run the update software/visit the manufacturer's web site for every piece of software that you own?
It's not so bad when they update themselves (Adobe, Java, Apple, etc).
But yes, having to visit the manufacturer's website is bad. That's why we have this concept of a "package manager" on Linux, and why we're still so confused that people think it's more complex to install and manage software on Linux than on other systems.
Actually, I lied, there are currently two package managers I have to keep track of: Debian (Ubuntu) Apt and Rubygems.
Still, it means that if I really want to, I can do this:
That will update everything except the Windows software that I have under Wine... Hell, I could add a couple of svn updates to that line, and it's even keep me up-to-date with everyone else in the office!
Oh, whoops -- nvidia doesn't have ANY automatic update.
So yes, Microsoft Update is a start, but until it's just a generic Update feature which all apps can hook into, it's pretty useless for keeping the whole system up-to-date.
As long as your ports aren't all opened up by default and your server is behind and monitored by an updated firewall
Or my server could be an updated firewall.
At the very least, you want to keep sshd up-to-date.
Most updates seem to slow things down these days.
Plenty of updates speed things up. See Ruby.
I have plenty enough unix knowledge to know that that odd libmcrypt version update out of sync with mhash or whatever means I have to reinstall a server
See, I generally trust the updates, because I figure that if Adobe didn't screw me over the first time, they're not going to screw me over this time.
So, what I've done is, I leave the update notifications on, in case I forget, but I make a habit of, when I first boot, checking for updates. This means that I get to sit and drink coffee and slowly wake up in the rare case that a reboot is required.
The difference is, on Ubuntu, I push one button for it to update, and then I forget about it for the rest of the day. If I really wanted to, I could script that -- have everything handled by a cron job.
On Windows or OS X, there's probably at least five or ten things which try to auto-update (or at least ask permission), and another five or ten things which don't even try, but which it's generally a good idea to keep up to date. So I still make a habit of checking Windows Update, but there's also a dozen things I don't bother to check (partly because some won't even work; my video drivers are not likely to get any more updates, ever), and there's a dozen things that pop up and cheerfully inform me that I have a few hundred megs worth of, say, Java updates to download.
So yes, Windows needs a proper package manager. A package manager is more than updates, but it would be nice to have just one place to check for updates, or just one thing that nags me to update, and then not have to deal with it for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, with HD-DVD work on hold, I get to run Linux at work.
Well, your department, maybe not you personally. I have no idea what the office politics are like there, so I don't know what's actually stopping you from implementing best practices...
There's nothing magical about WSUS.
I don't know how easy the tools are, but you should be able to build and maintain your own repository for your distro of choice. Then just add a daily cron job to each machine, forcing it to update. If it's a desktop Linux machine, institute a policy that machines get shut down when you leave -- thus allowing you to upgrade the kernel.
So you're right, it has nothing to do with what OSes are being run. But you're wrong to blame the users here -- many of them (rightly) feel that this should not be their job. I get to admin my own machines where I work, so keeping them up-to-date is my job -- and also my responsibility; there's no IT department to blame if something goes wrong. But in an organization which does have an IT department, even if it's a one-man IT department, keeping the system up to date should be IT's job.
Are we talking about this keyboard? Because I'm fairly addicted to it now. I have big complaints, but I can't really go back to any other keyboard.
I'm faster on this keyboard than on just about any other I've used since my Powerbook keyboard. It doesn't take much force to press the keys, and they are low-profile, which makes it easy to slide fingers from one key to another (when typing fast enough for that to matter), but it does, in fact, give me good, solid tactile feedback. Despite typing lighter and faster than on really any other keyboard I've tried, it has a solid feeling that I can only describe as a "click" feel when a key actually goes down.
(Except, of course, there's not actually much sound. I'm much quieter on this thing than on my old keyboard.)
Which isn't to say that I love Apple for it. In fact, I dearly wish someone other than Apple had made this keyboard. It goes above and beyond previous Apple keyboards in bastardizations of common functions. I mean, obviously, there's the alt/super mixup (or option/command), which is what prompted me to start remapping it. But it goes farther.
Minor complaint: The F-keys are all shifted slightly to the left. I don't touch-type those, in general, but it is odd. And this was done to add an eject button, which nothing but OS X recognized out of the box. (Still haven't mapped that to anything.) The num pad is also minor, because I don't use it that much, but it is weird -- on a normal keyboard, plus takes up as much space as enter (it's double-sized, vertically). On mine, it's normal-sized, and just above enter. Minus, times, and slash have been moved clockwise to fill the space, and to make room for an equals key right next to "clear" (which is actually numlock).
I don't really see the need for an = key on the numpad. (And I'm not entirely sure what it's mapped to by default; I'll have to fix that.) But honestly, most calculator-type apps are going to let you hit "enter" (or "return") to find the result of an expression.
But these are really minor complaints, and they are kind of balanced by the coolness of having extra F-keys. Specifically, F16 through F19 where you would otherwise find LEDs on another keyboard.
Now, back to the complaints: No LEDs. Or rather, one: a Capslock LED, right on the key. But no numlock LEDs or scroll lock LEDs. This makes sense for Apple, I'm sure, as there isn't actually a key labeled with numlock or scroll lock. But on OSes other than OS X -- Linux in particular, which may not have numlock on by default -- it would be very nice to actually have an LED somewhere.
Now, the last keys that annoy me... Home, delete, end, pageup, and pagedown are all exactly where you'd expect them. Print screen, Scroll lock, and Pause are not, of course -- instead, there's F13, F14, and F15, but those are easy to remap.
