Any changes need to be properly tested. PERIOD. All well and good, but you still need the procedures in place.
Right now, it seems that voting officials don't see anything unusual in having "last minute updates" applied to the systems they're managing - as far as they're concerned, it's a magic black box which is fantastically complicated and so occasionally these things occur.
I would dearly hope that in a paper-based election, the voting officials would certainly have something to say about someone rocking up out of nowhere and presenting them with a new batch of printed ballot papers and demanding the old ones be destroyed.
>in other *more* *democratic* countries, he'd be very well entitled to a better environment in prison
Oh don't try to pretend that the experience for a person in prison for murder is pleasant in... where? Denmark? Sweden? Netherlands? Australia? What is this "more democratic country" that has such wonderful prisons for people who commit murder? It's not pleasant, let's not deny it.
But the UK penal system has categories of prisoner, and the type of prison you're sent to depends on the category. A murderer would almost certainly be a Cat A (maximum security), sure, but there is the opportunity to have your category re-assessed and moved to a prison with a slightly-less nasty regime.
In theory, prisoners move through the categories towards Cat D (open prison) before they're let out, and that's a lot cushier. Though let's not deny it, for a murderer that process would take many years.
You kid, but your analogy hit the nail on the head. Windows can survive without Gates... might it would even get better. Can all the personality-centered software platforms (well, Linux/GNU and Apple are the only ones I am thinking off) survive their personalities? Reiser was a popular file system. This might be telling. I am really not trolling here. I use both Windows and Linux (depending on which tools I need for a task at hand), but I don't have to make long-term strategic decisions that will effect other people. Maybe a better summary would have been a question posed to the community. The question would be what kind of process can be established to save a project like ReiserFS. I keep hearing questions like "What can we do as a strategy?"
I do not understand them.
It is a filesystem. The data on top is the important bit, and isn't really dictated by the filesystem.
It may suffer corruption which you can't easily get fixed because the main author's in jail. So what? Such corruption can happen to any filesystem under any OS. In most businesses, the length of time it would take to get the corruption fixed is rather greater than the length of time it would take to restore from backups - and you can take that as an opportunity to use an alternate FS. The extra risk introduced by maintaining something on reiserfs is negligible. Just don't roll it out on anything new.
Aside, even if the devs were 100% perfect and typed ALL the code perfect, there's nothing stopping some jerk from slipping something in at final compile time, or even after that with "last minute update" to the "firmware". It would probably relevant to point out here: This could just as easily happen with opensource voting software. You need to change the entire procedure so "last minute updates" don't exist - or if they do, there's an audit trail for them.
Governments do not exist to create criminals. Governments exist to create a smooth living environment that allows large groups of people to interact in an easy and predictable fashion. True. But they only have a couple of tools to do this:
- Make things legal - Make things illegal - Raise taxes (generally done by passing a law - eg. in the UK, the Finance Act) - Lower taxes (again, passing a law).
Further - in the UK at least - they tend to be composed of career politicians who really can't afford to be out of a job. Not least because they're accustomed to a generous salary complete with an expenses policy that states "you don't have to provide receipts to claim on expenses" and there's damn-all else that they're qualified to do.
So, when there's a big media fuss about some Terrible Crime (particularly when there's a string of such Terrible Crimes, as happens from time to time), the politicians have to do something or risk career suicide. This has been going on for many years - see also the Dangerous Dogs Act.
What OS you run won't make the remotest bit of difference.
It really wouldn't be hard to cook up a Linux-based thumbdrive which automatically mounts more or less any filesystem in common use today, runs a combination of find and grep to weed out potentially interesting files, copy them onto an area of the thumbdrive and shut the system down when done.
It probably wouldn't generate anything which would stand up to forensic questions in court, but it would give you a pretty good idea as to whether or not it's worth investigating someone further.
In fact, I'd be astonished if something similar to this wasn't already on the market to law-enforcement agencies.
Solution: Configure your PC to boot direct from the hard drive, disable all other boot devices and put a password on the BIOS. It won't protect you from law enforcement deciding that if you're going to make their life difficult you're hiding something, kick your door down and seize your PC, but frankly in those circumstances you need a lawyer, not someone on/. advising you how to secure things.
