The outer walls of the Reactor 1 building have partially blown off, leaving only what looks like a steel frame. NHK is saying that a sensor within 5km of the plant is detecting radiation levels approaching 1015 microsieverts - that is apparently a year's worth of radiation exposure each hour.
People in the danger zones are being told to cover faces with wet towels, avoid eating vegetables and other fresh foods, and refrain from drinking tap water. Things seem to be happening quickly.
You speak of tumors and cancer pretty freely, considering the nasty, poisonous hearsay you're spreading, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
You have no credibility. You haven't even made a case for your opinions.
Jeff, on the other hand, has contributed something to GNOME, and continues to participate in the discussions of the day because he cares about the project.
I don't agree with his take on things all the time, but he is worthy of more respect than you are giving him.
You know, Jeff Waugh was one of the first Canonical employees before he resigned to work on GNOME-related stuff. He's had issues with anxiety and depression in the past, and he does tend to go off-topic at inopportune times, or not answer email - hardly noteworthy offenses. He wrotePlanet, and as far as I know he runs the pgo instance. People who have been around GNOME for a long time are friends with the guy, he supports the project, and you can't expect people to turn on their friends.
Jeff Waugh is an absolute cancer in the GNOME project. He adds nothing to the project but is a constant source of frustration and drama. How he maintains the influence he has is truly beyond me. My only supposition is that because in the past he has done some work in the past and runs P.G.O the other members of gnome's blah blah waah waaahh
A cancer? Really? That's a bit rich coming from... who are you again, Oh Bitter One? What has Jeff done to you, exactly?
I get that attempted character assassination can be fun for semi-anonymous sad clowns, but you're not even landing punches here.
I used Ubuntu from Hoary until Lucid. Before that, I used Debian. Now, I run Debian again.
I switched to Ubuntu because I was tired of thinking about Linux, but still wanted to use it. Ubuntu seemed to prioritize making things 'just work', even with non-free hardware and software. Bonus, it was essentially Debian at the time, just with more up-to-date packages and some pretty-juice.
Over time, I watched as Canonical made decisions I knew weren't in service of the 'big picture'. Maybe it was my Debian roots and the fact that I was used to community discussion counting towards decisions about which way the OS was going. On one hand I enjoyed experimenting with the 'weird' stuff Ubuntu pushed - Upstart, for instance. On the other hand, they pushed broken PulseAudio packages and then took forever to fix them, thus turning the fanboi crew into raging "fuck-Lennart-PA-sucks" drones.
As time went on, more and more 'weirdness' made its way into Ubuntu. The new notification area still feels unpolished and was developed without real input from GNOME. Ubuntu One, Gwibber, and DesktopCouch were all released without much polish and royally stunk the desktop up for a while there - crashes, conflicts, and sync issues were common. They are much better now, but man 6 months with Gwibber's background process crapping out, that sucked. Too much new crack got dumped on me before it was ready.
And Launchpad has devolved into a real cesspool. I still have open bugs from many releases ago that get a "Hello! There's a new Ubuntu out! Please see if your issue was fixed!" every 6 months. Triagers seem unfamiliar with basic terminology and will keep closing bugs until you go away, even if they demonstrate that they don't understand the reported issue.
I guess that's what happens when you encourage people on the "BugSquad" to triage 5 bugs a day. Gotta make the quota so I can claim my propz, yo. Communitaaaahh! *rocks out to Severed Fifth and throws up the horns*
I've given up. I'm tired of being a beta tester. It takes less time to make Debian pretty than it does to deal with the unpolished, weird apps that Canonical insists on bundling. I trust Debian to take upgrades seriously and not to transition to new subsystems without letting them shake out for a year or so. Plus, my bug reports are actually listened to, by people with some experience and domain knowledge. The Debian Developer approvals process is a wonderful thing - it keeps the posers out.
I wish Ubuntu all the best with their move to replace X with Wayland, and replace GNOME Shell with Unity, etc. etc. They will have legions of users shaking their bugs out for them, and that's actually enviable if you have the trained staff and developers to fix the issues quickly.
Debian is big enough for multiple SysV replacements, multiple X servers, multiple desktop environments, icon themes, wallpapers, etc. etc. Ubuntu could have just added the packages they cared about, and released Debian installer CDs that set things up their way.
She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.