But there is no insert key. And on Linux, I (used to) use the insert key quite a lot -- shift+insert is a common paste-to-terminal shortcut. And I don't mean that there's no key labeled "insert" -- the "clear" key, for instance, actually sends the NumLock keycode, and NumLock is the key I expect to find there, so all is well. But instead of insert, they have an fn key.
And it's a real fn key, just like on laptops, in that it's hardware-controlled. This means it's for turning F1-F12 into brightness controls, Expose, Dashboard, playback controls, and volume controls. (Or, if it's like my Powerbook, by default, the F-keys do all these things in OS X, and to make them actually send an F1 keycode to an application, you have to hold fn -- but this is customizable.) I don't mind having those available, but was there nowhere else they could've put an fn key? Was there nowhere they could've implemented this in software?
So, I actually have a completely un-mappable key on my keyboard, and it's pretty fairly useless. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to convince my OS to use those playback and volume controls, because t
To me, it's basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.
Well, sure. And when someone comes to visit my house, I let them in. That doesn't mean I leave my door unlocked.
If people are actually my guests, I'll give them access. Otherwise (if they're outside in a car, say), they don't get access.
I can count five open wireless networks in coffee shops within a mile of my house, and any potential spammer is far more likely to sit in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a scone than in a cold car outside my house.
Not all coffee shops have free wireless networks. Technically open, but I remember Starbucks wanting to charge something for it. And it's a network you have to share with all the other potential spammers.
But think more like this: Any potential spammer could simply find a small, wifi-capable device with a nice battery, and drop it outside your house. They could simply wardrive around, dropping these things off... Alright, iPhones are not cheap enough, but you do see the point, right? And finish it up with a cup of coffee and a scone.
If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence.
This is America. It's supposed to be that they have to prove your guilt. You don't have to prove anything, you're assumed innocent.
If I configure my computer to be secure regardless of the network it's on, then it simply doesn't matter.
Indeed. But with closed wifi, you don't have to be as concerned about a desktop, which simply won't be on those other networks. (A laptop will.)
And any solution will apply to your desktop machines as well.
Not really. For a laptop, I generally lock things down tight, run Linux or OS X, precisely because it has to be secure. But I play games on my desktop, so I have to be able to boot Windows. Even if all major OSes are equally secure, I am much more knowledgeable about Linux security, so Linux is more secure for me.
Fon wireless access points have two wireless networks: a secure one for you, and an open one for everyone else.
That's how I'd set it up, actually. In fact, left entirely to myself, I'd set up an open wireless network, and I'd VPN back to some server behind the router (or some server which has a wireless card). The open network would have bandwidth limits and such, and I might occasionally play pranks like upside-down-ternet, or more malicious man-in-the-middle attacks.
Unfortunately, I'm not left entirely to myself, and the people I live with blamed my Linux router for several problems. I gave in and let them go back to the same old wireless router, which is the last thing between me and the Internet. I'm not really sure of a better way of securing it than crypto, in this case.
If it is actually illegal, it is the job of the police. If it is immoral, it is the job of the parents.
Schools are not to here only to educate you. They are here to help prepare you for your entire life. To think anything less than that is simply not thinking.
So, someone who disagrees with you is "simply not thinking"? Sounds like they did a wonderful job preparing you for the real world...
And they are here to educate you. There are certainly other ways to prepare you for other things in your life than a lack of knowledge. For instance, if getting a job is the most important thing, an internship is going to teach you more that you need to know than a high school education will.
I have never in my life had a problem with someone absolutely reeking of beer or weed. It doesn't bother me a bit. As much as you choose to ignore their drinking, you can choose to ignore their absolute reek.
Except that their drinking does not directly affect you. The smell... Not as bad as secondhand smoke, but it does carry some of the effect.
But you see, you have to go out of your way to notice their drinking. You have to go out of your way to not notice their stinking.
Maybe you don't understand that kids, as much as they think they know, do not generally realize they are being self-destructive.
And kids are capable of making their own decisions. They need guidance, certainly, but should you make the decision for them?
More importantly to you, however: Parents are capable of making their own decisions.
I'm glad you're not a school administrator. I for one will continue to try to help people, especially kids.
I do try to help people. But if they don't want to be helped, that is really, honestly not my problem.
I will absolutely tell them that what they are doing is dangerous. I'll tell them all the horrible ways that it will get them killed. If they're contemplating suicide, I will try to talk them out of it, and I will stay with them for as long as it takes -- and I have done this.
But I will not simply make their choice for them, especially if I am not their parent. (If I have children, I will have to think very, very carefully about what choices I get to make, and what choices I have to leave to them.)
Having someone choose for them teaches them nothing, and it solves nothing. If they're simply reckless, they'll just be reckless when they know you won't catch them. If they're suicidal, there are so many ways to kill yourself that if they're still alive (and not physically restrained), they were never going to go through with it anyway.
Let me close with one more thought. Not an argument, or an accusation, I just want you to think about it, and chew on it...
All sorts of things start this way. The Golden Shield Project, I'm sure, started with someone saying "Let's help people. Let's protect them from bad things."
It's worth mentioning that, at least in IRC, this is the preferred medium. It should work elsewhere, too, and there are scripts to assist in it.
Your point is valid, but I don't believe I should constrain the format of a language because it won't work in some mediums. Should I not include []-bracketed arrays because bbcode might hate them?
In languages that use delimiters as block and line markers, you can run a code beautifier to standardize the code, and even fix code that is horribly malformatted. If the white space gets screwed up really bad in a python program (line endings are deleted somehow), it will it not only fail to run, it will require a human to go in and unscrew it.
Ah, but if the whitespace gets screwed up in a python program, that's equivalent to the bracketing getting screwed up in a C-style program. So the difference is that broken whitespace is not the domain of a code beautifier in Python, anymore than brackets and parentheses are the domain of a code beautifier in just about any language.
