So, this book advertises itself as a guide for administrators who want to secure their systems. Fair enough. But how much do you want to bet that a chapter like "Attacking and Defending Windows 2000" spends 40 pages on hacking techniques, then closes with a short paragraph reading, "install the latest security patches from Microsoft"?
Security is not exactly rocket science from an admin POV. You keep your system up-to-date and pay attention to the latest exploit warnings, and you will be fine 99.9% of the time. Almost without fail, hacking incidents at major companies are found to be due to security holes that have been known about and fixed for months, if not years. Competant admins simply do not get hacked.
Any admin who isn't completely shirking his duties has exactly no use for this book. Who, then, will find it valuable? That's right: hackers. Script kiddies have an easy enough time of it as it is. The computer book industry needs to take some responsibility and stop publishing this sort of hacker how-to.
I'm glad to hear this, as SP3 wrecked havoc on my machine at work. Apparently Windows Upbreak decided to update a bunch of stuff that required the new video driver before it updated the video driver itself. So I had to boot into Safe Mode and do a bunch of voodoo at 640x480 to make things work again.
This is great news for the Open Source community. While Plan9 is often rediculed as being outdated, it no doubt has its share of novel and useful algorithms, which may now be incorporated into more mainstream open source OSes such as Linux and the HURD (yes, it's still around).
Open sourcing OS code has proven to be a good way to keep ailing systems relevant in the current marketplace. It kept BeOS and VMS from dying in obscurity, and even helped BSD limp along for a few more years.
I predict nothing but good things from GNU/Plan9. Hopefully Debian will introduce a Plan9 distro, to go with their Darwin, HURD, and Linux distrii. I still have a few spare boxen lying around that I could use this on.
The Slashdot community should be ashamed. This story has only been up a short while, and already I'm seeing references to rockets made of bamboo, astronauts eating freeze-dried dog meat, and even the despicable phrase, "runar rander." This sort of bigotry and racism is unbefitting of one of the most respectworthy technical communities on the web today.
You are probably all just jealous because you lost your jobs to better trained immigrants, or because you always strike out with the cute Chinese ladies. Sad.
I was shocked and disappointed to hear that the Wallace and Gromit cartoons will be hitting both the silver screen and the console in the next few years. That the cartoons seemed to have fallen out of favor was some consolation for their initial popularity.
The Wallace and Gromit shorts promote a world-view centered around materialism and hedonism. The characters are motivated by idle pleasure and selfishness, and the absurdity and pessimism of their "adventures" encourage existential angst in young, impressionable minds.
That there has been no public outcry against these cartoons, and rather they seem to be enjoying a resurgance in popularity, speaks to the moral bankruptcy of contemporary Western society.
I am of course incredibly interested in this game. It takes quite possibly the greatest war epic ever written and makes it interactive. This is the future of fiction and art in general.
However, I'm a little concerned about the timing. The Lord of the Rings (the first two installments anyway) have been incredibly succesful at the box office. This in turn has sparked a huge revival in the books' popularity, as mainstream folks who normally eschew such geeky reading, are seduced by the interesting characters and awe-inspiring scope of LOTR. This same phenomenon might bring those people, who would normally never partake in an activity as asocial as videogaming, to the play (and love) the game in question.
So what's the drawback? I feel that it risks glorifying war. As the civilized nations of the West teeter on the brink of war with terrorists, the simple black and white portrayal of the War of the Ring borders on propoganda, especially when charged imagery like "the two towers" is used. The bookish geeks who normally consume video games are smart enough to separate reality from fiction, but I doubt the general populace will be able to avoid mapping the fictional events in the game onto the present world crisis.
So this is M$ "putting its power to good use?" If there's one thing we've learned, it's that actions that would be acceptable, even commendable, if performed by other companies are evil when done by M$, because of their illegal monopoly power. At the very least, we should approach this case with skepticism before proclaiming our support.
Hotmail has a ton of customers. Most people these days don't even use their ISP email addresses, because they may change and are often hard to remember in the first place. Instead they use Hotmail. Which means that M$ effectively controls all Internet email. If they start filtering stuff out--even spam--then they are abusing their monopoly power to limit free speech. This could be used to their advantage, again illegally, if they decide to only filter anti-M$ spam while letting pro-M$ spam through. This is atrocious, and must be resisted.
