The netatalk package, which provides Appletalk services (most commonly used servies are AFP, ie filesharing, and papd, the printing spooler), isn't compiled in with ANY encrypted password support. If you connect to a debian or debian-based appletalk fileserver, you get a warning you are transmitting your password in clear-text. Yes, we're jumping about 10 years BACKWARDS in security.
Why? Because the legal-circle-jerk that is the debian-legal mailing list, decided that it wasn't "legal" to link netatalk (a GPL project) to OpenSSL (license supposedly incompatible with GPL.) This doesn't stop every other distribution on the planet from compiling netatalk with openssl, and hence supporting encrypted passwords.
They politely suggested that GnuTLS, which isn't even remotely drop-in, be used instead. That was back in 2002...and the issue still hasn't been addressed. I filed a bug on it and the bug was simply ignored.
while I can appreciate the logic of the research, I imagine this only gives creedance to the theories that companies deliberately design viruses so that they can sell more of their latest security product. or system/OS upgrade
You mean like those trying to sell TPM / Trusted Computing?
Seems like a solution (TPM/TC) in search of a problem consumers/end-users can identify with ("VIRUSES VIRUSES VIRUSES!"), because "protecting our intellectual property" wasn't really ringing with end-users.
It's still an interesting idea, and good to start thinking about how to defeat it...but I suspect this is a back-handed way of selling TPM crap.
A start-up tries to break Cisco's lock on the $4 billion corporate router business.
Cisco's market share year to year over the last 5-6 years has bounced from a near-dominating 80% to as low as 50%...and it's swung that much in ONE year.
That must be some definition of "lock" I'm not familiar with...
And as time goes by, more manufacturing will be moved there.
Not so. A lot of Japanese companies have moved their facilities from China and other countries, BACK to Japan. Why? Because, quite frankly, you get what you pay for. Workers who are uneducated, untrained, unmotivated...don't make a good product. I'm sure there are great Chinese manufacturing companies, but US companies don't have any real tools to find them except by trial and error.
I remember talking to someone about tools. Snap-On makes their tools here in the US for the most part, with US metal. They also license their tools to AutoZone, which makes them in China using Chinese metal. I've yet to have a problem, but he said a town near him that lost manufacturing business to China regained it after binning (rejections) from metalurgy defects went from 25% to 75%.
The video stream will have DRM and IP protection to attempt to limit access to residents of the US
Raise your hand if you're:
Tired of the location Olympic games being picked based on a bribe-fest (with your tax dollars as the ante money)
Tired of your tax dollars going towards facilities that most often are never used again
Tired of being shown only the most 'marketable' events or not seeing them at all, because only one news source is granted "rights"
Tired of the drama
Tired of people who happen to be good at a particular sport getting acts of congress to instantly give them citizenship while hard-working, tax-paying greencarders have to wait years and pass exams
Tired of the olympic committee getting special legislation to protect its interests and giving it the ability to shut down businesses simply because they contain the word "olympic" in their title
Tired of the drug scandals and an IOC obviously looking the other way, like virtually every other major sports sanctioning body
Tired of "for the sport" or "for the joy of competition" having turned into "for the money", right down to the recent decision by the IOC to allow athletes to be paid endorsements and more
Used to be that when the olympics came on in the winter, we'd fire up the TV, make popcorn, and watch. We stopped watching right around the same time they started doing 10 minute long fluff pieces about athletes, instead of just showing us the damn competitions.
Is easy to do under Linux or Windows, so you can already do this without any fancy hardware.
Same with OSX; you can pick which interface to share, and what interfaces(multiple ones can be used) to share it with. I've done it before in hotels where we didn't all want to pay for high speed internet, so each night one of us 'bought' internet and shared it with everyone else.
Anyone else get the feeling the summary is major astroturf? Half expecting it to dice and do my taxes, from the sound of it.
...namely, the first generation 17" PB, which is sitting on my desk right now making a soft, irregular crackling noise. It used to be that loading an SSL webpage in Safari would make it squeal/squeak very loudly- people didn't believe me until I demonstrated it. The Apple Store geniuses shrugged and dismissively said, "And?"