Also, code beautifiers are still going to leave some things out of place, particularly comments which are spaced to match the code.
Actually it would still include paper. A paper receipt that cannot be altered, or maybe an email... this receipt is used by the voter to audit the system and check that their votes were properly registered in at least three of the public databases.
Alright, let me get this straight: Are these "public databases" exposed, in full? Are they simply every single vote, and who it was for?
If so, that kills your anonymity/secrecy. It now becomes possible for people to literally and directly buy votes, because they can make sure, when you come back out, that your vote was for the candidate they paid you to vote for.
I have designed a universal information architecture / system that engineers Big Brother out of the system and retains privacy and control of one's data, yet includes transparency. The voting system could use some of the methods and structure.
The system is autonomous, with anonymity yet also providing certification and verification.
I'll believe it when I see it. (Or specs, or a whitepaper, or an informal rant.)
It is also my understanding based on insight and thought from William Poundstone and others that we need to switch from plurality voting to range voting or instant-runoff voting.
Maybe so, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with the voting process.
As far as hacking the system we will award anyone several hundred thousand dollars that can figure out how to hack the system.
You might think: "How does he KNOW that this is nonsense? If it's so bad, why can't he break it?" That's actually backwards. In the world of cryptography, we assume something is broken until we have evidence to the contrary. (And I mean evidence, not proof.)
Look, we both agree on what the perfect, ideal goal is. I'm not really sure it's possible -- in fact, I'm reasonably sure it's not possible, and that we can only get some rough approximation of it. So, when I say "nice try", I actually mean that I'm glad you're trying, but I sincerely doubt you've come up with anything fundamentally different enough to work.
Apparently some GPL fans feel that the political aims are more important than the engineering aims.
By that logic, any license other than public domain is about "political aims".
But look at the history of BSD, and you will see what these "political aims" can do to help the engineering ones. Specifically, it discourages fragmentation. It doesn't prevent it, obviously, but it stops the situation where a company will simply take BSD code, close it, slap the attribution on it and be done with it. If the company were to use GPL'd code instead, they would be forced to release their contributions back to the community (or not use that code).
I hope I don't have to spell it out for you completely, but having one open source project that's actively maintained is much better than having ten closed projects which do mostly the same thing, all with their advantages and disadvantages, and a completely stagnant open project.
The goal is not to promote reuse, except by people who agree with them.
So what?
Would you rather I release my code under some Shareware license, with a nag screen to Paypal me some cash every five minutes?
It's my code. If I'm donating my blood, sweat, and tears to a project, I think I should have some say in how it's used.
But if TiVo had decided not to use Linux, would these GPL people be happier?
Possibly.
I wouldn't be, you know, happy about the situation, but I also wouldn't feel taken advantage of.
If someone doesn't like DRM, then bitch at Hollywood or Hughes Satellite, not the company that's trying to create a useful product under real world conditions.
I am not bitching at TiVo. I'm just no longer donating code to them. If they want my code, they can hire me.
But you are missing a very crucial point here: It's not only that TiVo is implementing DRM. It's that they are using that DRM, among other things, to restrict access to the very code that is supposedly GPL'd. The intent of the GPL is that anyone can modify software they've purchased (or obtained for free), and TiVo does not allow that, even with GPL'd stuff. GPLv3 makes it so they can't do that anymore, at least with GPLv3 stuff.
In other words, if I wrote a cryptographic library, and you use it to implement DRM on movies, that's fair. I don't like it, but it's fair. But it really does seem unreasonable when I can't even patch my own library (that I wrote), on my own hardware (that I bought), and have it run. (All hypothetical -- I didn't write a cryptographic library.)
Open source should be about creating software and letting others use it in any way they want, no matter what political views they have. That's software 'freedom'.
That's developer freedom. And I get that, I really do -- I do develop some commercial software, and the issue of licensing does come up a lot. And we're really happy when we can find BSD'd or public-domain stuff.
But "free software" is not about freedom of the software company. It is about freedom of the end-user.
And you're right, that's not what Open Source is about -- all Open Source is about is the ability to get source code. But that does not equal freedom, for either software company or end-user.
Intentional, but not dishonest. Go look up the definition if you're having trouble.
Yes, it's censorship. Active, intentional censorship. But the Chinese know they are being censored -- no one's pretending they're not. Censorship is many things, but it is not dishonest.
SEO technologies, on the other hand, work by deliberately attempting to mislead search engines.
Overwriting your MBR is possible only with raw access to the hard drive, and is always possible with raw access to the hard drive. In other words, Vista shares this same flaw with nearly every operating system in existence.
Except, you know, OSes which don't allow raw access to the hard drive.
To gain this access, you need to already have unfettered administrative access, which means you stand to gain nothing further.
That depends on the system, but I tend to agree you, and I made the same point.
See an OS should be CAPABLE of locking everything down. If it can't it should log.
None of which tells me that it's a bad thing if everything isn't locked down, even if it's not locked down by default. I don't know enough about NT to know if it can be sufficiently locked down in this way. I do know Linux can.
Oh, and speaking of logs: What's your guarantee that log is still valid? On most machines, root access means freedom to modify the logs, the log daemon, and so on.
By the way, this technique does NOT work on all systems. I'm not entirely sure about the last time I tried it on Ubuntu, but on at least some systems, the initrd will also respond to init=foo, thus you'll get the initrd environment. That's not to say that you couldn't do similar damage from there (including running a root shell on the "real" system), I'm just stressing that there is no one way to attack all Linux systems.
Also, some of your stuff here is sloppy, on the systems for which it will work. "init 6" is not what you want -- you don't have init running at all at this point. What you want is to manually unmount, or "mount -o remount,ro", every filesystem, then sync, then either physically reboot or mess with/sbin/poweroff and such.