Hotmail spammers are such a burden on you. Why not allow another to carry some of that burden?
There was a time when people took pride in their last names. If you hate who you are enough to change your name, how can you expect other people to like you?
I know my own heritage is crucial in my self identity, and I would never give it up, not for all the wealth in the land.
This is useful information (goodness knows I'll be putting it to work soon!), and Slashdot is certainly a good place to post it. However, I'm concerned that perhaps publishing this kind of material could be counterproductive, both for "geeks" and for mankind.
One aspect of geekiness has always been a lack of connection with other people. This emotional chasm is what has driven many of the Great Geeks (Einstein, Feynman, et al) to pour their energy into invention and genius. Geeks are thus given a choice, between intellectual pursuits and the attempt to integrate themselves with normal society. There should be no shortcuts, or we risk losing future geniuses to the normal life.
Also, the human race is kept strong is through evolution. If asthmatic, neurotic geeks improve their chances in the great slot machine of life, then future generations may be cursed with poorer health and social skills (which are essential to proper child-rearing), a state that will only be perpetuated and intensified in generations to come. Geeks need to be at a sexual disadvantage to temper their intellectual superiority, lest we introduce imbalance to the human race.
Geek guides for dating could be a powerful weapon against the Dark Lord in the East.
Comdex has been in steady decline for a few years. I don't think anyone's exactly floored by this announcement, which is just ceiling the fate we all saw coming as the trade show has become increasingly walled in.
Then we have trade shows like LinuxWorld that have trouble selling enough booths to cover their costs. I don't think this is anything to be upset over. The Internet is to some extent doing away with the need for meatspace trade shows, and in these lean times it's hardly shocking that businesses don't want to throw away money on a trade show booth that could be spent in their web presence with many times the return on investment.
So, the Comdex bankrupty filing has been found, as legend foretold.
I see all these people already complaining about how this is a security risk, because they have this idea that shell == danger and they see the word "shell."
News flash, guys, this is still just a CGI script, meaning it will be run by an unprivelaged user. You won't be able to do anything with this that you couldn't have done with a CGI script before, and it's no more susceptible to being hacked than any other CGI script. Sure there's a security risk, but any time you let clients execute server code you're putting yourself out there. Now chill out.
A CGI shell simulation could save our people, if we use it with wisdom.
Actually, they are just hosting both of the sets of guidelines on the same site, not agreeing on one set of guidelines for both toolkits. In the end, this is a good thing, because the two widget sets are radically different on a few key points, making agreement on human interface guidelines fundamentally improbable.
It is a sign; the free desktop guidelines were sent to us to aid in our defense.
I like GNOME well enough, but I get confused by their rapidly changing terminology. For example, this writeup makes it sound like Evolution and Ximian are two competing "desktops," but I thought Ximian was a company and Evolution was a file manager.
Actually, I'm not even sure what a "desktop" is. I used to think it was anything behind the application windows, but now I'm wondering...does it have to have icons on it? Does Blackbox have a desktop?
Gnome has been lost for nearly an Age, and now I fear that it is emerging again as a force of great strength.
It seems weird that the government would be funding development of corporate desktops, since corporations and government are so often in opposition to one another (cf. Microsoft vs. the People).
I wonder if the German government is maybe trying to cripple companies by forcing them to use KDE. Not that KDE isn't as good as the alternatives, but in the doggy dog world of business, any restriction of choice is a threat to profit ability.
And though I fear the corporate KDE desktop, I do not doubt that it could be used as a weapon of good.
I hadn't realized that research into AI continued. I thought it was pretty much abandoned in favor of statistical methods in the late 80's. But if all goes well, we all stand to benefit.
It's a little short sighted to talk about the application to games. Since when have games pushed innovation? Rather, I'm looking forward to intelligent machines like coffee makers that know how to make good coffee and record players that can mix tracks and perform scratches without a human DJ.
Artificial Intelligence need not be feared, if we use it wisely and with caution. It could save our people, if we only have the courage to take it.
It seems odd that so many people would be experiencing the same problems with batteries in a specific model of laptop. Perhaps there was an accident at the factory?
I think you should contact IBM with your serial number. I'll bet they'll sort it out. Most likely you wouldn't be the first person to complain, and I doubt they'd charge you to fix it. If all else fails, look into getting a Mac. Their batteries are known to last for figuritively ever.