(To be honest, I think it's more likely this was a convenient way of distributing a bunch of tools meant to be used in conjunction with a drive image taken through appropriate imaging tools rather than a fully-bootable forensics kit)
1. Pirating Windows XP very easily or 2. Corporate customers buying PCs with no OS, and installing Corporate licensed XP or 3. People switching over to Macs and Linux.
I think it could be a bit of all the above. In 3 years time, if Microsoft does not release a really good successor to Vista, it could be Curtains for Windows! (TM). Will it happen? Certainly not the second one. Corporate Windows licenses are upgrade-only - you still need either a retail or an OEM license on the hardware.
I'd imagine it's a combination of a two main things:
1. Vista has few, if any, compelling features. 2. The economy isn't exactly in the healthiest of states.
This combination has businesses and individuals alike asking the question "What benefit is there to buying a [business: whole lot of] new PCs rather than just adopting a policy of replace when broken and not before?". And the answer coming back is "Errr.... none".
I'm given to understand first degree murder (which doesn't exist here in the UK) implies premeditation - however if you don't get your suspect until some time after the victim's disappeared, how can you tell the difference between premeditation and someone scrambling to cover up the evidence?
Question: Do judges in US courts have the freedom to tell the jury "This person is being prosecuted for first degree murder. It may be your opinion that while he did commit the murder, it wasn't premeditated, in which case you should find him guilty of second degree murder."?
If I go out and buy a mid-price Dell or other PC, and put in a really bad video card, I would not blame Dell for the poor experience. Well done. You've completely missed the point,
A $50 expansion card from Wal-Mart (NOTE: Not necessarily a graphics card, could be anything) probably won't be supported in OS X. Though it's fair to assume it would be based on a common-as-muck cheap Chinese chipset which was reasonably supported under Windows.
You might think "ah well, it was a cheap card, what did I expect?" The novice who's never even considered that it might sometimes be a bad idea to buy the cheapest expansion card (or even be aware that a large choice exists) probably won't.
By excluding the market that would do this, Apple are essentially ensuring that the stack of cheap & nasty expansion boards which aren't worth the silicon, copper & plastic they're made with don't damage their "it Just Works" image.
"Most women [...] ship with all ports closed by default."
I disagree. I believe that there is one port thats constantly open. The sad truth is that the volume knob only has one setting: 10. My woman's volume knob goes to 11.
However, what with all the Microsoft/Yahoo stuff going on, I think I'll give that a few months to shake out before I stake my reputation on a product owned by Yahoo.
Where do I get this "with a girlfriend" release?.. of course with my luck, the "girlfriend" will be the openbsd version, and ship with all ports closed by default. Most women (or at least most women you'd really want anything to do with for more than about 20-30 minutes) ship with all ports closed by default.
Part of the fun is in figuring out how to get the ports open.
Linspire's been trying exactly this for several years.
I'm not sure how much good it does them.
It's not GUI that gets the OS market. It's a combination of GUI, visibility and available software.
Visibility means all the little things like appearing on a list of compatible operating systems on the side of the box a peripheral comes in, it means the software people want to use trumpets on its website "Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux!", it means people know it exists and it's serious.
Without all three, there's no chance of achieving significant desktop penetration.
And how well do you think your girlfriend would go on a vanilla windows install with no flash installed, MSN account not setup, etc? RTFA. While Youtube did/does bodge the referral for the plugin, at least it takes you to a download page.
The girlfriend then downloaded a reasonable-looking link on the download page and tried to execute it. This would probably have worked on Windows.
Youtube fixing the referral link doesn't solve the underlying problem - an end-user with little experience of Linux will find packaging to be a bit of a mess, at least until they get their head around the idea of apt-get install (or a GUI wrapper providing similar functionality).
They chose Spice Girls because not even the RIAA, with their inflated ideas of what each infraction costs, could possibly demand more than about 20 US cents with a striaght face.
Purely out of curiosity, does the US have any equivalent to UK Companies House?
If they were a UK company, you could get a list of directors of both the SIC and various RIAA member companies and their home addresses through Companies House. All you need to do then is see if any names match up.
Obviously this doesn't help if the company has been set up as a totally separate entity with a totally separate list of directors, but it would tell you pretty quickly if Mr. Bloggs (who lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company A and Mrs. Bloggs (who also lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company B.