Or you can simply set everything back to the way you found it (mounted readonly and such), then "exec/sbin/init", and the system will have absolutely no clue that you changed anything.
Regardless, on anything, you just need physical access to the machine and sufficient time.
Yeah but its not possible to install a patch without rebooting:)
Not sure about Windows, but Linux will actually "install" the patch -- it just won't run it without rebooting.
The important feature here is that you can basically put your disk in a state where, if you were to cold boot right there, everything would already be installed the way it's supposed to be -- no weird tricks during an otherwise "normal" boot. When it says "done installing", it really means "done installing", and while you have to reboot for it to take effect, that is really just a reboot.
If the guest user has permission to read from the DVD drive, then this implies they have permission to send commands to the DVD drive.
On Windows, maybe.
On Linux, it means the user has permission to read from the DVD drive.
If Windows sends what should be a "safe" command, and the driver/firmware interprets this command as a "rewrite firmware" command,
That is possible, if, say, it was a "read" command, or maybe an "eject the disc" command.
More importantly, though, drivers should make a distinction between normal read/write access and firmware flashing. As a normal user, I should be able to send "commands", like eject, close, etc; I should be able to read; I should be able to write (burn); I should not be able to flash the firmware.
(That, admittedly, is probably a problem linux also has.)
But you're right, it does look like the problem is Plextor here.
You obviously didn't read any of that rant, did you?
There are things I said which are obviously wrong, but there is absolutely more to HD-DVD (versus DVD) than capacity and bandwidth. Maybe you were thinking of HD-DVD-ROM?
Well, that depends. Sanctuary, at least, will let me download it as many times as I want. I've seen other services where it's a limited number of downloads, but very few limit you to exactly one download.
That doesn't mean I'd be happy in the case of a crash, but I wouldn't be happy with decaying media, either. If the files are indeed available for download forever, that also means that they're immune to just about any kind of data loss, including my house exploding.
Generally I just want to hand someone something quickly and easily.
Yes, there's an advantage to that... I concede that point, at least until transcoding is no longer such a big deal. (Think mp3 audio.)
For now, well, my brother just "handed" me something relatively quickly and easily: I had a laptop at his house, so I grabbed some files off his network share. But they were on the order of 700 megs each, not 50 gigs.
But that's not the same as getting content from all over. And as I said, transmission times are just one part of the equation - that faster path will not help you obtain Sanctuary any faster.
Alright, what are the other parts of the equation, then?
Companies don't have to use AACS. I don't mind licensing fees going to people who actually provide something of value.
Well, people recently picked apart a rant I gave, so I'm trying to remember if this is accurate... But I think AACS is actually required by Blu-Ray. I know it's not required by HD-DVD.
As for "something of value", I don't consider the AACS to be something of value... The rest of it is actually more of an activism bit, in that there are other things Sony does which make me want to boycott them as entirely as I can.
As a customer I don't actually care how nice the menus or extra features are.
Just give me a button to click so the movie will start playing.
Well, hey, HD-DVD doesn't require DRM, and is region free. So eventually, you'll just be able to put the disc into your computer, open VLC, skip all the logos and antipiracy bullshit, and play the movie. (Well, skip the logos -- I haven't seen any antipiracy bullshit on HD-DVD yet.)
But honestly, that better audio/video part? Not noticeable. Or go try it for yourself and see...
Oh, by the way: I had exactly the same reaction you did when I started working there. I changed my mind when I started to notice features which actually help with that main bit, the desire to "just play the movie". Specifically, I was able to "bookmark" a scene, turn off the player and the TV, and go away, then come back, start it all back up again, and find my bookmark.
That is, not just the chapter -- when I resumed, it took me to the very second I left off.
How many bookmarks could it handle? That depends on their script, but figure 128 megs worth of custom XML. I figure I'll never fill that with bookmarks.
It's not Verizon, and it's certainly more than 25. I have downloaded torrents at some 3 or 4 megabytes per second, without interfering (that I know of) with anyone else's web browsing (certainly not my own).
First off. Did you use BBcode option to reply? It is rather nicely formatted, much nicer than the normal Italics stuff...
I used HTML. The style I use is <blockquote> for quoting and <p> tags for my own paragraphs.
Your original statement is not logical from where I stand. Do you say that there is only one approach to coming to a logical conclusion?
Depends what you mean by "approach". There are certainly often multiple, well-formed arguments which lead to the same conclusion. But a well-formed argument is not a logical one.
There are four personality types (depending on who you ask, but there we could go on forever on another topic altogether) and each one of them approaches a set problem in a certain manner that is logical to that personality type.
See, the thing about logic is that it's universal. There is no such thing as "is logical to that personality type" -- something is either logical or it isn't. It is the "mathematical" or "formal" approach, yes, but that is what "logical" is actually defined to mean.
Let me put it this way: Given the assumptions of basic algebra (and there are actually quite a lot of assumptions), 2+2=4. Given the assumptions of Euclidian geometry, the sum of the angles of a triangle are 180 degrees. These are theorums, which is to say that you cannot argue against them, because they are logical. Thus, the only way they are not true is if you change the assumptions -- in certain non-Euclidian geometry, for instance, the sum of the angles in a triangle can vary. (If that triangle is on the surface of a sphere, for instance.)
The reason I am interested in logical arguments is that I can actually make my own logical arguments against them, either by attacking their assumptions (implicit or not), or by showing a flaw in their reasoning. And furthermore, someone could actually convince me of God by making a logical argument, if they limit themselves to only assumptions I share.
She asks when something will be done, I say soon, she wants a set time. Oh some days...
