Well, not exactly. MSFT's "ecosystem" used to give end users more choices than Apple's walled garden. In my personal experience, it appears that MSFT has decided to limit the choices and start imposing their corporate will.
I'm on Win7 Pro. I have now uninstalled KB3035583 three or four times. I had my Windows update preferences set to download but let me decide, but several months ago, it stopped letting me decide and just installed what it wanted at boot time. Now I have changed my preferences to let me know when there are updates and let me download and install when I want. Somehow, I doubt that it's going to do what I want.
I have no opinion about Win10, but in the past I have always migrated to new operating systems at the same time as I bought a new machine. Win7 works just fine for me at the moment, so why should I run the risk that some of my older applications are going to break by installing a new OS? More than that--the last two times I bought a new machine, I went out of my way to install an older, more stable OS: XP when Vista was about a year old, and Win7 when Win8 was already predominant in new sales. I spared myself lots of grief that way. I may decide I want Win10 someday, but if Msft chooses to shove it down my throat, I will (reluctantly, as long time Windows user) tell them where they can shove it.
Taking them down seems like a futile approach, as they'll only reappear with a different identity. Clever trolling would be more effective--poison the well instead. Problem is, to be effective requires considerable language skills and cultural expertise, which one wouldn't necessarily expect from a hacker community.
TFA doesn't say. The software (including Win 3.1) may still be doing just what it always did correctly, which might explain why it hasn't been replaced.
I don't understand why brute force attacks can't be stopped by limiting the number of failed attempts on any given account name and password. After x failures on either, don't accept another attempt for y minutes. It can't just be stupidity, so what am I missing?
Yes, I believe you've hit upon the key problem with all this. Leaving aside all the daunting difficulty is making a true copy, the result would only benefit your survivors, not you. Now that's no small accomplishment, but it most certainly falls short of immortality.
Another element that is frequently overlooked is that our brains are embedded in our bodies. Proprioception depends on all the real-time feedback from the stuff that's outside the brain. So without simulating the rest of us as well, the uploaded copy might have consciousness but it wouldn't feel or act like we do in the slightest. Even your survivors wouldn't be fooled for long.
They sent me a heads up email with a link to the new policy. So they're being up front about it. That said, I don't care for it. I've used their free version for probably close to 10 years, but I'll be looking for a replacement soon. Avast? Microsoft Essentials? Dunno. In all that time, I think AVG gave me one false positive and once it failed to warn me of something that I could immediately see was suspicious. Not a single true positive, IIRC. My sense is that the threats these days are much more sophisticated than the AV software supposedly keeping us safe. AV software has become like the life vests under the seat in airplanes. There's a remote chance that it will save you some day, but that's about it. Safe practices in browsing and email are probably orders of magnitude more important.
I used MUMPS (and MIIS) extensively while working in healthcare in the 80s and 90s. It was an efficient programming and database environment for mini-computers which combined a hierarchical database and interpreted language with sparse arrays and extensive pattern-matching capabilities baked in. It was widely used in hospitals for clinical operations and that legacy is still present in healthcare. The language itself would scare the shit out of anybody using modern technologies (self-modifying code, anyone?), but used with discipline it ran many applications that were literally a matter of life or death for patients. Some variants (MIIS, DEC) were also stand-alone operating systems running on the bare metal. It gave you lots of bang for the buck, even if the code itself looked like a printer test.
There used to be a small but active community of vendors and users. Today, there is one large player, Epic Systems, which dominates the applications market, especially in the electronic medical records area. They use Intersystems MUMPS (now known as M) as the underlying language; it has an extensive application building environment on top of the basic language to provide relational, Web and object-oriented abstractions. You can build applications in this environment without ever touching MUMPS code, though commercial applications will generally drop down into MUMPS for special purpose routines.
Then, I change it back to whatever. It's obnoxious behavior, but hardly the end of civilization as we know it. Move along, there are bigger fish to fry.