A flaky laptop battery, now that is a powerful weapon. We could save my city, and all the cities of the land.
I have to say, the concept of an enormous database of all of this information that may one day be useful is pretty astounding. Privacy and data accuracy issues aside, I mean. It's the scale of data mining problem that hasn't been seen before other than in the field of genomics. Crazy stuff.
I'm not sure what "the Tolkien of the web" is supposed to be, and I'm battling with myself to avoid making the "Tolkien Ring network" joke that I imagine every Slashbot and his lover is making as I type this. Maybe it just refers to the epic scale of a global digital information suppository, and I'd certainly enjoy that.
Often I wonder if this is the end of the Age of Man. But the Semantic Web gives me hope, and with it we may yet survive.
I guess I still don't see what the big deal is. It's just like the email "virii" that require people to execute scripts. If you don't want the stupid toolbar, don't download and install it. If you do install it and then you change your mind, uninstall it. This is isn't rocket surgery, people.
I'm also pretty surprised to see this kind of sympathy for Windows newbs on this site. We're all well beyond computer literate, and we recognize that computers and software are just tools that do what we want. If the lusers can't take the time to learn how to use their computers properly, well, that's their own fault.
The toolbar must not fall into the hands of one who would use it to destroy us. It is folly, then, to take it to him, when we could use it ourselves for such greatness.
It's scary to see such strife within the Open Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we all, a focus on our true enemies, those who persist in making and publishing proprietary and other non-Free software.
The beauty of it is that we have the option of choosing our battles. Mplayer is a great program, and has made many contributions to the community and innovations to media applications in general (QuickTime, for example). Why go after them? Instead, we should be going after the real offenders, the companies that violate the GPL to line their own profit margins.
Do not forget that mplayer is a powerful tool in our battle against those who would destroy us.
This is a great idea that's been a long time coming. It sounds to me like it takes the ideas first put forth in FreeNet (which spawned later P2P networks like Napster and Kazza) and finally makes them accessible to everyday content producers and consumers.
I'm wondering if maybe this is the future of blogs like Slashdot, with design, features, and content distributed the same way moderation and commenting are today. Creative Commons licensing would be a further boon.
This sort of next generation P2P network might be the weapon we need against the forces of evil, if only we are brave enough to use it.
It's great to see something available for those of us who want to record our favorite music to hard drive, but don't want the low quality and artifacts of lossy formats like mp3 and ogg. Even 256kbps mp3s are noticeably worse than CDs when listening to certain types of music.
I'm also a little curious as to why they've gone and reproduced all of this work rather than just using gzip or bzip2, which frequently achieve compression rates of 50% or more.
Either way, I urge all of you to consider lossless compression of music data. Lossy compression is a great burden for one person to bear, and there are other options.
I've read about this before (perhaps even on Slashdot). Many college professors are indeed upset about grade inflation, but I think not completely correctly.
What professors don't realize, in their ivory towers, is that grades can have an incredible impact on liberal arts students. A few points can mean the difference between a top tier and a second tier graduate program, or between a bottom tier one and none at all. Students' futures are at stake.
Also, I can't help but notice that our technical and engineering industries, which do not have as much grade inflation, tend to lag behind those of countries such as Japan and the Netherlands (home of Philips). Meanwhile, our grade-inflated literary and historical output dominates those of other countries. Perhaps it is the very grade inflation that allows us to excel in the liberal arts, even as we struggle in technology.
If we can harness the power of grade inflation and put it to our own use, we might triumph in the end.
I'm continuously amazed by the stuff they can cram into these little devices these days. And the comment about a more powerful processor had me ROFL...this thing's faster than my PC for glory's sake!
I sometimes question the value of integrating everything. It's cool and all, but I sort of like the modularity of things as they stand. Like if I'm in a meeting I can have my PDA but leave the cell phone behind, and I can go jogging with my mp3 player and not have to bring the camera along too.
Still, I don't think we should be too hasty. If wielded with wisdom and with the desire to defend, the Sony Clie NZ90 could save us from the doom that grows nearer with each dawning day.
Slashdot Mirror
So, this book advertises itself as a guide for administrators who want to secure their systems. Fair enough. But how much do you want to bet that a chapter like "Attacking and Defending Windows 2000" spends 40 pages on hacking techniques, then closes with a short paragraph reading, "install the latest security patches from Microsoft"?
