHz Atom processor and nVidia graphics, certainly pulls less than 30w in idle, and has no fans so coupled with SSD storage would be completely silent. Also has a kit to hang it on the back of an LCD so it would be pretty invisible as well.
Long-time reader, but didn't bother to comment until a ways in.
But the Otrona Attache', Epson HX-20, PX-4 and PX-8, Model 100 and NEC PC-8201A I have put away are my oldster cred.
Had to get rid of the bigger machines a long time ago, too much space - sadly one of them was an original Lisa with the Pascal development system and all the manuals. Wish I had kept that one!
Oh yes, totally agree - it's just the idea of an Epson PC-compatible box as "a vintage car" that's foreign to me.
Now, a QX-10 running Valdocs, that would be another matter. Or the HX-20, PX-4 or PX-8 Geneva I have put away, yes. Those I still get out on occasion, along with the battery-powered serial 3.5 inch drive that goes with.
Just not a DOS machine that was one of a bazillion with no real thought put into it other than "how can we jump on this PC money train?".
I guess it must be the difference between ages that causes someone to think that a cruddy DOS machine is actually something worth bringing back up.
Me, I cut my teeth on Radio Shack Model 4 machines, quickly discovering how much more software I could run once I got Montezuma CP/M running on it and downloading public domain software from the local (multi-user) CP/M bulletin board system.
Once the actual PC came along, I think just about anyone who had run a CP/M system saw it for what it was: a crappy copy that took none of the good from CP/M and just about all of the bad, running on a machine that supported a bit more RAM (not 640K yet, RAM was way too expensive) and a slightly faster processor.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
I tell everyone I know, along with everyone I work with, that surfing anything but internal corporate sites with Internet Exploder is the same thing as saying "take my machine, please!" to the world at large. Since I'm in charge of security infrastructure for a nationwide company with over 10K employees, I get listened to a bit more than your average geek. I'm single-handedly responsible for at least 30-40 people, if not more, switching to Firefox over the last 6 months, I'm quite sure.
The current ActiveX video 0-day, plus the constantly-updated list of sites that are actively exploiting it, is perfect proof that you're a fool to surf with IE.
You're also a fool to run Windows XP on a daily basis, but that's another topic.
When the same percentage of Windows users as Linux users run day-to-day as unprivileged users, I'll start to believe that. Note that annoying UAC prompts that give you no information whatsoever as to what action you're authorizing do not count.
A simple glance at the durations for which MS has refused to acknowledge "game over" vulnerabilities, much less patch them, should easily put the lie to that statement.
According to what I've read in the past, I believe that around 600K load/unload cycles is supposed to start getting in the "bad" range. So, although others have said this issue is all bogus, I'd start making sure my data was backed up if I were you.
Drives are cheap nowadays, but the data on them likely isn't - think what you would miss if that drive just died tomorrow and that's how important backups are.
Take a given Windows laptop, boot up with a Linux bootable CD distro, and run
"sudo smartctl -A/dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle"
and see what number you get.
Hint: on my work Dell D420, which is maybe three years old (probably younger) and has run only Windows, that number was about 250,000 head unload/load cycles.
The difference is Microsoft doesn't give a crap about fixing it.
Slashdot Mirror
What does the FCC care? It's still compliant, even if it's hacked.
I daresay the wireless carrier will be a bit ticked though, but they should have seen it coming. If the data connection this thing uses isn't firewalled to only talk to the B&N servers it's their own fault.
Plausible.
And anybody who goes for it deserves what they get.
Stockholm Syndrome much?
Uh, "save your allowance" ring a bell?
Small price to pay for MS to get a user back on an unmodded 360 that won't be able to play torrented games, resulting in more game sales, plus more recurring Live credit purchases.
Look people, it's not that tough - if you're going to mod your box, then don't put it online where anybody that wants to can inspect it. You can't have it both ways.
is less the distro and more the messaging. My work machine runs Ubuntu with a Windows VM, but it's running Hardy and it will stay that way until Lucid comes out and has been confirmed stable by checking Ubuntu Forums for posts on the specific model. Works like a charm.
Now, on my personal laptop (Dell XPS M1330), it got reloaded this weekend with no issues whatsoever and everything worked perfectly, with one small exception - Gnome MPlayer causes flickering in fullscreen mode when the seek bar animates away. A single Google search resulting in a single gconf setting fixed that. I don't think that's too much to ask for a "bleeding edge" release. Disregarding the fact that I opted to move 500G of encrypted data off and back on so I could move to EXT4, it would have taken about 2 hours to get a total reload back to the same state as previous.