It's the processor sleep/cycling; if I force it into "slow" CPU mode, the noise goes away. Very short bursts of heavy CPU will make it squeal and squeek; constant load over 30% or so makes it go away. It is pretty annoying- it's louder than the near-silent seagate 100GB drive I installed a year or so ago. Oh, and the variable speed fans? They're not variable speed, despite what every website, and the Apple "developer documentation" say. They're one speed- "on".
My MacBook is on order, and news of this noise issue pisses me off. I've never heard PC laptop make these kinds of noises. Ever.
"the jury's out on this one, I'm not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students"
No, the jury isn't "out on this one". That would imply there is evidence that WiFi causes any sort of health consequences- and further, that it is equal to evidence it does not. That's simply not the case.
People have been looking for this supposed cancer/mind-ray/whatever link to cell phones and other wireless devices. They still haven't found it. That doesn't say "the jury is out"- it says "research conducted thusfar has found no evidence."
It's like doing a study on whether there are little green moon men. Twenty research projects are conducted, scouring the moon with telescopes and satellites, and researchers say, "well, we haven't seen any green moon men." Then some nutjob comes along and says that "the jury is out on whether there are little green men on the moon!", simply because the researchers (like proper scientists) guardedly said "we didn't see any moon men", not "there are no moon men."
Some rat fuck middle management asscrack would probably write the group up for "unauthorized use of business resources" and start drawing up requests for department-wide layoffs.
I honestly can't figure out if you're serious or not. Probably doesn't help that you were modded insightful- now you seem to be moderated funny, but I suspect you were not trying to be...
What a bunch of crap. You're buying partially into the romanticization of historical inventors, and ignoring the fact that you only really hear about the people who were NOT shut down, the projects that were not abandoned because of penny pinchers, etc.
Talking about the "good old days" when inventors just picked money from trees, never had to justify research, didn't struggle against powermongering and corporate politics etc...is a bunch of pure, complete, uneducated, knee-jerk bullshit.
...every other optical telescope in the world nowadays.
It's not as prevalent anymore; CMOS is gaining considerable ground in a lot of different imaging fields.
Canon, for example, uses CMOS sensors in all its digital SLRs; noise, power consumption, speed of "reading" the sensor (I think), and dynamic range are all much better. CMOS's only real technical downside is that there is a non-sensor component next to every sensor well. However, CMOS sensors are harder/more expensive to come by. They also aren't available as readily with cooling devices; a cooled CCD will have lower noise levels than a non-cooled CMOS sensor.
Canon did release a special version of the 20D for astrophotographers called the 20Da, with no IR filter...never heard how popular it was...
This story was originally covered by the Boston Globe on the 16th of Feburary. Welcome to last week, guys.
The most disturbing part of the email was her princess tone. The attitude is just...incredible. It's like she lives in a whole other reality:
''The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living."
She said she ultimately decided not to take the job because the reduced salary ''might have been realistic for other people to survive on, but I like nicer things. I like the finer things in life."
In China journalists brave jail and execution for independence.
Li didn't seem all that worried about either, to be honest. I think you're romanticizing things a tad.
In America journalists are afraid to ask politicians questions about their crimes.
So, which is more insideous? The blatant "don't go against the groupthink, or we'll kill you"?
Or, the subtle "don't go against the groupthink, because we give nothing useful in a public press conference, and you won't be given the good stuff anymore like your colleagues. You'll be labelled a 'biased liberal', and because nobody in the administration will speak to you, you'll be unemployable"?
Study the White House press core situation, and tell me that isn't censorship in full force. The press secretary refutes any serious question with almost every trick in the logical-fallacy handbook. Unless you play along, you don't get the "government official, speaking on condition of anonymity" or "after the press conference, Scott McClellan said privately..." tidbits. Remember the days when presidents would be the ones speaking at a press conference, not a guy who keeps saying, "The President feels..."?
I recall reading recently how the WH press core got all bent out of shape about getting the news late about Cheney's little shooting incident. Where was the outrage over something that matters, like domestic spying? And if they were truly so angry, why didn't they just all get up and leave?
The White House press core are like crack whores. They rely on yet despise their pimps, occasionally developing some backbone or attitude. But at the end of the day, they're still just puppet addicts.
