"Hmm... So all we need to do is design an operating system that is all but impossible for anyone who lacks an advanced background in computer security to use, and it will be the most secure operating system ever!!"
Sounds good to me.
To complete your secureBSD installation, please answer the following questions:
(1) What is the command for portscanning your system to look for services?...
"Morons that have Outlook set up to automatically download and execute attachments"
Set up? I didn't set it up at all, it just came like this. Look! I can click this button, and it downloads my email.
Setup? You mean those 7 tabs (2-3 of which are hidden?), with about 3-4 buttons on each tab that bring up an "advanced options" window with lists and tabs, some of which have little buttons to bring up "advanced advanced options"? I can't quite work those out, as all the options seem to be in illogical places. Is it in general->email options, or in email options->general?
Actually, I remember all of the incidents you describe, and I don't even consider myself a regular watcher of the series (I occasionally turn the TV on before breakfast and see it (UK), and my housemates used to watch it...)
"I don't think so. At that resolution you're capturing every grain in the film, at least if it's 35 mm film. That grain is not really part of the image, it's an artifact. Kodak states "(2048 x 3072 pixels) captures all the image data 35 mm film has to offer." There, we reduced file size by a factor of 12. Now, I hope you're not storing uncompressed tiffs? They'd be around half the size (depending on image) as compressed.png. That brings us to a 96% reduction from your figure. And that's without touching lossy compression - which I doubt you would touch, even though you don't mind scanning and storing away all the grain of film."
Even without going back to more research on the quality of film, a few things to note
My estimate of the equivalent pixel size of film might be a little high. But then, that quoted estimate comes from the marketing department of a digital camera manufacturer who're trying to compare their product against film, so maybe that's slightly low?
Uncompressed TIFF? No of course not. I'm going by the numbers on canon's site actually, 14 mega-pixel images (whatever that means) being available at 14MB download (whatever that means). So we can ignore that hand-waving "just divide by twelve" factor.
Does your camera save as compressed PNG files then? Or do you have to store pictures as this TIFF format until it gets transferred to a computer?
96% reduction? Fair enough. You can probably print a poster from that 2k/3k image.
So I suppose I'd better resort to some research to validate the original question. Dans data has a lot of resources on digital photography, and there's lots of useful information there. But I did a search for film resolution and came up with a letters page. 6000dpi for film, apparently. And at 35mm, that comes out to 6800 x 4500 pixels (the 35mm measurement is the diagonal of a 6:4 ratio film?), so about 31 megapixels (real megapixels I mean, not "multiplied-by-three for no good reason" megapixels)
Granted, that's for reasonable quality film, at a low ISO number, and a good lens, so some of those factors may not be applicable for various people. I don't think it's such a problem assuming a good camera though, because the quality of lens you can get for the price of that digital camera is going to be fairly good. You could preserve the "but film is lower cost" argument, and reduce the resolution by half again for a $300 camera and by more for ISO200 film.
So the 10000 x 8000 estimate is more suited to medium-format film (50mm film at 6000dpi would be 10000 pixels wide?), while Kodak's numbers are still looking optomistic.
The cynical person might suggest that manufacturer sites will say "6 megapixels is the same as film" because 6 megapixel cameras are what they're trying to sell. The real test is whether their pages get updated in the future to say that $x megapixels is enough to reproduce film, where $x is their latest model of consumer digital camera...
"That's why we have this handy thing called *backups*, something that is impossible with analog media (you will always have generational loss)."
Correction: some people have backups, occasionally. Almost always not when their camera fails though. Backups are one of those things which are always touted as the advantage of digital media, without realising that they're hardly ever used, or that when hard-disks fail, the backup is 2-months old because nobody believes that it will happen to them.
If photographic film failed as often as hard disks do, I'd take the comment seriously.
As for the old "no generational loss" chestnut, just ask anyone who's JPEG-encoded their pictures to try and fit them onto the available disk-space, or downsampled pictures so that they fit onto a CD-ROM. Hell, I don't even get "bit-for-bit" copies when I convert my digital CDs onto my digital MP3 player, yet people still rattle on about how digital formats are inherantly immune to information loss?