What needs to happen is messaging that Karmic is new and shiny, but is not an LTS release, so people who can't handle some problems should stay away. If Lucid comes out and has problems like this, I'll change my tune.
He got it because:
1. He's the president.
2. He's not John McCain.
3. He's not George W Bush.
4. Joe Biden is not Sarah Palin. Also.
Not sure I'd use Reiser - I hear it's murder on your USB drive.
As someone else mentioned, the way to get good battery life on a laptop is definitely NOT to watch movies on a physical DVD.
The machine has 4 GB of RAM and the movies were XviD rips I do of my movies as a matter of course - DVDs are a pain to schlep around.
My Linux setup takes about 400 MB of RAM in general use, so a big enough tmpfs isn't tough to set up nor does it tax the machine.
Sure! Nice Windows RAM disk app.
Now get the hard drive to spin down and stay that way while watching a two-hour movie.
This isn't a general problem - do you really think people would be running Linux on laptops at all if their battery life went from 3 hours on Windows to 40 minutes on Linux?
I happily get much longer battery life on my Linux laptops, because they're much more configurable. A couple of years ago I watched three movies in a row on my 17-inch Dell laptop on an international flight - this machine gets three hours with a tailwind running Windows and doing much of anything. How did I do it? I loaded the movies into a RAM disk and set the hard drive to power down, shut off syslog, and removed the DVD drive completely. Try that on a Windows box!
Notwithstanding trickery, I also get better life in normal use as well.
Please choose a title like "Why does my laptop get bad battery life on Linux"? And post it on a Linux support board, not on Slashdot.
I did RTFPDF, and I read that this is an 80's-era system running on a Z80 processor. Nowadays, we have chips with memory management, lockable pages, execute-only pages, and other nice things. If you require that the contents of any card inserted be signed by the election commission before you'll even touch them, it would be a bit difficult to get an interface to the system in the first place, now wouldn't it?
Here's what I'm trying to understand.
We have this great thing called Public Key Crypto and the PKI to go along with it.
If you presume a custom processor that will only execute code signed by an election commission, that would be a first step - the system won't run anything that hasn't been specifically approved for installation on the machine. There would be no more "last minute fixes" as we've seen in the past, where code was installed without being vetted by an election authority.
For that matter, require the software developers to store their code on a state or federal election repository, and only sign code that's been compiled on those systems, from that repository. Require that anyone who makes changes sign them with their private key and state the reason for the change.
For the results, take each ballot, strip off the identifying information, and encrypt it to the election commission, and sign it with a pre-deployed per-machine private key that's known. It would of course also be important to have a reliable time source for the device, to include that in the result file.
I would even envision that this would be a good purpose for a federal election agency - hosting the code for all certified voting systems, and being the "root of trust" that signs certificates for the state election commissions, which can then sign local and county commissions, which can then issue keys to individual election machines.
Some patches to an open-source OS, say Linux, a PKI infrastructure (along with some HSM modules to store keys) and a processor with an integrated crypto engine and TPM module would take care of all of this.
Banks do this kind of stuff all the time - what's so hard about it?
That's not sandboxing, that's privilege separation and has been implemented in Windows NT i think in the beginning of 90s and for consumer OSes like 2000/2K. I don't see why you point it out as if it was exclusive to UNIX and not present in Windows? We're not in MS-DOS/95/98 era anymore.
Um, because it's practically unusable? Have you ever tried to configure unprivileged users on a Windows box and allow them to run ALL of the apps they need? Good luck with that.
After watching my oldest son's handwriting get completely ruined by his moronic elementary school with their even more moronic D'Nealian handwriting program, which is intended to "better prepare students to move on to cursive writing", I'm more than a little soured on the whole cursive writing thing.
Those days are long over, people - the only thing the average person needs cursive for is to develop a signature, and a short session with each student can handle that. What's more important is working to ensure that a given student's PRINT writing is legible, not cursive that they'll never use.
All I know is, this D'Neal dude needs to go away, he's ruining a significant portion of the current student populace's writing.
I don't hate Microsoft, in fact I've done quite a few implementations of Exchange and SharePoint and AD for companies in the past.
But I do understand that they're a typical scumbag corporate giant acting the way scumbag corporate giants do - trying to make it so that you HAVE to buy their product because you have no other choice.