I've been running across tantalizing scraps of info about thorium reactors and their supposed advantages for years. I half thought the theory must be questionable (obviously I'm no physicist) largely because if it were so promising, why would thorium designs not be prevalent in Europe or the US?
This is exciting news. Seems like China is the place to be if you're looking to experiment with new (or old, rediscovered) ideas.
Openleaks is not what we need...
on
Openleaks Goes Live
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So these guys plan to release only to 'need-to-know' news organizations, approved by themselves and some sort of vote process? Yeah, that'll work well. If the media won't touch a certain story shopped around by OpenLeaks, we'll never know about it. I don't trust OpenLeaks; I hope they fail hard.
Wikileaks had it right - public disclosure with a reasonable attempt to scrub names not directly responsible for the crimes being exposed.
I hope someday my perserverance will pay off and I will be able to work not only with smart people (intelligence was rarely an issue), but educated and honest, and hopefully enlightened individuals that do not synthesize drama to manipulate perceptions such that those they like, towing the gang's loyalty, remain employed, while those that are effective, and thus throwing the curve, are terminated.
+5000. Wish I had mod points. I would hire you in a flash.
In my experience, it's mostly shops hiring egotistical just-out-of-school or I-taught-myself-PHP-and-I-am-an-expert-now whiz kids that are the worst for this kind of crap. You don't want to work with hypercasual, caffeine-fueled web developers when you're providing for a family, for instance.
A few places get it right. I have been fortunate enough to hire my co-workers, and we do NOT put up with drama. Full stop. We have work to do, we get it done creatively and with plenty of debate when it's warranted, and then we go home and live life.
Teams have limits. At some point the only way to increase productivity is to build another team with their own set of responsibilities and set them to work. And 'productivity' isn't really a goal in and of itself.
I get so tired of people throwing book titles around as if they were some sort of trump card.
Asking a question like that shows how little your boss values his employees, their productivity, and their mental well-being. For that matter, it shows how clueless he is about office politics. Is he trying to weed out the people who don't care deeply for his startup? Hint: NONE of the salaried staff care as much as he does.
Why on earth would salaried staff agree to sacrifice their ability to actually have a life for nothing but boss kudo points?
In order to get people to sacrifice for their employer, you need a well-understood, fair incentive. Companies pay for expert employees' time. Your boss needs to put his money where his mouth is and pay hourly for overtime. The problem is, to avoid abuse you would need to be measuring productivity fairly accurately, and since you're a startup you're probably running your projects casually.
I've worked at companies that tried things like this in half-baked ways. Endless process improvement meetings, coworkers that hate you for staying late for nothing, productivity falling through the floor as people try to game the system. I've even seen people damage their personal relationships beyond repair "for the project". It's not a pretty picture, and your boss needs to understand the magnitude of the possible consequences.
If your boss wants to add a team-wide incentive program for beating a deadline, fine. But if your salaried staff are happy, he shouldn't fuck with that, and he should be regularly encouraging them to get the hell out of the office at 5PM so that they are happy to come back in the morning.
Want to get more done during business hours? HIRE MORE STAFF.
People want the safety and security that comes from having a trusted party manage their computers for them... Most normal people just see it as a tool, and if someone else will change the oil and the spark plugs for them, then that's even better.
A car *is* just a tool that provides mobility. If your car breaks, you fix it or get another and you're right back to driving around. Your car is under your control, the roads are a common asset, and as long as you follow driving laws and have the economic ability to purchase one, you can do what you like with it. This is the ideal situation.
If your car chose to cease functioning because you fingered the manufacturer's CEO in traffic (thus breaking the no-obscenity clause in the car's TOS) would you be OK with that? Should that TOS even be allowed?
If cloud infrastructure becomes the norm, and local storage becomes somehow 'second tier' or 'for the poor', the commons of the network will cease to matter, and the very existence of a server on the internet will be subject to, say Amazon's Terms Of Service. See Wikileaks for an example of what to expect.
It's not hard to foresee a day when ISPs start shutting down access to sites not hosted on approved, "secure" clouds, at least for their basic service tiers. You'll pay extra for the 'full' internet. Most people won't bother because "everything they need is in the cloud", and they'll be happy with the lack of viruses and spam in the walled garden. The lack of IPV4 addresses might be used to drive this. Amazon might give away 'private' Elastic IP addresses to AWS customers, ISPs might pay to route customers to the AWS namespace. Suddenly Average Joe will be demanding lock-in as a feature.