See, I'm actually the same way, but that's more because I'm somewhat lazy, and I don't actually know how long things will take.
If you excuse me to be so bold, but read some work of Josh Mcdowell.
Any in particular you recommend? I'll try to find some...
Yes Jesus taught people to love their neighbor. He also taught that God is the highest authority on earth. He also taught that Christians would be persecuted for their faith. He told the apostles that they would die for their faith.
Even this could be disputed.
We know what he taught through people who wrote about it after his death, some hundreds of years after his death. That is what I mean by "revisionist history" -- even if you go back to the original Greek, there are some Gospels which are included, some which aren't; some don't agree with each other, even with the ones which were included; and as I said, some were written quite awhile after Christ's death.
The Bible has a lot of metaphor in it doesn't it. There are ways of determining what was metaphor, and what was not.
How so?
I ascribe to the Christian view, you would not, I can however say that if you are basing your argument here on say the Davinci Code you should really find a better source.
Nope. Haven't read it or seen the movie.
I'm actually basing this on somewhat vague memories of things like History Channel documentaries. I should check Wikipedia, but I'll let you do that if you want.
I won't go too far into that here, if you are interested in that you should go to http://godgab.org/ and check in the Christianity section.
Consider the options. "You take the punishment we are dishing out or we turn these photos over to the police. Which do you prefer?"
Between getting that choice and not getting that choice, I'd rather have the choice. It would also probably shut me up during that punishment, when I know, clearly, what the alternative is.
But consider a third alternative: Turn the photos over to the parents! Let them do some parenting for a change! (And there are a lot of photos that the police would ignore anyway.)
The school wants them to just not do these things in the first place.
That is not their job.
The job of the school is to educate. That's it. If a kid comes in drunk or stoned, it's going to affect his grades. If it's to the point where they absolutely reek of beer or weed, that's when you suspend them, call the police, etc, because then it becomes a problem for everyone around them.
I absolutely think kids should not be drinking. But if I was a school administrator, the farthest I'd really go is talk to them -- and be straight and honest about it. None of this "for your own good" bullshit -- if they really want to engage in self-destructive behavior, let 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so bad when they update themselves (Adobe, Java, Apple, etc).
But yes, having to visit the manufacturer's website is bad. That's why we have this concept of a "package manager" on Linux, and why we're still so confused that people think it's more complex to install and manage software on Linux than on other systems.
Actually, I lied, there are currently two package managers I have to keep track of: Debian (Ubuntu) Apt and Rubygems.
Still, it means that if I really want to, I can do this:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo gem updateThat will update everything except the Windows software that I have under Wine... Hell, I could add a couple of svn updates to that line, and it's even keep me up-to-date with everyone else in the office!
And what will update my video drivers?
Oh, whoops -- nvidia doesn't have ANY automatic update.
So yes, Microsoft Update is a start, but until it's just a generic Update feature which all apps can hook into, it's pretty useless for keeping the whole system up-to-date.
Or my server could be an updated firewall.
At the very least, you want to keep sshd up-to-date.
Plenty of updates speed things up. See Ruby.
Wow, your distro must suck.
Here's what I'd do:
See, I generally trust the updates, because I figure that if Adobe didn't screw me over the first time, they're not going to screw me over this time.
So, what I've done is, I leave the update notifications on, in case I forget, but I make a habit of, when I first boot, checking for updates. This means that I get to sit and drink coffee and slowly wake up in the rare case that a reboot is required.
The difference is, on Ubuntu, I push one button for it to update, and then I forget about it for the rest of the day. If I really wanted to, I could script that -- have everything handled by a cron job.
On Windows or OS X, there's probably at least five or ten things which try to auto-update (or at least ask permission), and another five or ten things which don't even try, but which it's generally a good idea to keep up to date. So I still make a habit of checking Windows Update, but there's also a dozen things I don't bother to check (partly because some won't even work; my video drivers are not likely to get any more updates, ever), and there's a dozen things that pop up and cheerfully inform me that I have a few hundred megs worth of, say, Java updates to download.
So yes, Windows needs a proper package manager. A package manager is more than updates, but it would be nice to have just one place to check for updates, or just one thing that nags me to update, and then not have to deal with it for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, with HD-DVD work on hold, I get to run Linux at work.
Well, your department, maybe not you personally. I have no idea what the office politics are like there, so I don't know what's actually stopping you from implementing best practices...
There's nothing magical about WSUS.
I don't know how easy the tools are, but you should be able to build and maintain your own repository for your distro of choice. Then just add a daily cron job to each machine, forcing it to update. If it's a desktop Linux machine, institute a policy that machines get shut down when you leave -- thus allowing you to upgrade the kernel.
So you're right, it has nothing to do with what OSes are being run. But you're wrong to blame the users here -- many of them (rightly) feel that this should not be their job. I get to admin my own machines where I work, so keeping them up-to-date is my job -- and also my responsibility; there's no IT department to blame if something goes wrong. But in an organization which does have an IT department, even if it's a one-man IT department, keeping the system up to date should be IT's job.
Are we talking about this keyboard? Because I'm fairly addicted to it now. I have big complaints, but I can't really go back to any other keyboard.
I'm faster on this keyboard than on just about any other I've used since my Powerbook keyboard. It doesn't take much force to press the keys, and they are low-profile, which makes it easy to slide fingers from one key to another (when typing fast enough for that to matter), but it does, in fact, give me good, solid tactile feedback. Despite typing lighter and faster than on really any other keyboard I've tried, it has a solid feeling that I can only describe as a "click" feel when a key actually goes down.
(Except, of course, there's not actually much sound. I'm much quieter on this thing than on my old keyboard.)