A single hard drive can hold MASSIVE numbers of pictures. Your basement would be full of "plastic can[s]" if you had the equivalent number of pictures on film negatives.
Pick a resolution for colour negative film? 10000 x 8000 sound reasonable? That's about 2.4E+8 bytes per picture, or 8.6E+9 bytes per roll of film, equivalent.
With a nice environmentally-sealed box to keep your hard-drive and caddy in, it might take the same space 100 rolls of film. Maybe the hard-drive is in your computer rather than in storage, but 100 film rolls will hardly "fill an entire basement". More like a shoebox or two.
So... even with very rounded numbers, a hundred rolls of film stores 800GB of data, which works out as about $1000 worth of hard disk at the moment. But if you'd bought the hard-disk at the same time as I bought my first roll of film, you'd have lots of 250MB/$200 hard drives filling the room, rather than one of the nice modern ones.
Of course, you can fit more than 36*100 pictures on a much smaller hard disk, because (a) you can't obtain the same resolution as with film*, and (b) you use lossy compression by default. However, that doesn't help if a magazine comes along in a year and asks to make a full-page print from one of the negatives.
* not without a digital camera costing more than a very nice sports car, at least.
"I've always had a geeky dreamproject of supplementing my traditional lock and key entry to my house with biometric security devices. The idea being that in the event of a systems failure, instead of being locked out of the house I could fall back to the old lock-n-key method."
(a) Nevermind the authentication -- unless you're still using cylinder locks, the weakest link will be the physical bolt itself. Get something which can withstand a battering ram before you worry too much about lockpicks.
(b) Get one of those coded safes that they use in hotel rooms -- cement it into your garage floor, set a long code on it, and put a spare set of house keys inside.
(c) If you have cylinder locks, then anyone with a pick set already has a universal key to your house.
"IIRC one of the prime reasons Intel won't release open source drivers is because the hardware chipset is capable of broadcasting on frequencies that are reserved for police/fire/etc and at higher output levels than is presently legal. Open source drivers would ease the path to hacking and utilising these hardware features."
I can transmit high-power on those frequencies with about 5 electronic components and a soldering iron. What's your point?
"With big people like Intel and IBM showing an interest in Linux, its bound to encourage others to do the same. Then with time, open source drivers might just happen?"
We'll just compromise now, and hope that sometime in the future people who have no interest in our requirements will fulful them completely?
Won't happen. If you buy hardware knowing that you can't run it on open-source drivers, you'll never get open-source drivers. And that means that sooner or later, your hardware will stop working with recent versions of your software.
"Open source drivers could tip their cards to AMD or some newcomer could gain the upper hand. That is the REALITY of how the hardware business works"
The other part of that reality being, that people who've chosen a Free Software operating system on principle, will choose not to buy hardware which is not supported in a Free Software operating system.
Installing nvidia or other precompiled hardware drivers makes your operating system non-Free. Congratulations, you just lost the advantage of running GNU and Linux. Maybe when you've installed a few more non-Free pieces of software (shouting down people who warn you otherwise on slashdot), you'll be running a configuration which is unusable without non-Free software.
So then what? Are you going to have to fall back to the cost/quality arguments, and hope that the companies you've bet your computer on won't choose to screw you? Or are you going to hope that the rest of us insisted on Free Software all along, and have kept alive the old drivers, continually improving with help from the community even if they're not doing the same FPS as the latest shiny lure from people who believe that they, and not you, should control your computer.
"You can break the law if it's disobedience against Microsoft, RIAA labels, Disney or any other mean big business. But you can't break the law when it comes to GPL code."
Odd that, that on a community website, people don't have a problem with attacking those known to be actively hostile to the general public, yet they seem to stick up for projects which consist of lots of normal people giving their time freely for the benefit of society.
You'd have thought that we should teach people to believe whatever the lawmakers tell them to think. After all, if something is illegal, it must be immoral.
"as i understand it, they would have to spoof to someone who you know, a virus could easily do that (after it has your address book) but not so much for spam."