The proliferation of tablets and dumbed-down, specialized devices with limited or no local storage will only encourage this evolution.
And it's the same way here, except to a few ultra-paranoids who think that everything is all about "the man controlling our data". Sorry, it just isn't. Apple doesn't give a crap about your data. They're just providing a service that the average guy who isn't a technophile *wants*. And that's why Cloud computing will take off. Technophiles have a 100% track record of being wrong about these things, because they don't understand that almost nobody else values what they value.
You really are mixing up your arguments, and your smugness is misplaced. This isn't about technophiles versus "normal people", or "ultra-paranoids" versus "average guys". Cloud computing has *already* taken off. We certainly understand that consumers don't value anything but cheapness and convenience. We're Technophiles, not Morons.
We're waving our hands because we understand the technical and social tradeoffs that are about to be made by our non-technical fellows. We are concerned for society and for everyone's abillity to build and use technology freely.
Technophiles built the digital ground you stand on. Cloud vendors will probably succeed in baiting Joe User back into an AOL-style walled garden, and you're free to go with him.
Enjoy your happy slavery while our tiny minority tries to figure out how to protect you from yourself. Or do some thinking, forgo some convenience, and help us help you: don't buy into the cloud if you can help it, even if Jobs makes it shiny.
Yep. He strikes me as a guy who has grown so used to being crapped on by people without his level of domain knowledge that he approaches everything as a war, even when dealing with his peers. He's a "fix the architecture" kind of guy in a "patch it up" world.
The botched Pulse rollout by a few of the major distros didn't help his stock in a lot of peoples' eyes, but that doesn't make him any less right when he's right.
...trying to market this as fixing something for the "desktop use case" is bollocks: normal desktop users do not have multiple TTYs running their apps...
Won't stop the herd from picking sides or making wild claims about huge increases in usability. Go go gadget placebo!
If the code quality follows the same curve as Pulseaudio, it will be a long while before I switch to systemd. Even if it means dumping Fedora.
Fair enough. Perhaps I should have said "If you use one of the major desktop Linux distros and don't immediately rip out the init system when you perform a fresh install, you'll be using it soon."
On the topic of PulseAudio, I'd be a fool to pretend that adoption by the distros has been trouble free - and you'd be a fool to confuse the rocky rollout of a major new codebase with "poor code quality".
Hopefully some lessons have been learned and we won't see systemd pushed out before it's ready.
The kernel patch is the hackish way to do it. They're hard-coding policy settings into a kernel patch. Dumb. The kernel is there to provide the knobs, not to twiddle them for you.
Lennart's argument is that policy should not be hard-coded into the kernel. He's not saying "everyone should do this in a bash script". He's saying "leave policy settings to userspace mechanisms that can handle them better." Say, systemd for instance.
Users would be better served by Lennart's approach, I think.
Funny thing is, most desktop users will not see the benefits of the patch, since most of them never use the terminal to run cpu-hogging kernel builds. All desktop apps share the same cgroup.
That won't stop hordes of n00bs from claiming ZOMG MAI SYSTEM IS SO MUCH FA$TER NOW OMG!
It's not perfect, but it's easy. You carry a card around (or a mobile phone app) and remember mnemonics like "Smiley Green 16" and "Heart Pink 12" for each site, which amount to x,y,length for looking up your password on the card.
If you lose the card you can regenerate it, but finders have no way of knowing how to look up your password. If you write your mnemonics on a sticky note attached to your monitor, it doesn't matter because no one has your card.
Also the Android app means no card needed. At no point do you give your passwords to any third party.
I find it pretty funny that people freak out about this stuff, but happily purchase vehicles with 'black boxes' like OnStar in them.
The government's need for this kind of James Bond nonsense is decreasing. Turns out people are dumb enough to:
o Post their relationships on Facebook and other such sites
o Publicly broadcast their most mundane thoughts
o Carry phones and drive vehicles that track and report their location, speed, and direction of travel at every moment
o Make unsecured, unencrypted VOIP calls
o Use Skype, which has long been suspected of having a back door
o Accept biometric identity cards
o Trust unsigned software
o Publicly tag their friends in photos (a secret national face-recognition project probably exists)...and then expect that governments won't use all this stuff for their own nefarious purposes.
Your willingness to participate in the worldwide circle-jerk that is Facebook is doing more to erode citizens' rights than anything else.