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in? The big deal is that no matter how unintuitive you consider the collaborative calendaring system, there isn't an alternative on the market that's any better.
With one exception, all the OSS "alternatives" either:
- Require a plugin which sucks donkey balls, costs money and is hard to manage across many desktops to integrate with Outlook.
OR
- Are purely web based and don't offer any Outlook integration at all - which doesn't sound like a big deal until you've got a senior manager wanting to be able to read email that he's already downloaded when he's on a plane at 30,000 feet.
And none of them have the fancy commercial plugins like Blackberry Enterprise Server available.
(The 1 alternative which claims not to suffer from this lot requires an Active Directory infrastructure and has similar per-seat costs as Exchange).
Don't forget about all the Acorn and RISC-OS machines still in active use. Shame the ARM platform never really took-off as a PC alternative, some of those boxes are kinda nifty for basic tasks. What, both of them?
It's a terrible shame, really, because it was a nice little platform - I used it myself for a long time. But to be fair, Acorn never really kept up and (like most British technology companies) had absolutely stellar engineering and absolutely lousy marketing.
Today, they're somewhat overpriced and the only reason I can think of for using one is some weird piece of software which no equivalent exists on any other platform.
Come on, that's just starting to stink of loopy conspiracy.
If there really was a conspiracy to destroy a whole bunch of documents, you're seriously telling me the simplest, easiest plan they could come up with was "Let's find and finance a bunch of nutjobs to fly planes into buildings - and make sure that two of those buildings are the towers of the WTC"?
Everyone makes mistakes. It's what separates humans from machines.
The important thing is how we deal with them.
Now, if Metallica are big enough to apologise for their previous actions, I see no reason why anyone should continue a boycott. (Of course, if you're boycotting their music because you don't like it that's something different - but hell, you know what I mean)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, 10 years ago I got flamed (at the time, rightly so) for forwarding a copy of the "Good Times" virus hoax email. Most of the flames concentrated on how it wasn't possible for viruses to spread just by opening an email.
Then someone realised that the HTML rendering engine used by IE was full of security holes, and that Outlook rendered HTML emails using this engine - indeed, it couldn't (easily) be prevented from doing so. We've been mopping up the mess ever since.
or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system. Same's true in Windows - the user has to be an administrator or the amount of damage it can do to the local system is limited.
However, viruses which intentionally hose the local system are more or less extinct today. Instead, they spawn a process in the background, connect to some central communications mechanism (generally IRC) and await instruction. The instruction they'll get is the kind of thing that any user can do - "ping this host constantly", "connect to that host, open a particular port and send the following....".
It can be made more awkward in linux (mount any filesystem where the user can write as noexec is a good start, and something you can't easily do in Windows), but to imagine that it's totally impossible for today's malware to appear on alternate operating systems is sadly naive.
"He seems to be completely unreceptive The tests I gave him show no sense at all His eyes react to light, the dials detect it He hears but cannot answer to your call....
His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak All the time the needles flick and rock No machine can give the kind of stimulation Needed to remove his inner block
Slashdot Mirror
Any changes need to be properly tested. PERIOD. All well and good, but you still need the procedures in place.
Right now, it seems that voting officials don't see anything unusual in having "last minute updates" applied to the systems they're managing - as far as they're concerned, it's a magic black box which is fantastically complicated and so occasionally these things occur.
I would dearly hope that in a paper-based election, the voting officials would certainly have something to say about someone rocking up out of nowhere and presenting them with a new batch of printed ballot papers and demanding the old ones be destroyed.
Oh don't try to pretend that the experience for a person in prison for murder is pleasant in
But the UK penal system has categories of prisoner, and the type of prison you're sent to depends on the category. A murderer would almost certainly be a Cat A (maximum security), sure, but there is the opportunity to have your category re-assessed and moved to a prison with a slightly-less nasty regime.
In theory, prisoners move through the categories towards Cat D (open prison) before they're let out, and that's a lot cushier. Though let's not deny it, for a murderer that process would take many years.
Does such a system exist in the US?
I do not understand them.
It is a filesystem. The data on top is the important bit, and isn't really dictated by the filesystem.