So now I make sure that I don't become dependent on that product by actively avoiding it wherever possible - which means my home family machine, my personal laptops, and my work machine all run Ubuntu quite happily. And when people ask me how I do it, I happily show them so they know they have that option too. Does it involve sacrifice? Yes, a little bit, and less every day. But it also involves great advantages, namely that I don't have to worry much at all about my wife and kids visiting the wrong Web site (and that's all it takes!) and getting our family machine rooted nine ways to Sunday, leading to my bank accounts being emptied out. That's really the stakes here.
Could I spend all my time positively hating Microsoft and all that they do? Yes, I could, but I'd rather spend my time making sure they don't matter to me. Recently I read an article about Microsoft's change in the upgrade rules, meaning you have to jump through more hoops to do a bare install from an upgrade CD. In the past, I would have been ticked off and hated Microsoft more. Now, I just thought "man, sucks to be you if you're still a Windows user" and moved on to trying out the latest Ubuntu alpha release and looking for bugs. Much more productive use of my time, and more hurtful to MS as well, because it means Ubuntu will be a better OS if the bugs I find are fixed.
to take this 68-point checklist with you of all the things that have a good chance of being wrong with your new Camaro, and check them all before you take possession from the dealer.
I mean seriously, isn't the Camaro supposed to be the showcase of GM? If things are bad enough that a group of Camaro fans create this list, what does that say about GM's statements that they've improved quality in the past few years?
Depends on your definition of "reasonably powered", but this has a dual-core 1.6 gHz Atom processor and nVidia graphics, certainly pulls less than 30w in idle, and has no fans so coupled with SSD storage would be completely silent. Also has a kit to hang it on the back of an LCD so it would be pretty invisible as well.
Long-time reader, but didn't bother to comment until a ways in.
But the Otrona Attache', Epson HX-20, PX-4 and PX-8, Model 100 and NEC PC-8201A I have put away are my oldster cred.
Had to get rid of the bigger machines a long time ago, too much space - sadly one of them was an original Lisa with the Pascal development system and all the manuals. Wish I had kept that one!
Oh yes, totally agree - it's just the idea of an Epson PC-compatible box as "a vintage car" that's foreign to me.
Now, a QX-10 running Valdocs, that would be another matter. Or the HX-20, PX-4 or PX-8 Geneva I have put away, yes. Those I still get out on occasion, along with the battery-powered serial 3.5 inch drive that goes with.
Just not a DOS machine that was one of a bazillion with no real thought put into it other than "how can we jump on this PC money train?".
I guess it must be the difference between ages that causes someone to think that a cruddy DOS machine is actually something worth bringing back up.
Me, I cut my teeth on Radio Shack Model 4 machines, quickly discovering how much more software I could run once I got Montezuma CP/M running on it and downloading public domain software from the local (multi-user) CP/M bulletin board system.
Once the actual PC came along, I think just about anyone who had run a CP/M system saw it for what it was: a crappy copy that took none of the good from CP/M and just about all of the bad, running on a machine that supported a bit more RAM (not 640K yet, RAM was way too expensive) and a slightly faster processor.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
I tell everyone I know, along with everyone I work with, that surfing anything but internal corporate sites with Internet Exploder is the same thing as saying "take my machine, please!" to the world at large. Since I'm in charge of security infrastructure for a nationwide company with over 10K employees, I get listened to a bit more than your average geek. I'm single-handedly responsible for at least 30-40 people, if not more, switching to Firefox over the last 6 months, I'm quite sure.
The current ActiveX video 0-day, plus the constantly-updated list of sites that are actively exploiting it, is perfect proof that you're a fool to surf with IE.
You're also a fool to run Windows XP on a daily basis, but that's another topic.
You laugh, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google did this as part of Google Earth.
And I for one would spend quite a bit of time using it!
Uh, no.
When the same percentage of Windows users as Linux users run day-to-day as unprivileged users, I'll start to believe that. Note that annoying UAC prompts that give you no information whatsoever as to what action you're authorizing do not count.
A simple glance at the durations for which MS has refused to acknowledge "game over" vulnerabilities, much less patch them, should easily put the lie to that statement.
According to what I've read in the past, I believe that around 600K load/unload cycles is supposed to start getting in the "bad" range. So, although others have said this issue is all bogus, I'd start making sure my data was backed up if I were you.
Drives are cheap nowadays, but the data on them likely isn't - think what you would miss if that drive just died tomorrow and that's how important backups are.
Uh yeah.
Take a given Windows laptop, boot up with a Linux bootable CD distro, and run
"sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle"
and see what number you get.
Hint: on my work Dell D420, which is maybe three years old (probably younger) and has run only Windows, that number was about 250,000 head unload/load cycles.
The difference is Microsoft doesn't give a crap about fixing it.