It's not just about privacy, it's about control and power. By giving away all of this information about ourselves, we are giving governments and multi-billion-dollar corporations the leverage they need to multiply the ways in which they move, divide, and exploit us. This is happening now, and you are probably guilty of helping it along.
Convenience, peer pressure and disdain for people who actually care about citizenship are apparently the best way to bootstrap this mess. Throw in a dash of "I'll never be able to change it, it's all too big for me" and the chains are in place.
You are responsible only for yourself. Make better decisions. Be willing to put up with some inconvenience to stick to your principles.
The gap between my suggestion and what those researchers did is pretty wide. My idea:
o Doesn't involve bilking people out of their private credentials;
o Would be limited to a class studying malicious software (how's that for an appropriate context)
o Involves a known-harmless teaching payload;
o Would be fully understood and removed by students at the end of the class.
Deception is inherently disrespectful, even if it is done with good intentions.
What may seem like a "harmless infection" to you demeans the students, because you're encouraging the instructor to abuse the trust that their students have placed in him. In short, what you are proposing causes harm to the teaching profession.
I have a hard time understanding why any real teacher in this fellow's position would abstain from imparting one of the most critical lessons a student can learn about security: that they themselves are the weakest link, no matter how smart and prepared they think they are, and no matter how much theory they can regurgitate at paper time.
The burned hand teaches best, and understanding how and why you were burned is priceless.
It's disrespectful, and even a little condescending, to 'protect' students from real lessons. Are we preparing them for the real world or not? And are students so fragile that they would run to the Dean's office to complain to about the teacher after such a simple and well-explained exercise?
What do you expect a student to learn from being told "there is a virus on this machine, remove it by hand"?
If they are in the "demystifying the black box" phase, they have no idea what you're talking about.
Teach them that viruses are just programs like Word or Excel, except with a specific malicious purpose. Give them an overview of how a machine or user might be tricked into running malicious software. Teach them about how malicious software might propagate. Use historical examples. Talk about privileges.
Virus is a slang term that brings up all kinds of scare reactions in ordinary people. They immediately assume that machines are vulnerable to bacteria floating around on the wind, or something similar. You need to de-emphasize the term "virus". It's just software. Then teach them that 99% of all malicious software runs on Windows, and that it's a reflection of the number of vulnerabilities in Windows code and market share.
Write a simple program that copies itself to the Windows folder and starts itself at boot. The program should show an alert box saying "HACKED BY PROFESSOR HANDSOME!!!!" if it sees it is being run from the Windows folder. Put it on a USB key with an autorun.ini, tell them you have placed a virus you wrote on there, and let them sort it out. Just be sure you're on an XP machine and that autorun is enabled.
Better yet, email the.exe to the entire class. Call it CS101-Example.exe, and use the harmless infection to talk about social engineering. Then take them through the 'infection' process, and show them how to remove the file by hand.
“Peep it, I’ll break it down so you can absorb it (okay) You need to mind planets’ minerals and do it from orbit (yo) Some good advice, and you’re too much of a noob to ignore it (ay) You’ll get stranded with no fuel if you foolishly floor it I used to rock microphones rhyming in a stadium (okay) These days i launch probes mining for palladium (no doubt)”
Slashdot Mirror
The outer walls of the Reactor 1 building have partially blown off, leaving only what looks like a steel frame. NHK is saying that a sensor within 5km of the plant is detecting radiation levels approaching 1015 microsieverts - that is apparently a year's worth of radiation exposure each hour.
People in the danger zones are being told to cover faces with wet towels, avoid eating vegetables and other fresh foods, and refrain from drinking tap water. Things seem to be happening quickly.
You speak of tumors and cancer pretty freely, considering the nasty, poisonous hearsay you're spreading, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
You have no credibility. You haven't even made a case for your opinions.
Jeff, on the other hand, has contributed something to GNOME, and continues to participate in the discussions of the day because he cares about the project.
I don't agree with his take on things all the time, but he is worthy of more respect than you are giving him.
You know, Jeff Waugh was one of the first Canonical employees before he resigned to work on GNOME-related stuff. He's had issues with anxiety and depression in the past, and he does tend to go off-topic at inopportune times, or not answer email - hardly noteworthy offenses. He wrote Planet, and as far as I know he runs the pgo instance. People who have been around GNOME for a long time are friends with the guy, he supports the project, and you can't expect people to turn on their friends.