Well, maybe. What I know is that I don't see much spam even in my spam folder, which does suggest that Gmail may be blowing a lot of stuff away before I have any chance to see it. OTOH, I don't ever recall a case of learning later that something legitimate had been deleted instead of put into my spam folder, and the number of false positives there is tiny. My overall impression is that their filtering system is very effective. I haven't seen a true spam message in my inbox for years and don't even think of it as a problem anymore.
My first reaction was that it was like OJ Simpson offering a reward to find the real killer. But then I took off my snarky goggles and on reflection, I realized that given government, corporate and media interests and manipulation there's no way in hell we'll ever know the truth. Sad but true, I'm afraid.
I don't think any software vendor should be required to support software forever, but there is a difference between withdrawing support and disabling a product without ample prior warning. They blew the rollout, but it looks like they're going to make amends, at least for the Leopard crowd. Hopefully, they'll learn a thing or two about the value of good corporate communication as well.
For me personally, you're quite right, though I'm on CS5 and will stay there for the foreseeable future. I'm an amateur photographer and have no need to keep up with the latest and greatest effects for graphic artists. There are a lot of Adobe customers like me, and many of us preferred the old model, where we could pay to upgrade when the new features seemed worth it. The new model makes sense for companies and design pros who (think they) always need the latest. They probably will save money. I'm not interested in the lock-in the new model imposes.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work. The software runs locally. It would actually be a step forward if, say, they came up with some killer algorithms that require super-computer power to run and gave subscribers access to those cycles in the cloud. But currently, the cloud is mainly used for license validation (periodically) and software updates.
Adobe is leaving money on the table by not accommodating the customers who used to go for every other or every third update. I expect that within a couple of years they will realize this and come up with some sort of hybrid subscription/perpetual license scheme.
While it's not a news site, among other things it provides thoughtful analysis of current affairs and cultural trends. Some of it is available for free, but subscribing gives you access to all content, current and past. It's not light reading, but Vishnu knows we have more than enough of that the Web.
"And yes, until it broke, I loved the fingerprint sensor on my laptop."
My old Thinkpad T61 had a fingerprint reader, which worked maybe half the time. So (naturally) I stopped even trying to use it after a week. Apple's implementation may be better, but if it's no better than Siri, well, nothing to see here...
Few American commentators seem to be questioning the unstated assumption that spying on non-Americans is perfectly OK, even if there is no reasonable cause for suspicion. By that logic, it's perfectly OK for other countries to spy on all Americans.
There are many ways to lie with a camera, and most of them don't rely on Photoshop--framing, cropping, timing, staging or simple selection from a number of shots. Rules tend to be arbitrary--composites may be utter fictions, but they can also be stitched panoramas that provide a wider view and greater detail than the lens/camera combination could provide in a single frame. Film shots were dodged and burned in the darkroom long before digital photography was created. Digital has merely made manipulation easier than it used to be.
The only meaningful question is, did the photographer stay within the bounds set by the rules of the competition? Producing the raw file should provide a conclusive answer.
The problem was supposedly more severe in Europe but, FWIW, my response times in Madrid, Spain were completely normal. I realize that proves nothing, but it does make me skeptical of the Internet Brought to It's Knees claims.
If you are not planning on moving/working abroad, you're not going to learn any second language well enough to be very useful. People with technology skills are rather mobile and the largest tech firms have foreign subsidiaries. So the big employers have no shortage of native speakers of the most commonly spoken languages. In the meantime, machine translation is getting better all the time and while it may never do poetry or literature very well, it will certainly be good enough for most business purposes in the not very distant future. I wouldn't expect adding a new language to change your employment potential much, but there are many other good reasons to do so.