And virus-infected machines are being used to send spam, they're also capable of swapping email address details between machines?
Coincidence? You'd better hope the spammers think so.
"My only question concerns how this would deal with mailing lists, which must appear to it like spam?"
Well mailing lists are, by definition, identical to spam, so far as an automated program looking at each messagae is concerned. Whenever there's a test of spam-filtering programs the "false positives" are mailing lists that the tester forgot to tell the spamfilter about.
It would be useful to have some way of publishing a list of mailing lists who have permission to send you email -- I'll leave it up to the "all you need is a system of public keys..." crowd to start shouting suggestions.
And for the people who'll suggest whitelisting based on the From field, don't forget that the spammers can easily put "bugtraq@securityfocus.com" as the sender.
"This is why when you add a GPL license to your code, you either say "Placed under the GPL version X" or you say "Placed under the GPL version X or later"".
Okay, so what happens if the FSF releases GPL version 3 which says "microsoft may use this code as it sees fit, nobody else may touch it"?
Isn't free software supposed to be immune to destruction by any one organisation?
"I don't know many who turn to Yahoo for their search results anymore."
And for a reasonably simple reason. It's been a long time since Yahoo announced that they'd only list websites who paid them, but I remember thinking, "if I can only search amongst websites who can afford to give Yahoo $100 per year, that's a fairly limited search"
Slashdot Mirror
"How hard is it to link the links!"
(1) Select the text which ought to be a link
(2) Press and hold the mousebutton over the selected text
(3) Drag it to the "new tab" button at the top-left of your screen, it looks like a piece of paper with a circle containing a 6-point star overlaid.
The link will open in a new tab, which will load in the background, and you can read the it without having to close this slashdot thread.
(Note: non-Mozilla users' milage may vary)
"Hmm... So all we need to do is design an operating system that is all but impossible for anyone who lacks an advanced background in computer security to use, and it will be the most secure operating system ever!!"
...
Sounds good to me.
To complete your secureBSD installation, please answer the following questions:
(1) What is the command for portscanning your system to look for services?
"Morons that have Outlook set up to automatically download and execute attachments"
Set up? I didn't set it up at all, it just came like this. Look! I can click this button, and it downloads my email.
Setup? You mean those 7 tabs (2-3 of which are hidden?), with about 3-4 buttons on each tab that bring up an "advanced options" window with lists and tabs, some of which have little buttons to bring up "advanced advanced options"? I can't quite work those out, as all the options seem to be in illogical places. Is it in general->email options, or in email options->general?
"Yes, I'm a geek."
Actually, I remember all of the incidents you describe, and I don't even consider myself a regular watcher of the series (I occasionally turn the TV on before breakfast and see it (UK), and my housemates used to watch it...)
"I don't think so. At that resolution you're capturing every grain in the film, at least if it's 35 mm film. That grain is not really part of the image, it's an artifact. Kodak states "(2048 x 3072 pixels) captures all the image data 35 mm film has to offer." There, we reduced file size by a factor of 12. Now, I hope you're not storing uncompressed tiffs? They'd be around half the size (depending on image) as compressed .png. That brings us to a 96% reduction from your figure. And that's without touching lossy compression - which I doubt you would touch, even though you don't mind scanning and storing away all the grain of film."
Even without going back to more research on the quality of film, a few things to note
My estimate of the equivalent pixel size of film might be a little high. But then, that quoted estimate comes from the marketing department of a digital camera manufacturer who're trying to compare their product against film, so maybe that's slightly low?
Uncompressed TIFF? No of course not. I'm going by the numbers on canon's site actually, 14 mega-pixel images (whatever that means) being available at 14MB download (whatever that means). So we can ignore that hand-waving "just divide by twelve" factor.
Does your camera save as compressed PNG files then? Or do you have to store pictures as this TIFF format until it gets transferred to a computer?
96% reduction? Fair enough. You can probably print a poster from that 2k/3k image.