Jeff Waugh is an absolute cancer in the GNOME project. He adds nothing to the project but is a constant source of frustration and drama. How he maintains the influence he has is truly beyond me. My only supposition is that because in the past he has done some work in the past and runs P.G.O the other members of gnome's blah blah waah waaahh
A cancer? Really? That's a bit rich coming from... who are you again, Oh Bitter One? What has Jeff done to you, exactly?
I get that attempted character assassination can be fun for semi-anonymous sad clowns, but you're not even landing punches here.
I used Ubuntu from Hoary until Lucid. Before that, I used Debian. Now, I run Debian again.
I switched to Ubuntu because I was tired of thinking about Linux, but still wanted to use it. Ubuntu seemed to prioritize making things 'just work', even with non-free hardware and software. Bonus, it was essentially Debian at the time, just with more up-to-date packages and some pretty-juice.
Over time, I watched as Canonical made decisions I knew weren't in service of the 'big picture'. Maybe it was my Debian roots and the fact that I was used to community discussion counting towards decisions about which way the OS was going. On one hand I enjoyed experimenting with the 'weird' stuff Ubuntu pushed - Upstart, for instance. On the other hand, they pushed broken PulseAudio packages and then took forever to fix them, thus turning the fanboi crew into raging "fuck-Lennart-PA-sucks" drones.
As time went on, more and more 'weirdness' made its way into Ubuntu. The new notification area still feels unpolished and was developed without real input from GNOME. Ubuntu One, Gwibber, and DesktopCouch were all released without much polish and royally stunk the desktop up for a while there - crashes, conflicts, and sync issues were common. They are much better now, but man 6 months with Gwibber's background process crapping out, that sucked. Too much new crack got dumped on me before it was ready.
And Launchpad has devolved into a real cesspool. I still have open bugs from many releases ago that get a "Hello! There's a new Ubuntu out! Please see if your issue was fixed!" every 6 months. Triagers seem unfamiliar with basic terminology and will keep closing bugs until you go away, even if they demonstrate that they don't understand the reported issue.
I guess that's what happens when you encourage people on the "BugSquad" to triage 5 bugs a day. Gotta make the quota so I can claim my propz, yo. Communitaaaahh! *rocks out to Severed Fifth and throws up the horns*
I've given up. I'm tired of being a beta tester. It takes less time to make Debian pretty than it does to deal with the unpolished, weird apps that Canonical insists on bundling. I trust Debian to take upgrades seriously and not to transition to new subsystems without letting them shake out for a year or so. Plus, my bug reports are actually listened to, by people with some experience and domain knowledge. The Debian Developer approvals process is a wonderful thing - it keeps the posers out.
I wish Ubuntu all the best with their move to replace X with Wayland, and replace GNOME Shell with Unity, etc. etc. They will have legions of users shaking their bugs out for them, and that's actually enviable if you have the trained staff and developers to fix the issues quickly.
Debian is big enough for multiple SysV replacements, multiple X servers, multiple desktop environments, icon themes, wallpapers, etc. etc. Ubuntu could have just added the packages they cared about, and released Debian installer CDs that set things up their way.
Gee. I wonder why that didn't happen.
Hm, your low UID should indicate that you'd know that slashdot has no lameness filter. I mean, it let you through, right? :)
Oh, it exists, and it let me through.
Having your self-esteem really all wrapped up in a fruity consumer electronics brand is pretty lame though. Did I hit a nerve, Mr. Coward? :)
She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.
Wow. Why didn't the lameness filter catch this?
Deb-i-aaaaaaaan...
Deb-i-aaaaaaaan...
Debian, FUCK YEAH
Releasin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah
Debian, FUCK YEAH
Freedom is the only way yeah
Pity those who use Ubuntu
Their purple desktops look like poo, yeah
Debian, FUCK YEAH
So lick my ports, and Squeeze my mouse ball,
Debian, FUCK YEAH
What you gonna do when we package you now,
it's the dream that we all share
it's the hope for tomorrow
FUCK YEAH
apt-get! FUCK YEAH! ....
Free kernel! FUCK YEAH!
Lackin' firmware! FUCK YEAH!
New Site! FUCK YEAH!
Space Fun! FUCK YEAH!
Original here.
I've been running across tantalizing scraps of info about thorium reactors and their supposed advantages for years. I half thought the theory must be questionable (obviously I'm no physicist) largely because if it were so promising, why would thorium designs not be prevalent in Europe or the US?