CNET: "Abe Usher, a 10-year veteran of the security industry, created an application that runs on an iPod and can search corporate networks for files likely to contain business-critical data."
Actual article: "I've created an application (slurp.exe) that demonstrates this concept. When the program is run from an iPod, it can very quickly copy data files off of a PC and on to an iPod."
Am I reading it correctly that CNet doesn't understand the difference between launching an executeable stored on an external media device, and somehow running it "on" the media device? Am I the only one who thinks Mr. Usher could have been clearer, but intentionally wasn't? Or that both are playing it as "plug an ipod in, instantly hack a machine", like in the movies where magical devices "hack" systems?
It's sensationalist bullshit- all admins would need to do is set up windows to not permit mounting removeable media drives/USB mass storage devices. Or control what executables are permitted to be launched. I'm sure an expert Windows sysadmin could name half a dozen MORE system/domain level ways to stop this dead in its tracks. It strikes me as a distinct non-issue for any company with a properly managed/secured windows network. But hey, that doesn't stop CNet from crying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
"Security consultant releases overblown vulnerability with a confusing and/or misleading description to generate hits to his website, more at 11"...
After comparing an upgrade to this with MS Exchange and OSS solutions I recommended a Linux-PC based solution with either Open Xchange or Open Groupware.
OpenGroupware is still in beta; has been for years. The Outlook and Palm plugins for Open Xchange are commercial.
Also, I'm a Linux sysadmin, and unless the company building the linux box really knows what they're doing, you can't really treat it like an appliance. Additionally, both projects on their own strike me as immature (ie some monitoring and such would be a great idea).
Someone hit that guy over the head with a copy of 1984
Where do you think he got his ideas from? Seriously. Most people read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, and are either frightened, or mildly disturbed ("That'd never happen. People would be outraged!")
People like him read 1984 and think, "I wouldn't use those cameras like that...", missing the point completely.
Police these days are so far removed from reality, it's not even funny. I recently read an article about police stepping up speeding enforcement on "the most deadly road" in a particular county in (I believe) Ohio. The officers bragged about writing 40+ speeding tickets in two hours, using a LIDAR gun ($2k-$4k each, often paid for by Geico), one officer clocking vehicles, and 4-5 motorcycle units pulling people over. They talked about how they really want to get one patrol car to spend one day each week sitting out pulling over speeders, and they were makin' the roads safe.
Except the reason that the highway is so deadly is because it's a single lane highway with nothing but a double yellow line between you and oncoming traffic; the fatalities are from head-on collisions.
So instead of patrolling the road and pulling over anyone who tries to pass on a double-yellow, they write speeding tickets, making more people drive EXACTLY the speed limit, which is only bound to result in more idiots trying to pass the "law abiding" "safer" drivers. Not to mention, they're pulling people over on a single-lane highway, where all those flashing lights and whatnot are a major distraction.
Saved in my permanent archive of text bits for just such an occasion as this, is a post to Slashdot a couple months ago. Disclaimer: It's NOT written by me. Also, you can see the three lines or so were quoted as part of the thread.
Bonus goodie points to the person who actually names the logical fallacy behind "if you have nothing to hide" etc. If possible, please include a link. More people need to know how to intelligently refute arguments such as these.
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
I wrote about this a while ago. Here's the text:
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Ever heard that one? I work in information security, so I have heard it more than my fair share. I've always hated that reasoning, because I am a little bit paranoid by nature, something which serves me very well in my profession. So my standard response to people who have asked that question near me has been "because I'm paranoid." But that doesn't usually help, since most people who would ask that question see paranoia as a bad thing to begin with. So for a long time I've been trying to come up with a valid, reasoned, and intelligent answer which shoots the holes in the flawed logic that need to be there.
And someone unknowingly provided me with just that answer today. In a conversation about hunting, somebody posted this about prey animals and hunters: "Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!" but in a brilliant (and very funny) retort, someone else said: "If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
Suddenly it made sense, that nagging thing in the back of my head. The logical reason why a reasonable dose of paranoia is healthy. Because it's one thing to be afraid of the TRUTH. People who commit murder or otherwise deprive others of their Natural Rights are afraid of the TRUTH, because it is the light of TRUTH that will help bring them to justice.