So I suppose I'd better resort to some research to validate the original question. Dans data has a lot of resources on digital photography, and there's lots of useful information there. But I did a search for film resolution and came up with a letters page. 6000dpi for film, apparently. And at 35mm, that comes out to 6800 x 4500 pixels (the 35mm measurement is the diagonal of a 6:4 ratio film?), so about 31 megapixels (real megapixels I mean, not "multiplied-by-three for no good reason" megapixels)
Granted, that's for reasonable quality film, at a low ISO number, and a good lens, so some of those factors may not be applicable for various people. I don't think it's such a problem assuming a good camera though, because the quality of lens you can get for the price of that digital camera is going to be fairly good. You could preserve the "but film is lower cost" argument, and reduce the resolution by half again for a $300 camera and by more for ISO200 film.
So the 10000 x 8000 estimate is more suited to medium-format film (50mm film at 6000dpi would be 10000 pixels wide?), while Kodak's numbers are still looking optomistic.
The cynical person might suggest that manufacturer sites will say "6 megapixels is the same as film" because 6 megapixel cameras are what they're trying to sell. The real test is whether their pages get updated in the future to say that $x megapixels is enough to reproduce film, where $x is their latest model of consumer digital camera...
"That's why we have this handy thing called *backups*, something that is impossible with analog media (you will always have generational loss)."
Correction: some people have backups, occasionally. Almost always not when their camera fails though. Backups are one of those things which are always touted as the advantage of digital media, without realising that they're hardly ever used, or that when hard-disks fail, the backup is 2-months old because nobody believes that it will happen to them.
If photographic film failed as often as hard disks do, I'd take the comment seriously.
As for the old "no generational loss" chestnut, just ask anyone who's JPEG-encoded their pictures to try and fit them onto the available disk-space, or downsampled pictures so that they fit onto a CD-ROM. Hell, I don't even get "bit-for-bit" copies when I convert my digital CDs onto my digital MP3 player, yet people still rattle on about how digital formats are inherantly immune to information loss?
A single hard drive can hold MASSIVE numbers of pictures. Your basement would be full of "plastic can[s]" if you had the equivalent number of pictures on film negatives.
Pick a resolution for colour negative film? 10000 x 8000 sound reasonable? That's about 2.4E+8 bytes per picture, or 8.6E+9 bytes per roll of film, equivalent.
With a nice environmentally-sealed box to keep your hard-drive and caddy in, it might take the same space 100 rolls of film. Maybe the hard-drive is in your computer rather than in storage, but 100 film rolls will hardly "fill an entire basement". More like a shoebox or two.
So... even with very rounded numbers, a hundred rolls of film stores 800GB of data, which works out as about $1000 worth of hard disk at the moment. But if you'd bought the hard-disk at the same time as I bought my first roll of film, you'd have lots of 250MB/$200 hard drives filling the room, rather than one of the nice modern ones.
Of course, you can fit more than 36*100 pictures on a much smaller hard disk, because (a) you can't obtain the same resolution as with film*, and (b) you use lossy compression by default. However, that doesn't help if a magazine comes along in a year and asks to make a full-page print from one of the negatives.
* not without a digital camera costing more than a very nice sports car, at least.
"I've always had a geeky dreamproject of supplementing my traditional lock and key entry to my house with biometric security devices. The idea being that in the event of a systems failure, instead of being locked out of the house I could fall back to the old lock-n-key method."
(a) Nevermind the authentication -- unless you're still using cylinder locks, the weakest link will be the physical bolt itself. Get something which can withstand a battering ram before you worry too much about lockpicks.
(b) Get one of those coded safes that they use in hotel rooms -- cement it into your garage floor, set a long code on it, and put a spare set of house keys inside.
(c) If you have cylinder locks, then anyone with a pick set already has a universal key to your house.
"LCDs don't have radiation at all."
Apart from the obvious ones at visible-light freqencies?
"- Ryan, who can't remember his password right now, and so posted AC"
Open-source your password, and many eyes will help you remember it.
"IIRC one of the prime reasons Intel won't release open source drivers is because the hardware chipset is capable of broadcasting on frequencies that are reserved for police/fire/etc and at higher output levels than is presently legal. Open source drivers would ease the path to hacking and utilising these hardware features."