This is exciting news. Seems like China is the place to be if you're looking to experiment with new (or old, rediscovered) ideas.
So these guys plan to release only to 'need-to-know' news organizations, approved by themselves and some sort of vote process? Yeah, that'll work well. If the media won't touch a certain story shopped around by OpenLeaks, we'll never know about it. I don't trust OpenLeaks; I hope they fail hard.
Wikileaks had it right - public disclosure with a reasonable attempt to scrub names not directly responsible for the crimes being exposed.
I hope someday my perserverance will pay off and I will be able to work not only with smart people (intelligence was rarely an issue), but educated and honest, and hopefully enlightened individuals that do not synthesize drama to manipulate perceptions such that those they like, towing the gang's loyalty, remain employed, while those that are effective, and thus throwing the curve, are terminated.
+5000. Wish I had mod points. I would hire you in a flash.
In my experience, it's mostly shops hiring egotistical just-out-of-school or I-taught-myself-PHP-and-I-am-an-expert-now whiz kids that are the worst for this kind of crap. You don't want to work with hypercasual, caffeine-fueled web developers when you're providing for a family, for instance.
A few places get it right. I have been fortunate enough to hire my co-workers, and we do NOT put up with drama. Full stop. We have work to do, we get it done creatively and with plenty of debate when it's warranted, and then we go home and live life.
Hire more staff? Wrong.
See: The Mythical Man Month
I've read it. Have you?
Teams have limits. At some point the only way to increase productivity is to build another team with their own set of responsibilities and set them to work. And 'productivity' isn't really a goal in and of itself.
I get so tired of people throwing book titles around as if they were some sort of trump card.
Asking a question like that shows how little your boss values his employees, their productivity, and their mental well-being. For that matter, it shows how clueless he is about office politics. Is he trying to weed out the people who don't care deeply for his startup? Hint: NONE of the salaried staff care as much as he does.
Why on earth would salaried staff agree to sacrifice their ability to actually have a life for nothing but boss kudo points?
In order to get people to sacrifice for their employer, you need a well-understood, fair incentive. Companies pay for expert employees' time. Your boss needs to put his money where his mouth is and pay hourly for overtime. The problem is, to avoid abuse you would need to be measuring productivity fairly accurately, and since you're a startup you're probably running your projects casually.
I've worked at companies that tried things like this in half-baked ways. Endless process improvement meetings, coworkers that hate you for staying late for nothing, productivity falling through the floor as people try to game the system. I've even seen people damage their personal relationships beyond repair "for the project". It's not a pretty picture, and your boss needs to understand the magnitude of the possible consequences.
If your boss wants to add a team-wide incentive program for beating a deadline, fine. But if your salaried staff are happy, he shouldn't fuck with that, and he should be regularly encouraging them to get the hell out of the office at 5PM so that they are happy to come back in the morning.
Want to get more done during business hours? HIRE MORE STAFF.
See http://xkcd.com/743/ ...
People want the safety and security that comes from having a trusted party manage their computers for them... Most normal people just see it as a tool, and if someone else will change the oil and the spark plugs for them, then that's even better.
A car *is* just a tool that provides mobility. If your car breaks, you fix it or get another and you're right back to driving around. Your car is under your control, the roads are a common asset, and as long as you follow driving laws and have the economic ability to purchase one, you can do what you like with it. This is the ideal situation.
If your car chose to cease functioning because you fingered the manufacturer's CEO in traffic (thus breaking the no-obscenity clause in the car's TOS) would you be OK with that? Should that TOS even be allowed?
If cloud infrastructure becomes the norm, and local storage becomes somehow 'second tier' or 'for the poor', the commons of the network will cease to matter, and the very existence of a server on the internet will be subject to, say Amazon's Terms Of Service. See Wikileaks for an example of what to expect.
It's not hard to foresee a day when ISPs start shutting down access to sites not hosted on approved, "secure" clouds, at least for their basic service tiers. You'll pay extra for the 'full' internet. Most people won't bother because "everything they need is in the cloud", and they'll be happy with the lack of viruses and spam in the walled garden. The lack of IPV4 addresses might be used to drive this. Amazon might give away 'private' Elastic IP addresses to AWS customers, ISPs might pay to route customers to the AWS namespace. Suddenly Average Joe will be demanding lock-in as a feature.
The proliferation of tablets and dumbed-down, specialized devices with limited or no local storage will only encourage this evolution.