Which isn't to say that I love Apple for it. In fact, I dearly wish someone other than Apple had made this keyboard. It goes above and beyond previous Apple keyboards in bastardizations of common functions. I mean, obviously, there's the alt/super mixup (or option/command), which is what prompted me to start remapping it. But it goes farther.
Minor complaint: The F-keys are all shifted slightly to the left. I don't touch-type those, in general, but it is odd. And this was done to add an eject button, which nothing but OS X recognized out of the box. (Still haven't mapped that to anything.) The num pad is also minor, because I don't use it that much, but it is weird -- on a normal keyboard, plus takes up as much space as enter (it's double-sized, vertically). On mine, it's normal-sized, and just above enter. Minus, times, and slash have been moved clockwise to fill the space, and to make room for an equals key right next to "clear" (which is actually numlock).
I don't really see the need for an = key on the numpad. (And I'm not entirely sure what it's mapped to by default; I'll have to fix that.) But honestly, most calculator-type apps are going to let you hit "enter" (or "return") to find the result of an expression.
But these are really minor complaints, and they are kind of balanced by the coolness of having extra F-keys. Specifically, F16 through F19 where you would otherwise find LEDs on another keyboard.
Now, back to the complaints: No LEDs. Or rather, one: a Capslock LED, right on the key. But no numlock LEDs or scroll lock LEDs. This makes sense for Apple, I'm sure, as there isn't actually a key labeled with numlock or scroll lock. But on OSes other than OS X -- Linux in particular, which may not have numlock on by default -- it would be very nice to actually have an LED somewhere.
Now, the last keys that annoy me... Home, delete, end, pageup, and pagedown are all exactly where you'd expect them. Print screen, Scroll lock, and Pause are not, of course -- instead, there's F13, F14, and F15, but those are easy to remap.
But there is no insert key. And on Linux, I (used to) use the insert key quite a lot -- shift+insert is a common paste-to-terminal shortcut. And I don't mean that there's no key labeled "insert" -- the "clear" key, for instance, actually sends the NumLock keycode, and NumLock is the key I expect to find there, so all is well. But instead of insert, they have an fn key.
And it's a real fn key, just like on laptops, in that it's hardware-controlled. This means it's for turning F1-F12 into brightness controls, Expose, Dashboard, playback controls, and volume controls. (Or, if it's like my Powerbook, by default, the F-keys do all these things in OS X, and to make them actually send an F1 keycode to an application, you have to hold fn -- but this is customizable.) I don't mind having those available, but was there nowhere else they could've put an fn key? Was there nowhere they could've implemented this in software?
So, I actually have a completely un-mappable key on my keyboard, and it's pretty fairly useless. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to convince my OS to use those playback and volume controls, because t
My response to TFA:
Well, sure. And when someone comes to visit my house, I let them in. That doesn't mean I leave my door unlocked.
If people are actually my guests, I'll give them access. Otherwise (if they're outside in a car, say), they don't get access.
Not all coffee shops have free wireless networks. Technically open, but I remember Starbucks wanting to charge something for it. And it's a network you have to share with all the other potential spammers.
But think more like this: Any potential spammer could simply find a small, wifi-capable device with a nice battery, and drop it outside your house. They could simply wardrive around, dropping these things off... Alright, iPhones are not cheap enough, but you do see the point, right? And finish it up with a cup of coffee and a scone.
This is America. It's supposed to be that they have to prove your guilt. You don't have to prove anything, you're assumed innocent.
Indeed. But with closed wifi, you don't have to be as concerned about a desktop, which simply won't be on those other networks. (A laptop will.)
Not really. For a laptop, I generally lock things down tight, run Linux or OS X, precisely because it has to be secure. But I play games on my desktop, so I have to be able to boot Windows. Even if all major OSes are equally secure, I am much more knowledgeable about Linux security, so Linux is more secure for me.
That's how I'd set it up, actually. In fact, left entirely to myself, I'd set up an open wireless network, and I'd VPN back to some server behind the router (or some server which has a wireless card). The open network would have bandwidth limits and such, and I might occasionally play pranks like upside-down-ternet, or more malicious man-in-the-middle attacks.
Unfortunately, I'm not left entirely to myself, and the people I live with blamed my Linux router for several problems. I gave in and let them go back to the same old wireless router, which is the last thing between me and the Internet. I'm not really sure of a better way of securing it than crypto, in this case.
I'd have to find the article, but it does discuss all of these things. (Not RPM by name, but...)
I'm not advocating makefiles, just saying that the complaint of performance, in particular, isn't relevant.
(Oh, and you can always have different files -- include files and such. But including them is fundamentally different than a recursive make.)
If it is actually illegal, it is the job of the police. If it is immoral, it is the job of the parents.
So, someone who disagrees with you is "simply not thinking"? Sounds like they did a wonderful job preparing you for the real world...
And they are here to educate you. There are certainly other ways to prepare you for other things in your life than a lack of knowledge. For instance, if getting a job is the most important thing, an internship is going to teach you more that you need to know than a high school education will.
Except that their drinking does not directly affect you. The smell... Not as bad as secondhand smoke, but it does carry some of the effect.
But you see, you have to go out of your way to notice their drinking. You have to go out of your way to not notice their stinking.
And kids are capable of making their own decisions. They need guidance, certainly, but should you make the decision for them?
More importantly to you, however: Parents are capable of making their own decisions.
I do try to help people. But if they don't want to be helped, that is really, honestly not my problem.
I will absolutely tell them that what they are doing is dangerous. I'll tell them all the horrible ways that it will get them killed. If they're contemplating suicide, I will try to talk them out of it, and I will stay with them for as long as it takes -- and I have done this.
But I will not simply make their choice for them, especially if I am not their parent. (If I have children, I will have to think very, very carefully about what choices I get to make, and what choices I have to leave to them.)