Security is not exactly rocket science from an admin POV. You keep your system up-to-date and pay attention to the latest exploit warnings, and you will be fine 99.9% of the time. Almost without fail, hacking incidents at major companies are found to be due to security holes that have been known about and fixed for months, if not years. Competant admins simply do not get hacked.
Any admin who isn't completely shirking his duties has exactly no use for this book. Who, then, will find it valuable? That's right: hackers. Script kiddies have an easy enough time of it as it is. The computer book industry needs to take some responsibility and stop publishing this sort of hacker how-to.
I'm glad to hear this, as SP3 wrecked havoc on my machine at work. Apparently Windows Upbreak decided to update a bunch of stuff that required the new video driver before it updated the video driver itself. So I had to boot into Safe Mode and do a bunch of voodoo at 640x480 to make things work again.
This is great news for the Open Source community. While Plan9 is often rediculed as being outdated, it no doubt has its share of novel and useful algorithms, which may now be incorporated into more mainstream open source OSes such as Linux and the HURD (yes, it's still around).
Open sourcing OS code has proven to be a good way to keep ailing systems relevant in the current marketplace. It kept BeOS and VMS from dying in obscurity, and even helped BSD limp along for a few more years.
I predict nothing but good things from GNU/Plan9. Hopefully Debian will introduce a Plan9 distro, to go with their Darwin, HURD, and Linux distrii. I still have a few spare boxen lying around that I could use this on.
The Slashdot community should be ashamed. This story has only been up a short while, and already I'm seeing references to rockets made of bamboo, astronauts eating freeze-dried dog meat, and even the despicable phrase, "runar rander." This sort of bigotry and racism is unbefitting of one of the most respectworthy technical communities on the web today.
You are probably all just jealous because you lost your jobs to better trained immigrants, or because you always strike out with the cute Chinese ladies. Sad.
I was shocked and disappointed to hear that the Wallace and Gromit cartoons will be hitting both the silver screen and the console in the next few years. That the cartoons seemed to have fallen out of favor was some consolation for their initial popularity.
The Wallace and Gromit shorts promote a world-view centered around materialism and hedonism. The characters are motivated by idle pleasure and selfishness, and the absurdity and pessimism of their "adventures" encourage existential angst in young, impressionable minds.
That there has been no public outcry against these cartoons, and rather they seem to be enjoying a resurgance in popularity, speaks to the moral bankruptcy of contemporary Western society.
Intel is already running at, what 4GHz? That's still an order of magnitude faster. Too little too late from AMD, I'm afraid. Time to sell that stock.
I am of course incredibly interested in this game. It takes quite possibly the greatest war epic ever written and makes it interactive. This is the future of fiction and art in general.
However, I'm a little concerned about the timing. The Lord of the Rings (the first two installments anyway) have been incredibly succesful at the box office. This in turn has sparked a huge revival in the books' popularity, as mainstream folks who normally eschew such geeky reading, are seduced by the interesting characters and awe-inspiring scope of LOTR. This same phenomenon might bring those people, who would normally never partake in an activity as asocial as videogaming, to the play (and love) the game in question.
So what's the drawback? I feel that it risks glorifying war. As the civilized nations of the West teeter on the brink of war with terrorists, the simple black and white portrayal of the War of the Ring borders on propoganda, especially when charged imagery like "the two towers" is used. The bookish geeks who normally consume video games are smart enough to separate reality from fiction, but I doubt the general populace will be able to avoid mapping the fictional events in the game onto the present world crisis.
The LOTR RTS seems a great burden.
So this is M$ "putting its power to good use?" If there's one thing we've learned, it's that actions that would be acceptable, even commendable, if performed by other companies are evil when done by M$, because of their illegal monopoly power. At the very least, we should approach this case with skepticism before proclaiming our support.
Hotmail has a ton of customers. Most people these days don't even use their ISP email addresses, because they may change and are often hard to remember in the first place. Instead they use Hotmail. Which means that M$ effectively controls all Internet email. If they start filtering stuff out--even spam--then they are abusing their monopoly power to limit free speech. This could be used to their advantage, again illegally, if they decide to only filter anti-M$ spam while letting pro-M$ spam through. This is atrocious, and must be resisted.