And it's the same way here, except to a few ultra-paranoids who think that everything is all about "the man controlling our data". Sorry, it just isn't. Apple doesn't give a crap about your data. They're just providing a service that the average guy who isn't a technophile *wants*. And that's why Cloud computing will take off. Technophiles have a 100% track record of being wrong about these things, because they don't understand that almost nobody else values what they value.
You really are mixing up your arguments, and your smugness is misplaced. This isn't about technophiles versus "normal people", or "ultra-paranoids" versus "average guys". Cloud computing has *already* taken off. We certainly understand that consumers don't value anything but cheapness and convenience. We're Technophiles, not Morons.
We're waving our hands because we understand the technical and social tradeoffs that are about to be made by our non-technical fellows. We are concerned for society and for everyone's abillity to build and use technology freely.
Technophiles built the digital ground you stand on. Cloud vendors will probably succeed in baiting Joe User back into an AOL-style walled garden, and you're free to go with him.
Enjoy your happy slavery while our tiny minority tries to figure out how to protect you from yourself. Or do some thinking, forgo some convenience, and help us help you: don't buy into the cloud if you can help it, even if Jobs makes it shiny.
What prevents scope/mission creep from turning the whole race into behavior-on-rails zombies?
Hello there, fellow former Ruby developer!
Lennart is being himself...
Yep. He strikes me as a guy who has grown so used to being crapped on by people without his level of domain knowledge that he approaches everything as a war, even when dealing with his peers. He's a "fix the architecture" kind of guy in a "patch it up" world.
The botched Pulse rollout by a few of the major distros didn't help his stock in a lot of peoples' eyes, but that doesn't make him any less right when he's right.
...trying to market this as fixing something for the "desktop use case" is bollocks: normal desktop users do not have multiple TTYs running their apps...
Won't stop the herd from picking sides or making wild claims about huge increases in usability. Go go gadget placebo!
If you use Linux, you'll be using it soon.
We'll see about that.
If the code quality follows the same curve as Pulseaudio, it will be a long while before I switch to systemd. Even if it means dumping Fedora.
Fair enough. Perhaps I should have said "If you use one of the major desktop Linux distros and don't immediately rip out the init system when you perform a fresh install, you'll be using it soon."
On the topic of PulseAudio, I'd be a fool to pretend that adoption by the distros has been trouble free - and you'd be a fool to confuse the rocky rollout of a major new codebase with "poor code quality".
Hopefully some lessons have been learned and we won't see systemd pushed out before it's ready.
WTF is systemd?
Let me Google that for you.
If you use Linux, you'll be using it soon.
Here are some slides explaining it.
Also, mods, the GP wasn't flamebait, it was a valid opinion.
The kernel patch is the hackish way to do it. They're hard-coding policy settings into a kernel patch. Dumb. The kernel is there to provide the knobs, not to twiddle them for you.
Lennart's argument is that policy should not be hard-coded into the kernel. He's not saying "everyone should do this in a bash script". He's saying "leave policy settings to userspace mechanisms that can handle them better." Say, systemd for instance.
Users would be better served by Lennart's approach, I think.
Funny thing is, most desktop users will not see the benefits of the patch, since most of them never use the terminal to run cpu-hogging kernel builds. All desktop apps share the same cgroup.
That won't stop hordes of n00bs from claiming ZOMG MAI SYSTEM IS SO MUCH FA$TER NOW OMG!
Have a look.
It's not perfect, but it's easy. You carry a card around (or a mobile phone app) and remember mnemonics like "Smiley Green 16" and "Heart Pink 12" for each site, which amount to x,y,length for looking up your password on the card.
If you lose the card you can regenerate it, but finders have no way of knowing how to look up your password. If you write your mnemonics on a sticky note attached to your monitor, it doesn't matter because no one has your card.
Also the Android app means no card needed. At no point do you give your passwords to any third party.
Not affiliated with the author, just a fan.
I find it pretty funny that people freak out about this stuff, but happily purchase vehicles with 'black boxes' like OnStar in them.
The government's need for this kind of James Bond nonsense is decreasing. Turns out people are dumb enough to:
o Post their relationships on Facebook and other such sites ...and then expect that governments won't use all this stuff for their own nefarious purposes.
o Publicly broadcast their most mundane thoughts
o Carry phones and drive vehicles that track and report their location, speed, and direction of travel at every moment
o Make unsecured, unencrypted VOIP calls
o Use Skype, which has long been suspected of having a back door
o Accept biometric identity cards
o Trust unsigned software
o Publicly tag their friends in photos (a secret national face-recognition project probably exists)
Your willingness to participate in the worldwide circle-jerk that is Facebook is doing more to erode citizens' rights than anything else.