It may suffer corruption which you can't easily get fixed because the main author's in jail. So what? Such corruption can happen to any filesystem under any OS. In most businesses, the length of time it would take to get the corruption fixed is rather greater than the length of time it would take to restore from backups - and you can take that as an opportunity to use an alternate FS. The extra risk introduced by maintaining something on reiserfs is negligible. Just don't roll it out on anything new.
- Make things legal
- Make things illegal
- Raise taxes (generally done by passing a law - eg. in the UK, the Finance Act)
- Lower taxes (again, passing a law).
Further - in the UK at least - they tend to be composed of career politicians who really can't afford to be out of a job. Not least because they're accustomed to a generous salary complete with an expenses policy that states "you don't have to provide receipts to claim on expenses" and there's damn-all else that they're qualified to do.
So, when there's a big media fuss about some Terrible Crime (particularly when there's a string of such Terrible Crimes, as happens from time to time), the politicians have to do something or risk career suicide. This has been going on for many years - see also the Dangerous Dogs Act.
What OS you run won't make the remotest bit of difference.
/. advising you how to secure things.
It really wouldn't be hard to cook up a Linux-based thumbdrive which automatically mounts more or less any filesystem in common use today, runs a combination of find and grep to weed out potentially interesting files, copy them onto an area of the thumbdrive and shut the system down when done.
It probably wouldn't generate anything which would stand up to forensic questions in court, but it would give you a pretty good idea as to whether or not it's worth investigating someone further.
In fact, I'd be astonished if something similar to this wasn't already on the market to law-enforcement agencies.
Solution: Configure your PC to boot direct from the hard drive, disable all other boot devices and put a password on the BIOS. It won't protect you from law enforcement deciding that if you're going to make their life difficult you're hiding something, kick your door down and seize your PC, but frankly in those circumstances you need a lawyer, not someone on
(To be honest, I think it's more likely this was a convenient way of distributing a bunch of tools meant to be used in conjunction with a drive image taken through appropriate imaging tools rather than a fully-bootable forensics kit)
2. Corporate customers buying PCs with no OS, and installing Corporate licensed XP or
3. People switching over to Macs and Linux.
I think it could be a bit of all the above. In 3 years time, if Microsoft does not release a really good successor to Vista, it could be Curtains for Windows! (TM). Will it happen? Certainly not the second one. Corporate Windows licenses are upgrade-only - you still need either a retail or an OEM license on the hardware.
I'd imagine it's a combination of a two main things:
1. Vista has few, if any, compelling features.
2. The economy isn't exactly in the healthiest of states.
This combination has businesses and individuals alike asking the question "What benefit is there to buying a [business: whole lot of] new PCs rather than just adopting a policy of replace when broken and not before?". And the answer coming back is "Errr.... none".
That's a very good point.
I'm given to understand first degree murder (which doesn't exist here in the UK) implies premeditation - however if you don't get your suspect until some time after the victim's disappeared, how can you tell the difference between premeditation and someone scrambling to cover up the evidence?
Question: Do judges in US courts have the freedom to tell the jury "This person is being prosecuted for first degree murder. It may be your opinion that while he did commit the murder, it wasn't premeditated, in which case you should find him guilty of second degree murder."?
A $50 expansion card from Wal-Mart (NOTE: Not necessarily a graphics card, could be anything) probably won't be supported in OS X. Though it's fair to assume it would be based on a common-as-muck cheap Chinese chipset which was reasonably supported under Windows.
You might think "ah well, it was a cheap card, what did I expect?" The novice who's never even considered that it might sometimes be a bad idea to buy the cheapest expansion card (or even be aware that a large choice exists) probably won't.
By excluding the market that would do this, Apple are essentially ensuring that the stack of cheap & nasty expansion boards which aren't worth the silicon, copper & plastic they're made with don't damage their "it Just Works" image.
I disagree. I believe that there is one port thats constantly open. The sad truth is that the volume knob only has one setting: 10. My woman's volume knob goes to 11.
I've looked at Zimbra and I am tempted.
However, what with all the Microsoft/Yahoo stuff going on, I think I'll give that a few months to shake out before I stake my reputation on a product owned by Yahoo.
Have you been reading Tom Holt?
The UK offices will almost certainly be subsidiaries, which may or may not share some of the directorships with their US parent companies.