But it's another thing entirely to be afraid of hunters. And all too often, the hunters are the ones proclaiming to be looking for TRUTH. But they are more concerned with removing any obstactles to finding the TRUTH, even when that means bulldozing over people's rights (the right to privacy, the right to anonymity) in their quest for it. And sadly, these people often cannot tell the difference between the appearance of TRUTH and TRUTH itself. And these, the ones who are so convinced they have found the TRUTH that they stop looking for it, are some of the worst oppressors of Natural Rights the world has ever known.
They are the hunters, and it is right and good for the prey to be afraid of the hunters, and to run away from them. Do not be fooled when a hunter says "why are you running from me if you have nothing to hide?" Because having something to hide is not the only reason to be hiding something.
Apple's standard warranty is one year, not one month. This makes me believe that you're trolling.
Sample of Apple customer policies/problems I've run into:
After 90 days, no telephone support. If you post into the web forums about a problem Apple doesn't like to "discuss", expect it to be silently removed.
As a friend discovered, Apple's return policy is 14 days AFTER DATE OF SHIPMENT, not DATE OF RECIEPT, despite this being VERY clearly outlined on their store policies page. Her iBook took 7 days to arrive via UPS ground, and 4 days later called Apple to return it. No go. I even found the URL of the webpage on the store.apple.com website which reads "from date of reciept", and they refused to adhere to it. Slimy doesn't begin to cover it.
You know that friendly bit about upgrading existing orders? Guess why she wanted to return her iBook? Answer: they started shipping iBooks with better processors and GPUs (or more VRAM, I forget) while her iBook was in transit. Her order certainly wasn't held or upgraded for free.
The display on my $3k, 17-inch powerbook was very wobbly 9 months in, so I took it to the store. "Huh", says the genius. Walks over to the display model, which has been on the floor for over a year (and shows it.) That's 12 hours a day of geting wobbled, poked, prodded...whereas mine sat mostly on my desk and was closed+opened once a day on average. "Ours does the same thing. It's normal." Uh...what? So, I took it home, popped it open, tightened the bolts for the clutch mounts, and problem solved. Jerks.
No reserving a spot via the web for the 'genius bar' unless you're a ProCare customer. At the local Apple store, that typically means a 30+ minute wait, and there's nowhere to sit.
Various parts are not "covered" by Apple. For example- the "duckbill" on the power adapters for powerbooks? Not covered. Mind you, it doesn't SAY this anywhere in the warranty. A $3k laptop, and they wanted $30 to replace the thing. The rubber feet were "covered", but I had to wait for fifteen minutes for the paperwork to be filled out.
Parts are not available. Period. End of discussion. Unless you're an authorized reseller, which has a laundry list of requirements. The only parts you can find on the web are almost always used- ripped out of machines bought on ebay or whatnot by parts recyclers, who charge virtually the same price for used parts as Apple charges you if you ship your unit to Texas.
There's only one place to get your Powerbook repaired. Not the local store, nope! Has to go to Texas. And if it's not under warranty, you get charged a $200+ "diagnostic" fee. What the fuck? At a place I worked at, our Dell Latitudes had on-site-next-day service included. Nice guy showed up, took him 20 minutes to swap the entire motherboard (bad mouse buttons, which are on the motherboard, doh!). A signature, shake of the hand, and 30 minutes later we had a working laptop.
If you go through Apple's technician training program, you loose all access to their internal support database (not a thing to submit cases- a knowledgebase for "cool people") after a couple months, and you can't order parts period, unless you work for an Apple authorized reseller. It is essentially impossible to be an independent technician.
I won't even begin to get into the illegal price fixing and racketeering against independent dealers.
Actually I don't think so. Artificially causing spikes in oil price just causes more people to seek other energy sources, causing demand for oil to decrease.
Did you notice that most of the alternative energy technology is in the hands of companies which are ultimately owned by oil companies?
BP Solar is one excellent example. We're Eco Friendly advertisements, check. Dog and pony show, check. Diversification with continued monopoloy on the energy market for when oil dries up, check.