Manipulation--whether in the darkroom or with a computer--is only one of the ways images can mislead. Scenes may be staged. Even when they are not, framing an image in the viewfinder and deciding when to release the shutter determine what small bit of reality is rendered. It may or may not be an honest, representative sample. Every photographer knows that you don't need Photoshop to lie with a camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not exactly. MSFT's "ecosystem" used to give end users more choices than Apple's walled garden. In my personal experience, it appears that MSFT has decided to limit the choices and start imposing their corporate will. I'm on Win7 Pro. I have now uninstalled KB3035583 three or four times. I had my Windows update preferences set to download but let me decide, but several months ago, it stopped letting me decide and just installed what it wanted at boot time. Now I have changed my preferences to let me know when there are updates and let me download and install when I want. Somehow, I doubt that it's going to do what I want. I have no opinion about Win10, but in the past I have always migrated to new operating systems at the same time as I bought a new machine. Win7 works just fine for me at the moment, so why should I run the risk that some of my older applications are going to break by installing a new OS? More than that--the last two times I bought a new machine, I went out of my way to install an older, more stable OS: XP when Vista was about a year old, and Win7 when Win8 was already predominant in new sales. I spared myself lots of grief that way. I may decide I want Win10 someday, but if Msft chooses to shove it down my throat, I will (reluctantly, as long time Windows user) tell them where they can shove it.
Taking them down seems like a futile approach, as they'll only reappear with a different identity. Clever trolling would be more effective--poison the well instead. Problem is, to be effective requires considerable language skills and cultural expertise, which one wouldn't necessarily expect from a hacker community.
TFA doesn't say. The software (including Win 3.1) may still be doing just what it always did correctly, which might explain why it hasn't been replaced.
I don't understand why brute force attacks can't be stopped by limiting the number of failed attempts on any given account name and password. After x failures on either, don't accept another attempt for y minutes. It can't just be stupidity, so what am I missing?
Yes, I believe you've hit upon the key problem with all this. Leaving aside all the daunting difficulty is making a true copy, the result would only benefit your survivors, not you. Now that's no small accomplishment, but it most certainly falls short of immortality.
Another element that is frequently overlooked is that our brains are embedded in our bodies. Proprioception depends on all the real-time feedback from the stuff that's outside the brain. So without simulating the rest of us as well, the uploaded copy might have consciousness but it wouldn't feel or act like we do in the slightest. Even your survivors wouldn't be fooled for long.
They sent me a heads up email with a link to the new policy. So they're being up front about it. That said, I don't care for it. I've used their free version for probably close to 10 years, but I'll be looking for a replacement soon. Avast? Microsoft Essentials? Dunno. In all that time, I think AVG gave me one false positive and once it failed to warn me of something that I could immediately see was suspicious. Not a single true positive, IIRC. My sense is that the threats these days are much more sophisticated than the AV software supposedly keeping us safe. AV software has become like the life vests under the seat in airplanes. There's a remote chance that it will save you some day, but that's about it. Safe practices in browsing and email are probably orders of magnitude more important.
Anything exposing the ridiculousness of copyright is welcome.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice, the absurdities only seem to be accumulating, not going away.
I used MUMPS (and MIIS) extensively while working in healthcare in the 80s and 90s. It was an efficient programming and database environment for mini-computers which combined a hierarchical database and interpreted language with sparse arrays and extensive pattern-matching capabilities baked in. It was widely used in hospitals for clinical operations and that legacy is still present in healthcare. The language itself would scare the shit out of anybody using modern technologies (self-modifying code, anyone?), but used with discipline it ran many applications that were literally a matter of life or death for patients. Some variants (MIIS, DEC) were also stand-alone operating systems running on the bare metal. It gave you lots of bang for the buck, even if the code itself looked like a printer test. There used to be a small but active community of vendors and users. Today, there is one large player, Epic Systems, which dominates the applications market, especially in the electronic medical records area. They use Intersystems MUMPS (now known as M) as the underlying language; it has an extensive application building environment on top of the basic language to provide relational, Web and object-oriented abstractions. You can build applications in this environment without ever touching MUMPS code, though commercial applications will generally drop down into MUMPS for special purpose routines.
Then, I change it back to whatever. It's obnoxious behavior, but hardly the end of civilization as we know it. Move along, there are bigger fish to fry.
Well, maybe. What I know is that I don't see much spam even in my spam folder, which does suggest that Gmail may be blowing a lot of stuff away before I have any chance to see it. OTOH, I don't ever recall a case of learning later that something legitimate had been deleted instead of put into my spam folder, and the number of false positives there is tiny. My overall impression is that their filtering system is very effective. I haven't seen a true spam message in my inbox for years and don't even think of it as a problem anymore.