Hotmail spammers are such a burden on you. Why not allow another to carry some of that burden?
There was a time when people took pride in their last names. If you hate who you are enough to change your name, how can you expect other people to like you?
I know my own heritage is crucial in my self identity, and I would never give it up, not for all the wealth in the land.
This is useful information (goodness knows I'll be putting it to work soon!), and Slashdot is certainly a good place to post it. However, I'm concerned that perhaps publishing this kind of material could be counterproductive, both for "geeks" and for mankind.
One aspect of geekiness has always been a lack of connection with other people. This emotional chasm is what has driven many of the Great Geeks (Einstein, Feynman, et al) to pour their energy into invention and genius. Geeks are thus given a choice, between intellectual pursuits and the attempt to integrate themselves with normal society. There should be no shortcuts, or we risk losing future geniuses to the normal life.
Also, the human race is kept strong is through evolution. If asthmatic, neurotic geeks improve their chances in the great slot machine of life, then future generations may be cursed with poorer health and social skills (which are essential to proper child-rearing), a state that will only be perpetuated and intensified in generations to come. Geeks need to be at a sexual disadvantage to temper their intellectual superiority, lest we introduce imbalance to the human race.
Geek guides for dating could be a powerful weapon against the Dark Lord in the East.
I always knew that the DreamCast failed because it didn't have enough disco music and cigarette smoke.
A Sega Pachinko machine could be what we need to save our people.
Comdex has been in steady decline for a few years. I don't think anyone's exactly floored by this announcement, which is just ceiling the fate we all saw coming as the trade show has become increasingly walled in.
Then we have trade shows like LinuxWorld that have trouble selling enough booths to cover their costs. I don't think this is anything to be upset over. The Internet is to some extent doing away with the need for meatspace trade shows, and in these lean times it's hardly shocking that businesses don't want to throw away money on a trade show booth that could be spent in their web presence with many times the return on investment.
So, the Comdex bankrupty filing has been found, as legend foretold.
I see all these people already complaining about how this is a security risk, because they have this idea that shell == danger and they see the word "shell."
News flash, guys, this is still just a CGI script, meaning it will be run by an unprivelaged user. You won't be able to do anything with this that you couldn't have done with a CGI script before, and it's no more susceptible to being hacked than any other CGI script. Sure there's a security risk, but any time you let clients execute server code you're putting yourself out there. Now chill out.
A CGI shell simulation could save our people, if we use it with wisdom.
Actually, they are just hosting both of the sets of guidelines on the same site, not agreeing on one set of guidelines for both toolkits. In the end, this is a good thing, because the two widget sets are radically different on a few key points, making agreement on human interface guidelines fundamentally improbable.
It is a sign; the free desktop guidelines were sent to us to aid in our defense.
I like GNOME well enough, but I get confused by their rapidly changing terminology. For example, this writeup makes it sound like Evolution and Ximian are two competing "desktops," but I thought Ximian was a company and Evolution was a file manager.
Actually, I'm not even sure what a "desktop" is. I used to think it was anything behind the application windows, but now I'm wondering...does it have to have icons on it? Does Blackbox have a desktop?
Gnome has been lost for nearly an Age, and now I fear that it is emerging again as a force of great strength.
It seems weird that the government would be funding development of corporate desktops, since corporations and government are so often in opposition to one another (cf. Microsoft vs. the People).
I wonder if the German government is maybe trying to cripple companies by forcing them to use KDE. Not that KDE isn't as good as the alternatives, but in the doggy dog world of business, any restriction of choice is a threat to profit ability.
And though I fear the corporate KDE desktop, I do not doubt that it could be used as a weapon of good.
I hadn't realized that research into AI continued. I thought it was pretty much abandoned in favor of statistical methods in the late 80's. But if all goes well, we all stand to benefit.
It's a little short sighted to talk about the application to games. Since when have games pushed innovation? Rather, I'm looking forward to intelligent machines like coffee makers that know how to make good coffee and record players that can mix tracks and perform scratches without a human DJ.
Artificial Intelligence need not be feared, if we use it wisely and with caution. It could save our people, if we only have the courage to take it.
It seems odd that so many people would be experiencing the same problems with batteries in a specific model of laptop. Perhaps there was an accident at the factory?