In 50 years, you're going to be at the BP/Esso/Exxon/Shell/Hess/Whatever "electric stations" having the battery pack in your car charged (or swapped- I remember Discover 10-15 years ago had a story about stations exchanging charged packs for uncharged packs). Grumbling about the battery exchange tax. The $/kW rate. How solar panels cost $10k for 120W. How you're prevented from charging your car at home for "safety" reasons.
As for the dog and pony show, you're seeing it already with hybrid SUVs and such. Jeremy Clarkson hit it best. "Look at it. It's just a regular transit van, with a bunch of decals slapped on it. Mercedes comes out of a meeting with the prime minister and whispers to BMW: 'talk a lot about hydrogen and electric. Big gasolene engines BAD!'"
if (home=single_family_dwelling AND new_appraisal >= current_appraisal *1.30) then
Except that a huge number of friends and coworker's houses came close to doubling in value since their last appraisal. Problems aren't as simple as you think they are, and your snap judgement on this shows you've never worked with a dataset that is naturally diverse, or of sufficient size. It is quite possible to have a county with a home that doubles in value even if other values don't go up or drop- for example, a major addition could be made.
You can't fix problems like these technically; you need to keep the data entry error from happening in the first place.
Ie, institute policies to help employees avoid mistakes, and if they get lazy/sloppy...policies to punish them for repeated failures.
Really now, don't you know that what you do at work WITH COMPANY RESOURCES is up to the (shock) COMPANY?
Yep. It's like my parents and I when I was in high school:
Mom: "Okay, what car are you taking?"
Me: "My car."
Dad: *COUGHAHEM*
Me: "The car which I am permitted to use."
Dad: "Have fun!"
I see it all the time- employees get very posessive about their computers. The word "my" is thrown around very casually, they get attached to them, etc. Hell, I worked at places where people (almost exclusively sales staff) would take laptops with them when let go, and they'd act REALLY pissed when we called them and asked for them back. Some we had to literally harass the CRAP out of, to get machines returned- and when they were, they'd invariably be damaged, usually the keyboard and mouse/trackpad buttons; it was clear they whacked the shit out of it with a shoe or something just to piss us off.*
It's equipment. Capital. I don't see a machine shop operator getting pissed when he's fired and he can't take the mill home with him...
*I've also had to lock sales people out of databases WHILE they were getting "The Talk", because in the past, every single one of their predecessors had immediately logged in to the customer database from home and dumped it... un frigging believeable. Never had more trouble with terminated/let go employees than with sales dweebs/bimbos. ZERO morals, which I'd like to think was part of the reason they were fired.
This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal.
This is the story of my life in Eve Online.
This is a story about a COMPUTER GAME. Jesus christ.
You definitely would NOT mention it to the press if you wanted to get published in a top journal like Nature, Science, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They have strict restrictions against talking to the press before the work is accepted and published. If you feel like ignoring these restrictions, then these journals can and will yank your paper.
I read their reasoning behind why they do what they do- except that it's all pretty trivial nonsense.
You don't revoke "membership" to your clubhouse except to punish people (and they're equally willing to punish authors as well as journalists), and you don't hold people to terms like theirs unless you're interested in protecting your marketshare as the news-bringer.
Slashdot Mirror
The netatalk package, which provides Appletalk services (most commonly used servies are AFP, ie filesharing, and papd, the printing spooler), isn't compiled in with ANY encrypted password support. If you connect to a debian or debian-based appletalk fileserver, you get a warning you are transmitting your password in clear-text. Yes, we're jumping about 10 years BACKWARDS in security.
Why? Because the legal-circle-jerk that is the debian-legal mailing list, decided that it wasn't "legal" to link netatalk (a GPL project) to OpenSSL (license supposedly incompatible with GPL.) This doesn't stop every other distribution on the planet from compiling netatalk with openssl, and hence supporting encrypted passwords.
They politely suggested that GnuTLS, which isn't even remotely drop-in, be used instead. That was back in 2002...and the issue still hasn't been addressed. I filed a bug on it and the bug was simply ignored.
You mean like those trying to sell TPM / Trusted Computing?
Seems like a solution (TPM/TC) in search of a problem consumers/end-users can identify with ("VIRUSES VIRUSES VIRUSES!"), because "protecting our intellectual property" wasn't really ringing with end-users.