I can transmit high-power on those frequencies with about 5 electronic components and a soldering iron. What's your point?
"There are millions of bluetooth enabled cell phones (mine included) in consumers hands around the world"
And they've served their purpose admirably - getting people to upgrade a perfectly good cellphone. What next, attaching cameras to them?
"With big people like Intel and IBM showing an interest in Linux, its bound to encourage others to do the same. Then with time, open source drivers might just happen?"
We'll just compromise now, and hope that sometime in the future people who have no interest in our requirements will fulful them completely?
Won't happen. If you buy hardware knowing that you can't run it on open-source drivers, you'll never get open-source drivers. And that means that sooner or later, your hardware will stop working with recent versions of your software.
"Open source drivers could tip their cards to AMD or some newcomer could gain the upper hand. That is the REALITY of how the hardware business works"
The other part of that reality being, that people who've chosen a Free Software operating system on principle, will choose not to buy hardware which is not supported in a Free Software operating system.
Installing nvidia or other precompiled hardware drivers makes your operating system non-Free. Congratulations, you just lost the advantage of running GNU and Linux. Maybe when you've installed a few more non-Free pieces of software (shouting down people who warn you otherwise on slashdot), you'll be running a configuration which is unusable without non-Free software.
So then what? Are you going to have to fall back to the cost/quality arguments, and hope that the companies you've bet your computer on won't choose to screw you? Or are you going to hope that the rest of us insisted on Free Software all along, and have kept alive the old drivers, continually improving with help from the community even if they're not doing the same FPS as the latest shiny lure from people who believe that they, and not you, should control your computer.
Don't tell me, it's a valid program in Perl 6?
"Rename the distro to dleob043mv0934984mswkjy498x98c79s432kj43h987ckjhdf , and never worry about a name change again."
What, and get raided for exporting encryption?
"You can break the law if it's disobedience against Microsoft, RIAA labels, Disney or any other mean big business. But you can't break the law when it comes to GPL code."
Odd that, that on a community website, people don't have a problem with attacking those known to be actively hostile to the general public, yet they seem to stick up for projects which consist of lots of normal people giving their time freely for the benefit of society.
You'd have thought that we should teach people to believe whatever the lawmakers tell them to think. After all, if something is illegal, it must be immoral.
"No matter what your opinion on politics, don't forget to get out and vote this year and let them know how you feel about this and other issues."
Hang on, didn't the only serious candidate drop-out of the election? So again, the point of voting is...?
I just got out of Yale
"If you get the job, many firms will fire you if they found out you lied on the application."
Cynics might suggest that some firms prefer this.
"as i understand it, they would have to spoof to someone who you know, a virus could easily do that (after it has your address book) but not so much for spam."
And virus-infected machines are being used to send spam, they're also capable of swapping email address details between machines?
Coincidence? You'd better hope the spammers think so.
What distro are you running?
"VictorFGanzi-sucks, version 10.0 beta"
"My only question concerns how this would deal with mailing lists, which must appear to it like spam?"
Well mailing lists are, by definition, identical to spam, so far as an automated program looking at each messagae is concerned. Whenever there's a test of spam-filtering programs the "false positives" are mailing lists that the tester forgot to tell the spamfilter about.
It would be useful to have some way of publishing a list of mailing lists who have permission to send you email -- I'll leave it up to the "all you need is a system of public keys..." crowd to start shouting suggestions.
And for the people who'll suggest whitelisting based on the From field, don't forget that the spammers can easily put "bugtraq@securityfocus.com" as the sender.
"This is why when you add a GPL license to your code, you either say "Placed under the GPL version X" or you say "Placed under the GPL version X or later"".
Okay, so what happens if the FSF releases GPL version 3 which says "microsoft may use this code as it sees fit, nobody else may touch it"?
Isn't free software supposed to be immune to destruction by any one organisation?
"I don't know many who turn to Yahoo for their search results anymore."
And for a reasonably simple reason. It's been a long time since Yahoo announced that they'd only list websites who paid them, but I remember thinking, "if I can only search amongst websites who can afford to give Yahoo $100 per year, that's a fairly limited search"