I think you should contact IBM with your serial number. I'll bet they'll sort it out. Most likely you wouldn't be the first person to complain, and I doubt they'd charge you to fix it. If all else fails, look into getting a Mac. Their batteries are known to last for figuritively ever.
A flaky laptop battery, now that is a powerful weapon. We could save my city, and all the cities of the land.
I have to say, the concept of an enormous database of all of this information that may one day be useful is pretty astounding. Privacy and data accuracy issues aside, I mean. It's the scale of data mining problem that hasn't been seen before other than in the field of genomics. Crazy stuff.
I'm not sure what "the Tolkien of the web" is supposed to be, and I'm battling with myself to avoid making the "Tolkien Ring network" joke that I imagine every Slashbot and his lover is making as I type this. Maybe it just refers to the epic scale of a global digital information suppository, and I'd certainly enjoy that.
Often I wonder if this is the end of the Age of Man. But the Semantic Web gives me hope, and with it we may yet survive.
I guess I still don't see what the big deal is. It's just like the email "virii" that require people to execute scripts. If you don't want the stupid toolbar, don't download and install it. If you do install it and then you change your mind, uninstall it. This is isn't rocket surgery, people.
I'm also pretty surprised to see this kind of sympathy for Windows newbs on this site. We're all well beyond computer literate, and we recognize that computers and software are just tools that do what we want. If the lusers can't take the time to learn how to use their computers properly, well, that's their own fault.
The toolbar must not fall into the hands of one who would use it to destroy us. It is folly, then, to take it to him, when we could use it ourselves for such greatness.
It's scary to see such strife within the Open Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we all, a focus on our true enemies, those who persist in making and publishing proprietary and other non-Free software.
The beauty of it is that we have the option of choosing our battles. Mplayer is a great program, and has made many contributions to the community and innovations to media applications in general (QuickTime, for example). Why go after them? Instead, we should be going after the real offenders, the companies that violate the GPL to line their own profit margins.
Do not forget that mplayer is a powerful tool in our battle against those who would destroy us.
This is a great idea that's been a long time coming. It sounds to me like it takes the ideas first put forth in FreeNet (which spawned later P2P networks like Napster and Kazza) and finally makes them accessible to everyday content producers and consumers.
I'm wondering if maybe this is the future of blogs like Slashdot, with design, features, and content distributed the same way moderation and commenting are today. Creative Commons licensing would be a further boon.
This sort of next generation P2P network might be the weapon we need against the forces of evil, if only we are brave enough to use it.
It's great to see something available for those of us who want to record our favorite music to hard drive, but don't want the low quality and artifacts of lossy formats like mp3 and ogg. Even 256kbps mp3s are noticeably worse than CDs when listening to certain types of music.
I'm also a little curious as to why they've gone and reproduced all of this work rather than just using gzip or bzip2, which frequently achieve compression rates of 50% or more.
Either way, I urge all of you to consider lossless compression of music data. Lossy compression is a great burden for one person to bear, and there are other options.
I've read about this before (perhaps even on Slashdot). Many college professors are indeed upset about grade inflation, but I think not completely correctly.
What professors don't realize, in their ivory towers, is that grades can have an incredible impact on liberal arts students. A few points can mean the difference between a top tier and a second tier graduate program, or between a bottom tier one and none at all. Students' futures are at stake.
Also, I can't help but notice that our technical and engineering industries, which do not have as much grade inflation, tend to lag behind those of countries such as Japan and the Netherlands (home of Philips). Meanwhile, our grade-inflated literary and historical output dominates those of other countries. Perhaps it is the very grade inflation that allows us to excel in the liberal arts, even as we struggle in technology.
If we can harness the power of grade inflation and put it to our own use, we might triumph in the end.
I'm continuously amazed by the stuff they can cram into these little devices these days. And the comment about a more powerful processor had me ROFL...this thing's faster than my PC for glory's sake!
I sometimes question the value of integrating everything. It's cool and all, but I sort of like the modularity of things as they stand. Like if I'm in a meeting I can have my PDA but leave the cell phone behind, and I can go jogging with my mp3 player and not have to bring the camera along too.
Still, I don't think we should be too hasty. If wielded with wisdom and with the desire to defend, the Sony Clie NZ90 could save us from the doom that grows nearer with each dawning day.