It's still an interesting idea, and good to start thinking about how to defeat it...but I suspect this is a back-handed way of selling TPM crap.
Cisco's market share year to year over the last 5-6 years has bounced from a near-dominating 80% to as low as 50%...and it's swung that much in ONE year.
That must be some definition of "lock" I'm not familiar with...
Not so. A lot of Japanese companies have moved their facilities from China and other countries, BACK to Japan. Why? Because, quite frankly, you get what you pay for. Workers who are uneducated, untrained, unmotivated...don't make a good product. I'm sure there are great Chinese manufacturing companies, but US companies don't have any real tools to find them except by trial and error.
I remember talking to someone about tools. Snap-On makes their tools here in the US for the most part, with US metal. They also license their tools to AutoZone, which makes them in China using Chinese metal. I've yet to have a problem, but he said a town near him that lost manufacturing business to China regained it after binning (rejections) from metalurgy defects went from 25% to 75%.
"Deleted, article has no point."
"Reinstated. Of course it has a point" (flame war on 1_millionth_article:Talk omitted)
the fucking one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia.
"Removed vandalism"
the one-millionth article was created in Wikipedia.
"Corrected grammatical errors."
the one-millionth article was created in the English-language Wikipedia.
"It was right the first time, moron."
GOOD DAY I AM UZU UMBAMBE, I HAVE A SPECIAL OFFER FOR ALL WICIPEBA USERS. PLEASE SEND $500 TO ME AT...
"Motion to consider the possibility of blocking this user for possible violation of the Wikipedia Organization's policy on commercial advertising."
"Moved to subcommittee."
Raise your hand if you're:
The list goes on...and don't get me started about the sex-fests that go on in the olympic "village"; ever wonder why the media isn't allowed in? It's for "privacy" all right...
Used to be that when the olympics came on in the winter, we'd fire up the TV, make popcorn, and watch. We stopped watching right around the same time they started doing 10 minute long fluff pieces about athletes, instead of just showing us the damn competitions.
You can play it on other computers in your house via iTunes music sharing; up to three simultaneously, if I remember correctly?
I'm not positive, but I think you could probably get iTunes running under WINE to play stuff on your linux system.
Same with OSX; you can pick which interface to share, and what interfaces(multiple ones can be used) to share it with. I've done it before in hotels where we didn't all want to pay for high speed internet, so each night one of us 'bought' internet and shared it with everyone else.
Anyone else get the feeling the summary is major astroturf? Half expecting it to dice and do my taxes, from the sound of it.
It's the processor sleep/cycling; if I force it into "slow" CPU mode, the noise goes away. Very short bursts of heavy CPU will make it squeal and squeek; constant load over 30% or so makes it go away. It is pretty annoying- it's louder than the near-silent seagate 100GB drive I installed a year or so ago. Oh, and the variable speed fans? They're not variable speed, despite what every website, and the Apple "developer documentation" say. They're one speed- "on".
My MacBook is on order, and news of this noise issue pisses me off. I've never heard PC laptop make these kinds of noises. Ever.
But you wouldn't be able to run World of Warcraft on it...
No, the jury isn't "out on this one". That would imply there is evidence that WiFi causes any sort of health consequences- and further, that it is equal to evidence it does not. That's simply not the case.
People have been looking for this supposed cancer/mind-ray/whatever link to cell phones and other wireless devices. They still haven't found it. That doesn't say "the jury is out"- it says "research conducted thusfar has found no evidence."
It's like doing a study on whether there are little green moon men. Twenty research projects are conducted, scouring the moon with telescopes and satellites, and researchers say, "well, we haven't seen any green moon men." Then some nutjob comes along and says that "the jury is out on whether there are little green men on the moon!", simply because the researchers (like proper scientists) guardedly said "we didn't see any moon men", not "there are no moon men."
I honestly can't figure out if you're serious or not. Probably doesn't help that you were modded insightful- now you seem to be moderated funny, but I suspect you were not trying to be...
What a bunch of crap. You're buying partially into the romanticization of historical inventors, and ignoring the fact that you only really hear about the people who were NOT shut down, the projects that were not abandoned because of penny pinchers, etc.