Having someone choose for them teaches them nothing, and it solves nothing. If they're simply reckless, they'll just be reckless when they know you won't catch them. If they're suicidal, there are so many ways to kill yourself that if they're still alive (and not physically restrained), they were never going to go through with it anyway.
Let me close with one more thought. Not an argument, or an accusation, I just want you to think about it, and chew on it...
All sorts of things start this way. The Golden Shield Project, I'm sure, started with someone saying "Let's help people. Let's protect them from bad things."
It's worth mentioning that, at least in IRC, this is the preferred medium. It should work elsewhere, too, and there are scripts to assist in it.
Your point is valid, but I don't believe I should constrain the format of a language because it won't work in some mediums. Should I not include []-bracketed arrays because bbcode might hate them?
Ah, but if the whitespace gets screwed up in a python program, that's equivalent to the bracketing getting screwed up in a C-style program. So the difference is that broken whitespace is not the domain of a code beautifier in Python, anymore than brackets and parentheses are the domain of a code beautifier in just about any language.
Also, code beautifiers are still going to leave some things out of place, particularly comments which are spaced to match the code.
Alright, let me get this straight: Are these "public databases" exposed, in full? Are they simply every single vote, and who it was for?
If so, that kills your anonymity/secrecy. It now becomes possible for people to literally and directly buy votes, because they can make sure, when you come back out, that your vote was for the candidate they paid you to vote for.
I'll believe it when I see it. (Or specs, or a whitepaper, or an informal rant.)
Maybe so, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with the voting process.
Read this.
Read this. A relevant excerpt:
Look, we both agree on what the perfect, ideal goal is. I'm not really sure it's possible -- in fact, I'm reasonably sure it's not possible, and that we can only get some rough approximation of it. So, when I say "nice try", I actually mean that I'm glad you're trying, but I sincerely doubt you've come up with anything fundamentally different enough to work.
By that logic, any license other than public domain is about "political aims".
But look at the history of BSD, and you will see what these "political aims" can do to help the engineering ones. Specifically, it discourages fragmentation. It doesn't prevent it, obviously, but it stops the situation where a company will simply take BSD code, close it, slap the attribution on it and be done with it. If the company were to use GPL'd code instead, they would be forced to release their contributions back to the community (or not use that code).
I hope I don't have to spell it out for you completely, but having one open source project that's actively maintained is much better than having ten closed projects which do mostly the same thing, all with their advantages and disadvantages, and a completely stagnant open project.
So what?
Would you rather I release my code under some Shareware license, with a nag screen to Paypal me some cash every five minutes?
It's my code. If I'm donating my blood, sweat, and tears to a project, I think I should have some say in how it's used.
Possibly.
I wouldn't be, you know, happy about the situation, but I also wouldn't feel taken advantage of.
I am not bitching at TiVo. I'm just no longer donating code to them. If they want my code, they can hire me.
But you are missing a very crucial point here: It's not only that TiVo is implementing DRM. It's that they are using that DRM, among other things, to restrict access to the very code that is supposedly GPL'd. The intent of the GPL is that anyone can modify software they've purchased (or obtained for free), and TiVo does not allow that, even with GPL'd stuff. GPLv3 makes it so they can't do that anymore, at least with GPLv3 stuff.
In other words, if I wrote a cryptographic library, and you use it to implement DRM on movies, that's fair. I don't like it, but it's fair. But it really does seem unreasonable when I can't even patch my own library (that I wrote), on my own hardware (that I bought), and have it run. (All hypothetical -- I didn't write a cryptographic library.)
That's developer freedom. And I get that, I really do -- I do develop some commercial software, and the issue of licensing does come up a lot. And we're really happy when we can find BSD'd or public-domain stuff.
But "free software" is not about freedom of the software company. It is about freedom of the end-user.
And you're right, that's not what Open Source is about -- all Open Source is about is the ability to get source code. But that does not equal freedom, for either software company or end-user.
Intentional, but not dishonest. Go look up the definition if you're having trouble.
Yes, it's censorship. Active, intentional censorship. But the Chinese know they are being censored -- no one's pretending they're not. Censorship is many things, but it is not dishonest.
SEO technologies, on the other hand, work by deliberately attempting to mislead search engines.
Except, you know, OSes which don't allow raw access to the hard drive.
That depends on the system, but I tend to agree you, and I made the same point.
None of which tells me that it's a bad thing if everything isn't locked down, even if it's not locked down by default. I don't know enough about NT to know if it can be sufficiently locked down in this way. I do know Linux can.
Oh, and speaking of logs: What's your guarantee that log is still valid? On most machines, root access means freedom to modify the logs, the log daemon, and so on.
By the way, this technique does NOT work on all systems. I'm not entirely sure about the last time I tried it on Ubuntu, but on at least some systems, the initrd will also respond to init=foo, thus you'll get the initrd environment. That's not to say that you couldn't do similar damage from there (including running a root shell on the "real" system), I'm just stressing that there is no one way to attack all Linux systems.
/sbin/poweroff and such.
/sbin/init", and the system will have absolutely no clue that you changed anything.
Also, some of your stuff here is sloppy, on the systems for which it will work. "init 6" is not what you want -- you don't have init running at all at this point. What you want is to manually unmount, or "mount -o remount,ro", every filesystem, then sync, then either physically reboot or mess with
Or you can simply set everything back to the way you found it (mounted readonly and such), then "exec
Regardless, on anything, you just need physical access to the machine and sufficient time.
Not sure about Windows, but Linux will actually "install" the patch -- it just won't run it without rebooting.