Did the study factor in the known phenomenon of dead Democrats voting in Chicago?
Sure, but what businesses are so dumb that they will share their internal communications with another company?
What utter nonsense. Miracle cures are just artifacts of long tail effects.
My first reaction was that it was like OJ Simpson offering a reward to find the real killer. But then I took off my snarky goggles and on reflection, I realized that given government, corporate and media interests and manipulation there's no way in hell we'll ever know the truth. Sad but true, I'm afraid.
It seemed remarkably appropriate that this was the cookie at the bottom of the thread:
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell
I don't think any software vendor should be required to support software forever, but there is a difference between withdrawing support and disabling a product without ample prior warning. They blew the rollout, but it looks like they're going to make amends, at least for the Leopard crowd. Hopefully, they'll learn a thing or two about the value of good corporate communication as well.
For me personally, you're quite right, though I'm on CS5 and will stay there for the foreseeable future. I'm an amateur photographer and have no need to keep up with the latest and greatest effects for graphic artists. There are a lot of Adobe customers like me, and many of us preferred the old model, where we could pay to upgrade when the new features seemed worth it. The new model makes sense for companies and design pros who (think they) always need the latest. They probably will save money. I'm not interested in the lock-in the new model imposes.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work. The software runs locally. It would actually be a step forward if, say, they came up with some killer algorithms that require super-computer power to run and gave subscribers access to those cycles in the cloud. But currently, the cloud is mainly used for license validation (periodically) and software updates.
Adobe is leaving money on the table by not accommodating the customers who used to go for every other or every third update. I expect that within a couple of years they will realize this and come up with some sort of hybrid subscription/perpetual license scheme.
While it's not a news site, among other things it provides thoughtful analysis of current affairs and cultural trends. Some of it is available for free, but subscribing gives you access to all content, current and past. It's not light reading, but Vishnu knows we have more than enough of that the Web.
"And yes, until it broke, I loved the fingerprint sensor on my laptop."
My old Thinkpad T61 had a fingerprint reader, which worked maybe half the time. So (naturally) I stopped even trying to use it after a week. Apple's implementation may be better, but if it's no better than Siri, well, nothing to see here...
Few American commentators seem to be questioning the unstated assumption that spying on non-Americans is perfectly OK, even if there is no reasonable cause for suspicion. By that logic, it's perfectly OK for other countries to spy on all Americans.
Aren't we all entitled to a little privacy?
There are many ways to lie with a camera, and most of them don't rely on Photoshop--framing, cropping, timing, staging or simple selection from a number of shots. Rules tend to be arbitrary--composites may be utter fictions, but they can also be stitched panoramas that provide a wider view and greater detail than the lens/camera combination could provide in a single frame. Film shots were dodged and burned in the darkroom long before digital photography was created. Digital has merely made manipulation easier than it used to be. The only meaningful question is, did the photographer stay within the bounds set by the rules of the competition? Producing the raw file should provide a conclusive answer.
The problem was supposedly more severe in Europe but, FWIW, my response times in Madrid, Spain were completely normal. I realize that proves nothing, but it does make me skeptical of the Internet Brought to It's Knees claims.
Funniest post I've seen here in years. Bravo!
If you are not planning on moving/working abroad, you're not going to learn any second language well enough to be very useful. People with technology skills are rather mobile and the largest tech firms have foreign subsidiaries. So the big employers have no shortage of native speakers of the most commonly spoken languages. In the meantime, machine translation is getting better all the time and while it may never do poetry or literature very well, it will certainly be good enough for most business purposes in the not very distant future. I wouldn't expect adding a new language to change your employment potential much, but there are many other good reasons to do so.
Manipulation--whether in the darkroom or with a computer--is only one of the ways images can mislead. Scenes may be staged. Even when they are not, framing an image in the viewfinder and deciding when to release the shutter determine what small bit of reality is rendered. It may or may not be an honest, representative sample. Every photographer knows that you don't need Photoshop to lie with a camera.