It's not just about privacy, it's about control and power. By giving away all of this information about ourselves, we are giving governments and multi-billion-dollar corporations the leverage they need to multiply the ways in which they move, divide, and exploit us. This is happening now, and you are probably guilty of helping it along.
Convenience, peer pressure and disdain for people who actually care about citizenship are apparently the best way to bootstrap this mess. Throw in a dash of "I'll never be able to change it, it's all too big for me" and the chains are in place.
You are responsible only for yourself. Make better decisions. Be willing to put up with some inconvenience to stick to your principles.
If you're not teaching, you should be (although it's hard to find well-paying work--but if you do, you hang on like grim death).
You just made my day. Thanks for the encouragement.
Better yet, email the .exe to the entire class.
Are you insane?!? Absolutely DO NOT DO THIS!!
The gap between my suggestion and what those researchers did is pretty wide. My idea:
o Doesn't involve bilking people out of their private credentials;
o Would be limited to a class studying malicious software (how's that for an appropriate context)
o Involves a known-harmless teaching payload;
o Would be fully understood and removed by students at the end of the class.
Deception is inherently disrespectful, even if it is done with good intentions.
What may seem like a "harmless infection" to you demeans the students, because you're encouraging the instructor to abuse the trust that their students have placed in him. In short, what you are proposing causes harm to the teaching profession.
I have a hard time understanding why any real teacher in this fellow's position would abstain from imparting one of the most critical lessons a student can learn about security: that they themselves are the weakest link, no matter how smart and prepared they think they are, and no matter how much theory they can regurgitate at paper time.
The burned hand teaches best, and understanding how and why you were burned is priceless.
It's disrespectful, and even a little condescending, to 'protect' students from real lessons. Are we preparing them for the real world or not? And are students so fragile that they would run to the Dean's office to complain to about the teacher after such a simple and well-explained exercise?
What do you expect a student to learn from being told "there is a virus on this machine, remove it by hand"?
If they are in the "demystifying the black box" phase, they have no idea what you're talking about.
Teach them that viruses are just programs like Word or Excel, except with a specific malicious purpose. Give them an overview of how a machine or user might be tricked into running malicious software. Teach them about how malicious software might propagate. Use historical examples. Talk about privileges.
Virus is a slang term that brings up all kinds of scare reactions in ordinary people. They immediately assume that machines are vulnerable to bacteria floating around on the wind, or something similar. You need to de-emphasize the term "virus". It's just software. Then teach them that 99% of all malicious software runs on Windows, and that it's a reflection of the number of vulnerabilities in Windows code and market share.
Write a simple program that copies itself to the Windows folder and starts itself at boot. The program should show an alert box saying "HACKED BY PROFESSOR HANDSOME!!!!" if it sees it is being run from the Windows folder. Put it on a USB key with an autorun.ini, tell them you have placed a virus you wrote on there, and let them sort it out. Just be sure you're on an XP machine and that autorun is enabled.
Better yet, email the .exe to the entire class. Call it CS101-Example.exe, and use the harmless infection to talk about social engineering. Then take them through the 'infection' process, and show them how to remove the file by hand.
Dude...they aren't making an Instant Messenger client.
Dude, you're getting a Dell!
They are making a Facebook killer, social networking website.
They hope.
XMPP and eJabberd are both chat protocols.
You are wrong.
XMPP is a generic messaging standard. Chat is just one service that can be implemented using XMPP. Go have a read.
eJabberd is a piece of software that implements the XMPP spec and a number of extensions.
Maybe you should brush up on just what this Diaspora is all about before you comment.
Congrats on managing to get both your foot in your mouth AND your head in your ass all at the same time!
Take a photo, post it, and you might be the next goatse man!
Have a listen.
“Peep it, I’ll break it down so you can absorb it (okay)
You need to mind planets’ minerals and do it from orbit (yo)
Some good advice, and you’re too much of a noob to ignore it (ay)
You’ll get stranded with no fuel if you foolishly floor it
I used to rock microphones rhyming in a stadium (okay)
These days i launch probes mining for palladium (no doubt)”