The important feature here is that you can basically put your disk in a state where, if you were to cold boot right there, everything would already be installed the way it's supposed to be -- no weird tricks during an otherwise "normal" boot. When it says "done installing", it really means "done installing", and while you have to reboot for it to take effect, that is really just a reboot.
On Windows, maybe.
On Linux, it means the user has permission to read from the DVD drive.
If Windows sends what should be a "safe" command, and the driver/firmware interprets this command as a "rewrite firmware" command,That is possible, if, say, it was a "read" command, or maybe an "eject the disc" command.
More importantly, though, drivers should make a distinction between normal read/write access and firmware flashing. As a normal user, I should be able to send "commands", like eject, close, etc; I should be able to read; I should be able to write (burn); I should not be able to flash the firmware.
(That, admittedly, is probably a problem linux also has.)
But you're right, it does look like the problem is Plextor here.
You obviously didn't read any of that rant, did you?
There are things I said which are obviously wrong, but there is absolutely more to HD-DVD (versus DVD) than capacity and bandwidth. Maybe you were thinking of HD-DVD-ROM?
Well, that depends. Sanctuary, at least, will let me download it as many times as I want. I've seen other services where it's a limited number of downloads, but very few limit you to exactly one download.
That doesn't mean I'd be happy in the case of a crash, but I wouldn't be happy with decaying media, either. If the files are indeed available for download forever, that also means that they're immune to just about any kind of data loss, including my house exploding.
Yes, there's an advantage to that... I concede that point, at least until transcoding is no longer such a big deal. (Think mp3 audio.)
For now, well, my brother just "handed" me something relatively quickly and easily: I had a laptop at his house, so I grabbed some files off his network share. But they were on the order of 700 megs each, not 50 gigs.
Alright, what are the other parts of the equation, then?
Well, people recently picked apart a rant I gave, so I'm trying to remember if this is accurate... But I think AACS is actually required by Blu-Ray. I know it's not required by HD-DVD.
As for "something of value", I don't consider the AACS to be something of value... The rest of it is actually more of an activism bit, in that there are other things Sony does which make me want to boycott them as entirely as I can.
Well, hey, HD-DVD doesn't require DRM, and is region free. So eventually, you'll just be able to put the disc into your computer, open VLC, skip all the logos and antipiracy bullshit, and play the movie. (Well, skip the logos -- I haven't seen any antipiracy bullshit on HD-DVD yet.)
But honestly, that better audio/video part? Not noticeable. Or go try it for yourself and see...
Oh, by the way: I had exactly the same reaction you did when I started working there. I changed my mind when I started to notice features which actually help with that main bit, the desire to "just play the movie". Specifically, I was able to "bookmark" a scene, turn off the player and the TV, and go away, then come back, start it all back up again, and find my bookmark.
That is, not just the chapter -- when I resumed, it took me to the very second I left off.
How many bookmarks could it handle? That depends on their script, but figure 128 megs worth of custom XML. I figure I'll never fill that with bookmarks.
It's not Verizon, and it's certainly more than 25. I have downloaded torrents at some 3 or 4 megabytes per second, without interfering (that I know of) with anyone else's web browsing (certainly not my own).
Ah, found it: they also have gigabit services.
I used HTML. The style I use is <blockquote> for quoting and <p> tags for my own paragraphs.
Depends what you mean by "approach". There are certainly often multiple, well-formed arguments which lead to the same conclusion. But a well-formed argument is not a logical one.
See, the thing about logic is that it's universal. There is no such thing as "is logical to that personality type" -- something is either logical or it isn't. It is the "mathematical" or "formal" approach, yes, but that is what "logical" is actually defined to mean.
Let me put it this way: Given the assumptions of basic algebra (and there are actually quite a lot of assumptions), 2+2=4. Given the assumptions of Euclidian geometry, the sum of the angles of a triangle are 180 degrees. These are theorums, which is to say that you cannot argue against them, because they are logical. Thus, the only way they are not true is if you change the assumptions -- in certain non-Euclidian geometry, for instance, the sum of the angles in a triangle can vary. (If that triangle is on the surface of a sphere, for instance.)
The reason I am interested in logical arguments is that I can actually make my own logical arguments against them, either by attacking their assumptions (implicit or not), or by showing a flaw in their reasoning. And furthermore, someone could actually convince me of God by making a logical argument, if they limit themselves to only assumptions I share.
See, I'm actually the same way, but that's more because I'm somewhat lazy, and I don't actually know how long things will take.
Any in particular you recommend? I'll try to find some...
Even this could be disputed.
We know what he taught through people who wrote about it after his death, some hundreds of years after his death. That is what I mean by "revisionist history" -- even if you go back to the original Greek, there are some Gospels which are included, some which aren't; some don't agree with each other, even with the ones which were included; and as I said, some were written quite awhile after Christ's death.
How so?
Nope. Haven't read it or seen the movie.
I'm actually basing this on somewhat vague memories of things like History Channel documentaries. I should check Wikipedia, but I'll let you do that if you want.
Thanks. I've been
Between getting that choice and not getting that choice, I'd rather have the choice. It would also probably shut me up during that punishment, when I know, clearly, what the alternative is.
But consider a third alternative: Turn the photos over to the parents! Let them do some parenting for a change! (And there are a lot of photos that the police would ignore anyway.)
That is not their job.
The job of the school is to educate. That's it. If a kid comes in drunk or stoned, it's going to affect his grades. If it's to the point where they absolutely reek of beer or weed, that's when you suspend them, call the police, etc, because then it becomes a problem for everyone around them.
I absolutely think kids should not be drinking. But if I was a school administrator, the farthest I'd really go is talk to them -- and be straight and honest about it. None of this "for your own good" bullshit -- if they really want to engage in self-destructive behavior, let 'em.