Talking about the "good old days" when inventors just picked money from trees, never had to justify research, didn't struggle against powermongering and corporate politics etc...is a bunch of pure, complete, uneducated, knee-jerk bullshit.
It's not as prevalent anymore; CMOS is gaining considerable ground in a lot of different imaging fields.
Canon, for example, uses CMOS sensors in all its digital SLRs; noise, power consumption, speed of "reading" the sensor (I think), and dynamic range are all much better. CMOS's only real technical downside is that there is a non-sensor component next to every sensor well. However, CMOS sensors are harder/more expensive to come by. They also aren't available as readily with cooling devices; a cooled CCD will have lower noise levels than a non-cooled CMOS sensor.
Canon did release a special version of the 20D for astrophotographers called the 20Da, with no IR filter...never heard how popular it was...
The most disturbing part of the email was her princess tone. The attitude is just...incredible. It's like she lives in a whole other reality:
''The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living."
She said she ultimately decided not to take the job because the reduced salary ''might have been realistic for other people to survive on, but I like nicer things. I like the finer things in life."
Wow. Just....wow.
Li didn't seem all that worried about either, to be honest. I think you're romanticizing things a tad.
In America journalists are afraid to ask politicians questions about their crimes.
So, which is more insideous? The blatant "don't go against the groupthink, or we'll kill you"?
Or, the subtle "don't go against the groupthink, because we give nothing useful in a public press conference, and you won't be given the good stuff anymore like your colleagues. You'll be labelled a 'biased liberal', and because nobody in the administration will speak to you, you'll be unemployable"?
Study the White House press core situation, and tell me that isn't censorship in full force. The press secretary refutes any serious question with almost every trick in the logical-fallacy handbook. Unless you play along, you don't get the "government official, speaking on condition of anonymity" or "after the press conference, Scott McClellan said privately..." tidbits. Remember the days when presidents would be the ones speaking at a press conference, not a guy who keeps saying, "The President feels..."?
I recall reading recently how the WH press core got all bent out of shape about getting the news late about Cheney's little shooting incident. Where was the outrage over something that matters, like domestic spying? And if they were truly so angry, why didn't they just all get up and leave?
The White House press core are like crack whores. They rely on yet despise their pimps, occasionally developing some backbone or attitude. But at the end of the day, they're still just puppet addicts.
CNET: "Abe Usher, a 10-year veteran of the security industry, created an application that runs on an iPod and can search corporate networks for files likely to contain business-critical data."
Actual article: "I've created an application (slurp.exe) that demonstrates this concept. When the program is run from an iPod, it can very quickly copy data files off of a PC and on to an iPod."
Am I reading it correctly that CNet doesn't understand the difference between launching an executeable stored on an external media device, and somehow running it "on" the media device? Am I the only one who thinks Mr. Usher could have been clearer, but intentionally wasn't? Or that both are playing it as "plug an ipod in, instantly hack a machine", like in the movies where magical devices "hack" systems?
It's sensationalist bullshit- all admins would need to do is set up windows to not permit mounting removeable media drives/USB mass storage devices. Or control what executables are permitted to be launched. I'm sure an expert Windows sysadmin could name half a dozen MORE system/domain level ways to stop this dead in its tracks. It strikes me as a distinct non-issue for any company with a properly managed/secured windows network. But hey, that doesn't stop CNet from crying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
"Security consultant releases overblown vulnerability with a confusing and/or misleading description to generate hits to his website, more at 11"...
OpenGroupware is still in beta; has been for years. The Outlook and Palm plugins for Open Xchange are commercial.
Also, I'm a Linux sysadmin, and unless the company building the linux box really knows what they're doing, you can't really treat it like an appliance. Additionally, both projects on their own strike me as immature (ie some monitoring and such would be a great idea).
Where do you think he got his ideas from? Seriously. Most people read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, and are either frightened, or mildly disturbed ("That'd never happen. People would be outraged!")
People like him read 1984 and think, "I wouldn't use those cameras like that...", missing the point completely.