UK Companies House will know that they're a subsidiary of a US company, but probably not much more than that.
Part of the fun is in figuring out how to get the ports open.
Linspire's been trying exactly this for several years.
I'm not sure how much good it does them.
It's not GUI that gets the OS market. It's a combination of GUI, visibility and available software.
Visibility means all the little things like appearing on a list of compatible operating systems on the side of the box a peripheral comes in, it means the software people want to use trumpets on its website "Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux!", it means people know it exists and it's serious.
Without all three, there's no chance of achieving significant desktop penetration.
(And in 10 years you will probably need to lay on ensuites in every bedroom or you'll never get a chance to take a leak).
The girlfriend then downloaded a reasonable-looking link on the download page and tried to execute it. This would probably have worked on Windows.
Youtube fixing the referral link doesn't solve the underlying problem - an end-user with little experience of Linux will find packaging to be a bit of a mess, at least until they get their head around the idea of apt-get install (or a GUI wrapper providing similar functionality).
They chose Spice Girls because not even the RIAA, with their inflated ideas of what each infraction costs, could possibly demand more than about 20 US cents with a striaght face.
Purely out of curiosity, does the US have any equivalent to UK Companies House?
If they were a UK company, you could get a list of directors of both the SIC and various RIAA member companies and their home addresses through Companies House. All you need to do then is see if any names match up.
Obviously this doesn't help if the company has been set up as a totally separate entity with a totally separate list of directors, but it would tell you pretty quickly if Mr. Bloggs (who lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company A and Mrs. Bloggs (who also lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company B.
With one exception, all the OSS "alternatives" either:
- Require a plugin which sucks donkey balls, costs money and is hard to manage across many desktops to integrate with Outlook.
OR
- Are purely web based and don't offer any Outlook integration at all - which doesn't sound like a big deal until you've got a senior manager wanting to be able to read email that he's already downloaded when he's on a plane at 30,000 feet.
And none of them have the fancy commercial plugins like Blackberry Enterprise Server available.
(The 1 alternative which claims not to suffer from this lot requires an Active Directory infrastructure and has similar per-seat costs as Exchange).
It's a terrible shame, really, because it was a nice little platform - I used it myself for a long time. But to be fair, Acorn never really kept up and (like most British technology companies) had absolutely stellar engineering and absolutely lousy marketing.
Today, they're somewhat overpriced and the only reason I can think of for using one is some weird piece of software which no equivalent exists on any other platform.
Come on, that's just starting to stink of loopy conspiracy.
If there really was a conspiracy to destroy a whole bunch of documents, you're seriously telling me the simplest, easiest plan they could come up with was "Let's find and finance a bunch of nutjobs to fly planes into buildings - and make sure that two of those buildings are the towers of the WTC"?
Even if that was Paul McCartney & Wings...
Everyone makes mistakes. It's what separates humans from machines.
The important thing is how we deal with them.
Now, if Metallica are big enough to apologise for their previous actions, I see no reason why anyone should continue a boycott. (Of course, if you're boycotting their music because you don't like it that's something different - but hell, you know what I mean)
Then someone realised that the HTML rendering engine used by IE was full of security holes, and that Outlook rendered HTML emails using this engine - indeed, it couldn't (easily) be prevented from doing so. We've been mopping up the mess ever since. or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system. Same's true in Windows - the user has to be an administrator or the amount of damage it can do to the local system is limited.
However, viruses which intentionally hose the local system are more or less extinct today. Instead, they spawn a process in the background, connect to some central communications mechanism (generally IRC) and await instruction. The instruction they'll get is the kind of thing that any user can do - "ping this host constantly", "connect to that host, open a particular port and send the following....".
It can be made more awkward in linux (mount any filesystem where the user can write as noexec is a good start, and something you can't easily do in Windows), but to imagine that it's totally impossible for today's malware to appear on alternate operating systems is sadly naive.
Except he wasn't.
....
"He seems to be completely unreceptive
The tests I gave him show no sense at all
His eyes react to light, the dials detect it
He hears but cannot answer to your call
His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak
All the time the needles flick and rock
No machine can give the kind of stimulation
Needed to remove his inner block
("Go to the Mirror!", Townshend)