Police these days are so far removed from reality, it's not even funny. I recently read an article about police stepping up speeding enforcement on "the most deadly road" in a particular county in (I believe) Ohio. The officers bragged about writing 40+ speeding tickets in two hours, using a LIDAR gun ($2k-$4k each, often paid for by Geico), one officer clocking vehicles, and 4-5 motorcycle units pulling people over. They talked about how they really want to get one patrol car to spend one day each week sitting out pulling over speeders, and they were makin' the roads safe.
Except the reason that the highway is so deadly is because it's a single lane highway with nothing but a double yellow line between you and oncoming traffic; the fatalities are from head-on collisions.
So instead of patrolling the road and pulling over anyone who tries to pass on a double-yellow, they write speeding tickets, making more people drive EXACTLY the speed limit, which is only bound to result in more idiots trying to pass the "law abiding" "safer" drivers. Not to mention, they're pulling people over on a single-lane highway, where all those flashing lights and whatnot are a major distraction.
Way to go, guys!
Bonus goodie points to the person who actually names the logical fallacy behind "if you have nothing to hide" etc. If possible, please include a link. More people need to know how to intelligently refute arguments such as these.
Sample of Apple customer policies/problems I've run into:
I won't even begin to get into the illegal price fixing and racketeering against independent dealers.
Did you notice that most of the alternative energy technology is in the hands of companies which are ultimately owned by oil companies?
BP Solar is one excellent example. We're Eco Friendly advertisements, check. Dog and pony show, check. Diversification with continued monopoloy on the energy market for when oil dries up, check.
In 50 years, you're going to be at the BP/Esso/Exxon/Shell/Hess/Whatever "electric stations" having the battery pack in your car charged (or swapped- I remember Discover 10-15 years ago had a story about stations exchanging charged packs for uncharged packs). Grumbling about the battery exchange tax. The $/kW rate. How solar panels cost $10k for 120W. How you're prevented from charging your car at home for "safety" reasons.
As for the dog and pony show, you're seeing it already with hybrid SUVs and such. Jeremy Clarkson hit it best. "Look at it. It's just a regular transit van, with a bunch of decals slapped on it. Mercedes comes out of a meeting with the prime minister and whispers to BMW: 'talk a lot about hydrogen and electric. Big gasolene engines BAD!'"
Except that a huge number of friends and coworker's houses came close to doubling in value since their last appraisal. Problems aren't as simple as you think they are, and your snap judgement on this shows you've never worked with a dataset that is naturally diverse, or of sufficient size. It is quite possible to have a county with a home that doubles in value even if other values don't go up or drop- for example, a major addition could be made.
You can't fix problems like these technically; you need to keep the data entry error from happening in the first place.
Ie, institute policies to help employees avoid mistakes, and if they get lazy/sloppy...policies to punish them for repeated failures.
Yep. It's like my parents and I when I was in high school:
Mom: "Okay, what car are you taking?"
Me: "My car."
Dad: *COUGHAHEM*
Me: "The car which I am permitted to use."
Dad: "Have fun!"
I see it all the time- employees get very posessive about their computers. The word "my" is thrown around very casually, they get attached to them, etc. Hell, I worked at places where people (almost exclusively sales staff) would take laptops with them when let go, and they'd act REALLY pissed when we called them and asked for them back. Some we had to literally harass the CRAP out of, to get machines returned- and when they were, they'd invariably be damaged, usually the keyboard and mouse/trackpad buttons; it was clear they whacked the shit out of it with a shoe or something just to piss us off.*
It's equipment. Capital. I don't see a machine shop operator getting pissed when he's fired and he can't take the mill home with him...
*I've also had to lock sales people out of databases WHILE they were getting "The Talk", because in the past, every single one of their predecessors had immediately logged in to the customer database from home and dumped it... un frigging believeable. Never had more trouble with terminated/let go employees than with sales dweebs/bimbos. ZERO morals, which I'd like to think was part of the reason they were fired.
This is a story about a COMPUTER GAME. Jesus christ.
I read their reasoning behind why they do what they do- except that it's all pretty trivial nonsense.
You don't revoke "membership" to your clubhouse except to punish people (and they're equally willing to punish authors as well as journalists), and you don't hold people to terms like theirs unless you're interested in protecting your marketshare as the news-bringer.